
Denmark’s wind farms generated 140% of the country’s electricity needs yesterday - prostoalex
http://qz.com/450737/denmarks-wind-farms-generated-140-of-the-countrys-electricity-needs-yesterday/
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interfixus
Alas, as the wind soars, so do our energy costs. Danish electricity prices
have only gone up, up, up, and through the roof during the last thirty years
or so, concurrent with the massive, statesponsored introduction of wind
turbines. Or, to be precise, the pricetag of electricity itself hasn't really
changed much since the 1930s, but has been completely buried under an
avalanche of taxation, which in various guises makes up nearly nine tenths of
my electricity bill. A lot of this is "green" tax, earmarked for sponsoring -
you guessed it - more governmentally mandated wind turbines.

To the best of my knowledge, our Danish electricity is the most expensive in
Europe.

~~~
mrbabbage
Make sure you qualify what "most expensive" means. Here in California, we have
some of the highest electric rates in the United States but also some of the
lowest electric bills [1]. Saying we have "expensive" energy requires defining
what that metric is; sure, CA loses on energy _rates_ but I'll argue the rate
is a questionable metric at best. I have no idea what the situation is in
Denmark, of course, but there's more than the per-kilowatt-hour figure.

For the curious, California achieves this by a regulatory measure called
"decoupling": a utility's profits are not connected to how much raw energy it
sells. In particular, CPUC (the statewide utility regulator) lets electric
utilities, both municipal (e.g. SMUD) and investor-owned (e.g. PG&E), charge
higher rates if they implement energy efficiency or demand-side management
measure to reduce total demand, allowing the utility to maintain about the
same level of profitability but at reduced energy consumption. It's pretty
cool.

[1] in 2012, from EIA data, CA paid $0.15/kWh rate and $88 average monthly
bill mo whereas the national average was $0.12/kWh and $107/mo. Slides from
Jane Woodward.

~~~
interfixus
Yes, there is more than the per-kilowatt-hour figure. There is a fixed charge
for being connected to the public grid. That connection, here in Denmark, is
mandatory, by the way.

But apart from that, there's nothing more. That's the cost I see, that's the
price I have to pay. And I do mean HAVE to pay. Going off the grid, producing
my own electricity, will only get me into taxational hot water and possibly
fines.

~~~
rsync
Wait, what ?

If you have a rural vacation house (for instance) in Denmark, and you are off
the grid and ... perhaps have some solar arrays ... you would have to pay tax
on the power generated ? And possibly fines ?

Am I misunderstanding what you wrote ?

~~~
niklasni1
The thing you have to understand about Denmark is, there is no "off the grid".
If you have a house that it's legal to live in, it's connected to public
utilities. There are no unnamed roads or unnumbered houses here. (Or
unnumbered citizens, for that matter.)

What happens if you install a solar array is that your meter stops running or
runs backwards when you're generating more than you're using (and you're
selling back power). Even if you don't draw anything from the grid, you're
still paying to be connected.

~~~
afar
Fascinating. Wondering what their tax rates look like...

~~~
jafingi
VAT is 25%. And the tax is depending on your income. It's from about 40-51%.

However, living in Denmark I've got multiple things in return: \- Free health
care \- Free schools and university (got my computer science degree for free.
Only had to pay for the books). \- You get paid about $1000/month while
studying to cover apartment rentals etc. \- If you loose your job, you will
still get paid by the state to continue living :-)

When having got your education, and you might think that it's crazy to pay so
much in taxes of your income, but remember what you've got for free to get
there :-)

However, I think the whole tax-system needs an overhaul. For example there is
a 180% tax on cars (+25% VAT). So many people are driving in unsafe, fuel-
consuming cars. Lowering the tax on cars could lead to roads with safer and
more fuel-efficient cars. Electric cars have been tax-free the past years, but
it looks like it's going to change in 2016.

AND electricity is expensive by the end-users. The electricity itself is
cheap, but when I buy electricity for 200 DKK, I have to pay about 800 DKK in
taxes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Denmark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Denmark)

~~~
dylanjermiah
When ~half your income is getting taken, it is most definitely not 'free'.

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thebmax
This is partly the problem with renewable power. You get large swings in
generation where some days it's your entire demand and you may even have to
pay to export the excess power and other days it's 0 and you need to fire up
the gas plants in order to avoid brownouts. Building two power plants (wind
and gas) results in double the cost and less reliable grid overall. It's
surprising how much people seem to discount the reliability of wind and solar
when discussing them as true alternatives to fossil fuels.

