Why winter specifically? Because demand (in Europe) tends to be higher? But you also have more wind (and in particular offshore wind) in winter so it's not like electricity production stops in winter.
But the answer is the same as before - we have a lot of storage and/or flexible capacity in the system, until recently mostly used to adapt supply to demand (on top of the inflexible baseload) - that capacity is specifically designed for winter, when baselaod does not produce more than in the summer but demand is higher. It will be used for a different generation profile but it can still be used.
If Germany had gone all-in on nuclear twenty years ago, and maybe even ten years ago, it would today be producing cheaper electricity with effectively zero emissions and little to no Russian gas. Germany wouldn't be funding Russia's murderous war and war-crimes machine, and no one would be discussing the lignite coal situation. Nuclear prices would be low due to continual learning, and not needing to attempt to reconstitute the industry from scratch.
Germany declined the simple, easy, and obvious thing in order to do the difficult thing that's still not working. Ignoring this fundamental reality shows the post above to be naive at best and more likely dumb. It's not paying any attention to where power is coming from at the margin. So many words are ignoring the basic reality I point out in this comment, which is shorter, simpler, and more accurate.
Germany is culpable, gullible, and foolish, something the Twitter people understand, and the cope in this post misses. Germany could and should have already achieved essentially all the energy ends it hasn't achieved, and made its ratepayers wealthier to boot. A few thousand words of verbiage can't obscure this fundamental reality.
You should read actual experts, not Twitter experts with a black and white view of the world. Jerome's assessment is incredibly astute and factual, not biased towards any energy source.
I'm not against nuclear - if you read this (https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/the-eu-energy-policy-has-long-been) you'll see that I have mostly praise for the French nuclear programme. But things have changed. Nuclear is now more expensive, and renewables are cheaper, and more importantly, we no longer know how to build nuclear plants: France did start 20 years ago to build the new generation of its nuclear fleet, and yet, here we are, 20 years later, with one plant 10 years late, 5 time over budget, and still no idea when it will be ready. When you are able to point to actually built new nukes, then we talk about your solution.
Maybe batteries will get cheap enough to massively cover this, but we should still be working on and deploying nuclear for that ~40% of base load. It's also not clear that people and NIMBYs will accept the massive surface area necessary for solar and wind.
It's also true that we should be working to make nuclear cheaper through regulation simplification, high cost not being a law of nature.
How is the Energiewende successful when the IMF projects an hard economic slowdown in Europe if Russian gas is cut off in the winter. I appreciate how detailed your article is but I can't help but feel they're excuses for the projected recession in the EEA.
Most of German gas use is industry and heating, not electricity which is like 10% of the grid this year. Germany has made mistakes but primarily in heating, where it went for natural gas heating instead of, for example, heat pumps.
An external shock of that kind will always have economic consequences. Renewables are part of the solution but the transition was not complete. And if anything it has been blocked by the same people that tell us now that it's not enough to protect Europe. It will be, and it could have been, but it's not fully sufficient yet - but it's helping.
Great article, thanks. One critical remark: you argue that the most expensive part of Energiewende has already been done. That’s certainly true for generation. But what about energy storage? There is not much yet and the majority of costs for it is still ahead us. What’s your view on that?
There is more storage/flexibility in the system than most people imagine - but it was used to deal with inflexible baseload. The needs are not the same with renewables, but as Germany shows, they do not appear to be that different in scale (more MW needed probably, but not more MWh). And we will have a lot of things coming from the demand side - interruptible industrial processes, more price-sensitive demand, etc. Storage is only one solution out of many.
It is unclear to me how renewables can match 40% of demand when electricity cannot be stored and it is by its nature quite intermittent. One thing is production of electricity from green sources, another thing is actual consumption. There is a gap between the two. And I do fear that most of the green "power" is simply unused because there is no demand for it in specif hours of the day.
So, simply European policymakers and German policymakers in particular have condemned Europe to a marginal role in the industrialised world for the foreseeable future. And the fact that the euro is now below parity with the US dollar is simply one of the consequences of these stupid decisions.
