http://ecowatch.com/2016/05/11/germany-renewable-energy/
[Negative wholesale prices are a regular event in the Ontario
electricity market, especially on week-end nights. This is because the
Ontario nuclear fleet is so huge, we simply cannot ramp the amount of
generation down enough to match in-province demand. So, we have to
export power to other neighbouring jurisdictions rather than shutting
down reactors at low demand periods. The only way we get them to agree
to shutting down some of their baseload supply capacity is to pay them
to take the power. Unfortunately, Ontario does not see fit to encourage
its own citizens to shift load to benefit from free or negative cost
electricity, say for heating water, charging electric vehicles, putting
all those cordless tools on timers to only charge at night, etc. This
occurs despite a pumped energy storage system which literally pumps the
water of Niagara Falls back up to an upstream reservoir. Imagine the
situation if we actually encouraged people to turn off unneeded lights
at night - which is likely why Ontario has one of the lamest electricity
conservation programs in the industrialized world.
Oh, and having roughly 90% of the electricity supplied by intermittent
renewables did not crash the national grid.
links and images in on-line article]
This Country Generated So Much Renewable Energy It Paid People to Use It
Lorraine Chow | May 11, 2016 10:41 am
On May 8—a particularly sunny and windy day—Germany’s renewable energy
mix of solar, wind, hydropower and biomass generated so much power that
it met 88 percent of the country’s total electricity demand, or 55 GW
out of 63 GW being consumed.
This means, as Quartz reported, “power prices actually went negative for
several hours, meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume
electricity.”
“We have a greater share of renewable energy every year,” said Christoph
Podewils of Agora Energiewende, a German clean energy think tank.
“The power system adapted to this quite nicely. This day shows again
that a system with large amounts of renewable energy works fine.”
According to Quartz, industrial customers such as refineries and
foundries were able to earn money by consuming electricity because
nuclear and coal plants were unable to shut down production during the
spike and had to continue selling power to the grid.
Germany’s power system “is still too rigid for power suppliers and
consumers to respond quickly to price signals,” the publication noted.
Germany, the fourth largest economy in the world, is one of the global
leaders of clean energy as it attempts to phase out fossil fuels. The
country has an ambitious goal of hitting 100 percent renewable energy by
2050.
The European country already hit a milestone on July 25, 2015 when
solar, wind and other sources of renewable energy met 78 percent of the
day’s energy demand. That beat its previous record of 74 percent in May
2014.
Renewables supplied nearly 33 percent of German electricity in 2015,
according to Agora Energiewende. To compare, the U.S. receives around 10
percent of its electricity from renewable sources.
Osha Gray Davidson, author of Clean Break, a book about Germany’s
transition to carbon-free energy, said that Germany is a model for the
U.S., “because manufacturing accounts for much more of the German
economy than the American economy and they have 80 million people—much
larger than a country like Denmark, which gets more of its power from
renewables but has a much smaller industrial base and has a population
of five and a half million people.”
CleanTechnica reported that the rural German states of
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schleswig-Holstein already generate more
renewable power than households and businesses in each state consume.
Germany is also aiming to slash carbon emissions by 40 percent in 2020
and by 80 to 95 percent in comparison with 1990 levels by 2050.
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