Green Energy, and the German Grid, from: Kiev Is Burning

[Ivanhoe]

The freight rail line that passes through my small town occasionally features a long BNSF train carrying turbine blades westwards, I am guessing towards west Texas or NM. 

I have yet to see any of the blades on fire. While on the flat cars, they are about 15-25 ft AGL. However, there are countless videos of blades on fire when mounted on a turbine tower. Tentative conclusion; there is an atmospheric layer about 300-500 ft AGL that is so hot, aerospace type structural materials can ignite. 

Perhaps that is why aircraft that have just taken off keep climbing to 1000 ft AGL or more. 

[urbanoid]

On 6/27/2023 at 10:07 PM, Markus Becker said:

Well, it demonstrated the issues nicely. Plus the parking ticket machines were at least as evil. 

Considerably more evil. With the charger it was simply our lack of knowledge, while the machine was kinda broken.

[urbanoid]

Ah, so it looks like Germany wants 25GW worth of new natural gas plants, to serve as a stabilizer for the renewables, they would apparently succeed the decommissioned NPPs (22 GW out since 2000) and would allow to phase out some of the coal plants. Not sure if it's feasible with the Nord Streams not operational and 3/4 destroyed.

The CO2 emission from gas plants is about ~half of the coal plants. OTOH the emissions of the NPPs are basically zero. 

[jmsaari]

The fact that the video was asking for is that currently land-based wind is the cheapest way to generate a kWh of electricity there is, almost anywhere in the world. Turbines are at 500-900 eur/kW, installed costs on average(*) around 1500 for the whole farm including infrastructure, and depending on wind conditions maybe around 3000 h or so full-load hours of electricity.

The real question currently is less the cost of installed power or produced energy but the system cost for dealing with the variability of production. Hydrogen obviously being the hot topic now, there the question marks being how to store and use that, or if you will produce a fuel easier to store and transport out of that (e.g. methane or methanol), you're going to be running the plant for limited amount of hours per year if the power system is heavily dependent on VRE.

Right now, pumped hydro reservoir is still pretty much the only electricity storage that's economically competitive in large scale and large scale is really stretching the definition when feasible locations are few and far between and environmental permits for large reservoirs will make them fewer still.

 

(*) obviously varies greatly depending on where, cost of land, existing road networks, nearby grid, etc

[urbanoid]

OTOH the capacity factor for nuclear is 90%+, better than any other source. You need something else to complement the wind, something stable, nuclear is stable on its own and doesn't require backup. 

[Markus Becker]

Otoh, nuclear is EVIL in the eyes of the 🟩 and they are calling the shots. 

[jmsaari]

Luckily over here the greens are coming around on the topic. In EU it's a more close-run thing but at least the climate taxonomy eventually came out sensible in the end and won't hinder nuclear EU-wide. Haven't followed that closely but isn't there some rumblings that even in GER there's some s-l-o-w process of some sense returning into the attitudes re:nuclear?

The big problem with nuclear is that if the capacity factor is about triple that of land-based wind, the CAPEX per kW is more like quadruple...

Hopefully the SMR technologies will deliver on the promises at least to some extent but I'm not that hopeful for big cost cuts unfortunately. Modular design and bigger production runs will help, but amount of concrete and labour per reactor power will push the other way, so hard to see a really dramatic change about to come. But in climates with heating demands, getting legislation change to allow permits to build near population centers would be a big deal. If you can switch from condensing to back-pressure CHP and convert all, not just 1/3, of reactor thermal power to sellable product, that's a huge difference for profitability and LCOE.

[sunday]

1 hour ago, jmsaari said:

The big problem with nuclear is that if the capacity factor is about triple that of land-based wind, the CAPEX per kW is more like quadruple...

Wonder if that wind CAPEX takes into account the needed backup power for low wind days.

Then there is the costs to comply with nuclear-specific regulations, some of which are a bit over the top, and make uneconomical the mass production of modular, small power reactors.

