Germany’s Rush to Wind Power Not Working Out Too Well

Granted the data is from one German state, but this is the problem with a lot of wind installations. German Black Forest Wind Turbines Yielded Only 11.8% Of Rated Capacity In 2014! … “Frightening Results”.

Wind and solar have been bandied about as the be-all and end-all for our energy future, but results in Germany – in particular in the German state of Baden Wurttemberg (BW) – are not too good.

BW in 2014 had 397 wind turbines installed for a total generating capacity of 678 Megawatts of capacity. Over the course of the year they produced 699,564 Megawatt-hours of power, which is a 79.9 Megawatt annual mean power feed-in to the German grid. This means that the investment in German wind-power in the state of Baden Wurttemberg saw an annual utilization of 11.8%. Not too good

Consider buying a truck that was listed as 300 horsepower, and discovering that over the year you used it you only got 30 HP on average. Do you think you might have spent too much?

If you click-thru there are graphs of energy production broken out by month.

Readers can see the multiple times wind power went almost completely AWOL, like early December, early August, or the end of March through the early part of April.

I actually like solar and wind power, but not at industrial scale. And not on the grid.

There very best use is in small-scale off-the-grid, or grid-interactive systems. (These are the new systems that use batteries for storage, but will feed excess power to the grid.

Industrial scale wind-power doesn’t work everywhere. Ditto for solar. And as much as the politicians like to believe they can ignore the laws of physics, that doesn’t really work out well for anyone.

I wonder what the cost to install those wind turbines was, and how much of the cost was forced onto the average German electric user. And what was the visual impact to the Black Forest?