It is surprising that everyone hates German wind power expect germans them-self. Windmills are very popular in Germany and local politician must do unpopular decisions such as reducing the tariffs, because German grid infrastructure has hard time to handle the peak loads caused by windmills.
We could speculate that wind power is significant factor for the competitiveness of German industry, because windmills have been pushing down the electricity price. Especially the high price of daytime electricity has been reduced due to day active wind and solar power. There are 32 GW solar power and 31 GW Wind power installed in Germany. Average electricity demand in Germany is 60 GW. I calculated for german capacity factor 19 % from 2011 data. There was on average 28 GW wind power installed during the year and total output was 46 500 GWh. Therefore I would assume that your sources used misleading data. It must be considered that windmills in Germany are quite old. And efficiency has improved quite significantly in recent years. Also today the installation of onshore windmills costs just €850 per kW although just few years ago the cost was €1200 per kW. Also the maintenance costs has been reduced by one third. —Jouni > Terry Blanton <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > Close to 29% I guess. >> >> Optimistic: >> >> "The Dutch national wind capacity factor is a dismal 0.186. The German >> wind capacity factor “is even more dismal at 0.167,” the article >> said." >