Edited July 1, 2023 by sunday

[Markus Becker]

3 hours ago, urbanoid said:

Ah, so it looks like Germany wants 25GW worth of new natural gas plants, to serve as a stabilizer for the renewables, they would apparently succeed the decommissioned NPPs (22 GW out since 2000) and would allow to phase out some of the coal plants. 

The 🟩 also stated that gas itself is on the way out, so good luck finding anyone risking his own money building new gas fired plants. 

[urbanoid]

Just now, Markus Becker said:

The 🟩 also stated that gas itself is on the way out, so good luck finding anyone risking his own money building new gas fired plants. 

Apparently another issue with those gas plants was that they weren't supposed to operate at full capacity but merely stabilise the power grid when the renewables didn't produce enough - that would make the ROI even more modest. The plan is supposedly to adapt those plants for hydrogen later, though I have no idea about technical feasibility of that. The EU apparently doesn't want to co-finance those plants.

[jmsaari]

That's pretty much the role of gas-fired generation already.  A gas-fired plant is going to be either combined cycle gas turbine, simple-cycle GT, or internal combustion reciprocating ... CCGT is cheap to invest, simple GT or diesel cheaper still, the costs come mostly from fuel which is expensive (and has been, already before recent situation, but of course now more so than ever) in comparison to any solid fuel. Typically CCGTs would be mid-load and IC & GT peak load/reserve, so you build them expecting to not run for most of the year, in the case of latter two very little at all.

As investments they'd be pretty safe since the way the market is, as long as there is fuel available at almost any price (and there will be, with only minor caveats only for next 1-2 years perhaps), electricity can be sold for profit - end user is the one who loses if it's bloody expensive... the only real question for gas power investor is there lack of dispatchable power generation to which the answer is a resounding yes for some time.

Especially GT/CCGT would need next to no change to switch between fuels. I've understood the modern IC plants can be built for fuel flexibility as well but don't quote me on that...

[Markus Becker]

1 hour ago, urbanoid said:

Apparently another issue with those gas plants was that they weren't supposed to operate at full capacity but merely stabilise the power grid when the renewables didn't produce enough - that would make the ROI even more modest. The plan is supposedly to adapt those plants for hydrogen later, though I have no idea about technical feasibility of that. The EU apparently doesn't want to co-finance those plants.

Yes to the former -a super new gas plant closed down years ago in Bavaria because it was running so infrequently- and the latter is for starters prohibitively expensive. By accident even the 🟩 admitted that. They want to ban oil and gas heating and said green hydrogen won't work as it is far too costly. At the same time they say green hydrogen is the energy of the future for industry. 

Edited July 1, 2023 by Markus Becker

[urbanoid]

Not sure if it was mentioned, but the French weekly L'Express published an article based on the report of EGE (Economic Warfare School - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Warfare_School ), with the main point that Germany did what it could to sabotage French nuclear energy industry in the last decades.

Main tools used to achieve that goal were two foundations: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Heinrich Böll Foundation. 

Quote

German-funded NGOs seek to weaken France’s nuclear industry: report

The German government is seeking to weaken France’s nuclear industry through various “political foundations,” one of which is also active in Poland, according to a report.

Germany funds “political” NGOs that work to undermine the French nuclear sector, Poland’s biznesalert.pl website reported on Thursday.

It said the strategy employed by Berlin was described in a recent article by France’s weekly magazine L’Express.

The French magazine wrote on Monday that such NGOs, including the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, “don't make the headlines, yet they are deliberately weakening the French nuclear industry,” according to biznesalert.pl.

L’Express said, as quoted by biznesalert.pl, that "their weapons" included "drafting documents with an anti-nuclear narrative, guiding elites through training courses - doctoral grants, masterclasses, etc. - visiting and meeting foreign politicians, and forming alliances with certain NGOs or environmentalist parties.”

