Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear

sendler2112 said:
Not sure what numbers you are using. 2017 shows Germany using 13,700 PetaJoules/3,800 TWH per year. .44TW average. Half of which after converting all thermal to electric is .22TW. At the national average 11% capacity factor it takes 2TW nameplate of installed solar PV to replace half of Germany's energy. So 80 GW of solar per year forever to transition and then keep up.

I was talking about electricity production.

In 2018 Germanys primary energy consumption has bei 12,900 PJ, the lowest since the 1970s, so reducing energy consumption in times of ecomic growth is possible.

Electricity production in Germany in 2018 has been:

Lignite: 146,0 TWh
hard coal: 83,0 TWh
nuclear: 76,1 TWh
natural gas 83,0 TWh
oil: 5,2 TWh
solar: 46,3 TWh (2018 was quite sunny in Germany)
wind onshore: 93,9 TWh
wind offshore: 19,9 TWh
biomass: 45,7 TWh
other: 33,2 TWh

net export: 50,0TWh

electricity consumption: 598,9 TWh
all electricity production from renewable energy sources: 228,7 TWh

https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/#20181214_brd_stromerzeugung1990-2018

We will have 60% RE in electricity production by 2030. The rate is growing at an average of 2% per year for 15 years now. Of course weather conditions now have impact on the anual rate, so it's not a steady growth.
 
sendler2112 said:
UK gets 2.2% of energy from wind and .5% from solar. 7.9% nuclear, 6.4% biofuel, .3% hydro.
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nuclear always includes the heat production which is rarely used, so in reality what you get as useable energy from nuclear is the electricity and this is around 1/3rd of the quoted numbers for "primary energy".
 
sendler2112 said:
4MW onshore turbines average 1MW so 220,000 turbines. 8,800 per year forever.
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The manufacture, transport, and installation of 300 ton turbines on 1500 ton pads has no rational relationship to a factory mass assembling cars.

A new 4MW wind turbine on a 135m tower has a much better load capacity than the 10 or 20 year old smaller wind turbines.

Average production is around 14,000 MWh/year for those. (3500h/year)

Offshore wind is even better at 4,500 to 5,000 hours/year on the rated capacity

Using electricity for mobility and heating of building will lower energy consiumption in those sectors to around 1/3rd. heta pumps generate 3kWh heat out of 1 kWh electricity (or even better), electric cars consume 20kWh/km vs. 60kWh/100km of ICE cars

So much less wind power plants are needed than your simplifeid numbers suggest.

And we are not talking about onshore wind alone. We are heading to around 50% onshore wind, 30% photovoltaik, 30% offshore wind and 10% "rest". (sum is 120%, this is bacause of 20% losses for storage are not useable overproduction)

So for 600 TWh/a (electricity consumption in 2018) we would need maybe 300 TWh/a onshore wind.

At 14,000MWh per turbine this makes 22.000 onshore Wind turbines which is less the number of todays installed wind turbines in Germany (but larger ones)

For 1,500TWh anual electricity production (consumption depends mainly on usage of electric transport vs. synthetic fueal and how we heat our buildings) ca. 54,000 onshore wind turbines would be needed. That's around 2% of our area and you can use it to grow food or forest under those wind turbines, only a very small amount has to be the actual foundation plus maintainance pathways.

54,000 wind turbines with a average lifetime of 20 years would translate to 2,700 onshore wind turbines every year.

This can be done, it is not even a significant act.

If you stay at that technological Level of 4MW turbines and there is no improvement on wind energy for the future you can even reuse many components and installations like transformators or grid connection after those 20 years.

For photovoltaik eben the roof area alone would be sufficient.

You still get more energy from biomass than wind and solar.

Yes, if you include wood for heating houses and all those biomass to be consumed by our cars, that's correct.

For electricity production in 2018 see my numbers above. We now get more kWh from photovoltaik than from biomas. Wind is already the 2nd largest source of electricity generation in Germany.

