If you look at 2016 and 2017 February tends to the best month for wind energy generation in Germany
https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_pie.htm?year=2016&month=3
20% in Feb and just 12% in March.
Last few days of wind in Germany have been well below average. Getting as low as 2.5GW of 50GW wind capacity or 5%..
If you bought a car and at times could only drive it at 5% the legal speed, you wouldn't buy it but with renewables most data told via mainstream media always refers to everything about it as something that can do 100% all the time.
I tried posting on the Australian whirlpool forums renewable energy section and it didn't go down well. Everyone on there talks about new wind farms like this "that new 400MW windfarm is coming online soon and that extra 400MW is exactly what they need", when you tell them about capacity factor they get nasty, and often respond to my post with a dubiously broken up 20 individual posts/response to push my post out of the page thread and I noticed they don't do that when responding to others. This person even seemed to work in the wind industry so it seemed to me they don't even want people to know about capacity factor! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
I keep getting little bits of feedback from looking at the renewables-industry that the only thing folks in the renewables industry want to do is mislead people, so I really like https://www.electricitymap.org/ because it makes looking at this stuff fun compared to just charts and helps inject useful information into peoples minds.
With South Australia, its been a couple of days of 40c heat and now its gone and of course the wind has picked up now that they don't actually need the electricity that was needed during those hot nights. And I expect that in the next day there wont be much wind as it seems the wind is there the never next day after some hot days and then dies away. Looks like during peak demand the wind that they were trying to utilized dropped suddenly and they had to pay $600 a MW/h to fill in the gap.
One thing I have noticed in European countries with all the wind farms is they all have large hydro-storage that can help utilize the randomness of wind, even the little euro countries have hydro.
This is something South Australia will never have on any comparable level as they just don't get enough water, and its probably one of the reasons why South Australia trying to copy Europe has been such a failure. Sure we can build Snowy-hydro-storage this is going to be in Victoria closer to Sydney than Adelaide and it will be the only practical large hydro-storage to ever be built.
Looking around on Electricitymap you see
Germany: 5.5GW hydro capacity with
9.4GW hydro-storage.
Italy:
15.6GW hydro capacity with 6.45GW hydro-storage
Spain:
20GW hydro?storage capacity
Sweden:
16GW hydro?storage
Austria: 8.6GW / 3.4GW storage
Romania: 6.7GW hydro?storage
Russia: 48GW hydro?storage
Slovakia: 1.6GW / 1GW storage
Turkey:
27GW hydro?storage
Hillhater said:
Whilst the S Australian state Govmt have established a visible example of a disfunctional power plan, they are not alone.
Victoria is rapidly following down the same track forcing coal plants to shut, and even QLD ,..a coal "Anchor" state has pledged to be 50% Re by 2030.
Federal Govrmt is no better, playing political word games and setting up commities and control organisations (NEG) to appear to have a plan.
The latest thought bubble is to distribute "Smart Meters" to consumers to support a "Demand Management". Program.
What that actually means they want to force consumers to change their lifestyle to reduce the demand peaks, and if necessary, they can use smart meters to regulate supply if things get critical.
Few in Politics see the seriousness of this situation, with mostly just blame shifting and finger pointing to score political points, Meanwhile , SA steams towards another inevitable power blackout at some point.
I dont want to see it happen, because of the cost , inconvenience, and danger, to alll residents, but i fear it will take a major power failure with serious consequences (deaths ?) before something significant is done. :|
Yes it seems like most Australians believe renewables will be cheap (except now via brute force in South Australia) and they trust their state governments can do a good job of making it happen despite everything so far. Malcome Turnbull while half half trying to be a conservative also can't help but be supportive of the most easily absorbable idea that renewables can solve all their problems.
This seems to be because media like the ABC manipulate opinions like marketing experts, for example as officially Hazelwood was meant to run until 2030 and only after the state government Daniel Andrews tripled the royalty rate for mining its coal did Hazelwood a few weeks later inform the government that they may as well just shutdown Hazelwood, which was shut down so abruptly that it later became a federal law you must give 3 years notice of a power-station shutdown to mitigate disasters that Daniel Andrews managed to create with Hazelwood which was just months.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUJIl5zVwAE4wCx.jpg
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victorias-own-mining-tax-to-triple-as-treasurer-gouges-brown-coal-for-revenue-20160422-gocymk.html
The thing is ABC news just pounded the public mind with claims the Hazelwood boilers had
mysteriously become too old since the weeks since Daniel Andrews tripled the coal power-station royalty rates that caused Hazelwood owners to chose to abruptly announce Hazelwoods shutdown. People believed this claim by the ABC and it really just shows how much of a powerful grip the leftist media has on the general Australian public mind. Most people epically trust ABC, I think its mostly because when you don't see cheesy private advertisements between every piece of information you get from them it makes non-discerning people suck it down like a baby on its bottle. They never ever even raised a question that Hazelwood might be shutting down for other reasons other than sudden old boilers, this why abc is bad value for money.
It's the incredible bias that exists in peoples minds when people take sides in politics that over-rides the wider more obvious logic when presented with all the information. The ABC has made some incredibly clever baloney manipulative torpedoes of information into Victorian voters protecting Daniel Andrews and now the Victorian people are going to suffer as a result.
To get a window into the mind frame of Daniel Andrews the state premier leader, here is an article a few days ago about how he wanted to change ANZAC day (the official day to honor Australia's war dead) to also be spending time honoring indigenous people on the very same day. To me extreme unbalanced SJW ( for general explanation of SJW's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUhc3Kv4ieE ) is a sign of a dysfunctional mind as a lot of these people tend to show such extreme narrow-mindedness to the point they tend to be incredibly comfortable wanting to kill other technically innocent people to help other people, they have technically become the equivalent of Adolf Hitler while wearing the badge of the ultimate humanitarian. More videos on the general explanation of SJW's https://youtu.be/iVQy9LWlGvM https://youtu.be/oFrZsGbO6N0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior
The Victorian government has sparked controversy after surveying citizens about their thoughts on honouring Indigenous people killed by early white settlers on Anzac Day.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5347731/Vic-government-considers-honouring-Aborigines-Anzac-Day.html#ixzz56OLUF45P