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
Germany gives tax credits to go solar, average home cost in US about 17 thousand dollars for south facing roofs to go 80% on solar, if this same house was in Germany you get a 50% tax deductable on it ! Germany’s have always been on top for they are one of the most productive & resourceful people in the world. Was reason the Brits. wanted to go to war with them, Churchill wanted to break the spirit of the Germans, hated them more then Hitler himself….!
@CLH: But when you leave the big name companies, the incentive to go green is limited to one thing- money.
There is no good engineering reason for thermal solar to steam to electricity to be as expensive as current production, or even coal, if mining and shipping costs are taken into account.
Thermal solar collection exists at 98% efficiency; heat transference hits 95% routinely, steam (and Stirling) engines have exceeded 50% efficiency, relatively inexpensive inverters are 95% efficient. That is 44% efficiency from insolation to electric energy (and three times the power of photovoltaic). It would reduce the area needed by a home, to power the home, to about 188 sf of mirror (a 24 x 8 foot parabolic trough, for example).
I think companies will get off the grid, because the time will come when generating the electricity yourself will be cheaper.
Leander,
After reading your post, I checked on your comment and it was flagged for moderation automatically. I think the filter just got confused. Sometimes it seems to not like links for foreign servers. I’ve approved the comment.
CLH, I just realized that my comment above my comment above does not show in spite of it containing only two links. Thus it somehow hangs in the air. I am no expert, and beside linking to two experts above only told you only about my consumer experience concerning energy and what changed during the last decade in Germany, I suppose based on EU law. This is admittedly an assumption, since I can’t imagine our energy giants giving up their monopol without outside force, in this case EU legal force.
But I would be pleased to help you find the experts you look for to find efficient and informed answers to your questions. If you like me to do that, send me an email: lea.hahn(at)web.de. That’s my mothers maiden name.
Maybe they simply give back part of the gains resulting from the prepayments, since your rate/tariff is based on last year’s consumption, with the same monthly rate for a year.
don’t misunderstand, I not only got back what I had paid above my actual use in prepayments, but got an extra bonus for spending less energy. I am pondering about changing to 100% renewable energy now, or next time I can change the tariff/rate. In the normal mix it’s 35
BTW, can anyone tell me what the cost effictiveness of Germany’s power grid is?
I am not the expert you look for, but I am German.
That’s a complex issue. we used to have only a few giants, part of my family worked for them over generations. They must have been quite well off considering the way above average pensions they receive, compared to other family members. 😉
I gave up my local provider one of these giants and am supported by a little energy agency for a couple of years now. They make matters much more transparent for me, just as I can handle everything online. I changed basically because I had no chance to check my yearly consumption, no one could explain to me the enormous differences in spite of pretty constant consumption. Now nobody comes to read the meter, I do that myself. And my consumption actually went down enormously. Interestingly I even got a bonus for using less, than my former consumption. No idea how they do this. Maybe they simply give back part of the gains resulting from the prepayments, since your rate/tariff is based on last year’s consumption, with the same monthly rate for a year.
Additionally the little agency, actually is cheaper even cheaper than what I paid a decade ago. OK the expert will say: that’s deregulation. But strictly the old giants own the power grid so the new ones in the market should be worse off, since they have to pay for using the grid. There obviously must be laws that handle how much has to be paid, negotiated with the parties I guess.
To return to one of my family member’s former company (earlier Badenwerk, now EnBW), I have no idea how they do it, but they use the power grid for the phone, internet and television for at least a decades by now, maybe much longer. The influence of the people that worked for the power giants in my family members is that everyone uses both geothermal energy and solar panels, privately now, except me. …
Power grid = Stromnetz, with Strom = power/electricity, Netz = grid, Betreiber=provider. This is an automatic translation of the German site: http://www.stromnetzbetreiber.de It’s a site that offers reliable market data to little providers like mine mentioned above.
Even if the translation is not very good they may be very helpful to an interested American trying to understand our market. At least I hope they are. Obviously the European power grid is linked up, has to be. The deregulation may well be the result of European laws, but as I told you, I am no expert, only German.
this is the translation to the site of the department of Energy at the department of Economics at the University Cologne.
Click contact and sent a message to the secretary of the chairholder, Prof. Dr. Marc Oliver Bettzüge, Christel Schaefer, the E-mail you’ll find there. Careful her name has been translated in the process from Schäfer to Shepard, but not her email. I wonder if our for American eyes curious umlauts will show, but I think they do. You don’t need them in the email address and they are transcribed like this ä=ae, ü=ue. He surely will be able to point out relevant links in the really complex EU environment or give you advise on literature. I am pretty sure there will be enough in English to satisfy your interest.
