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mduerksen | 2 years ago

Lack of sun/wind in Denmark correlates strongly with lack of sun/wind in Germany and surrounding countries. The importing of electricity works precisely because the surrounding countries still have the "baseline" power plants the article dismisses so boldly.

Transmitting electricity over larger distances remains very expensive, which is why the idea of using the African sun for Europe (e.g. Desertec[1]) has stalled [2].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmcgdh_0gyo

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phicoh|2 years ago

Apart from Denmark, few countries have enough wind turbines installed to power the entire country. Certainly, countries like Germany, The Netherlands, UK, don't come close. The Netherlands does come close to having enough PV to power the country during mid day on a bright sunny day.

So at the moment there is not a lot to export, and there is not of excess electricity from sun/wind to store.

The next thing is that, for example, The Netherlands needs a lot of green hydrogen for industry. So quite a bit of new wind turbine installations may go to powering that.

Germany has an other problem, building enough transport capacity within the country.

There is a big difference between transporting electricity all the way from Africa, including the question if it is smart to depend on those country for your electricity needs and transporting electricity between countries that border at the North Sea.

silvestrov|2 years ago

Current map of wind speed would disagree a lot with Denmark and Germany "correlates strongly": see https://www.windy.com/?55.670,12.530,5

Germany is a big country, so even internally in Germany there is a big difference: right now Stuttgart has 0 m/s while Sylt has 9 m/s.

MagnumOpus|2 years ago

Most wind power in Germany gets generated close to Denmark, in the northern plain and offshore in the North sea and Baltic. There are very few wind plants near Stuttgart. (There were lots of nuclear plants in Baden Wuerttemberg though - but they were switched off and not replaced by renewables.)