~~~
crdoconnor
It's surprising just how much people seem to discount the reliability of
markets to smoothly deal with variations in supply and demand.

German aluminum smelters for instance are already building their plants to be
able to scale electricity with supply. They've seen these periods where
electricity prices dropped almost to zero and they want in.

As always, markets often take time to adjust to new realities, so this shift
won't be instantaneous.

~~~
Gibbon1
I'm totally with this, the idea that no market for 'excess' electric will
appear doesn't pass the sniff test. A paper I read discussed a pilot plant in
the 50's that produced iron from sulfide ores. Certainly sounds like a process
that can consume excess power without much trouble provided that situation
happens frequently enough.

[http://www.ulcos.org/en/docs/Ref03%20-%20Electrowinning%20-%...](http://www.ulcos.org/en/docs/Ref03%20-%20Electrowinning%20-%20publ.pdf)

'High purity iron was produced, with a current yield of 85% and a power
consumption of 4.25 kWh/kg iron'

Far as I can tell, 1 GW for an hour would produce ~250 tons of iron.

------
bottled_poe
Does anyone know how many days are required to cover the energy required to
produce one turbine?

~~~
mariopt
I don't think this is relevant honestly. ( I'm assuming you want to compare
the costs with other energy sources )

This reminds the question about How much energy are we spending today to build
an electric/hybrid card versus a petrol one? (By comparing the factory
emissions for example) Currently petrol cars are cheaper to produce because of
the decades of investment, usually no one has in consideration in the
equation, but on the long run eco tech wins the race. We should also expect
new discoveries in Material Engineering that would help to reduce the cost
and/or improve the efficiency.

I don't think it's a fair to compare the cost of producing versus the cost of
petrol solutions until the planet's crust isn't a source of energy.

~~~
bottled_poe
Depending on the answer to my question, it is totally relevant.

> but on the long run eco tech wins the race

Fine, but if some cleaner alternative is developed over the carbon repayment
period, we could in fact be better off sticking with the current technology
until then.

~~~
gonvaled
You can not make the switch in a hurry.

------
PebblesHD
Meanwhile in Australia, "Coal is the future!" \- Tony Abbott

~~~
static_noise
Financially it is, at least in the short term.

Australia has a lot of coal (no need to import raw material).

Australia has coal mining companies (no need to import technology).

CO2 is only a global problem, the coal which Australia burns won't make a big
dent in the effects and the cost is shared globally.

So, financially it totally makes sense to use up the local resources first. At
least in the short term until these resources get scarce.

In the long term, saving resources may be the wiser option. E.g. have coal
plants on standby most of the time while solar and wind supply the grid. Then
you can export some of the coal or save it for future generations.

~~~
ams6110
Coal plants don't really do "standby" well though. They are much better at
providing constant output. Gas turbine plants are better at handling rapid
changes in supply and demand. Possibly pulverized coal could be used in a
turbine but I don't know how well that works.

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wodenokoto
It's worth noting that we sell wind energy a lot cheaper than the non-
renewable we buy back to cover the times where we don't produce surplus.

~~~
sauce71
Then buy it back from Norway. (99% hydroelectric) :-)

~~~
mrweasel
We also some times just give the excess power to Germany, or pay them to take
it. The Danish power grid is funny like that.

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idlewords
This article reminded me of an interesting structural problem in eastern
Germany, right next door to Denmark. The many wind farms there give a net
surplus of power, but there's no easy way to route it to western Germany,
where most of the demand is. Maybe a fellow commenter will remember the
details better than I do.

~~~
cmarschner
The problem is mostly discussed in Germany in context of north vs. south - the
north with the coast and all its wind parks, and the energy-hungry, industry-
rich south. Right niw the solution is to build new power lines, but that
spawned a huge political debate (NIMBY). Power lines are about as unpopular as
new freeways, and there is a risk of court cases dragging on for years,
stalling the energy transition program. The compromise right now is to spend
more tax money and use underground cables in densely populated or otherwise
sensitive areas (e.g. nature reserves).

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irixusr
The question never was can wind generate enough power - just build more
windmills. The question is can it be reliably integrated into a stable
electrical system?

Unfortunately, largely no. At least not still. Without getting into technical
details note that in jurisdictions with a legal mandate to prefer windpower
(when available) and large installed windbase the price of power goes
negative. That is, there are situations when power companies pay to have
anyone dump their power. Otherwise they'll damage their equipment.

the problem never was the turbines, but the grid!