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There is still a long way to go. 90% RE on primary energy consumption by 2050 (incl. planes and ships and all industry processes) would be a great success imho, even 80% sounds good to me.
 
neptronix said:
Here is another dataset which shows very large variations over short time spans, since i cannot find a really high resolution long plot of the vostok ice core data.
sg2wav.jpg

So we can see that the earth before industrial times has a rather unstable climate and a variance of 2.5 degrees in global temperature can happen over a 100-200 year timespan.

So 1.1 degrees C rise over ~100 years is actually mild compared to what natural phenomena can dole out.

Who made that diagram?

Ice cores are usualy taken in arctic areas and the surface temperatur anomaly because of AGW is much higher there than what has been shown in that diagram.
It's more like something around +3K and if you compare that with the "natural fluctuation" you clearly see that what we eperience now is something new...

AnnualMaps.2011-2025.png


source: http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/Temperature/T_moreFigs/
 
I don't know who exactly made it, but you can find many graphs generated based on ice core data all over the internet. There's multiple well respected scientific organizations that focus on climate from geography.

Of course, it will not tell you anything about local areas.. it still does say a lot about the global picture. Other data that represents other parts of the world also shows extreme swings in temperature from way before the time we started burning fossil fuels.

The vostok data is likely the longest record of history you will ever find, which is why i bring it up.


We don't have any long term data ( >50 years ) showing temperature anomalies over time, simply because we were not measuring it until recently. The data set is so short that establishing a baseline of what climate normally is in a given area is extremely difficult.

You would have to piece that data together from a large set of data. Something i've not seen alarmists do yet.
 
neptronix said:
We don't have any long term data ( >50 years ) showing temperature anomalies over time, simply because we were not measuring it until recently.
We have data from England since 1659. We have global records starting in 1850.
You would have to piece that data together from a large set of data. Something i've not seen alarmists do yet.
Perhaps. But scientists (not alarmists) have pieced together the data from a great many sources (often called proxies) which is why we have a fairly good idea of temperatures over the past few million years.
 
billvon said:
We have data from England since 1659. We have global records starting in 1850.

What's the quality of that data like? I think i have seen one graph going back to 1850.. i have not seen the 1659 data yet.
I know that a few orgs have revised the data we've collected with modern instruments. So a comparison of ~400 year old data to our ~50 year data might be a bit flawed.

What's more interesting to me is at least a 150,000 year timespan. Because that will show you approximately 1 climate cycle in full.
Then you are closer to establishing a baseline for what climate *should* be.
..except within those cycles, you have large variations that we still haven't explained. Larger anomalies than we are said to have created by geoengineering the planet.

But scientists (not alarmists) have pieced together the data from a great many sources (often called proxies) which is why we have a fairly good idea of temperatures over the past few million years.

If you have any links on that, let's see it. I have not came across such things in my searchings.

Also, nice to see that you separate alarmists from scientists. Some people equate the two, but many alarmists do not have a deep understanding of how far the rabbit hole goes, and often make bold claims with no evidence.

..not that the deniers are any better.. usually they have a much worse grasp of science.. i've only heard of one that i'd call smarter than your average doofus...
 
neptronix said:
What's the quality of that data like?
Like you'd expect, it gets more accurate the 'newer' it gets. Still, we can get a 95% certainty within 2C in 1750, and within .5C by 1850.

And it should be noted that this improves all the time, as old records are recovered and digitized. The ultimate way to do it is to get a good (i.e. sealed) thermometer used for temperature measurement along with temperature records from lighthouse keepers, old military bases, ship's logs etc. The thermometer may have not been calibrated well back in 1910, but with today's accurate references you can recalibrate the thermometer and apply those corrections to all the measurements at that station.

A graphical representation of the error bands:

https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/897847195474337795/photo/1

If you have any links on that, let's see it. I have not came across such things in my searchings.
NOAA has a great writeup on that - but with the government shutdown it's not accessible.