I’m one of those bizarre, irrational people (according to R.) who has always advocated the fact that “green” will eventually meen “green dollars”. My degree is in ME, and I specialize in manufacturing processes. Several of the studies I was privleged to work on this last semester were related to how manufacturing companies could make money by going green. That, IMHO, is the only carrot (with negative consumer reaction and governemnt interference as the sticks) to entice corporations to go green. Many of today’s companies who proclaim themselves green do so because a sizable portion of the American public thinks green is good. It’s positive PR for these companies, in other words. But when you leave the big name companies, the incentive to go green is limited to one thing- money. But the arguments are there, for anyone with a brain to use for energy efficiency. Very simple equations can be used to demonstrate long term viability and cost reduction in using energy efficient sources, renewable energy, and energy efficient processes and machinery. I think what a lot of corporations are getting stuck on is some of the old perceptions of green tech- it used to cost more, it used to be highly ineffecient,which ticked off shareholders, not to mention what can be a painfully large initial investment. Some of the things that can be used to advocate for a company to go green are those same equations, a presentation to stockholder meetings using good, reliable QUANTIFIABLE scientific data and cost estimates. Another way is to introduce companies to best practices for RCI used by companies like Dr. Pepper, which has been successfully implementing a green strategy into all of their processes, for the simple fact that they can make millions more by using less resources.. RCI can be used as a successful strategy from an engineering standpoint to continously overhaul processes at a much lower initial investment cost, and the continual feedback from actual observed costs during manufacturing using different types of technology provides incontrovertible evidence for the benefit of green tech.
BTW, can anyone tell me what the cost effictiveness of Germany’s power grid is? I haven’t been able to isolate any type of analytical data on it, and it would be very interesting, I think.
Suspiciously dubious claims has always been made for solar energy which has been a highly politicized subject in order to promote it. Tell that to us living in Siberia and Northern Russia. Solar energy can never compete efficiently with properly designed self-recycling nuclear power plants which we are building in mass production to fight the coming Ice Age and increasingly cloudy and colder winter seasons. 50%? At what time and season? Nuclear power can do that 24/7 regardless of weather!
And Gemany’s Green energy is costing an arm and a leg to produce. So much so over 600,000 German’s are disconnecting anually. Due too the execessive high power bills!
We do know how disasterous Solar and windpower can be when it comes to supplying electricity during winter!
No wonder Germany are building Coal power to replace nuclear!
I don’t buy this claim for one minute. Some info is missing and I don’t believe it. Both East & West Germany were just recently married and now they get half of their energy from alternative sources? Sorry, there is a catch somewhere!
ROFL!!! oh my gosh! “Gut durchgebraten?????????? hahahahahah!
google translator classic! of course it means “Well done” but in the sense of a well done piece of meat!
it should say “Gut gemacht!”
hahah… still wiping my tears… Well done!!!
Plus, FYI, if we decided on big installations instead of home installations (I prefer the latter), we could use some of our desert lands to generate electricity.
The USA has about 580,000 square miles of desert. It would take about 14,500 square miles of collectors, using off-the-shelf solar thermal tech, to generate 100% of the current electrical needs of the USA. That is 2.5% of the desert area. Even quadrupling that space to allow for access, repair, worker living space and various means of electrical storage, it would still be only 10% of our desert area, leaving 90% preserved for beauty or ecological preservation.
Fun Facts.
The 2010 census puts the average American home at 2400 sf.
The 2010 DOE stats say the average home consumes 31.5 kwh per day.
NASA, for a nationally representative collection of sites in the Continental USA reports average insolation (energy from the sun striking a surface perpendicularly) values of 4.1 kwh per day per square meter (sm) of collection area. A square meter is 10.76 square feet (sf). So, say the sun energy is 0.381 kwh per sf.
The typical efficiency of solar thermal->steam->electricity with off-the-shelf components is 7.5% (but 44% has been achieved with modern materials, heat recycling and purpose-specific engineering).
So, although the sun averages 0.381 kwh per sf, at off-the-shelf 7.5% efficiency, that is only 0.0285 kwh per sf. For the average home to get 31.5 kwh, they would need 35 sf per kwh, or 1102.5 sf of solar collection area.
