Can renewables replace coal?
This week, Ontario announced the closure of its last remaining coal plants as the province switches to renewables. Meanwhile, carbon counters seem focused on the slight increase in the coal consumption in Germany. So can renewables replace baseload coal?
Yesterday, Ontario announced that its two remaining coal plants will be closed this year, one year ahead of schedule. Renewables campaigner Tim Weis of the Pembina Institute explains that Ontario got 25 percent of its power from coal plants only a decade ago, but the Province has managed to replace this capacity with a mix of renewables. As Weis told Renewables International, one small coal plant in northern Ontario will remain in operation "for emergency purposes" for another year, "but today's announcement literally accomplishes 99.9 percent of the phaseout."
How did Ontario do it? The province has been focusing on renewables for much of the past decade, but the phaseout in Ontario has not focused on nuclear, which still makes up "more than 50 percent of Ontario's electricity needs" according to nuclear plant operator Ontario Power Generation. And because everyone continues to count carbon emissions and not nuclear waste production, Ontario's success is likely to be hailed as a major success story among carbon counters.
In contrast, the German nuclear phaseout faces fierce criticism from the Economist to a wide range of bloggers, who believe Germany remains committed to coal. Figures published yesterday by the BDEW show that power production increased overall in Germany by 1.3 percent year over year, with consumption decreasing by 1.4 percent – essentially, Germany is exporting a lot more power. The main reason is that renewables, especially solar, are drastically pushing down the price of electricity on the power exchange at midday, when demand generally peaks. As EPEX's website shows, electricity from Germany is cheaper than from France or Switzerland both in terms of baseload and peak load.
So while the Economist claims that "German electricity prices are at their highest in the middle of the day when solar generation is also strongest," the opposite is increasingly true – the price of peak power on the exchange is increasingly the same as the price of baseload power, making electricity from Germany very competitive for foreign markets. The result is that medium and peak load power plants – largely gas turbines – not only in Germany, but also in neighboring countries, such as the Netherlands, are running less often as power producers opt to import from Germany.
The Economist is right, however, in saying there is "no room for gas in the Energiewende," at least not at the moment. The sudden, unnecessary shutdown of 40 percent of Germany's nuclear capacity within a week in March 2011 left a gap in baseload production – at the bottom, so to speak – which coal power has safely fallen into for the moment. From the top, the strong growth of renewables, which increased from 20 to 22 percent of gross power supply in 2012 alone, is mainly pushing down on natural gas, which shrank by an astonishing 27 percent within power supply although natural gas consumption rose overall by around one percent (mainly for heat) according to the BDEW.
The big news in Germany is therefore that gas is in trouble; renewables are not replacing coal, which grew from 43.1 percent of German power supply last year to 44.8 percent, an increase of 1.7 percentage points – not a very significant change, and certainly not as big as the shift in natural gas relatively speaking. But in fact, this slight shift towards coal power may turn out to be a statistical blip. In 1990, coal power made up 56.3 percent of German power supply; in 2000, 53.4 percent; and in 2003, 50.3 percent. In less than a decade, Germany has reduced its coal consumption significantly even as it cut nuclear power consumption by more than half (from 33.1 percent in 2003 to 16 percent in 2012; for the historical figures, see this AGEB spreadsheet).
The focus therefore needs to be on getting German renewables to replace more coal power and less natural gas, but increasingly Germany will need its European neighbors to stop importing cheap German coal power. To that end, European emissions trading urgently needs to become strict and effective. And the rest of us also need to stop merely counting carbon and start counting nuclear waste as well. (Craig Morris)