Creating more renewable energy is pointless unless it reduces/replaces the use of fossil fuels. Having more energy than we need is useless, and there's an environmental footprint to even the greenest wind farm.
The point the article is making is that because of the way the renewable industry is being funded (from taxes on electricity consumption), consumers are opting to continue burning fossil fuels rather then use electricity.
This means that the supply of electricity is greater than demand for it, and prices go below zero.
This has two knock-on effects:
1. Investment in electricity production is guided by government policy goals and support, rather than actual demand. The only source of revenue is government redistribution of energy taxes, and that can change quickly depending on government policy. This is not sustainable, there is no incentive here to produce efficient, long-lasting energy production infrastructure. There is only an incentive to maximise government subsidy payouts in the short term.
2. Germany is producing more energy than it needs, and producing energy (from any source) has a negative environmental impact. These policies that were intended to preserve the environment and reduce fossil fuel use are actually causing more environmental damage and preserving fossil fuel use.
Of course, this only considers domestic consumption, and specifically heating. It may be that the policies do better in other areas.
> Creating more renewable energy is pointless unless it reduces/replaces the use of fossil fuels.
It does.
> The point the article is making is that because of the way the renewable industry is being funded (from taxes on electricity consumption), consumers are opting to continue burning fossil fuels rather then use electricity.
No, it doesn't. Renewable energy has a systematic preference and its share in electricity production has risen from 6% (in 2000) to 42% (in 2019).
> Investment in electricity production is guided by government policy goals and support, rather than actual demand
That's always the case. Energy policy is a government task. No nuclear would be build without MASSIVE government support and government demand.
Germany actually created an energy market, which before did not exist, since electricity production and distribution was in the hand of 4 big companies, each having a full monopoly in a large region.
> Germany is producing more energy than it needs
It doesn't. Far from. Also Germany is importing energy. Lots.
> reduce fossil fuel use are actually causing more environmental damage and preserving fossil fuel use.
This is not what is happening. The goal is to have more than 85% renewable energy for electricity production in 2050.
EDIT: My data is a bit outdated, they did significantly reduce they reliance on hard coal. Lignite use (the worst kind of fossil fuel...) stayed about the same and they use more gas. But still, renewable mostly replaced nuclear.
Fossil fuel usage is significantly going down and adding gas power plants for very agile backup for renewable makes sense, too.
Keep in mind that the Energiewende is a long term project for rebuilding the whole energy landscape in an industrialized country of more than 80 Million people and one of the larger economies in the world. The time scale is 50 years from 2000 upto 2050. Even the current point where we are at 42% of renewable energy (up from 6% in 2000) for electricity was unbelievable 20 years ago - for example given that Germany does not have much hydro-electric capacity. From 'the grid would collapse' to 'Germany will be losing all industry' everything was claimed.
Germany has massive overcapacity in electricity production capabilities - even though a bunch of nuclear power plants have been closed. Many gas power plants were not profitable and were idling. This has changed a bit and coal got more expensive, so it was increasingly leaving the market.
Whenever renewable is available, it pushes a lot of other sources out of the market. In the current months there were a lot of days where wind was the major source of electricity for the whole of Germany. For example in the windy days from Tuesday 28th Jan until Saturday 1st Feb the wind electricity share climbed from 47% on Tuesday to 61% on Saturday. Other sources either leave the market or more gets exported.
> This is not what is happening. The goal is to have more than 85% reneable energy for electricity production in 2050.
I believe the point was that, because of the subsidies that are included in the price for electricity, that electricity isn't used for what it could be because it's more expensive than fossil-fuel options.
Even if there was 100% renewable energy for electricity production in 2050, that wouldn't help with emissions that stem from heating unless you'd also make people heat with electricity. And to do that, you'd need to lower the prices (or raise the prices of alternatives).
There is not really a separate price for fossil fuel electricity. And renewable energy has preference: if renewable energy is available, it will be used with preference.
> Even if there was 100% renewable energy for electricity production in 2050, that wouldn't help with emissions that stem from heating unless you'd also make people heat with electricity. And to do that, you'd need to lower the prices (or raise the prices of alternatives).
That's right. In a future with large electricity surplus it makes sense to switch to electricity for heating. To make that attractive new price models are needed.
Currently another goal is to increase heating efficiency and cheap heating prices would go against it. When we switch to electricity we want to make sure that the heating is max efficient. Different from France, where electricity for heating is cheap and is used very inefficiently.
> There is not really a separate price for fossil fuel electricity. And renewable energy has preference: if renewable energy is available, it will be used with preference.
Sure, sure, the issue is that you can use electricity or fossil fuels for heating. If the prices are massively different, people cannot afford to go green.