The energy transition claims are simply unrealistic since you need a huge amount of batteries whose raw materials need to be mined, transported, processed etc. We are talking of a skyrocketing rise in demand, and demand rise leads to cost increase.
It is the reality today that 40% of consumer electricity comes from renewables (and you have similar or higher percentages in other countries). It is happening. There is no wasted energy. Even if it seems counterintuitive, this is the reality. You can't run policy on people's beliefs that "this can't be done" (especially when it is ALREADY HAPPENING). Despite what you believe, there will not be a need for more batteries with renewables than with inflexible baselaod like nuclear or lignite.
You are literally claiming that my house in Poland runs on 100% solar and produces no CO2, because I have a solar installation with net metering, where during few summer months I get enough sunlight to rack up enough credit to last me the entire year, as I run an electric heat pump throughout the winter or work at my PC at night. So, as Poland burns lignite coal to power my home I can flex on how my electricity is renewable! And, funnily enough, it's all my less well off neighbours who can't afford to drop a cars worth of money on an installation are now paying for my "free power" (they thankfully got rid of net metering, finally, to cries of fossil fuel conspiracy and obviously it's completely economically unviable to install solar panels for homes again)
No, I'm saying the exact opposite actually. It's easier to balance the net difference between supply and demand at the grid level than at every individual producer and consumer.
Can you please stop repeating this disinformation? Wait for the lignite plants to close and replace nuclear with what? Exactly. Russian natgas. And stop talking about 40-50% of energy mix of renewables, when Germany is using almost every single surrounding country as a "free battery" - they export (dump) solar and wind electricity when it's worse than useless (negative wholesale prices) and reimport nuclear/coal/gas fired electricity when it's necessary. If every country in EU did what Germany had done, we would have daily rolling blackouts across half the EU. Meanwhile France is chilling at somewhat around 30g CO2 per kWh, less than 10% of what Germany or Britain produces to get their kWh of power most of the day. And it's significantly cheaper. So I have no idea on what planet you exist, energiewende is a failure on every single crucial point we should be interested in. Hell, it would be cheaper to take what was spent on energiewende, and pay the absolutely insane prices per kWh it nowadays costs to build nuclear, and in the end you'd have way more actually CO2 free power that you can use (do the math)
The country that is using neighbors (well, the Alps) as a giant battery is actually France - sending cheap nuclear at night to Germany, Switzerland, and buying back the power during the day, on much larger volumes because it needs to be done almost every day.
Germany is getting good prices for its exports, in general (of course there will be days of very high winds and low demand when it exports very cheaply, but it's not the general rule. In any case, what is wrong with Germany exporting cheap electricity to its neighbors - they are getting cheaper energy : the only ones to be unhappy are the local utilities who get less revenue, but how is that a bad thing in economic terms?
Another blatant misinformation. The law FORCES other countries to buy "renewable power", even if they have to curtail their own, CLEANER (nuclear) generation. It's a disaster, because it effectively increases prices, since you still have to pay for almost the same amount of capacity to produce power at night or in bad weather conditions AND you are forced to pay for power you don't actually need. this idiotic setup is actually increasing french power emissions, since they are forced to install...natural gas turbines (just like Germany) to be able to deal with wild fluctuations of "renewable energy" And without France to power Germany overnight, they either would have to burn way more coal and gas or literally go without. So the difference is that Germans couldn't actually function without France and quite the opposite in the reverse case. (And there isn't anything actually forcing "poor, abused Germans" to buy french power, again, the reverse)
I believe you are not up to date with current regulations. Also gas turbines being installed and being used are not the same. The reality is more complex: French nuclear needs Germany more than the other way around. Nonetheless it was until recently a two way beneficient deal, until the entire thing crash with the French nuclear fleet's major issues.
