Offsetting conventional power
Germany is just emerging from its longest, darkest winter since records started being kept decades ago. Last weekend shows what the future looks like – and the picture is bleak for conventional power.
On Friday, energy futures in Germany dropped to below 0.04 euros for the first time ever according to today's edition of Photon's newsletter, which also quotes the CEO of German energy giant RWE stating that "no economical investment" is possible that that price. As Renewables International reported last week, new conventional plant projects are currently all on hold – contrary to the common misconception that Germany is switching to coal power.
As one of our readers pointed out in the comment section below that article (keep the excellent feedback coming!), the price of peak power fell below the price of baseload power on Saturday and Sunday – a complete reversal of what the market expects. The chart below from the EEX Transparency platform indicates what's going on – and how dire the situation is for baseload power plants (medium load power plants were already largely squeezed out last year).
During the early afternoon, solar power production peaked at around 18 GW as the sun broke through in the southern half of Germany, where most of the country's solar capacity is installed. Nonetheless, the northern half of Germany remained fairly cloudy, which helps explain why solar did not peak closer to 25 GW (the country currently has around 33 GW installed, and total solar power production can peak at around 70 percent of that capacity on a sunny day). But those days are coming over the next six months.
Yesterday afternoon, wind power production was quite low at between three and four gigawatts, though it did rise up to nine gigawatts as the sun went down. Germany also has around 32 GW of wind power capacity. The only conclusion to draw is that wind and solar power are already disruptive even at relatively low levels. This summer, green electricity will regularly cut into the baseload on weekends, and we may increasingly see the same thing happening on workdays when wind and solar are simultaneously at relatively high levels.
The renewables sector will rejoice in the news, but one problem still remains: Germany will always need more than 80 gigawatts of dispatchable capacity on those November evenings when the sun never shines and power demand always peaks. (Craig Morris)
