What surplus? 48% is less than half, isn't it?

So, another way of looking at it is - Germany is still producing most of its electricity from non-renewable sources. Adding nuclear, it's still ~40% from coal and gas [0]. So again, what surplus?

In contrast, France is producing ~70% of its electricity just from nuclear, with another ~19% from renewables.

Note that either way, the major energy expenditure that ties all of these countries to Russian gas is not electricity, it is heating.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/romania?country=DE...

There often is a renewable energy surplus at night (wind /hydro) and more recently even around noon, thanks to solar. And renewables are constantly expanding.

The whole problem with renewables is the temporal variation and lack of large scale storage.

Producing hydrogen (and potentially converting that into more traditional gasses) is a perfectly viable solution, but of course such infrastructure can only be stood up over years and decades. It's not relevant for this winter.

TIL that apparently Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) has the lowest cost of any method of energy storage? "Techno-economic analysis of bulk-scale compressed air energy storage in power system decarbonisation" (2021) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192... https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/21/compressed-air-storag... :

> They found the former has a considerably lower Capex and a payback time of only two years. [compared with Lead Acid batteries]

I wouldn't thought that a Gravity Battery would've been more efficient than compressed air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery

Also TIL about geothermal heat pump energy storage: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-09-geothermal-ideal-energy-... :

The surplus will be available soon. If you look at the trajectories of the installed capacity, it's obvious.

Germany is in the process to switch over to electricity for heating, too. There are a lot of incentitives to install new heatpumps for example.

Let's first have that surplus, and then we can discuss how to use it.

Edit: Having a mostly renewable grid with backup coal/gas/nuclear is much much easier than having an entirely renewable grid.

A surplus is already generated on specific days. At the moment the extra energy is thrown away, in case you didn't know.

48% of its electricity this summer I'd believe, the whole year is unlikely. The crunch is winter when there is near-zero sunlight. Solar Panels in Northern Europe is waste of money.

The lowest was 41 percent in march 2022. Jan and Feb were over 50%

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE shows stats. Looks like Dec and Jan were windy, Feb, Mar not so much. Its higher than I expected, but not 50%. Biomass is high is that wood? I've also heard Germany fudges the numbers a lot, its coal stations take a long time to heat up and the emissions dont count if there is no electricity coming out.

Yep, that's wood. Some shipped from US even. Can't make this up.

Incorrect. While would is part of it, there's also grass, leaves, and agricultural waste as well as biomass collected from water treatment plants.

Incorrect. Solar panels in Northern Europe provide plenty of energy.

Additionally in the winter we have complementary wind production from our windfarms.

> Solar panels in Northern Europe provide plenty of energy.

For ~9 months of the year. For winter you need some other form of production that you can turn on at demand.

For example a panel in Helsinki produces less than 1% of its nominal output in the darkest months of winter.

edit: Just go and look at https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/sol... if you check December of 2021 you can see that the avg output was ~2MWh/h with solar 395MW of capacity installed at the end of 2021.

That's why we have wind energy in Germany. The wind is mostly strong in the winter and the sun in summer. Soon we will have energy from storage (hydrogen, thermal, and some batteries), too.

That is why I took issue in you saying "northern europe". Solar might work in Germany but that does not help me living in Finland (more like actively hurt by taking government subsidies)

For those doubting/disputing this - it was over 50% in q1 2022 https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-cover-50-ger...

Doesn't hydrogen leak more through typical petroleum gas infrastructure?

It has a much smaller molecule.

let's stop calling renewables the solar panels made from polysilicon using gas and creating toxic silicon tetrachloride

Let's not.

what is renewable exactly? cheap early chinese panels had 10year shelf life. it is now 20-30.

Is this incorrect information?

This is absolutely correct. And there is a lot of renewable generation in the winter too because it gets really windy in most of Germany.

And sure, having about 3x renewable generation and consuming the excess generation when it's above the demand, into producing green hydrogen, is about what the longer-term plan for electricity production looks like. There will still be times when renewables will be insufficient, on calm winter days, but infrequently, and then electricity can be produced back from that green hydrogen, but overall there will be surplus, resulting in hydrogen replacing the one produced currently from fossil fuels, for steel production and other industrial uses.

No, it is correct information.