1) There used to be "priority dispatch" for renewables but (i) that has ended a while ago already (so the capacity this still applies to is quite low), (ii) it's not cross-broder (it's a matter of national law), and (iii) renewables are zero-marginal cost and therefore it make sense to dispatch them in priority anyway. What was changed ( a good change in my view) was to eliminate the right for renewables to continue to dispatch when prices were negative
2) installing gas turbines is not an issue, as long as they burn little gas. They provide capacity but little energy. The fact that gas-fired generation has not moved significantly shows that you don't actually need to burn more gas to ensure stability (you burn it in more power plants, that function less often - this is what "peakers" do and it's a business model that works
3) France needs (well, needed) to get rid of excess power at night more than Germany needed France's power - that's why it got a poor price for it, and pays more to get it back the next day. France actually cannot handle its own peaks of demand without imports - with heating heavily electrified, the peaks are sharper than in other countries, and nuclear, as fixed capacity baseload, cannot do anything for peaks...
1a) just because renewables are zero marginal doesn't mean it makes sense for them to undercut nuclear, which is the only actually low CO2 tech we have
2) peaker plants require you to pay for effectively double the infrastructure AND they are the highest cost per unit of power produced. And they run every day for hours on end. Open any real time electricity generation stats for Germany and weep. And this failed "renewable" policy also meant billions more in drastic investment in the grid infrastructure, so it could cope with endless instability, none of course is actually treated as a cost of solar and wind (just as the cost of running gas peaker plants should be rolled into the "per kWh price")
3) it is better to have excess power than not have enough. France also basically stopped investing into their nuclear fleet due to politics and complete inviability of nuclear when it can't run as it's supposed to.
Ps. All energiewende managed to do is get Germany utterly dependent on russian gas and their economy is about to implode over it
1) I did say that some legacy generators still had access to priority dispatch. Personally I think that should go, so I do not disagree with you there, but I don't think it matters much
1a) nuclear is free to bid at a lower price to be sure to be dispatched. In general, if there is an actual physical need to curtail wind or nuclear, it will always be wind that is curtailed, because it's actually quite easy to do. The question becomes an economic one - what do you pay producers for doing that. It can be anything from zero (network decision to cut the easiest or best-for-system plant at a given moment) to something set by a market mechanism. Both exist.
2) speaker plants are cheap as infrastructure - most of the cost of gas-fired electricity comes from the price of gas, and it is a well -known business model to have plants that produce very little but sell it very expensively - enough to cover their (low) fixed costs. You can achieve the same result with a capacity payment (the grid pays the plant to be available on demand, not for actual generation) - they don't run "for hours on end". This is a normal feature of a market with peaks of demand that must be absorbed by generation capacity - by design some capacity will only be needed very rarely. With renewables you need a bit more of that kind of capacity. It is designed into the system, because it increases prices when renewables do not produce (so they don't get it) and it means they get a lower than average price the rest of the time (check the concept of "capture price" - if it's below average prices, it means a supplier does not provide valuable electricity and is penalized via prices as a result)
3) it's a question of cost, but I don't object to that. But France did not stop investing - its nuclear companies squabbled over control of the next generation plants (EDF, Areva, with Siemens doing some of the fighting for a while too) and fails to actually deliver a working EPR. The politicians gave them the means to go ahead, they failed. The nuclear industry failed to deliver.
Energiewende has not increased dependency on gas - not in the power sector.
Yes, I do agree with this. One thing is green power generation, another thing is consumption. The difference is abysmal.
There is no battery storage for the energy that Germany needs to run their industries. Period. So most of the "green"energy is simply unused. And Europe is condemned to high rates of inflation, unemployment, lack of competitiveness and recession becasue of these hugely stupid and shortsighted decisions.
This is an awesome article and inspired me to start a substack as well.
We need more voices like yours accurately analyzing the German energy system.
Thank you for the coherently written article. It was a pleasure reading it.
How to store electricity for winter?
Why winter specifically? Because demand (in Europe) tends to be higher? But you also have more wind (and in particular offshore wind) in winter so it's not like electricity production stops in winter.
But the answer is the same as before - we have a lot of storage and/or flexible capacity in the system, until recently mostly used to adapt supply to demand (on top of the inflexible baseload) - that capacity is specifically designed for winter, when baselaod does not produce more than in the summer but demand is higher. It will be used for a different generation profile but it can still be used.
Splendid article as usual!
