Renewables in Germany

5 Jan 2012: DNC writes: I was pleasing to read that in Germany, the power generated from Renewables has now become the largest part. Nuclear is in decline, as a policy change since Fukushima.
http://www.ecogeek.org/preventing-pollution/3664
The downside of the story is that the second largest part of German power production is from Lignite, which is brown coal, a more polluting kind of coal.
  For this illustration, I just looked at Germany with googlemaps, and zoomed in on a random part of a randomly picked town, which happened to be Konigsbrunn in Bavaria. In the photo taken from the west, South is off to the right. It is amazing how many people are home-generating, some with larger arrays than the 4kW limit of the UK.
   They are further south than the UK, so will be generating more power, but Rushcliffe and most areas south of here are still getting enough sun for it to be worthwhile.

Power UP and Power Down

  This shows that if we keep plugging away, we can make a difference, one house at a time.

  Converse to energy generation, we also need (as a country) to pay attention to house insulation, so that we achieve a good balance. I don't believe that one should be conditional on the other, as the British government is trying to do after April 2012.
  If you get the two right, it can be a fantastically good balance. My house generates 3,350 kWh/year from the PV roof, but only needs 2,700-3,300 kWh for all heating and hot water (depending on weather variations). So the combination of Powering Up (generate) and Powering Down (insulate) can be effective in reducing carbon emission. 

Germany can balance its power!

8 Nov '10: I read a report today in Time magazine,
http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/11/08/can-solar-power-lead-to-blackouts/
implying that too much Solar power could lead unintentionally to blackouts - central power stations being confused by a sudden surplus of renewable energy. This is an absurd extrapolation of a trend. In Germany, the amount of home generated power on a fine summer day is getting close to the entire country's electrical needs, which could lead to a shut down of the coal fired and other power stations.

   Partially this is because Germany (with its well designed buildings) has a low demand for air conditioning, and if this occurred in the US, the surplus power would be eaten up by aircon.
   The UK is a long way from getting near this, and it would be a blessing if it could. Weather forecasting is  now an advanced science, and there is plenty of warning if we are going to get such days, just as we can predict days of higher wind or rain. If the system was really this fragile, then it needs fixing quickly!
   The accusation by Stephan Kohler is absurd, because of its alarmist extrapolation.  If it got anywhere near this situation, there would be adaptations to the grid to offload the electricity as an export, just as France currently dumps surplus nuclear power to the UK, through undersea cables. There is talk of a European super grid to share energy, so that the UK may sell North Sea wind power to the south, and the south sell Solar energy to the cold north. The more home generated energy we see, the quicker this grid will evolve. At the moment, in this house, we use something like 70% of the energy we generate annually because we use a heat pump, so we are not 'swamping' our neighbours quite yet!
   The UK is aiming for 50% windpower eventually, and the Grid is going to have to get used to dealing with intermittency.