Thinking about this, it looks like you're going 3 kinds of days in the market now:

• days like this one, where renewables displace almost all the variable production capacity (there will be quite a few, given solar's natural production profile, which matches demand quite well over the day - a lot of days from April to October will be like this, and in winter, wind tends to produce more so the seasonal effect will be muted); these days will be easy for the system operationally, but crappy economically for all traditional producers

• days when renewables are so plentiful that even some baseload may need to be switched off - or prices will turn negative and the country will export a lot of cheap power (see my separate comment below on exports); this will be painful for baselaod plants, and horrible for economics of all tradiitonal producers;

• days when you have less renewables, or temporary peaks and troughs; on these days, traditional producers will be needed and prices will be significantly higher; these days will be operationally more complex for the system but economically profitable for the traditional producers - and the only days when peakers and other highly flexible can actually earn money, so the number of such days is going to be critical for their continued viability (and thus their availability to the system);

German power exports more valuable than its imports

Now that the switch to renewables has not produced blackouts, but record power exports, the new conventional wisdom has it that German ratepayers are subsidizing electricity sold on the cheap to neighboring countries. Why doesn't anyone just do the math?

The new official figures published today by DeStatis basically confirm the preliminary statistics published by BDEW at the beginning of the year, which put Germany's net power exports at a record level - an outcome that flies in the face of concerns that the sudden nuclear phaseout of 2011 would lead to a shortfall of power generation.

Now, the German press is full of reports charging that German ratepayers are having to subsidize energy that is given away practically for free to neighboring countries. RP online writes of the "paradoxical situation" in which "German power providers have to pay for the power they export just to get rid of it so it can be consumed where it is not really needed."

As regular readers of Renewables International know, regular readers of Der Spiegel are particularly misinformed, so it comes as no surprise that the five visible comments under Spiegel's article largely assume that Germans are subsidizing cheap power for foreign countries. The third comment reads, "It would be interesting to know how much foreign countries pay for German power and how much Germany pays for foreign power."

The stupid thing is that all of this is provided in DeStatis' press report from today, but no article I could find (RP online, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Rundschau, etc.) bothers to do the math on the statistics published. So here it is:

                                          TWh     Billion euros     Price per kWh in cents
German power exports     66.6             3.7                     5.6
German power imports     43.8             2.3                     5.25

This is not rocket science; it's basic math. On average, Germany received 5.6 cents and paid 5.25 cents per kilowatt-hour exported/imported, respectively. In other words, the value of the kilowatt-hour Germany exports is more than the value it imports - exactly the opposite of what everyone seems to expect.

Germany: Construction of Trianel's Borkum Offshore Wind Farm Reaches Next Stage

The installation work for the internal transformer platform for Trianel's Borkum wind farm was successfully completed yesterday.

During a two-day mission at the construction site, 45 kilometers off the Borkum's coast, the heavy lift vessel Oleg Strashnov lifted the 2,400-ton deck onto the substructure (jacket).  Then the transformer platform and jacket were welded together.

"With the transformer platform, we haven't just installed the power outlet for the wind farm, but we also created the conditions for the next stage of construction," said Klaus Horstick, Managing Director of Trianel wind farm Borkum GmbH & Co. KG. "In the coming months, we will erect the wind turbines."

The erection of the AREVA M5000 turbines with a capacity of 5 MW should start in May. During the installation of wind turbines, the installation vessel MPI Adventure will be used for half a year.

The offshore wind farm is planned to be connected to the grid by TenneT in the 3rd quarter of 2013. Originally, the commissioning was planned for 2012/2013 year. However, a new completion date is scheduled for the 4th quarter of 2013.

This is one of the several German offshore wind projects that have been bank-financed to be under construction now - in fact, this was the first one to have been financed (I worked on it when I was still in my previous job, but was not involved in the final stages of the financing in 2010). As a few other projects in Germany, it's been hit by the delays in building the grid connections but is now moving to the final construction stage. (Bank financings include contingency planning that allows project construction to survive serious delays (typically in the 6-12 months range); I can't comment on any project specifics, but the generalised delays on grid connections have meant that these projects have had less room for manoeuver than usual for other problems. The lesson banks are taking from these projects is not that you can't do project finance for offshore, but that you need to increase the contingency budget a bit more. That will have a cost but at least it not prevent financing)

Wind power