
Wind turbines in Denmark reached record level in 2014 - drkrab
http://energinet.dk/EN/El/Nyheder/Sider/Vindmoeller-slog-rekord-i-2014.aspx
======
teh_klev
Scotland does pretty well with regards to renewables with ~49.8% of energy
consumption sourced from renewable sources (17.1k GWh wind/hydro out of 19k
GWh total renewables).

This puts wind and hydro at around 42%.

[https://www.scottishrenewables.com/sectors/renewables-in-
num...](https://www.scottishrenewables.com/sectors/renewables-in-
numbers/#chart5)

[http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0048/00480365.pdf](http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0048/00480365.pdf)

~~~
jacquesm
Beware of double-counting pumped storage.

~~~
teh_klev
I don't understand what you mean by that. Could you explain?

~~~
jacquesm
Scotland (and other countries besides) has a lot of 'pumped storage', lakes at
a relatively high point that are fed from lakes at a lower point by running
pumps that push the water from the lower lake to the higher one when energy is
cheap and then back into the grid when it is more expensive (when there is a
scarcity).

The net effect of this is that electricity originally generated by nuclear
plants and other fossil fuel plants gets 'converted' into (more expensive!)
'green' energy.

It's a kind of white-washing for electrons. The price difference can be
substantial more than making up for the cost of the pumping and subsequent re-
generation.

And of course it's the energy sold to the public that matters, not how it was
originally generated so by double counting this energy it changes the balance
considerably without there actually being more renewable energy to begin with.

~~~
liotier
No, pumped storage is not "white-washing" : energy storage is the key piece to
making unpredictable energy sources viable, by storing during low demand and
having a buffer instantly available to respond to peaks. It displaces having
extremely expensive gas turbines on standby or lighting up fuel burners during
peak loads, so it has a direct impact on reducing fossil fuel consumption.

~~~
jacquesm
Of course it is. The arbitrage is what makes it happen because that's what
makes it _profitable_. If the energy so generated were labeled with the point
of origin then it would count as fossil fuel and then it would yield less on
the energy market. The load variations are not such that the generating
capacity could not be reduced in time, but there is less money in that.

This is _not_ renewable energy though it masquerades as such. Note that before
green energy became a thing this was already happening so it is simply a re-
labeling rather than that these lakes suddenly got re-purposed for renewable
energy storage.

If the source of the electricity is not originally renewable energy then it is
deceptive to sell it as such. People pay a pretty premium for renewable
energy.

~~~
msandford
> Of course it is.

Not necessarily!

It may be, it may not be. It depends on the time and place and whatnot. Pumped
hydro today might be mostly "white washing" today in Scotland. It might not be
"white washing" tomorrow in Germany. It depends on a lot of factors.

If the electrical rates do occasionally go negative in mainland Europe (from
wind) and there are pumped hydro stations there then it's entirely possible
that the wind electrons are the ones pushing the water uphill rather than the
fossil fuel electrons, and then when that water eventually does generate
electricity again, it's technically still renewable.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-
storage_hydroel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-
storage_hydroelectric_power_stations)

It sounds like the plant that you visited in Scotland was white washing, at
least when you visited. But that doesn't mean that all pumped hydro everywhere
in the world definitely, for sure, guaranteed, is also doing the same.

------
kaybe
Extensive plots for Germany for comparison:

[http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-
files...](http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-files-
englisch/data-nivc-/electricity-production-from-solar-and-wind-in-
germany-2014.pdf)

~~~
adamtulinius
Does that report mention consumption anywhere? This article is about
consumption, not production, so it doesn't really make sense to compare this
report to the article.

~~~
kaybe
If you put it into the net, it has to be consumed somewhere. If there is too
much production you have to take plants off the grid, and I think those are
not included in the plots.

There is an extensive planning process with weather forecasts and peak
consumption predictions (break in the football world cup finals for example)
to prevent sudden surprising changes. Different kind of power plants have
different timelines that it takes to power them up and down. Small peaks in
demand can be covered with gas plants since they are very fast to power up and
down, but they are expensive. Coal plants take a day, nuclear - forget it-,
and solar and wind can be predicted fairly well with the weather (there are
plots about the success of predictions in the pdf), water is fairly stable and
biomass behaves like gas. You really only want to produce what is consumed,
and then there's export and import. There are charts for that as well.

