Germany Leads The Way In Renewable Energy - And Suffers The Consequences

No other industrialized country has been more aggressive than Germany in developing renewables, in the form of  solar and wind power. The potential up side was demonstrated on September 14, when Germany hit 31 gigawatts of energy from wind power alone.  That's a huge number, lots of free energy, and had to be a large percentage of national electricity usage.  So why aren't more Germans celebrating, and why is Germany investing in so many new coal-fired power plants?

Christopher Booker explains in the (UK) Telegraph why reliance on renewables like wind and solar cause electricity rates to skyrocket and put an economy at risk. As Mr. Booker explains:

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there will arise – as Germany is discovering – two massive technical problems. One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations. The other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” than normal that it negates any supposed CO2 savings from the wind).

 As consumers we are used to hitting the switch and lights coming on.  We have no idea of the complexities that are involved in matching the vagaries of solar and wind-produced electricity to the steady demands of the electrical grid. If our governments insist on more renewables in energy companies' portfolios, we may soon find out.

This was one example of what can happen to manufacturing when electricity is unreliable, which is especially interesting in light  of the possible start up of the aluminum smelter in Ravenswood:

Now the problem for the German grid has become even worse. Thanks to a flood of subsidies unleashed by Angela Merkel’s government, renewable capacity has risen still further (solar, for instance, by 43 per cent). This makes it so difficult to keep the grid balanced that it is permanently at risk of power failures. (When the power to one Hamburg aluminium factory failed recently, for only a fraction of a second, it shut down the plant, causing serious damage.) Energy-intensive industries are having to install their own generators, or are looking to leave Germany altogether.