[Skybird]

It must be frustrating for them, they try so hard to make the addition of 2 and 2 appear as 5, but they just dont get there. Tichy's Einblicke - https://www.tichyseinblick.de/kolumn...-energiewende/ - writes:

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Hectic expansion is of no use: Solar and wind in the red in 2023

In the first half of the year, renewable energy plants produced less than in the same period last year - despite the construction of more than 500 new wind turbines, for which Robert Habeck praises himself. Other data also show the absurdity of his energy transition.

When an ARD journalist recently asked him on Tagesthemen where the electricity for the planned production of green hydrogen would actually come from, Economics Minister Robert Habeck answered confidently: The expansion of renewable energies is now really making rapid progress. So there is no reason to worry. The Green politician likes to be filmed in videos of the ministry in front of wind farms that have just been inaugurated. The message is that more and more electricity is coming from wind and solar parks. And the minister is personally pushing this development.

However, the reality - and here the Tagesschau editor didn't bother to check - looks somewhat different. Although, according to the statistics of Deutsche WindGuard, 551 new wind power plants with a total capacity of 2.403 gigawatts and photovoltaic plants with a capacity of 7.5 gigawatts were added across Germany in 2022, the generation of wind and solar power did not increase in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period of the previous year - but rather decreased. And by two terawatt hours. The Federal Environment Agency states: "In the first half of 2023, despite the increased addition of new photovoltaic and wind energy plants, about one percent less electricity was generated from renewable energies (just under 136 terawatt hours (TWh)) than in the first six months of the previous year (just under 138 TWh)."

This does not come as a surprise: installed capacity does not have all that much to do with actual generation. In weather-dependent electricity production, it is the wind and sun situation that decides, not what the plants could theoretically deliver. Although this should also be known in the Federal Ministry of Economics, Robert Habeck repeatedly operates with misleading capacity or percentage figures. In fact, the share of renewable energies in electricity generation increased in 2023 compared to the previous year. But this is simply because total electricity consumption declined in the first six months of this year due to the poor economic situation. So if you look at the absolute figures here and there, you get a very different picture than what the federal government wants to publicly disseminate.

Since large-scale industrial storage facilities are lacking for the foreseeable future, Habeck plans to build a gas-fired power plant capacity totalling 30 gigawatts by 2030 in order to secure the electricity supply despite fluctuating feed-in from renewables on the one hand and the planned shutdown of coal-fired power plants on the other.

The catch is that so far there are not even rough plans for these power plants, which in the ministry's imagination will serve as gap fillers from time to time in the future. That, in turn, is because it is completely unclear who is to operate them. Gas-fired power plants, which are only allowed to run for 1500 or 2000 hours a year on an auxiliary basis, cannot finance themselves by selling electricity. They would therefore need massive state subsidies. How this is to be done, how much it will cost - all this is so far in the typical Habeck fog.

Paradoxically, the German energy transition system also runs into serious problems when the summer sun is shining and the wind is blowing well. Then electricity from wind and solar plants often cover demand alone on days when consumption is low, such as on Sundays in July. On 2, 16 and 23 July, renewables each generated up to 49 gigawatt hours during the day. And on the last Sunday of the month, the 30th, they managed it almost without conventional power plants.

The problem is the lack of storage capacity. On all Sundays in July, the supply of electricity therefore exceeded the demand, and the price of electricity on the exchange tipped into negative territory. Particularly drastic on 2 July: on that day, someone who bought a megawatt hour from Germany abroad got an extra 500 euros at certain hours.

For operators of pumped-storage plants in Austria, for example, this has been opening up a splendid business field for quite some time: if Germany doesn't know what to do with its solar and wind power, they take it plus a disposal premium - in order to sell the energy back to Germany at a high price when the electricity price turns positive again. The disposal fee of 500 euros per megawatt hour ends up in the grid fee bill - and thus with every German electricity customer. In some regions, grid fees already account for up to a third of the electricity price.

So the hectic expansion of wind and solar energy not only does not bring a plannable increase in generation - it also makes electrical energy drastically more expensive. Even if the promised hydrogen storage facilities do eventually come, they will not ease the cost situation. This is because a good 60 percent of the energy is lost between the storage and withdrawal of electricity surpluses. Although this energy is occasionally available for zero or negative prices on the stock exchange, it must first be paid for with fixed feed-in tariffs. These rates are currently around 4 cents for wind power and up to 7.8 cents per kilowatt hour for solar plants.

Conclusion: In all likelihood, coal-fired power plants will have to step in in the coming years when the sun and wind supply little. They therefore keep German CO2 emissions high. And: the price of electrical energy is likely to rise even further in the future, if only because of the grid fees.

https://www.tichyseinblick.de/kolumn...-energiewende/