The European Tribune is a forum for thoughtful dialogue of European and international issues. You are invited to post comments and your own articles.
Please REGISTER to post.
Here's a back-of-envelope calculation
germany's current electricity consumption is 1.6 billion kWh/day To cut CO2 emissions, you need to shift most transport to electrified rail (as Jerome advocates) and to plug-in electric road vehicles. At a minimum, this will double electricity consumption to 3 billion kWh/day.
Onshore wind is the only renewable source likely to make much contribution to this. Wind farms have an average output of about 50,000 kWh/day per sq km. So you'd need 60000 sq km of wind farms - one seventh of germany's land area - for average wind output to equal average consumption. For peak capacity, you'd need far more than this, even with pumped storage and demand management. Does anyone really think that allocating this much land to wind farms is feasible?
by Oui - Dec 5 6 comments
by gmoke - Nov 28
by Oui - Dec 617 comments
by Oui - Dec 612 comments
by Oui - Dec 56 comments
by Oui - Dec 41 comment
by Oui - Dec 21 comment
by Oui - Dec 154 comments
by Oui - Dec 16 comments
by gmoke - Nov 303 comments
by Oui - Nov 3012 comments
by Oui - Nov 2838 comments
by Oui - Nov 2713 comments
by Oui - Nov 2511 comments
by Oui - Nov 24
by Oui - Nov 221 comment
by Oui - Nov 22
by Oui - Nov 2119 comments
by Oui - Nov 1615 comments
by Oui - Nov 154 comments
by Oui - Nov 1319 comments