Having super high prices for consumers while essentially subsidizing industry seems like a problematic approach, and one that primarily hits the lower classes, as a higher electricity bill will very much directly affect their bottom line. Combining this with a subsidy policy framework for renewables that also primarily the upper middle & upper class profit from, this looks more like redistribution via market.
> Sure, sure, the issue is that you can use electricity or fossil fuels for heating.
You can't. Fossil fuels are still used for electricity, too and there is not enough cheap electricity for heating. If you want to bring people from relatively cheap gas to expensive electricity (the free electricity claim is just nonsense) that would be massive investments, while the consumer already pays for the move into renewable energy for electricity production, which without heating still needs to scale to replace more fossil and nuclear. If we want to have the consumer to pay for new heating systems and electricity distribution for heating on a larger scale, then this will be difficult...
It's simply not the case that one lowers the price for electricity (who pays for that?) and consumers will switch on their electrical heating systems. There is simply no large scale infrastructure for that.
It might even be better to create gas from electricity and deliver that to the customer... Then one can use the large storage and distribution systems for gas in Germany and the gas heating which is widely available. There is a move to get rid of oil heating and to provide incentives to install different heating from 2026 onwards...
>> Even if there was 100% renewable energy for electricity production in 2050, that wouldn't help with emissions that stem from heating unless you'd also make people heat with electricity. And to do that, you'd need to lower the prices (or raise the prices of alternatives).
>That's right. In a future with large electricity surplus it makes sense to switch to electricity for heating. To make that attractive new price models are needed.
Again, maybe read the article before commenting. Because the article explains how the pricing structure is incentivising people to continue using fossil fuels, even with a large electricity surplus.
Again, the article is misleading and fails to understand the German electricity markets (!), how the EEG works, how the electricity production/distribution/sales works in Germany, the pricing and how consumers buy electricity.
For example: the renewable produced electricity is delivered onto the grid and the distribution takes it. As much as is possible. This is mixed with non-renewable electricity. The consumer then gets delivered the mix. The normal consumer has no choice - he always gets the mix. He/she can't prefer fossil fuels or renewable. If there is more coal generated electricity, the renewable energy electricity has a preference. By law:
'Netzbetreiber sind vorbehaltlich des § 11 verpflichtet, den gesamten angebotenen Strom aus Erneuerbaren Energien und aus Grubengas unverzüglich vorrangig abzunehmen'
translates: 'Grid companies ... are required to take all provided electricity generated from renewable energies ... immediately and with preference.'
That's the German law, the EEG, the renewable energy law.
Thus there is simply no choice: ALL AVAILABLE RENEWABLE ENERGY IS PUSHED INTO THE GRID IMMEDIATELY WITH PREFERENCE.
The provider of renewable energy gets a guaranteed price, based on some calculations. The goal is that this price goes down over the years.
Additionally coal gets further price burdens, which last year had an effect that a lot of coal was driven out of the market, because coal generated electricity was suddenly much less competitive.
Currently there is no time in Germany when renewable energy electricity drives the country 100% or more. There are weekends with lots of wind where we reach 60%. These days are still relatively rare.
On these days the consumer can not choose to get more wind electricity, since he AUTOMATICALLY gets as much as possible via the mix provided by the grid.
The producer gets his price. Now there might be additional capacity available and there might not be a buyer for it. Thus the price on the spot market gets zero for some short period of time or even negative.
But for me as an end consumer I can't choose what kind of electricity I get delivered. What I can influence is where I buy the electricity from and where the profits from that are invested. For example I buy my electricity from a local provider, which invests in renewable energy. The company not only buys renewable energy on the market, but also has its own renewable energy production. The provider invests their profits into more renewable energy production.
For coal its currently tough to make any profits and they are slowly driven out of the market:
Last year in the first half brown coal power plants were 650 Million Euros in the red.
Thus the consumer doesn't give the coal power plants any advantage.
The added capacity of renewable produced electricity is each year planned (but not completely determined) and the government has instruments to influence that.
The article makes the point that for heating, consumers are choosing to stay with fossil fuel-driven heating rather than install electrical heating, because the tax-driven pricing for electricity makes electricity so expensive that where there is a choice to not use it, people do.
It doesn't address any of the non-heating areas that you're talking about, and doesn't make any claims around any of the electricity supply market that doesn't affect heating.
So it doesn't matter if the first 90% of the electricity people consume is green, because they're not choosing to use electricity for this. Thus the renewable power is not replacing the fossil fuel power in this market.
Because the article has no clue what the discussion is in Germany.
There is right now no cheap surplus clean electricity for heating. The so-called 'free electricity' simply does not exist.
What is free is SOMETIMES electricity traded on the spot market, which is not necessary available when the consumer needs it for heating and not necessarily in the amount that it would be useful.