~~~
7952
I agree the grid issues are a major constraint on new wind turbine. But is
there actually evidence that they cannot be reliably integrated in the grid?
Is Denmark's grid actually unstable?

At least in the UK the grid operators simply refuses connections if their is
not enough grid capacity in the locality of a proposed wind farm. It is surely
a problem, but one that is well understood. And paying people to dump power is
a method of maintaining the grid in unusual conditions; it is just a bit
unpleasant. Excess capacity is an unintended consequence of having free fuel!

~~~
irixusr
Before I rant; I dunno the specifics about Denmark, but as a maritime nation
they have a unique advantage for windpower. Off-shore windpower is far less
stochastic than on-shore windpower (see last paragraph for why). So all the
problems below are significantly mitigated.

In power engineering we're not talking about switches that readers in this
forum are more acquainted with (in computer architecture). Currents are in the
thousands of amps, not nano, and volts are in the hundreds of thousands (or
millions in one Soviet era line).

Furthermore the grid is very strict with quality. The frequency must be within
a certain tolerance at all times, and no more than a maximum allowed of phase
shift in a period of time. The sinusoid must be quite pure, with strict
maximums allowed of harmonics. The voltage has to be right. The power has to
flow out, not in.

Keep in mind that the grid is unforgiving with the python philosophy of asking
for forgiveness. A mistake costs millions.

Every time you add or remove a load/source the frequency changes, the voltages
change, the flows change. To stabilize the grid you have a bulldozer (the
throttle) and a little scalpel (capacitor banks). A few jurisdictions are
blessed by the engineering gods and have an instrument that works in-between
(hydroelectric storage).

Now imagine you don't have to slowly integrate a single large and lethargic
source in the middle of the night when ppl are sleeping. Instead you have
thousands of stochastically generating sources being integrated and removed as
the load is changing.

The proof are in the prices. Wind power is expensive, but ironically the spot
price sometimes drops to negative!

Wind power needs a storage revolution. Then most of these problems go away.

There is one cavet to all of this, off-shore wind. Since maritime flows are
very constant and the relative speed at an interface is zero, offshore wind
power if _far_ more reliable and useful the on-shore.

~~~
7952
In this kind of discussion I think most of us would assume that "instability"
means a threat to continuity of supply. High prices are hardly evidence of
that.

I understand that balancing supply from numerous turbines is difficult, but is
that a solved problem? Is there evidence of customer supply problems or not?

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allendoerfer
That is the reason why there are currently huge North-South power lines
planned to go through Germany. As you would expect, from the German states to
small villages everybody is fighting over where they will be build. Germany
has a huge generation of fit retirees and it has become a meme that they
engage in citizens initiatives to fight power lines. Then there is our special
child Bavaria, for whom these lines are primarily build, who wants them to go
through Hesse.

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usaphp
I wonder if taking energy (sun, wind, water) from the earth make any damage in
long term to it - let's say fields that not going to get sun they got used to,
or clouds wont move the way they otherwise would - thus causing unpredictable
climate changes. Just a thought

~~~
Kaizyn
Wind farms are known to impact their micro-climate. See for example:
[http://m.phys.org/news/2012-04-farms-temperature-
region.html](http://m.phys.org/news/2012-04-farms-temperature-region.html)

~~~
Intermernet
Almost everything impacts it's own micro-climate. Cities being the most
obvious example.

It's when the effect creeps into the global climate that we need to really pay
attention.

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krasin
While the number is slick, it does not account for the energy needed for cars.
(see below for the explanation of this terse statement)

~~~
higherpurpose
That's why it says electricity. Also, when you can produce this much
electricity (already), it makes it possible to fill electric cars' batteries
with 100% renewable energy.

~~~
ekianjo
You will need to burn a whole lot of fossil fuels to make batteries for every
car on the road. Thats always ignored by proponents of electric cars who
conveniently ignore the fact that batteries manufacturing processes are very
dirty and use a number of toxic materials.

~~~
lyschoening
You also need a lot of energy to make a car, or to build a combustion engine.
Yes, battery driven cars are particularly polluting to produce, but a couple
tanks full of gasoline will make up for the difference.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/07/21/are-
electr...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/07/21/are-electric-
cars-really-that-polluting/)

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guard-of-terra
"Earlier today, the Chernobyl power plant has fulfilled its 5-years plan of
thermal energy generation in just 150 milliseconds"

Talk about mad swings.

