Tour of the German offshore wind sector | 79 comments (79 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Tour of the German offshore wind sector (none / 1)

Or to put it a bit differently: Europe in general and Britain in particular has been heavily under-investing in baseload for a generation and a half. This has allowed gas to creep into the baseload portfolio, where it has no business being under any sane grid planning regime.

Now new baseload is coming online, in the form of wind and solar, and this is in some measure making up for the underprovision of baseload. This, of course, displaces gas, because gas is a generating mode that has no business being run as baseload in the first place. That this leaves in place those legacy modes that are optimized for baseload production, such as lignite, is not a bug. It's a feature.

If you don't like that feature, make a political decision to close the lignite-burners - they will be easily replaced with gas in the short term and renewables as they come online.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Fri Jun 14th, 2013 at 03:01:05 PM EST
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Re: Tour of the German offshore wind sector (none / 0)

All that may be true, but that's not what they write!

by mustakissa on Sat Jun 15th, 2013 at 02:45:30 AM EST
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Re: Tour of the German offshore wind sector (4.00 / 3)

They write that the relative share of gas is dropping, and the relative share of coal is rising, due to the entry of renewables into the grid. That's the sum total of their "analysis," such as it is.

There is no causal model, because economists don't do causal models. There is no robustness check against alternative scenarios, because economists don't do causal models and you need a causal model to construct credible alternative scenarios. There is no internal consistency check on the story, because the Economist does not do due diligence when a naive reading supports the conclusion it wants.

The overwhelming majority of your average issue of The Economist is written by highly educated incompetents for highly educated incompetents.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sat Jun 15th, 2013 at 03:10:19 AM EST
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Re: Tour of the German offshore wind sector (4.00 / 7)

We've discussed the rise in coal last year already on ET. I can't dig up past comments so will just rewrite it:

gas is relatively more expensive currently because it is still largely indexed to oil in Europe (under long term supply contracts), while coal went down thanks to the price pressure from shale gas in the US which has led to lower coal consumption there and volumes avialable for export;
coal plants will need to close soon; they have a set number of hours to run before doing so (under a EU directive), and it makes sense to run them as much as possible when it is unusually profitable to do so, like today, rather than wait for later
gas plants are higher in the merit order and thus taken out by renewables more often than coal. As renewables keep on growing, coal will be hit too.

One could argue that Gerany should have closed coal plants before the nukes (I share that opinion), but most of the rest of what they say is silly.

Wind power

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Sat Jun 15th, 2013 at 05:32:19 AM EST
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Re: Tour of the German offshore wind sector (none / 0)

> last year

Now that wasn't even worthy of a commentary. It's down there with 'global warming stopped last Friday'.

Where's the world coming to when not even economists grasp a concept like 'the longer term'?

by mustakissa on Sat Jun 15th, 2013 at 07:31:10 AM EST
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Re: Tour of the German offshore wind sector (none / 1)

mustakissa:

Where's the world coming to when not even economists grasp a concept like 'the longer term'?

Well, not all economists failed to grasp the longer vs. the short term:

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again. -- John Maynard Keynes -- A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) Ch. 3

by Bernard on Sun Jun 16th, 2013 at 06:55:19 AM EST
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Re: Tour of the German offshore wind sector (none / 0)

So Keynes was anti wind power - I always suspected it.

by IM on Sun Jun 16th, 2013 at 12:32:27 PM EST
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Re: Tour of the German offshore wind sector (none / 1)

Only in the long run.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Sun Jun 16th, 2013 at 12:47:48 PM EST
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