That heating is not done via electricity is because it's simply not currently a part of the energy policy in Germany to promote electrical heating on a large scale. It's also not seen as a useful consumption of surplus energy in the next decade. The topics which are discussed are heat pumps, combined-cycle power plants, better insulation, zero-energy houses (which don't need much heating, but need electricity for air distribution), centralized district-level heating, electrical heating from local PV installations, adding gas generated from electricity to the gas distribution, pellet heating, solar, ...
The cost for a complete electrification of the heating market is estimated to be 2 trillion Euro. That's far away. There is a plan to disallow new oil heating from 2026 onwards, but there is no plan to support direct electrical heating with incentives. There will be incentives for heat pumps, but the achievable market share is not large in the next years.
> Thus the renewable power is not replacing the fossil fuel power in this market.
Because it was/is not wanted. This may change, but there are many experts saying that it is currently not useful to promote direct electrical heating and heat pumps are currently not a large scale solution. Also: Currently the price (different from what is claimed in the article) for electrical heating is too high in Germany.
The next main usage for electricity probably will be for electric vehicles and the infrastructure for that will be expensive to build. Thus investments will be needed for the electricity used to decarbonize energy in traffic.
The main reasons why Germany isn't currently using electrical heating (besides heat pumps, etc), is that on a large scale electricity usage in other areas has a preference, electricity for heating currently is expensive (the 'free electricity' is a myth) and building the infrastructure would be very expensive.
There are good energy efficient solutions to heating that use electricity. Here in Sweden the most common solution for new houses is the downhole heat exchanger [1]. If you want a cheaper initial investment an air heat pump can be used.
Sure, there are. But houses need to be insulated. Consumers need not waste energy by just using it -> for example don't open the window to cool down, instead of lowering the heating, etc. etc. Standards need to be defined for new houses. Also provide solutions for existing houses. Provide business models. To create that market and to make some impact means that we are talking about decades.
I keep forgetting how hopelessly after on the insulation central Europe is compared to us in the north. A friend of a friend built a house by Swedish standards in the UK a while ago and all her neighbors pitied her because the snow remained on her roof during winter.
We have that, too. But highly insulated houses have new problems: air quality can be bad and houses need an extensive fresh air supply system. Moisture needs to be removed from the air, too. But if coal&oil, now gas and future electricity would be cheap, there would be little incentive to develop working solutions. There are also concepts like 'virtual power plants': a virtual power plant consists of a bunch of renewable electricity producers (solar, wind, ...) and a gas power plant for back up. The gas power plant would then also provide the heat for homes in a centralized fashion. The efficiency of such a gas power plant could then very high. This would work for residential areas. The gas could also in the future be produced from local renewable energy sources.
UK is much much worse than Germany tho. And as an Austrian I have to say that most scandinavic houses I have been to (including iceland) were much worse insulated (both thermally and acoustically) than the houses in Austria.
Electrical heating is seen as an emergency solution in Germany. There are nearly no homes with electrical heating systems in place, and if people heat electrical it is when their central heating system is broken.
I think most Germans wouldn't even get the idea to heat electrically.
It's not happening because it is no goal in the energy policy to promote large scale electrical heating and there is no cheap surplus energy (different from what the article claims). There will be some expansion in the area of heat pumps, but it will be slow.
The renewable energy expansion is used to replace current non-renewable electricity usage. Then we will see more renewable energy electricity used to decarbonize traffic (trains, cars, trucks, busses, ...).
I'm more familiar with the solar aspect of Energiewende, but a goal was to kick-start an industry to make renewable energy viable in the first place. This couldn't happen without significant amounts of installation caused by political commitment.
Yeah, I'd love for them to fix the bad power-vs-gas incentives. But I would not expect this to happen any time soon in the current political climate were no one will be willing to take the hit for something consumer will feel that directly.
The point the article is making is that because of the way the renewable industry is being funded (from taxes on electricity consumption), consumers are opting to continue burning fossil fuels rather then use electricity.
This means that the supply of electricity is greater than demand for it, and prices go below zero.
This has two knock-on effects:
1. Investment in electricity production is guided by government policy goals and support, rather than actual demand. The only source of revenue is government redistribution of energy taxes, and that can change quickly depending on government policy. This is not sustainable, there is no incentive here to produce efficient, long-lasting energy production infrastructure. There is only an incentive to maximise government subsidy payouts in the short term.
2. Germany is producing more energy than it needs, and producing energy (from any source) has a negative environmental impact. These policies that were intended to preserve the environment and reduce fossil fuel use are actually causing more environmental damage and preserving fossil fuel use.
Of course, this only considers domestic consumption, and specifically heating. It may be that the policies do better in other areas.