December 14, 2018 by
Original link: https://stopthesethings.com/2018/12/14/hopelessly-helpless-german-wind-power-fails-93-3-of-the-time-collapses-in-minutes/?fbclid=IwAR2wrfmOSsIGH7hk1DJjD1-bUtRdHIMsRFut3pLQbnA5UWywISV1-0Dhvis
Costly, ugly, annoying and useless, what’s not to like?
When the challenge is thrown at wind power proponents about its
hopeless intermittency, like a drug addict, the answer is always “more”.
More of the same, more turbines, more panels, more subsidies, more
transmission network capacity, more non-existent mega batteries, well,
just more.
Germany is held up as the shining example of what our ‘inevitable
transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future will look like. The
line goes that Germany has built an enormous capacity with 30,000 wind
turbines, millions of solar panels and it will simply overcome issues
such as sunset and calm weather, by building more, much more.
Except that Mother Nature refuses to play ball. When the wind stops
blowing across Germany, it does so across the entire country, and it
does so such that wind power output totally collapses in a matter of
minutes. Leaving Germany’s coal- and gas-fired power plants to maintain
grid stability and deliver electricity to Germans, everywhere.
The idea that a Country can be entirely powered by sunshine and
breezes is, of course, patent nonsense. But that doesn’t stop the
delusional from claiming otherwise.
Here’s the data that shows just how ridiculous Germany’s wind power obsession is.
4 Charts Expose Abominable Inadequacy Of Europe’s Wind Energy …”Power Collapses Within Minutes”
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
2 November 2018
Pierre Gosselin
2 November 2018
German wind energy opposition organization Vernunftkraft here posted some charts at Facebook showing just how abominably inadequate wind as a source of power really is.
“Power collapses within minutes”
The following chart shows the performance of wind energy for 15
European countries (shaded dark blue) and that of Germany (light blue)
for the period May, 2018:
Source: Rolf Schuster, Vernunftkraft.
Vernunftkraft writes that with wind energy in Europe, “power generation collapses within minutes.”
Yet wind proponents and lobbyists like to counter by telling us that
the problem will be manageable by simply adding more capacity, some
storage and using a smart grid.
Growing grid instability
But as the following chart shows, Germany has in fact doubled
its installed capacity over the past 8 years, but this has done nothing
regarding grid stability, and has only made things worse:
Source: Rolf Schuster, Vernunftkraft.
Note that the peaks are far greater and that the instability has
become far more extreme. Yet, this is not stopping green energy
activists and lobbyists from calling for doubling, tripling or even
quadrupling the country’s installed wind capacity.
Vernunftkraft reports:
The steep increase in installed wind turbine power only leads to a small increase in electrical output, i.e. only a slight increase in power generation. This phenomenon is physical as wind turbines feed in an average only 15% of their rated power.
A further analysis of Germany’s solar and wind power outputs for the
month of July, for example, shows that wind and sun were AWOL far more
often than they were on the job:
Source: Rolf Schuster, Vernunftkraft.
While on some days German wind and solar installations can supply
almost all of Germany’s 70-80 gigawatts of power demand, just hours
later (night time) wind and solar at times all but totally disappear.
Less than 10% of rated capacity almost half the time
Ralf Schuster of Vernunftkraft did an analysis looking at the
distribution of the power fed in according to class (Verteilung der
Einspeisung nach Klassen) of the total wind energy that was generated:
10,693 gigawatt-hours in June.
Source: Rolf Schuster, Vernunftkraft.
The table above shows the wind ran a total of 744 hours. Some 320.25
hours, or 43% of the total time, saw wind turbines running at a measly 0
– 10% of their rated capacity. The turbines ran at 40% or more of their
rated capacity for only a totally lousy 1.5 hours (0.2% of the time)!
They write:
Wind power completely collapsed – the ‘pillar of the energy transition” (wind power) completely collapsed in June. July does not look better. More than 30% of the nominal output (NL) was achieved only 6.7% of the time. Or rather, in June, the wind turbines failed 93.3% of the time.
To illustrate wind’s inadequacy, using it is like hiring a worker who
shows up for work only one day a week, and nobody can say on which day
and which shift.
And the Germans think they can defy Mother Nature. Good luck with that!
