I wrote last week about how the Dunkelflaute (“dark lull” or “dark doldrums”), a phenomenon often seen in Northern Europe at this time of year, had settled over the U.K., pushing down the amount of power generated by its vast and hugely expensive fleet of wind turbines.
Germany, which has also invested phenomenal amounts of money in wind power was also hit, as were other parts of Europe.
Power prices across Europe soared as a slump in wind generation forces nations to fire up plants running on more expensive fossil fuels.
The Polish grid PSE triggered a so-called state of emergency for its power market on Wednesday. Much of northwest Europe is experiencing warmer-than-average temperatures, but a high-pressure system has resulted in a sharp dip in wind speeds, leading to tight energy supplies.
While Europe has pushed to rapidly expand its capacity to generate wind and solar power, it still relies on costly hydrocarbons as a back up. One of the region’s biggest challenges is to ensure that cheap, clean energy is available whenever it’s required.
Note the contrast drawn between “costly” hydrocarbons and “cheap, clean energy” (Bloomberg is what it is). If renewables require expensive backup from traditional power stations, then surely that cost should be added to their cost.
Bloomberg:
The path to net zero “requires more than a rapid rollout of renewables” according to Pranav Menon, a research associate at Aurora Energy Research. Building long-duration storage options and gas plants is also very important…
The UK, which turned off its last coal plant earlier this year, has often solved its intermittency issues by importing more electricity from other countries during periods of low wind and sun. However, this week the lack of wind has been widespread across Europe.
Successive British governments, both the Tories and their Labour kin, have insisted that their renewables regime will increase energy security, a dubious claim. One of the many things they seem to have overlooked is that inconvenient weather systems don’t pay attention to national borders, meaning that the U.K. may not be able to import as much electricity from Europe during a Dunkelflaute as it had hoped.
That electricity is meant to be transmitted by interconnectors (cables), which in the case of those supplying the U.K., an island nation, are subsea, as Vladimir Putin is doubtless aware.
Undaunted by such petty concerns, the U.K. is building more interconnectors.
Akshay Kaul, director general for infrastructure at Ofgem, said: “As the UK shifts to a clean power system more reliant on intermittent wind and solar energy, these new connections will play a key role in making our energy supply cheaper and less reliant on volatile foreign gas markets and associated price spikes.”
However, it will be increasingly reliant on (local) imports from Europe. And what if those countries need more of their own electricity?
The Financial Times, January 28, 2023:
Observers said there are risks in remaining reliant on the goodwill of neighbours. Although the UK has since April exported more energy than it has imported, there is a question as to whether there will be sufficient supplies if the situation reverses and cold snaps drain European storage. National Grid was forced to ask the Netherlands this week for an emergency increase in imports via the subsea cables to avoid blackouts in the south-east of England.
Dieter Helm, economic policy professor at Oxford university, said there was a “huge vulnerability in the UK relying on external energy supplies in the face of shocks”. “We are doing it with gas, where there is almost no storage and no back-up, which requires us to pay the highest price for LNG tanker loads, which is one reason the gas crisis hit the UK so hard,” he added. “With electricity it is good to trade but if the great Brexit game is taking back control, the right answer is to make sure we have enough domestic generation capacity, especially with so much intermittency from wind.”
At least it’s unthinkable that the U.K.’s European neighbors would ever use the clout they gain from supplying the U.K. with electricity for other ends.
The Guardian, October 5, 2021:
The EU could hit Britain and Jersey’s energy supply over the UK’s failure to provide sufficient fishing licences to French fishers, France’s EU affairs minister has said.
Oh.
There will be times when the U.K. exports electricity through those cables to the Continent, but:
Ofgem has previously warned that although being able to export would benefit generators, UK consumers may lose out because demand from European markets could push up UK prices.
Never mind.
As the Daily Telegraph reports, Britain’s Labour government has big ambitions in this area. Its misnamed “energy” minister talked recently about the “mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower.”
Translation: Britain will be taking a knife to a gunfight.
But back to Dunkelflaute Deutschland. Let’s take one hour in the morning of November 10. The principal contributors to Germany’s electricity mix were coal (48 percent), natural gas (22 percent), and biomass 16 percent, whereas in France they were nuclear (80 percent), hydro (8 percent), and natural gas (6 percent), a mix that was responsible for carbon emissions less than a tenth of those in Germany.
The same day, Holger Zschäpitz tweeted that:
electricity prices have soared this week due to a period of “dark doldrums.” With foggy weather & hardly any wind, renewable energy production dropped significantly. As a result, Germany had to import more electricity than ever before.
Quite a bit of that electricity came from France, courtesy of the nuclear power that Germany, a country not afraid of free riding (see NATO for details), will not have within its own borders because, in the event of a serious accident at a French nuclear power station, the radioactive cloud will know that it is not allowed in the country. #Science
Mark Nelson tweets a reminder that Germany has (so far) spent 500 [billion Euros] on renewables in its energy “transition”.
I touched on Germany’s investment in renewables in the most recent Capital Letter:
In 2018, Germany’s Court of Auditors estimated that cost of the switch to renewables in the previous five years had been at least 160 billion euros. The spending, it said, was in “extreme disproportion to the results,” a conclusion that would hold for longer periods too. And this was at a time of underinvestment elsewhere. The opportunity cost of climate spending is too often forgotten. The actual cost (on top of those billions) was to leave Germany with extraordinarily high electricity bills, the last thing its heavily energy-intensive industrial sector needed, and a result hard to reconcile with frequently repeated claims of renewables’ cheapness. And all this was before Germany lost access to “cheap” Russian gas, its second dangerous dependency. Efforts to blame Germany’s economic woes on the loss of that gas and China won’t wash. Both have contributed to the current mess, but the rot was spreading before then. Much of it was green.