If Germany had gone all-in on nuclear twenty years ago, and maybe even ten years ago, it would today be producing cheaper electricity with effectively zero emissions and little to no Russian gas. Germany wouldn't be funding Russia's murderous war and war-crimes machine, and no one would be discussing the lignite coal situation. Nuclear prices would be low due to continual learning, and not needing to attempt to reconstitute the industry from scratch.
Germany declined the simple, easy, and obvious thing in order to do the difficult thing that's still not working. Ignoring this fundamental reality shows the post above to be naive at best and more likely dumb. It's not paying any attention to where power is coming from at the margin. So many words are ignoring the basic reality I point out in this comment, which is shorter, simpler, and more accurate.
Germany is culpable, gullible, and foolish, something the Twitter people understand, and the cope in this post misses. Germany could and should have already achieved essentially all the energy ends it hasn't achieved, and made its ratepayers wealthier to boot. A few thousand words of verbiage can't obscure this fundamental reality.
Nuclear is not a bad option, but all-in with just one way to produce energy is always a bad option when you talk about energy resources of a nation.
You should read actual experts, not Twitter experts with a black and white view of the world. Jerome's assessment is incredibly astute and factual, not biased towards any energy source.
With a handful of exceptions, energy twitter is a cesspool of angry keyboard warriors and astroturfers.
I'm not against nuclear - if you read this (https://jeromeaparis.substack.com/p/the-eu-energy-policy-has-long-been) you'll see that I have mostly praise for the French nuclear programme. But things have changed. Nuclear is now more expensive, and renewables are cheaper, and more importantly, we no longer know how to build nuclear plants: France did start 20 years ago to build the new generation of its nuclear fleet, and yet, here we are, 20 years later, with one plant 10 years late, 5 time over budget, and still no idea when it will be ready. When you are able to point to actually built new nukes, then we talk about your solution.
The challenges of base-load power and the duck curve remain, https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-how-address-over-generation-solar-energy.
Maybe batteries will get cheap enough to massively cover this, but we should still be working on and deploying nuclear for that ~40% of base load. It's also not clear that people and NIMBYs will accept the massive surface area necessary for solar and wind.
It's also true that we should be working to make nuclear cheaper through regulation simplification, high cost not being a law of nature.
How is the Energiewende successful when the IMF projects an hard economic slowdown in Europe if Russian gas is cut off in the winter. I appreciate how detailed your article is but I can't help but feel they're excuses for the projected recession in the EEA.
Most of German gas use is industry and heating, not electricity which is like 10% of the grid this year. Germany has made mistakes but primarily in heating, where it went for natural gas heating instead of, for example, heat pumps.
Well granted only Norway and Sweden really have any significant number of heat pumps.
An external shock of that kind will always have economic consequences. Renewables are part of the solution but the transition was not complete. And if anything it has been blocked by the same people that tell us now that it's not enough to protect Europe. It will be, and it could have been, but it's not fully sufficient yet - but it's helping.
Great article, thanks. One critical remark: you argue that the most expensive part of Energiewende has already been done. That’s certainly true for generation. But what about energy storage? There is not much yet and the majority of costs for it is still ahead us. What’s your view on that?
Energy storage is being brought down by "others". And quite fast I must add.
There is more storage/flexibility in the system than most people imagine - but it was used to deal with inflexible baseload. The needs are not the same with renewables, but as Germany shows, they do not appear to be that different in scale (more MW needed probably, but not more MWh). And we will have a lot of things coming from the demand side - interruptible industrial processes, more price-sensitive demand, etc. Storage is only one solution out of many.
It is unclear to me how renewables can match 40% of demand when electricity cannot be stored and it is by its nature quite intermittent. One thing is production of electricity from green sources, another thing is actual consumption. There is a gap between the two. And I do fear that most of the green "power" is simply unused because there is no demand for it in specif hours of the day.
So, simply European policymakers and German policymakers in particular have condemned Europe to a marginal role in the industrialised world for the foreseeable future. And the fact that the euro is now below parity with the US dollar is simply one of the consequences of these stupid decisions.
