Germany’s economy is viewed as the most successful major economy in the world today and the key bedrock for European recovery. While many conservative leaders in the United States are calling on the tearing up of environmental protections to help our economy, Germany has shown the fallacy of that claim. The Germans continue to set new records on environmental protection. This week the German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour — literally half of the energy used through the key midday hours in the country.
That is the equivalent to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity without any radioactive waste left over. The Germans are getting rid of all nuclear plants after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year. Instead, the entire country will be using greater renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and bio-mass.
This is not some tiny country with a mainly tourism economy but one of the greatest industrial nations on Earth. It vividly demonstrates how far we have fallen back in the leadership on environmental issues and technology. As we return to an oil and coal emphasis on energy, the Germans are expanding their control over this industry and reducing the health costs of pollution for their population. It is the very definition of leadership and vision that is so lacking in our own country.
To our German friends, we say gut durchgebraten and danke danke?
Source: Inside
@Dredd: I read about a design for at-sea wind on floating platforms I think looked smart, including some schemes for storing the energy, including a pretty simple engineering design for compressing air to a liquid in tanks, so the “energy station” can be visited by a barge once a week that offloads the liquid air to its own empty tanks. Again, a reasonably low energy loss rate, there are modern designs for very efficient compressed air engines, and no need for cables or underwater maintenance or tangling. The platform itself can charge batteries that are used for electrical engines by an autopilot to keep it at certain GPS coordinates, and also to report by radio or satellite on status, energy production, and remaining storage capacity. All that enough miles offshore to be well out of sight. With beacons and lights for ships, of course.
Tony C. 1, May 28, 2012 at 11:11 am
@Dredd: They still produce a storage problem for the waste product. Why bother with that, when solar can satisfy all of our needs and produce no waste or danger at all?
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I prefer solar (pv & thermal), tidal, and wind. Not necessarily in that order.
Geography, geology, and location are considerations as to which one to use where.
I am proud of Germany for their good example.
ExxonMobil must hate them.
My pal (no respected dog calls his pal an owner) lives on a boat with almost 100% solar power. A house can be rigged the same way–same power without the sway. The sun dont shine so bright on my Ol Kentucky home though– high rates, coal power plants nearby producing clouds of dirt blocking out the sun. Sort of a vicious cycle–or circus. Germany is first in many catagories–solar is hot right now. Go to Berlin on a hot day and see some hot women.
TalkinDog
(BarkinDog is on vacation at the School for the Blind retreat and will be back in a day)
tony, thanks
It is much easier to solve difficult problems when people work together in cooperation and respect. In Germany (I do some business there each year), Labor has a seat at the table. Labor is respected. Capital and Management know they could do nothing without labor.
So this is the dynamic that makes them so successful In the US all these groups are adversarial. Everyone is trying to get over on everyone else in order to get more for themselves. Labor is hounded and reviled and used as a scape goat.
The two big solar projects in Nevada and Arizona used solar panels made in Germany.
How can this happen when the Germans have much HIGHER labor costs than America?
“[…] the Germans are expanding their control over this industry […]”
Not really. Quite a few of Germany’s biggest producers of solar cells have filed for bankruptcy in the last months (Solon, Q-Cells, Sovello, Pairan).
Photovoltaics is ultimately comparatively “low tech,” which means that Chinese products are ~20% cheaper.
This is of course positive for German producers of solar electricity, but fatal for German producers of solar cells.
@bettykath: The reservoir or molten salts are not really home-friendly; they require too much space. Fork-lift batteries offer a great alternative storage medium that doesn’t take too much space. For solar thermal, I have seen write ups of ad hoc (home grown) systems small enough for a home that operate a Stirling or Steam engine that drives an alternator that charges a bank of fork lift batteries, kept in a back yard shed.
@Dredd: They still produce a storage problem for the waste product. Why bother with that, when solar can satisfy all of our needs and produce no waste or danger at all?
Modern technology allows the precision manufacture of Stirling engines to be used in solar thermal applications with simple glass/aluminum mirrors that use no rare materials anywhere. The Stirling engine is basically a steam engine; but modern ones can be super-efficient and generate electricity as cheaply as coal. The parts are only high-tech in their tolerances, otherwise they are simple steel and copper, can be mass produced cheaply, and understood and repaired by the common car mechanic.