Here's a less detailed writeup:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/mar/07/past-climate-temperature-proxies
 
That's a huge margin of error!!

DHXLQqCVoAAYIhq.png

So yeah, the ~50 years of GOOD data statement applies. We just weren't thinking about climate as much in the past, so the trail from here to there is pretty murky.

In the article you linked me, they admit that the proxy bit is problematic in ways i thought.

I wonder what the baseline temperature is based on. If it's based on the 1930's, as in that picture, it could be too generous.
Or not!
 
Cephalotus said:
For 1,500TWh anual electricity production (consumption depends mainly on usage of electric transport vs. synthetic fueal and how we heat our buildings) ca. 54,000 onshore wind turbines would be needed. That's around 2% of our area and you can use it to grow food or forest under those wind turbines, only a very small amount has to be the actual foundation plus maintainance pathways.

54,000 wind turbines with a average lifetime of 20 years would translate to 2,700 onshore wind turbines every year.

This can be done, it is not even a significant act.

Your 40% capacity factor for onshore wind seems high. The highest CF for wind I have seen documented is 46% for some offshore wind in the North Atlantic. MacKay placed values of 2.5W/ meter2 for onshore wind and 5W/ m2 for rooftop solar if the roof faces south. 4W/m2 for solar farms to include spacing. For the UK. Which has better sun than Germany. To make 1500 TWh annual with 50% onshore wind it takes 34,223 km2 for the turbines. 1/10 of Germany's area covered with turbines. But the area under and around them can be used for other things. 30% from solar would be another South facing 10,300 km2. 3% of land area devoted to solar farms.
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How much storage will be needed?
 
It looks like maybe 15% of Germany's area has adequate 6ms wind. 7-9 ms is considered more economically viable. So 52,000 km2 to work with for 60,000 turbines which need 1km spacing (5 rotor diameters) on all sides. All yellow, orange and red on the map would be fully populated with 100 meter bladed turbines to produce 1/6 of current primary energy. to power a country on rebuildables, it has to be country sized.
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ijgi-03-00942-g005.png

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Cephalotus said:
In 2018 Germanys primary energy consumption has bei 12,900 PJ, the lowest since the 1970s

Impossible!

Since 1970 the population of Germany has grown from 61 to 82 million (+34%) while the economy grew by average 0.51% per year (27.7% compounded).

We have been repeatedly told population, energy use and economic growth are intrinsically linked in a 1:1:1 ratio!
 
neptronix said:
That's a huge margin of error!!

It's, at worst, approx. +/- 1°C at an uncertainty of 2 sigma (K=2). The furthest extent of the error band does no exceed the (very accurately determined) temperature of recent years.

What problem do you believe this presents in determining a general trend?
 
Look at the graph. Many times, co2 goes up or down and temperature doesn't follow it. There's a correlation, but it can be loose at times.

It's interesting that methane and co2 follow similar patterns tho.
I imagine it gets warmer and some dead stuff thaws and resumes decomposing, and releases co2 and methane.

This graph isn't particularly high res, but the dreaded temperature lag isn't observable.
Sometimes the temperature goes up, then methane and co2 go up. Other times, there's the lag. Other times, the co2/methane trend doesn't match temperature at all.

Good things don't really move in lockstep. We'd be screwed!
 
Punx0r said:
neptronix said:
That's a huge margin of error!!

It's, at worst, approx. +/- 1°C at an uncertainty of 2 sigma (K=2). The furthest extent of the error band does no exceed the (very accurately determined) temperature of recent years.

That's a huge error band range. So large that it could throw everything off.
In theory, we could only be 0.1C hotter than it'd been before the industrial revolution.
Or it could have been an ice age.

We have to revert to the ice core data, if we want any degree of accuracy to make statements about what weather has done in the past. Because you get to use the same methodology and tools for every square inch of ice rod that gets pulled out.

