Nature is not humanity’s friend.
Nature is not humanity’s friend. If we were left to rely for our survival on nature’s (supposed) bounty, there would not be eight billion of us, and the humans that there were would be living far shorter, far less comfortable lives than so many of us do today. One of the great achievements (and enablers) of modern civilization has been the development of technologies that enable us not to have to rely on the natural world. And so, for example, when it gets dark, most of us can turn on the lights, and when it gets cold, most of us can turn on the heating.
One of the more depressing aspects of the billions and billions now being sunk into wind and solar energy is the way that they are being used to rebuild that old, dangerous dependency on the natural world. To invest all that money into technologies that (for now) represent a step back seems perverse, a waste compounded by the opportunity cost that comes with it. How could that money have been better spent?
A key problem with wind and solar energy is “intermittency.” The wind does not always blow, the sun does not always shine, and sufficiently scalable storage technology is not yet ready to deal with that problem.
That’s no secret, but this story from the Daily Telegraph offers a glimpse of what it could mean:
A German plan to charge more for using electricity on cloudy days has been dismissed as “crazy” by businesses.
The country is pushing the use of solar power and other forms of renewable energy, and as part of that has said people should pay more for electricity usage on days with no sun – a concept companies say will harm their competitiveness.
The economy ministry outlined its energy plans earlier this month in a project called “electricity market of the future”.
A key area involves varying electricity charges to discourage usage in dull weather.
The proposal, which has yet to be agreed upon by Olaf Scholz’s cabinet, would see transmission charges hiked at times when wind parks and solar panels are producing too little electricity.
Germany, which scrapped its nuclear power stations and has been cut off from Russian gas, continues to increase its dependency on renewables. They are meant to provide 80 percent of the country’s electricity needs by the end of this decade.
Victims of green gouging, Germans already pay some of the highest electricity bills in Europe. High energy costs are one reason why its energy-intensive manufacturing sector has been losing ground.
The Daily Telegraph:
The plans amount to “totally crazy weather roulette”, Christoph Ahlhaus, the head of the lobby group for small and medium sized businesses BVMW, told the Bild newspaper.
He added that “machinery needs reliable electricity every hour of the day, every day of the year”.
Matching production to the weather “is either technically impossible or would lead to such low efficiency that we would be hopelessly outmatched by European competitors”, the Economic Council, a lobby group for more than 10,000 businesses, warned.
It couldn’t happen here, of course.
Not unrelatedly, here’s an account from the Sydney Morning Herald in late July, when a wintry Australia may have been going through a Dunkelflaute, a German word, which, as I noted in 2022, can be translated as “dark lull” or “dark doldrums.” This describes a weather pattern during which there is not a lot of sun and not a lot of wind. Meteorologists refer to this state of affairs as anticyclonic gloom, a magnificent term in its own right.
The Sydney Morning Herald:
Electricity costs are climbing again across Australia’s eastern seaboard after a prolonged stretch of cold weather coincided with a wind power drought, forcing expensive gas-fired generators to meet peak demand.
In an update to be released on Wednesday, the Australian Energy Regulator reveals wholesale electricity prices — which retailers pay for power before supplying it to customers — rose sharply in every eastern state other than Queensland during the three months to June 30.
The increases of up to 99 per cent in Victoria and 86 per cent in NSW were largely driven by greater power consumption from households dialling up their heaters, at the same time as low renewable energy generation, and network and generator outages were weighing on the system. . . .
Coinciding with soaring demand, output from renewables slumped across the period. Wind turbines contributed just 12 per cent of generation, their lowest quarterly share since 2021, while lower-than-average rainfall reduced output from hydroelectric dams.
When I wrote about the Dunkelflaute in 2022, I quoted from a report in Quartz:
Looking further ahead, the writer of the Quartz report refers to analysis that shows that once Germany achieves its goal of relying solely on renewables, the gap between supply and demand “during the most extreme dunkelflautes could be about 10 gigawatts. That’s equal to about a dozen typical gas or nuclear plants.”
Nuclear plants, eh? Pity Germany doesn’t have any of those.