The energy transition claims are simply unrealistic since you need a huge amount of batteries whose raw materials need to be mined, transported, processed etc. We are talking of a skyrocketing rise in demand, and demand rise leads to cost increase.
It is the reality today that 40% of consumer electricity comes from renewables (and you have similar or higher percentages in other countries). It is happening. There is no wasted energy. Even if it seems counterintuitive, this is the reality. You can't run policy on people's beliefs that "this can't be done" (especially when it is ALREADY HAPPENING). Despite what you believe, there will not be a need for more batteries with renewables than with inflexible baselaod like nuclear or lignite.
You are literally claiming that my house in Poland runs on 100% solar and produces no CO2, because I have a solar installation with net metering, where during few summer months I get enough sunlight to rack up enough credit to last me the entire year, as I run an electric heat pump throughout the winter or work at my PC at night. So, as Poland burns lignite coal to power my home I can flex on how my electricity is renewable! And, funnily enough, it's all my less well off neighbours who can't afford to drop a cars worth of money on an installation are now paying for my "free power" (they thankfully got rid of net metering, finally, to cries of fossil fuel conspiracy and obviously it's completely economically unviable to install solar panels for homes again)
No, I'm saying the exact opposite actually. It's easier to balance the net difference between supply and demand at the grid level than at every individual producer and consumer.
Can you please stop repeating this disinformation? Wait for the lignite plants to close and replace nuclear with what? Exactly. Russian natgas. And stop talking about 40-50% of energy mix of renewables, when Germany is using almost every single surrounding country as a "free battery" - they export (dump) solar and wind electricity when it's worse than useless (negative wholesale prices) and reimport nuclear/coal/gas fired electricity when it's necessary. If every country in EU did what Germany had done, we would have daily rolling blackouts across half the EU. Meanwhile France is chilling at somewhat around 30g CO2 per kWh, less than 10% of what Germany or Britain produces to get their kWh of power most of the day. And it's significantly cheaper. So I have no idea on what planet you exist, energiewende is a failure on every single crucial point we should be interested in. Hell, it would be cheaper to take what was spent on energiewende, and pay the absolutely insane prices per kWh it nowadays costs to build nuclear, and in the end you'd have way more actually CO2 free power that you can use (do the math)
France has more like 80-90 CO2 per kWh and growing because of the nuclear crisis. They might actually be overtaken by wind loving Denmark.
This comment is more accurate than the huge amount of smoke-blowing blather in the post.
The country that is using neighbors (well, the Alps) as a giant battery is actually France - sending cheap nuclear at night to Germany, Switzerland, and buying back the power during the day, on much larger volumes because it needs to be done almost every day.
Germany is getting good prices for its exports, in general (of course there will be days of very high winds and low demand when it exports very cheaply, but it's not the general rule. In any case, what is wrong with Germany exporting cheap electricity to its neighbors - they are getting cheaper energy : the only ones to be unhappy are the local utilities who get less revenue, but how is that a bad thing in economic terms?
Another blatant misinformation. The law FORCES other countries to buy "renewable power", even if they have to curtail their own, CLEANER (nuclear) generation. It's a disaster, because it effectively increases prices, since you still have to pay for almost the same amount of capacity to produce power at night or in bad weather conditions AND you are forced to pay for power you don't actually need. this idiotic setup is actually increasing french power emissions, since they are forced to install...natural gas turbines (just like Germany) to be able to deal with wild fluctuations of "renewable energy" And without France to power Germany overnight, they either would have to burn way more coal and gas or literally go without. So the difference is that Germans couldn't actually function without France and quite the opposite in the reverse case. (And there isn't anything actually forcing "poor, abused Germans" to buy french power, again, the reverse)
I believe you are not up to date with current regulations. Also gas turbines being installed and being used are not the same. The reality is more complex: French nuclear needs Germany more than the other way around. Nonetheless it was until recently a two way beneficient deal, until the entire thing crash with the French nuclear fleet's major issues.
Sorry, but this seems all incorrect.