------
martinald
The big problem with this is oversupply of the grid. While Denmark has the
ability to export to Norway, Sweden and Germany (amongst others) it's likely
wind production will be at high levels in neighbouring countries. Germany
often has a huge oversupply of energy, with electricity prices turning
negative.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
That surprised me a little, Germany oversupplying because of wind. Wind is
about 10% of electricity there, but then I looked up variability and it
explains why:

[https://carboncounter.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/germany.jp...](https://carboncounter.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/germany.jpeg)

Pretty crazy, it really calls for storage solutions doesn't it. Hell even if
you had the same smooth wind every day, there'd be a huge demand/production
discrepancy during sundown if enough wind is installed.

~~~
kaybe
If you run the calculations you can see that the more you have installed over
capacity the less storage you need (since you can also fully provide if there
is less wind). It's a trade-off, really.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Of course, you don't need to run any numbers to see make the logical
conclusion :-/

But wouldn't it be true to say that store is the cheaper alternative to
installing excess capacity, the alternative with less local resistance (a
political issue with both on and offshore wind), and the alternative with
fewer maintenance issues versus e.g. offshore wind? Let me know if you have
any numbers on that.

I've checked some numbers myself. For example, even domestic storage (which
includes things like an inverter already) like the Tesla powerwall costs
$3500, and has 5.000 full depth cycles of lifetime, and a capacity of 7 kwh.
Meaning purely for storing and using 1 kwh, it's about $10c. That's more than
the cost of onshore wind (about 7c or so, differs per country).

But we know that utility scale batteries can be much cheaper (I mean these
Tesla powerwalls are quite similar to batteries that go into cars, their
energy density is very high due to space constraints. If space and weight is
not a concern you can build cheaper batteries), plus batteries as an industry
are currently on a much steeper decline in cost annually than renewable
generation technologies so going in to the future storage should become much
more attractive, even as extra generation becomes more attractive, too.

One example is Alevo, found an interesting post about it I'll quote here: >
Alevo is claiming $100/kWh and 40,000 cycles. That works out to $0.003/cycle.
Financed for 20 years at 5% would mean a $0.022 price per cycle over the first
20 years and then the cost of storage dropping to roughly zero for 89 more
years.

That's 2-3 cents per cycle. It'd be really hard to make the case for excess
wind capacity over storage. Particularly because on some days wind generation
is still near zero. The image I showed shows the top day generating 200x as
much as the bottom day. To generate enough on the bottom day, you need a
ridiculous amount of excess capacity generation to compensate, capacity that
may be more expensive per kwh than storage, that overproduces the rest of the
year (while still costing money, unlike storage which costs money per cycle,
i.e. when used), and exacerbates the non-financial issues of wind (e.g.
landscape changes that local people resist).

It's looking like storage is going to be playing a huge role.

~~~
kaybe
I have some numbers from a basic simulation, but not on the political side. It
has costs, though. (It's a bacholor thesis in German.)

Of course storage is going to play a huge role, that would be hard to deny. I
just find the fact interesting that you can live with less storage if you have
more capacity for energy production.

You only assume battery storage, right? AFAIK Norway has offered extensive
storage by pumping water into high reservoirs (don't know the english name),
which would be another option, and just one of many. Of course, that would
require a lot of investments into infrastructure, and we're already fighting
about that locally. (Nobody wants the power lines in their backyards.)

~~~
IkmoIkmo
> pumping water into high reservoirs (don't know the english name)

It's just pumped storage! :) Easy to remember.

But yeah there's a lot of things. Pumped storage is a big one, The
International Renewable Energy Agency in their roadmap for 2030 for example
call for just 150 GW of battery storage, but a whooping 325 GW of pumped
storage.

There's other ones, too. One of them is storing thermal, heat energy in
caverns, or in rocks. You can then extract when you need to, so you could take
wind energy at night when there is barely any demand and use it to
electrically heat up rocks, and store the energy for the next day.

Molten salts is similar but different.

Ice, same thing for air conditioning purposes. At night you use excess
electricity and essentially run a big fridge on your roof to create ice, and
then use that to cool the air during the day.

Those are all thermal storage. Then there's say pressure based storage, like
compressing air and releasing it when you want to.

Flywheels are also a thing, you have a wheel and rotate it really fast using
energy, and then just slow it down and capture the energy when you want to. It
sounds pretty ridiculous but it works and there's various ways to reduce
friction.

------
bmarc
And what's the average price for kwh in Denmark?

