cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/52096709
Germany’s coal phase-out is on track to happen through market forces well before the legal 2038 deadline, regardless of current energy market turbulence, says Hauke Hermann, a researcher at the Institute of Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut). Carbon price trends make an exit as early as 2031 or 2032 likely, Hermann told Clean Energy Wire. Refiring old coal plants in response to the Iran war’s energy market shock to cut power costs would distort investment signals and is unlikely to happen in practice, he added.
Soaring energy prices have triggered calls for slowing Germany’s coal exit. The country’s coal exit law, agreed in 2020, provides for the step-by-step decommissioning of coal power plants. It also stipulates that coal-fired power generation must cease by 2038 at the very latest. Germany’s western coal region aims for an earlier phase-out by 2030, but delays in building new gas-fired power plants as a backup for renewables make meeting this earlier deadline increasingly unlikely.
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Shouldn’t that be GWh? Anyway, that’s peanuts if you want to rely purely on renewables. You also can’t look at average wind, you have to cover energy demand all the time. If there is no wind for minutes in such case, you have big problems.
No, grid connections are measured in GW.
These batteries usually are planned to have two hours of storage. Some more some less. So 158GWh would be enough to power Germany through sunny, but windless days. 1440GWh are more then a days worth of electricity consumption of Germany. Again there are no days with absolutely no wind and solar and Germany needs more of them to even charge those batteries up anyway. So it is on the lower end of what is needed to run a country like Germany without fossil fuels.
At that point you can talk about some weird forms of storage like hydrogen or use a bit of biomass or something like that. You might even get away with carbon capture and storage, because the amount of fossil fuels needed for that grid are so low.
Long duration energy storage is necessary for a purely renewable grid.
I think you need more than one day of energy’s worth, plus there is a problem with short and cloudy winter days where you’d struggle to generate enough energy let alone store it. I’d be really curious if there are some actual studies that observe past years and calculate all this.