Germany generating so much windpower today that price for electricity will fall... below zero

[hunter]

22. Why celebrate yet another major fault of wind energy?

When the windmills are not turning they are losing money. When all of them are spining furiously in windy weather they are losing money.

The sad fact is that Germany gets most of it's power from dirty brown coal.

The only decent thing about the German Electric grid is that it is transparent, anybody can look at the statistics and do the math:

https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm

A society powered entirely by renewable energy would look nothing like the high energy industrial consumer economy many of us now enjoy, and certainly nothing like the current German economy.

The German electric grid is a sorry fraud celebrated by innumerate people who call themselves "green." Giant industries such as Volkswagen pay about four or five cents a kilowatt hour for dirty, reliable 24/7 coal power, while smaller power users foot the bill for this failed solar and wind experiment, paying around six times that.

Germany could quit the coal industry for coals's nasty little brother, natural gas. Nimble gas power plants are very useful for picking up the load when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining. That's how my electric utility here in California deals with intermittent wind and solar power. Thanks to our nimble natural gas plants backing up otherwise decorative solar and wind projects, and a little over 20% nuclear power, we Northern Californians don't need no stinking coal. Our electric rates are also tiered so that small household users enjoy lower rates.

Unfortunately if Germany chose to implement a similar system it might mean they'd have to import more natural gas controlled by Russia's Putin & Company. California has somewhat nicer neighbors (other states, Canada, and Mexico), even a few willing to expose their own populations to fracking so we Californians don't have to.