1) There used to be "priority dispatch" for renewables but (i) that has ended a while ago already (so the capacity this still applies to is quite low), (ii) it's not cross-broder (it's a matter of national law), and (iii) renewables are zero-marginal cost and therefore it make sense to dispatch them in priority anyway. What was changed ( a good change in my view) was to eliminate the right for renewables to continue to dispatch when prices were negative
2) installing gas turbines is not an issue, as long as they burn little gas. They provide capacity but little energy. The fact that gas-fired generation has not moved significantly shows that you don't actually need to burn more gas to ensure stability (you burn it in more power plants, that function less often - this is what "peakers" do and it's a business model that works
3) France needs (well, needed) to get rid of excess power at night more than Germany needed France's power - that's why it got a poor price for it, and pays more to get it back the next day. France actually cannot handle its own peaks of demand without imports - with heating heavily electrified, the peaks are sharper than in other countries, and nuclear, as fixed capacity baseload, cannot do anything for peaks...
1) this article is from month ago, so I have no idea what you are talking about: https://extranet.acer.europa.eu/Media/News/Pages/Regulators-call-for-priority-dispatch-of-existing-Renewables-to-be-removed.aspx
1a) just because renewables are zero marginal doesn't mean it makes sense for them to undercut nuclear, which is the only actually low CO2 tech we have
2) peaker plants require you to pay for effectively double the infrastructure AND they are the highest cost per unit of power produced. And they run every day for hours on end. Open any real time electricity generation stats for Germany and weep. And this failed "renewable" policy also meant billions more in drastic investment in the grid infrastructure, so it could cope with endless instability, none of course is actually treated as a cost of solar and wind (just as the cost of running gas peaker plants should be rolled into the "per kWh price")
3) it is better to have excess power than not have enough. France also basically stopped investing into their nuclear fleet due to politics and complete inviability of nuclear when it can't run as it's supposed to.
Ps. All energiewende managed to do is get Germany utterly dependent on russian gas and their economy is about to implode over it
1) I did say that some legacy generators still had access to priority dispatch. Personally I think that should go, so I do not disagree with you there, but I don't think it matters much
1a) nuclear is free to bid at a lower price to be sure to be dispatched. In general, if there is an actual physical need to curtail wind or nuclear, it will always be wind that is curtailed, because it's actually quite easy to do. The question becomes an economic one - what do you pay producers for doing that. It can be anything from zero (network decision to cut the easiest or best-for-system plant at a given moment) to something set by a market mechanism. Both exist.
2) speaker plants are cheap as infrastructure - most of the cost of gas-fired electricity comes from the price of gas, and it is a well -known business model to have plants that produce very little but sell it very expensively - enough to cover their (low) fixed costs. You can achieve the same result with a capacity payment (the grid pays the plant to be available on demand, not for actual generation) - they don't run "for hours on end". This is a normal feature of a market with peaks of demand that must be absorbed by generation capacity - by design some capacity will only be needed very rarely. With renewables you need a bit more of that kind of capacity. It is designed into the system, because it increases prices when renewables do not produce (so they don't get it) and it means they get a lower than average price the rest of the time (check the concept of "capture price" - if it's below average prices, it means a supplier does not provide valuable electricity and is penalized via prices as a result)
3) it's a question of cost, but I don't object to that. But France did not stop investing - its nuclear companies squabbled over control of the next generation plants (EDF, Areva, with Siemens doing some of the fighting for a while too) and fails to actually deliver a working EPR. The politicians gave them the means to go ahead, they failed. The nuclear industry failed to deliver.
Energiewende has not increased dependency on gas - not in the power sector.
Fully agree with your assessment. There are a lot of fake concepts about how the energy system actually works.
Yes, I do agree with this. One thing is green power generation, another thing is consumption. The difference is abysmal.
There is no battery storage for the energy that Germany needs to run their industries. Period. So most of the "green"energy is simply unused. And Europe is condemned to high rates of inflation, unemployment, lack of competitiveness and recession becasue of these hugely stupid and shortsighted decisions.
This is a brilliant and impressive peice thanks Jerome..
Excellent Article Jerome! Thank you for this very valuable insight.