~~~
bjelkeman-again
Something I wrote in an earlier thread:

Denmark's electricity price is the highest in the EU "when you count in taxes
and VAT, which go to produce other useful outcomes. However, Ireland together
with the UK has the highest energy prices excluding taxes, closely followed by
Cyprus and Spain. Interestingly enough, three of these are islands.

It would be interesting to see these prices without subsidies, as the energy
market is pretty global and these big differences must come from something
else, I think."

[http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/index.php/...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/index.php/File:Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers,_second_half_2014_\(¹\)_\(EUR_per_kWh\)_YB15.png)

~~~
Someone
Looking at
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continen...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe)
and combining that with your remark, I would guess the electricity market
isn't _" pretty global"_. Yes, you can ship coal and oil about everywhere, but
there seem to be economies of scale in larger networks, especially if your
grid spans time zones (people switch on their stuff at different times in
GMT), and Europe's does that.

Of the four you mention, three aren't connected to that grid, and I would
guess the link with Spain doesn't have sufficient capacity to even out peaks
and troughs in Spanish demand ([http://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/power-system-
modelling](http://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/power-system-modelling) does show a
fairly thin line between France and Spain, both large countries in population)

The above is 100% educated GUESS. Corrections welcome.

------
Someone
The text doesn't mention it, and it often is implied in these kinds of reports
that this only is about domestic electricity use, so: does that include
industrial use?

If not, what percentage of total electricity use are we talking about?

If or if not, what percentage of total power use are we talking about?

------
mangeletti
I'm no electrical engineer (could be doing the math wrong), but I think there
is a pretty glaring error in this page:

The author mentions a 400 MW wind farm, and then says that correlates to
400,000 homes. Unless homes in Denmark use only 3% of what homes in the US use
on average[1], that number should be somewhere closer to 15,000 homes.

1\.
[http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3](http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3)

~~~
maxerickson
You have not accounted for the difference between power and energy. 909
kilowatt hours (energy) divided by a month (720 hours) is an average of about
1250 watts (power).

So 400 megawatts might only power 300,000 US homes, but the scale is about
right.

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jp_uy
[http://www.pennenergy.com/articles/pennenergy/2014/06/renewa...](http://www.pennenergy.com/articles/pennenergy/2014/06/renewable-
energy-renewables-generate-84-percent-of-uruguay-s-energy.html)

[https://news.vice.com/article/an-energy-revolution-is-
underw...](https://news.vice.com/article/an-energy-revolution-is-underway-in-
uruguay)

------
palmeida
In 2014 63% of Portugal's electricity needs were supplied by renewable sources
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Portugal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Portugal)

------
merpnderp
But how much of this was overlapping power production with baseline fossil
fuel production? Wind power often doesn't displace fossil fuels, it coincides
with it, since wind is less predictable and coal plants take hours to ramp
up/down.

If 39% of Danes' electricity completely displaced the same amount of fossil
fuels, my jaw would hit the floor.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Not sure if its the same for the Danes, but in the US coal is being displaced
by natural gas, which _can_ be throttled quickly for grid demand response (and
is cleaner, and releases drastically less CO2 per unit of power generated, and
can be moved across the country quicker via pipeline vs trains).

~~~
crdoconnor
The cleanliness of natural gas is significantly overstated. Fracking is a
dirty business.

------
kbutler
And the cost of electricity in Denmark is the highest in Europe:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity-prices-
europe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity-prices-europe.jpg)

~~~
mortenlarsen
That is mostly due to extreme taxes.

~~~
biehl
Yes. Here is a breakdown

[https://www.energifyn.dk/privat/elhandel/bag-om-
elprisen](https://www.energifyn.dk/privat/elhandel/bag-om-elprisen)

Orange is tax, grey is VAT, yellow also has some tax-like elements.

