At the beginning of this month, the German electricity supply reached its limits.
In the evening hours of November 6th, the price of electricity rose extremely quickly and extremely sharply — to more than 800 euros per megawatt hour. This made it around ten times more expensive than usual. There was a brief outcry, but it didn’t last long. Yet the whole situation was more than just a warning shot.
Phases in which wind and sun only produce a limited amount of electricity (a so-called Dunkelflaute, or dark doldrums) are normal. And they will always be noticeable, so we need to be prepared. To ensure stability — the stability of the system as a whole and the stability of prices in particular. After all, these high prices are an absolutely reliable indication of the state of supply security in Germany. They are the result of too little supply.
So let’s take a look at the figures from November 6th: Demand was around 66 GW. It was covered by domestic production (around 53 GW) and imports (around 13 GW). Almost the entire domestic supply was available (only around 4 GW was not available, which is not unusual). In terms of import capacity, only around 3 GW of interconnector capacity was unavailable (also not unusual).
In concrete terms, this means that the same situation would not have been manageable on another day with a higher peak load. For example, in January. The highest demand for electricity of the year was on January 15th, at more than 75 GW. Almost 10 GW more than on November 6th!
And in Germany, we have been acting (for years) as if the issue of adding secure capacity is something that can be postponed. Yet we can already clearly see today what happens when we switch off capacity and do not provide any backup for renewables.
No, we don’t have any more time, quite the opposite. Time is running out. The expansion is urgent.
Damn, do you even know who this is or what company he speaks for?
RWE is the biggest polluter in Europe and a promising candidate for the the source of the most corruption. Already 15 years ago, the newspaper “Der Spiegel” uncovered, they had over 3000 politicians on their payroll. And it goes way beyond this. Many laws have been made for this company. The “lex RWE” and other draconic laws give the police the power they need to suppress the protests of the inhabitants of the many villages whose homes have been expropriated to be swallowed, along with many ancient forests, by RWEs gigantic open pit lignite mines. These people are at the forefront of pushing Europe towards fascism and ecocide.
They and their lobby are also the people who have actively created the situation this hypocritical asshole is now lamenting. Funding for solar in Germany was defunded years ago destroying over 50.000 jobs. Research for batteries was gutted this year. The combination of solar and cheap solid state and Natrium batteries would have been able to go a long way towards stable energy supply.
By the way, that’s exactly what China is doing, leading in solar, already mass producing solid state batteries and set to start mass producing Natrium batteries next year.
When these ghoulish servants of capital speak about “adding secure capacity” they mean big centralized, subsidized power plants, that are easier to profit off of, then a smart, resilient net with many small distributed sources with an intelligent mix of technologies: they want gas, coal, lignite, fracking, US imported LNG and provided the state pays for it, nuclear.
Concerning the later: The sentiment some people here have about nuclear energy has to be one of the most annoying brain worm inherited from reddit. I can’t possibly extract that deep seated parasite in a single comment, so please just do your own research. Just a small rant from the top of my head:
Nuclear is the single most stupid, inefficient and dangerous way to boil water ever put into praxis using slightly warm ultra poisonous and radioactive rocks.
No one has ever build a nuclear power plant without massive amounts of government subsidies. No bank would give such a project credit. No one would insure it. Nuclear power has just never been able to compete on costs per kwh and the gap in costs to ever cheaper renewables just keeps getting larger. Nerds keep talking about the high energy density of uranium, as if that was a criteria for powering a nation. You know what it is a criteria for? For bombs.
And there you have it: the only reason nuclear power even exists at all is Imperialism. Imperialist countries needed it to develop and supply their world destroying arsenal of doomsday devices. Non imperialist nations regrettably had no choice, but to react by building up their own nuclear defence. Without the cold war, no one would ever have build a single nuclear power plant and without imperialism no one would continue to fund it.
Not to mention the off-loading of huge opportunity costs on the environment, on people and on future generations. Without getting into it too much: Literally the only sensible way to ever store nuclear waste is to post armed guards around a growing number of highly secured compounds for basically all eternity. And even then it’s not safe. Part of the European nuclear waste is just diluted, then discharged into the sea in northern France, slowly making life in the oceans on earth permanently worse instead of doing it faster in a more localized way if it was less diluted. Oh and also causing record cancer rates among children in the area. Mining the fuel for nuclear energy not only produces incredible suffering in the exploited nations, but also creates immense environmental destruction and considerable greenhouse emissions.
So please don’t uncritically parrot CEOs of the most reactionary company in Europe. And don’t fall for the liberal lesser evil argument of nuclear vs coal and gas. Both serve only capital, both are dying technologies and but a symptom of the old world dying, as the new world struggles to be born.
This is not an endorsement, and I’m not parroting anything uncritically. These are the people who own European energy industry and who will gauge as much as they can. What this highlights is the peril of privatizing basic needs.