But 1102.5 sf is only 46% of the square footage of the average home, and we can expect their roof to cover all of it! Of course that is an average, and typical peak usage is about double the average, so double the collection area to the size of the roof, and on average the home will generate twice its consumption. It is not expensive to double the collection area, unlike PV this is all just cheap, polished aluminum mirrors, probably single-axis sun-tracking parabolic troughs, that can be produced entirely by robots for maybe $1.50 per sf.
A side effect will be about a 10% to 15% reduction in energy usage; on average 22% of usage in American homes is for cooling. Covering the roof with mirrors has been shown to reduce cooling needs by 30% to 50%.
Anyway, there are 125 million homes in America on the electric grid; in all of 2011 America generated a total of 4100 billion kilowatt hours of electricity for all uses (residential, commercial, industrial are the big ones).
So total generation works out to about 32,800 kwh per house, per year. That is about 89.8 kwh per house per day. Now recall, 1102.5 sf will generate 31.5 kwh per day, so 2400 sf will generate 68.57 kwh per day, or about 76% of the national need. (That much electricity can be generated by a 20 hp steam engine running an average of 6 hours a day).
That is JUST residences, not any commercial or factory roofs, or open fields of unproductive land or desert, just existing residences already hooked up to an electric grid.
Let me also point out that is an average excess per house of 37 kwh per day, which is being used for commercial and industrial purposes, for which of course they should pay. The average price per kwh in 2011 was 12c, so over the course of the year, the excess energy per average residence would have a retail value of $1620 per year, and the total energy generated would have a value of $3003 per year. I believe the break-even point would be about three years.
In this alternate universe, we require no coal (42% of generation), natural gas (25%), or nuclear (19%) generation at all. Which means all of our current national electric needs can be met by off-the-shelf zero-emission technology. (And using residences alone, all coal and natural gas generating plants could be decommissioned immediately).
If we apply a little effort to get from 7.5% efficiency to even 37.5% (and recall that 44% is already a fact), five times as much, we have electric cars and we are off of oil. All of that can be done with already tested and proven prototype systems.
Which means ONE system can solve the entire energy problem by itself!
I am not saying we have to abandon wind and PV and other systems, I am saying we do not really need a magic bullet, or new technology, or more research, or rare materials, or new chemistry, or expensive systems or big investments. Solar thermal is executable with aluminum, copper, iron, steel and glass, the components really could not be more common, or the technology easier to comprehend.
The solutions are not esoteric or difficult to implement or difficult to understand. We could be a 98% zero-emission electrically powered energy-independent nation in under ten years: If we can run a power cable to it, we can run it on the sun. That doesn’t work for heavy flight (commercial or military) or oceanic ships (commercial or military) but those are small potatoes in the national energy budget.
IMO nothing stands in the way of nearly immediate energy independence except one insurmountable problem: A corrupt, corporatized government.
US electricity quoted at 11 cents per kW hour??? Not here in New England – more like 1.75X that.
Betykath:
I think those numbers are off, what I see says around 14% for Defense and about 43% for social programs.
Bron,
there are a bit over six million persons (this includes minors, seniors, and so on) in roughly three million households on welfare.
The share of welfare is roughly 16% of the federal budget (it should be noted that a lesser portion of welfare comes from local governments, I don’t have numbers for those).
The Federal Ministry for Labor and Social Affairs as a whole represents a little less then 40% (37% in 2011 IIRC) of the budget, but the lions share of that is support for pension funds (which are mainly financed by payroll contributions, but demographics make interventions with tax money unavoidable).
It will take an extreme and cooperative effort to wean ourselves from the petroleum teat; especially difficult when the wielder of that teat has no desire to see America weaned. I am the owner of the first residential PV solar installation in my town; a 5KW system of panels that cover the south facing roof. It added value to my property and reduced my utility bill from the $250-300 range to near zero through net metering. It will take years before I reach the break even point in capital outlay versus savings, but we need to start thinking more long term if we want the lights to stay on for succeeding generations. I will never understand why, when the technology is already available we continue to ignore it in favor of extremely limited resources. I can forsee a day when all daytime lighting is provided through fiberoptic transmission, appliances will be run off of on-site power generation, and transportation will be silently achieved through totally rechargeable vehicles.
Bron,
“In the states it is quite high and about 50% of our annual federal budget goes to all types of social welfare payments. What is the percentage in Germany?”
Actually it is less than 40%. OTOH, military spending is about 48%.
Social Security is a separate trust fund, not part of the budget, and should not be counted.
. . . both goals were possible . . . .