According to the French weekly, the German parliament has steadily increased funding for such “political foundations,” from EUR 295 million in 2000 to EUR 466 million in 2014 and EUR 690 million in 2023, biznesalert.pl reported.

L’Express quoted French expert Christian Harbulot as saying that “Germany is doing everything in its power to prevent French industry from benefiting from cheap energy and thus gaining a major competitive advantage,” while “with foundations such as Heinrich Böll, which has an address in Paris, the undermining work is also being carried out on French soil,” biznesalert.pl said.

German foundation critical of Poland’s nuclear policy?

Meanwhile, the Heinrich Böll Foundation is also active in Poland, and in 2020 it published a paper criticising Poland’s plan to develop nuclear energy, citing “high costs, long implementation period and incompatibility of nuclear energy with European Union trends,” biznesalert.pl reported.

The website noted that the Polish government plans to launch the country’s first nuclear reactor, using American AP1000 reactor technology, at a site in northern Poland in 2033.

Poland seeks to have at least 6-9 GW of nuclear energy capacity by 2043, according to biznesalert.pl. 

There are also plans to build a public-private nuclear facility using South Korean APR1400 technology and to deploy small modular reactors (SMR) in Poland, biznesalert.pl reported.

https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7786/Artykul/3199105,germanfunded-ngos-attack-france’s-nuclear-industry-report

And a twitter thread:

 

[sunday]

31 minutes ago, urbanoid said:

Not sure if it was mentioned, but the French weekly L'Express published an article based on the report of EGE (Economic Warfare School - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Warfare_School ), with the main point that Germany did what it could to sabotage French nuclear energy industry in the last decades.

Main tools used to achieve that goal were two foundations: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Heinrich Böll Foundation. 

https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7786/Artykul/3199105,germanfunded-ngos-attack-france’s-nuclear-industry-report

And a twitter thread:

(...)

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was KGB financing anti-nuclear movements. Then we had Qatar financing anti-fracking movies. Now is woke Germany...

Also, that bit on green hydrogen reminded me of looking the different hydrogen "colors":

Source

Note that those German Grüne so beloved by @Markus Becker seem to use exclusively the Green one, i.e. only electrolysis-produced hydrogen, but only with electricity from renewable resources.

Another source for the color classification

Edited July 2, 2023 by sunday

[seahawk]

Germany is becoming a failed state.

[BansheeOne]

10 hours ago, urbanoid said:

Main tools used to achieve that goal were two foundations: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Heinrich Böll Foundation.

🤣

[seahawk]

This https://kpmg.com/nl/en/home/insights/2023/03/ep-votes-for-ambitious-new-energy-performance-of-buildings-directive-epbd-iv.html

in combination with the German laws will be way too much for many home owners and the once people become aware of that, the election results will show it.

[sunday]

This could go in the environmentalism thread also

Quote

In today's eye-opening video, I, as a nuclear physicist, tackle some of the biggest misconceptions and outright falsehoods about nuclear energy perpetuated by Greenpeace on their website. Join me as I debunk their misleading claims with facts, logic, and scientific evidence. This is a must-watch for anyone interested in the truth about nuclear power and its role in our quest for clean energy. Don't forget to LIKE, SHARE, and SUBSCRIBE for more credible and insightful content! 

 

Edited July 3, 2023 by sunday

[BansheeOne]

3 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

🤣

Now, after the early morning half-awake laughing fit ... 😁

Every party represented in the Bundestag has one of these affiliated foundations, though they are legally separate entities. Their tasks are generally stated as contributing to public political education, giving stipends to the gifted, developmental cooperation and maintaining the party archives. For these public missions, they get public money from various ministries, which has increased considerably in the last 20 years. Unsurprisingly, they promote the politics, and the gifted which subscribe to them or typically are members, of the respective party.