..versus tools of questionable calibration that were used during the age of slave and animal power.

It's possible that it was hotter before if you believe the beginning of the red line.

2019-01-07 16_14_52-Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear - Page 123 - Endless Sphere.png

But we don't know!
 
Punx0r said:
Cephalotus said:
In 2018 Germanys primary energy consumption has bei 12,900 PJ, the lowest since the 1970s

Impossible!

Since 1970 the population of Germany has grown from 61 to 82 million (+34%) while the economy grew by average 0.51% per year (27.7% compounded).

We have been repeatedly told population, energy use and economic growth are intrinsically linked in a 1:1:1 ratio!
Germany energy consumption has gone from 250 to 330 mtoe since 1968. 30%. Energy consumption began to level in 1990 and go down after 2000 following along with population. There has been a slight decoupling in Germany.
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dsg208_500_350.jpg

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sendler2112 said:
There has been a slight decoupling in Germany.
And in the US. Energy use per capita peaked in 1975 and has been declining ever since.

Don't confuse useful work with energy. A Nissan Leaf gets you to where you are going as well as a Ford Expedition (i.e. the same work is done on your mass.) One uses 1/10th the energy.
 
Yes. It has been calculated by the roadmap to renewables that there is an almost 2:1 efficiency improvement awaiting us to complete a full electrification of all energy.
 
neptronix said:
That's a huge margin of error!!

So yeah, the ~50 years of GOOD data statement applies. We just weren't thinking about climate as much in the past, so the trail from here to there is pretty murky...
And remember , the only consistent temperature measurement records available for the past 100+ years is ALL Northern Hemisphere..predominantly North America with a minority of European records.....
.... So hardly a "Global" reference.
BUT also ..all that data has been "Corrected/ Processed" ..more than once... Resulting in the oldest measurements being LOWERED by more than 1deg from their original raw records.
XuPXc1.png
 
neptronix said:
That's a huge error band range. So large that it could throw everything off.
In theory, we could only be 0.1C hotter than it'd been before the industrial revolution.
Or it could have been an ice age.

Is this view based on mathematics or opinion?

neptronix said:
It's possible that it was hotter before if you believe the beginning of the red line.

2019-01-07 16_14_52-Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear - Page 123 - Endless Sphere.png

Why have you chopped the graph off at ~1910 and focused on the one trend line that's a clear outlier?
 
sendler2112 said:
Germany energy consumption has gone from 250 to 330 mtoe since 1968. 30%.

Cephalotus said:
In 2018 Germanys primary energy consumption has bei 12,900 PJ, the lowest since the 1970s

Unless there was a huge, permanent decline from 1968 to sometime in the 70's that the swamps the changes since then, these two statements appear to be contradictory.
 
sendler2112 said:
It looks like maybe 15% of Germany's area has adequate 6ms wind. 7-9 ms is considered more economically viable.

That's why our old wind turbines that a spread across the country (i.e. lots of wind turbines are in Brandenburg) are often not very effective and why we build the new ones way above 100m now. 100m is the Limit between Ekman and Prandtl layers for wind Profile.

Above 100m onshore wind is much more continous and more intense.

A modern Enercon E141 EP4 for example has the rotor at 159m and is optimized for harvesting wind inland (btw: it also doesn't use "rare earth" materials)
You can see the power to wind profile here:

https://www.enercon.de/fileadmin/Redakteur/Medien-Portal/broschueren/pdf/EC_E-141_EP4_092016.pdf

At 7m/s it produces already 1,5MW, at 10m/s 3,5MW, which is 80% of its rated maximum power.

