Germany’s new Economy Minister Katherina Reiche on Friday called for the rapid construction of new gas-fired power plants in the country to support the country’s energy supply when renewable sources are unavailable
She said it was important to “quickly move to tender at least 20 gigawatts of gas-fired power plants to maintain energy security.”
Reiche ruled out a return to nuclear energy
"This means we need to conclude the relevant free trade agreements with Chile, Mercosur, India, Australia and Mexico. And I explicitly say, we also need the United States of America," Reiche said.
You need something like 200-250GWh of storage to do that. Germany already has something like 39GWh of pumped hydro storage. So roughly 160-210GWh of new battery storage. China added 91GWh of grid scale batteries to its grid last year alone and they can be added very quickly. So this is actually realistic.
250GWh, at 50GW draw, last five hours. You’re off by at least an order of magnitude if you want the backup to last two days.
When do I need 50GW? I do have the already built methane, hydro and biomass power plants to give me a sort of baseload. Then I modulate on that using batteries to meet peak demand. So I only need enough to meet the difference between that baseload and the actual load. In the case of no wind and solar I charge at night, when load is low and power the grid at day, when the load is high.
Doing that a grid can use less flexible power plants, like biomass power plants converted from coal power plants and it means I only need enough power plants to meet average daily demand and not peak demand. It is also possible to predict, when those plants are needed using a weather forecast.
Batteries are incredibly useful anyway for say summer nights without wind. Just store some solar electricity from the day, for the night. That is actually the more likely situation.
You’re right, brainfart.
Nope you need more because transmission capacity isn’t infinite, you cannot serve local demand spikes with far-away sources. those 60GW max are still an average. I don’t have access to data of that level of detail, if it’s public, then I don’t know where.
All in all we’re at the point where, for one of us to have an argument better than the other, we’d have to run an analysis over the actual market data taking all those various factors into account. The nitty-gritty.
So what I’m going to say instead is that that analysis has been run, and the Greens never had an issue with building these plants. You can say a lot about the Greens, but not that they’re be bought by big fossil fuel, including Russia or the US.