It almost seems to me like people have an aversion to perfectly acceptable low tech solutions, as if the greater complication and difficulty somehow makes a solution better!
Or maybe it is just that much easier to for people to believe if they do not understand it; or maybe it is easier to wish for if they couldn’t accomplish it themselves. If the solution is straightforward but takes a lot of work, perhaps it becomes too real and therefore too much of a responsibility they would rather shirk; because with a solution in hand they are choosing the status quo instead of just sincerely wishing for another magic bullet.
In a way, that is the topic of this thread: Germany is proving the solution already exists, no magic bullet is needed.
Too bad the oil and nuclear folks have the money for lobbying. Are small scale systems of either the reservoir or liquid salt practical?
The administrator of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, top physicist Alvin M. Weinberg, wanted a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor (MSR), but was fired by Nixon for advocating MSR.
Thorium types are orders of magnitude safer, orders of magnitude less toxic, and orders of magnitude environmentally helpful on all fronts, than Fukushima style nuclear power plants that are in use today.
Weinberg was overruled because what he wanted did not produce weapons grade plutonium.
He wanted liquid salt reactors using Thorium, a common, non-toxic element. Video About It.
Liquid salt is good for energy generation in several ways.
There are vast areas of very sparsely populated land in the United States where the sun shines almost constantly, except at night.
@Dredd: There always has been, all it takes is some land area. The liquid salts you link to are only slightly more efficient than water reservoirs. The water reservoir technology is a century old. On a flat plain, one can dig a deep hole, and use the dirt taken out of the hole to build the walls of a lake beside it.
The energy generated during the day by solar, or when the wind blows for wind, is used to pump water from the collection pit to the upper reservoir. When the energy is needed, it exits from the upper reservoir to the collection pit via turbine, just like we get energy from a dam.
Between evaporation from the upper reservoir and the loss of energy due to pumping, the reservoir system cost is about 15%; i.e. we recover 85% of the energy we would have had if we had used it directly. The liquid salt has about half that cost, due to cooling of the salts and other losses before steam hits the turbine. However, the salt system is more involved and costly than the reservoir system, and requires more maintenance. The reservoir construction is passive; some old-school concrete, dirt, and big bulldozers. It is basically land-shaping (including concrete channels to turbines). It does take much more area, but can be located anywhere (even several miles from the energy generation, it is just electricity after all), so land is typically not the problem, and any junk land will do.
If one is located over an aquifer, then building an upper reservoir by digging a hole and using the dirt for walls is sufficient; the water can be pumped up from the aquifer and drained back into the aquifer through turbines; with essentially neutral environmental impact (the water isn’t being used for anything but its weight).
Because of the costs of storage/recovery, in both systems you would want to use as much energy at the time of generation as necessary, and only use the excess energy for storage, for later recovery.
Just want to note here, for the sake of accuracy, wind power (that would be industrial-sized wind turbine configurations) ain’t all it’s cracked up to be — and the Europeans are backing off. Much of it is a big industry taking advantage of the ‘green’ label to advance a technology.
Germany was the number one exporter in the world until a short while ago when China took 1st place. Now it is China, Germany, and the U.S.eh? in first through third place.
As JT said, powerful economies can be clean, green, and sane.
When the “right” people will make the money from alternative sources then we will have them. Right now the oil companies have all those expensive refineries, ships, etc. They need to make their make money back.. The more they invest in that, the longer it will take.
The oil companies want to squeeze every drop before they will let lose of the strangle hold on America.
wow, so you mean that instead of doing what they did..(attack their own population through dead brained bigotted fascist thuggery….) we could do what they are doing now?????
who knew!
Great post.
More good news is that there is a way to save the energy generated by solar or wind to be used at night and when the wind dies down.
Such is the power of rational social programs and the rational support and control of business.
“It vividly demonstrates how far we have fallen back in the leadership on environmental issues and technology . . .. It is the very definition of leadership and vision that is so lacking in our own country.” (JT)
And our so-called “leaders” (makes one choke) aren’t even embarrassed. Easier to blame the a-rabs and tout the inevitability of tarsands oil.
Germany is ahead of the rest of the world in so many ways…….