Laying out key priorities for the EU’s upcoming Clean Industrial Deal, German Economy State Secretary Sven Giegold said on Monday (30 September) he wants the Commission to prioritise renewable energy, taking a tough line on nuclear power and France’s renewable targets.
Alongside a quicker roll-out of renewable energy facilitated by “further exemptions from [environmental impact] assessments,” Giegold outlined several other German priorities for the EU’s upcoming strategy.
Based on the 2030 renewable energy targets, the EU should also set up a 2040 framework, complemented by new, more ambitious targets for energy efficiency, he said.
“It should include new heating standards, a heat pump action plan and a renovation initiative,” he explained, noting a heat pump action plan was last shelved in 2023.
Hydrogen, made from renewables, should be governed by a “a pragmatic framework,” the German politician stressed, reiterating calls from his boss, Economy Minister Robert Habeck (Greens), to delay strict production rules into the late 2030s.
No, because specific power levels need to be available at specific moments. The flat production curve of nuclear does not pair well with varying production from solar/wind. Gas sucks for climate-change reasons but at least you can regulate it up/down in a matter of half hours to react to variability of your other production. While we still had nuclear, wind parks needed to shut down more often.
In the longer run, batteries will shift solar peaks over the day and H2 will likely be used to replace methane.
You make it sound like the completely predictable power output of nuclear is a problem and unpredictable variation in output of the wind/solar is great.
Nuclear takes days to adjust safely. In a non emergency case you don’t regulate it up or down, it has a static load available.
There is emergency shutdown, but the rapid slowing of the fission takes a big burden on the rods and the reactor itself, its for emergency purposes only.
You make it sound like the completely predictable power output of nuclear is a problem
That is a challenge, because it means you need a flat consumption curve as well – which in reality you don’t see often. I.e. you either need to waste or cheaply export energy, especially at night and over the weekend to make sure your grid doesn’t crash.
and unpredictable variation in output of the wind/solar is great.
The point is that augmenting solar/wind with (plain) nuclear doesn’t work well.
But the variability of solar/wind are a challenge as well, especially given the at times negative energy prices. Fossil, biomass, battery, pumped hydro, and H2-based power production have a huge advantage there.
Well there’s a base load of the grid that can be effectively served by the non-variable power plants - or is this outdated approach?
There are ways to modulate production even with “flat” production. A clever way is to use water as energy accumulator: you pump water into a dam during the night, that you later let flow through turbines during the day.
If artificial reservoirs were feasible, they would be better used to flatten the production from renewables.
In practice it is only feasible in areas that have existing natural geographic features.
Germany already have hydroelectricity accounting for 3% of their production, however 3% is nowhere near enough to neither flatten renewable or to modulate flat nuclear production to fit the daily volatile consumption.
If artificial reservoirs were feasible, they would be better used to flatten the production from renewables.
Of course, they require the appropriate geographical features, but those features are relatively widely available in hilly landscapes, which are rather abundant in large parts of Germany.
The reasons why relatively few hydroelectric pump storage power plants have been built in Germany in the recent decades are entirely homemade. For once, the spirit of NIMBY is very strong in Germany, so if you’re planning to build something like that, you’ll be facing the wrath of a plethora of angry German Spießer forming citizens’ initiatives and fighting your project. On top of that, there is German bureaucracy, which will ensure, that the volume paperwork you’ll have to file for building your reservoir is sufficient for filling it up, should you happen to drop it in there. Then, there is the privatised power grid and its idiotic circumstances and rules, which make it unlikely for a pump storage power plant to be profitable, but thanks to the ideology of having privatised essential infrastructure, the state isn’t going to operate them.
Pumpspeicherkraftwerke. We have 31 of them in germany. Which is pretty much the maximum possible because you can’t build them just everywhere. And quick search says these things are economically unsustainable because of the extremely high construction costs but very low revenues. It is wasted money.
It’s only the maximum possible due to NIMBYs, misguided self proclaimed “environmentalists”, German bureaucrats and their petty shit preventing a dozen or so of new ones from being built in the past two decades. On top of that, idiotic “energy market” rules make them very unlikely to operate at profit, but thanks to the neoliberal ideology, essential infrastructure can’t be state operated.
It is wasted money.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it waste. It’s an inherent problem of any energy storage, and we need energy storage if we want to go all in on renewables. Storage has to pay for the energy it stores and can only sell that energy for profit if there is enough demand on the grid, so it sits idle for a lot of time, but you still have the building and maintenance costs.
Sure, if you’d wanted to put a lot of money into 30±year-old nuclear reactors, the power companies could have added storage. However, this is not the only issue of nuclear either and the societal consensus at one point was to phase the reactors out.
(Fwiw, the TerraPower reactors are supposed to store heat — except of course none have been built so far.)
