Separating Fact from Fiction In Accounts of Germany’s Renewables Revolution
http://blog.rmi.org/separating_fact_from_fiction_in_accounts_of_germanys_renewab...By Amory Lovins Aug 15, 2013
I recently wrote about—and debunked—the renewables “disinformation campaign” that spreads misinformed and falsely negative stories about the growth of renewable energy. A special focus of such disinformation has been reportage on Germany’s efficiency-and-renewables revolution. The impressive success so far of the German Energiewende (energy turnaround) is an important existence proof for the world, because Germany is cloudy, high-latitude, heavily industrialized, highly competitive (it rivals America’s merchandise exports with one-fourth its population), and the world’s fourth-biggest economy.
Perhaps because German success would therefore belie the supposed necessity of fossil-fuel and nuclear energy, some media regularly report the Energiewende’s failure or supposed impossibility. As I highlighted, Germany’s renewables revolution is in fact highly successful and strong as ever, but that hasn’t stopped three myths from gaining traction in the media: 1) Germany’s supposed turn back to coal, 2) how renewables undermine grid reliability, and 3) how renewables subsidies are cratering the German economy. None of those are true, and here’s why.
Myth #1: Germany’s turn back to coalAn efficient new German coal plant begun in 2006, with fast ramp rates to complement variable renewables, was widely but wrongly heralded on its commissioning in 2012 (Europe’s only new coal plant that year) as signaling Germany’s post-Fukushima turn back to coal—not mentioning that it replaced a larger amount of dirtier and far less efficient coal capacity that was shut down. Moreover, replacing old 35-to-38-percent-efficient coal units with modern 46-percent-efficient ones, like some of the 5.3 GW likely to come online this year, would save a fifth of their coal even if net capacity didn’t change. And though capacity may fluctuate for a few years, the German Energy Agency expects 11.3 GW of coal capacity to be added and 18.5 GW closed by 2020—a net decrease of at least 7.2 GW.
In fact, as explained here and here, Germany has begun no new coal plants since Fukushima, coal-fired generation will decline even more than capacity, lignite has no future, and any of the coal plants planned long ago that are completed—offsetting retiring units—are likely to lose money, just as existing ones do now. Another instance in Hamburg reinforces these points. Yet claims continue to propagate that “Germany alone is building 25 coal-fired plants” (20 of 29 originally proposed have already been stopped, 5–6 more shelved) and that “it has now become very, very cheap to burn coal and as a result, there’s a new coal boom in Europe” (nearly all in Britain and Spain), while renewables are “helping to continue the economic collapse of Germany” (Europe’s strongest economy).
German coal-fired generation did rise modestly in 2011–12, substituting for pricier natural gas, about half of which in Europe is price-linked to oil. Very low prices in Europe’s oversupplied carbon emissions market further reduced the price of burning coal. Similarly in the first seven months of 2013 compared with a year earlier, three-fourths of the rise in coal-fired generation was due to substitution for gas, the rest to lighter winds—though electricity demand probably declined too.
This temporary coal-burning uptick is often used to claim that German CO2 emissions are rising, even though emissions have trended down since 1990. In fact, despite economic growth, German renewables helped make CO2 emissions fall in 2011, hold steady for power plants and industry in 2012, and probably fall in total in 2012 after adjustment for more oil-fired heating in the exceptionally cold winter. The reason is simple: Germany’s renewable growth has more than offset nuclear shutdowns while efficiency has flattened or decreased electricity demand. It’s not even possible for German power plants to emit more CO2 because of their national emissions cap under EU law.
Flatly contradicting the official data, anti-renewables reports often claim that Germany is going back to coal because renewables didn’t work and are proving unaffordable. Actually, they work just fine, supplying 23 percent of German electricity in 2012 (more than any other source except lignite) and driving dramatically lower wholesale power prices that are attracting energy-intensive industry, making German industrial power highly competitive, and enabling record 2012 power exports that rose another 62 percent in the first half of 2013. (Germany is the only country that consistently exports power to France; its industrial power is cheaper than the EU average, and the gap is widening.) American media, rerunning many of these false stories, are awkwardly having to shift their tune from “renewables are too costly to compete” to “renewables are walloping our favorite old technologies.” Indeed, German photovoltaics today have achieved the price that the European Union in 2011 projected for 2050.
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