So in effect this is the parties voting themselves tax money to support their politics and sympathizers, run offices in other countries to maintain links with like-minded foreign groups, pay for nice trips abroad, etc. Since all of them benefit, domestic criticism of the system in general has been only from the outside like the Federal Auditing Office, the League of German Taxpayers, some media etc. - right until the AfD wanted in on the pork after the customary first re-entry into the Bundestag, at which point everyone scrambled to find ways to deny them. Obviously they sued before the Constitutional Court, which ruled this February that the current scheme is arbitrary, and a specific law is needed as a legal base.

There is of course no shortage of partisan criticism of individual foundations' activities. The Green-leaning "tageszeitung" has complained how the CSU-affiliated Hanns Seidel and the FDP-affiliated Friedrich Naumann Foundation were supposedly involved in "fake news campaigns" against the abortive Chilean draft constitution via their links to politically aligned local think tanks last year, for example.

Obviously authoritarian governments take a dim view of foreign organisations promoting their political values, too; Egypt all but pushed out Friedrich Naumann and the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation along with various other European and American NGOs under al-Sisi for failing to re-register under strict conditions, and imprisoned a couple dozen local staff. Russia of course closed them down along with AI, HRW and others last April. Which is no surprise from regimes always fretting about Western foundations organizing color revolutions for the CIA, NWO, WEF and such.

Neither is it that other sources with the same kind of paranoid mindset would make their activities out as "German attempts to sabotage our industry". 😄 What it really boils down to however is: German Greens and Left Party opposed to nuclear energy. In other news, U235 still radioactive. ☢️🤔

[Colin]

On 7/1/2023 at 12:20 PM, urbanoid said:

Apparently another issue with those gas plants was that they weren't supposed to operate at full capacity but merely stabilise the power grid when the renewables didn't produce enough - that would make the ROI even more modest. The plan is supposedly to adapt those plants for hydrogen later, though I have no idea about technical feasibility of that. The EU apparently doesn't want to co-finance those plants.

When I approved the Site C hydro dam, one of the sticking points was horn warning and when they should sound. This was due to the turbines being setup to kick in within .4 seconds of a power drop from one of the windfarms to the South. This was to stabilize the grip as they found the windfarms to erratic with winds in the area either dropping below minimums or going over maximums.  

[sunday]

13 minutes ago, Colin said:

When I approved the Site C hydro dam, one of the sticking points was horn warning and when they should sound. This was due to the turbines being setup to kick in within .4 seconds of a power drop from one of the windfarms to the South. This was to stabilize the grip as they found the windfarms to erratic with winds in the area either dropping below minimums or going over maximums.  

We have one of those peak hydropower plants not far from Barcelona. When visiting it, it was not rare to see the turbines start several times in a few hours, and that was before the massive installation of renewables.

[BansheeOne]

On 6/11/2023 at 4:04 PM, BansheeOne said:

Hit the 75 percent mark on 1 June. At the same time, prices momentarily bottomed out at 24 €. They have been slightly rising since; I suspect providers decided that they were now low enough to really start buying, and demand increased accordingly. Possibly also a sign of beginning economic recovery after negative growth in quarters IV/2022 and I/2023.

After a momentary rise to 41 € in mid-June, gas prices are now back down to 27. National storage capacity is also up to 84 percent, on track to meet the 85 percent target legally mandated for 1 October within the next days already.

[JWB]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/america-s-bet-on-wind-power-is-running-into-a-big-problem/ar-AA1e9pmy?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=9f7823df59974b5798ed425fc239c677&ei=65

[Colin]

On 7/19/2023 at 6:30 AM, BansheeOne said:

After a momentary rise to 41 € in mid-June, gas prices are now back down to 27. National storage capacity is also up to 84 percent, on track to meet the 85 percent target legally mandated for 1 October within the next days already.

Is that for a litre?

 

[sunday]

34 minutes ago, Colin said:

Is that for a litre?

 

I think natural gas is usually priced by energy units, i.e. €/kWh, €/MWh, $/MBTU, etc., as the heating power of a unit of volume at standard pressure could vary according to the composition of the gas.