There are many Analysis on that Topic and some of them published:

Wind energy in different rotor heights (in German), see page 16:

https://www.windguard.de/veroeffentlichungen.html?file=files/cto_layout/img/unternehmen/veroeffentlichungen/2017/Wirtschaftlichkeit%20unterschiedlicher%20Nabenh%C3%B6hen%20von%20Windenergieanlagen.pdf

Correlation of wind power in different regions: (in German)

http://100-prozent-erneuerbar.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Report-Windpotenzial-im-raeumlichen-Vergleich.pdf

Capacity density of offshorw wind: (English)

https://www.windguard.de/veroeffentlichungen.html?file=files/cto_layout/img/unternehmen/veroeffentlichungen/2018/Capacity%20Density%20of%20European%20Offshore%20Windfarmslr.pdf

You could use 5,4MW/km² and 50% load capacity for 2015.

Analysis of wind onshore potential in Germany: (German)

https://www.wind-energie.de/fileadmin/redaktion/dokumente/publikationen-oeffentlich/themen/01-mensch-und-umwelt/03-naturschutz/bwe_potenzialstudie_kurzfassung_2012-03.pdf

A bit outdated from 2012 but the area distribution should be similar with modern and higher wind power plants. They will just produce more and more constant electricity.

In that study 2% of the area is used to produce 390TWh.
 
Punx0r said:
sendler2112 said:
Germany energy consumption has gone from 250 to 330 mtoe since 1968. 30%.

Cephalotus said:
In 2018 Germanys primary energy consumption has bei 12,900 PJ, the lowest since the 1970s

Unless there was a huge, permanent decline from 1968 to sometime in the 70's that the swamps the changes since then, these two statements appear to be contradictory.

This is my source:

https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/index.php?article_id=29&fileName=ageb_press_release_05_2018.pdf

"Germanys energy ... consumption dropped by 5% to 12,900 Petajoules (PJ), or 440.2 million tonnes of coal equivalent (Mtce), when compared to previous year. Energy consumption in Germany, this, reached ist lowest level since the early 1970s..."

Sendler is talking about energy consumption in West Germany only from 1968 to ??? (maybe 1990?)

Btw, Germany population has grown by 1 million immigrants in 2015 alone, so far Population is not shrinking, but energy consumption is.

You may also not forget our trade surplus, there is lots of gray energy involved there...

4-format2020.png


Industrial production has also grown, but not so much...

41-596x340.jpg



We are far, far away from a successful energy transition to sustainability and other countries are much better than we are (i.e. Sweden), but it is still a valid sample for a heavily industrialised country with rather low resources on solar, wind, water and biomass and a high population density.

I also do not see how "expensive energy" impacts our wealth. Public debt may not be the perfect indicator, but usually it is an indicator for unsustainable wealth and during the last years our public debt was falling:

Staatsverschuldung_Deutschland.png


So overall I'm quite satiesfied with the state of ecomics (and my personal financial situation) and I wouldn't mind significantly more RE and higher energy Prices in the near future. I say shut down the last nukes till 2022 as planned, build a lot more solar and wind power plants (they are cheap now), strengthen the electric grid and advance quickly to electric cars and reduce burning lignite and lobby for a EU wide (or better global) CO2 price. That's the main factors for the next ten years...

edit:

For comparison prime energy consumption. Add 12,900PG for 2018.

It's not a significant drop, but at least it is shrinking a bit with growing population, growing indtry production and significantly growing exports (and still growing traffic). Switching to mainly electric vehicles in the next 10-20 years will help to reduce Primary energy consumption.

If you look only at fossil energy consumption this drop in usage is already more significant. Not as good as it should and could be, but better than nothing. The significant 5% drop in 2018 is mainly because of the mild winter, you generelly have to watch the longer trend to eliminate such factors.

2_abb_entw-pev-energietraeger-polit-ziele_2018-02-14.png
 
Punx0r said:
Is this view based on mathematics or opinion?

I don't understand why you're asking this. The data speaks for itself and i explained why is problematic from a statistics point of view. Do you have a counterpoint?

neptronix said:
Why have you chopped the graph off at ~1910 and focused on the one trend line that's a clear outlier?

I explained why i highlighted that area already. Do you have a counterpoint?
 
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