What follows is a chart showing the measly amount of power that Germany’s more than 40 gigawatts of installed solar electricity capacity actually managed to produce (yellow) in December 2017 (you may have to squint):
Germany’s more than 40 gigawatts of installed solar capacity barely produced anything in December 2017. Curved line shows German demand. Chart source: Agora.
Now that you’ve fallen on the floor with laughter and managed to get back in your chair, you can understand what is going on in green la-la-land.
This is the story of Germany’s Energiewende: install as much capacity of each type renewable energy as possible, and hope that one of them works when the others don’t.
Currently, Germany has well over 40 gigawatts of installed PV capacity, enough to power half of the country at lunchtime on a sunny day.
But it all does nothing at night, or in the wintertime when the sun stays blotted out by Germany’s notoriously cloudy climate and short daylight hours.
This past December in Hanover the sun shined a mere 10 hours over the entire month. In Lüdenscheid the sun was seen less than one hour!
Michael Kruger writes at Science Skeptical:
“Photovoltaic: 10 hours of sun in December 2017
Image: NDR German Public Television – “Hallo Niedersachsen”
Weathergirl Claudia Kleinert of NDR television above showed on ‘Hallo Niedersachsen’ [Hello Lower Saxony] the number of sunshine hours in December 2017.
Hanover reached a whole 10 hours for December. The average value for December in Hanover is 39 hours, thus this past December reached only a quarter of the sun’s usual output.
The operators of photovoltaic systems have not seen any real output at all. Imagine if the coal power plants had operated only 10 hours for the whole month of December, and only a bit over the daytime. They’d be mothballed immediately because of lack of economy.
Read more at No Tricks Zone
Those idiots who think CO2 needs to be regulated are totaly ignorant of the importance of CO2 as a plant food what comes from the tailpipe of a can is good for plants
Though man made warming is a total fraud, let’s assume for a moment that it isn’t. Let’s assume that the world is on the path of the worst case climate model and many of the predictions of the alarmists are likely to come true of significant reductions in emissions are not made. Even under this scenario, solar and wind power wouldn’t make sense. As already stated, they only work part of the time. For this part time power, tremendous resources are required not only financially but in materials. If global warming were real, the smart approach would be to use natural gas as a transitional energy as nuclear power was developed. The advocacy of the wind and solar power by the climate change movement supporters shows just how dumb they are.
The global warming alarmists are great at cherry picking data periods. If you look at this graph by itself on the original site, solar power appears to be absolutely laughable. This also is an example of cherry picking a data period, although in reverse. Go to the same source and look at August for example, and Solar is the source of 40% of Germany’s daytime electricity. If you disagree with large scale solar electricity, do not show this graph and imply that it is representative. It’s not. It is accurate for this past December, and is not representative (just as August is not either)
Solar and wind energy are passive sources . They need the “crutch” of backup generators. Solar + winter is like lead + balloon.
Would you hire some slacker, knowing that they’ll show up “like, whenever dude” ? Would you offer that prospective employee a salary triple that of dependable, driven and dedicated staff?
That’s what has happened.
Those who say we need to go totaly Solar and Wind powered are fools or just plain dumb i mean neither of these can be relied upon becuase the wind don’t blow all the time and the sun is’nt up 24/7 that why we have Nightime and Darkness