Solar and wind power is growing worldwide, but so is electricity consumption: as a result, renewables are often only added to the energy mix, rather than replacing fossil fuels.
Reducing energy demand would make net zero more achievable, but it recieves far less attention than decarbonisation efforts. This may be due to a perception that managing energy demand would be politically unpopular, requiring governments to make radical interventions into people’s lifestyles and spending.
Oliver Broad, Senior Research Fellow at University College London, tells Alasdair that such fears are unfounded. His team’s research found that the UK could reduce energy demand by 52% without new tech or overly disruptive societal change, and has worked with policymakers and public focus groups to demonstrate political acceptability.
Well this was a few years ago when mining bitcoin on GPUs was more practical. Still just feels like a waste of energy though.
How does that law work, is it just a limit on how much you can put into the grid, or how much you can generate at all?
Hot tub could be a more enjoyable use for the excess energy. I struggle really to think of much more that would benefit from a lot of excess power.
I also can’t really come up with reasonable uses for excess power, there is only so much a household can use.
I just looked up the law and it’s even more fucked up than I remember. It only applies to installations with > 2 kWp, so the famous Balkonkraftwerke are not affected.
As long as you don’t have a smart meter (only about 5% of homes in Germany have a smart meter yet, disregard the 23.3% “Pflicht-Rollout”, they are misleading)), you are only allowed to feed up to 60% of the installed power back to the grid (e.g. if you have 10 kWp installed, and you generate an excess of more than 6 kW, you have to limit its output so that you only feed 6 kW to the grid).
The regulations for installations with a smart meter also changed, the details are too convoluted for me to really care, but in the end the new law aims to reduce solar power output during “noon”/peak production hours.
There are several reasons this annoys me, but the worst is, that the grid is not really “overloaded”, it’s mostly just that coal/oil/gas power plants don’t get regulated down as much.
Take, for example, this months electricity generation in Germany (You can click on the legend below to filter out generation types) - even though solar, wind and biomass is regularly able to provide enough power to meet demand for several hours a day, fossil fuel power plants are running during those times. Even gas, which supposedly is so flexible and only there to provide power when necessary.
Anyway, this is getting way too long already - the blame is put on solar and renewables, when it is also fossil fuel power plants that are not properly regulated.