No, these are two different things. One is stability market, where batteries are now king, the other is physics of fault ride-through, where actual physical inertia is a real neccessity, at least for the time being. That is why synchronous condensers are installed.
Every major renewable grid has installed additional intertia to avoid blackouts.
Variously called "synthetic inertia", "virtual inertia" or "grid-forming inverters".
Some people treat the spinning metal like vinyl records and think you can't get that "warmth" with the new tech but on objective measures, including cost, they win.
People install them because they were the old tech for this, and there's lead times and caution, it's just slowly changing legacy not something batteries can't physically do better.
Ha, yes, a lot of deniers/delayers are going on about how Germany "wasted" billion on renewables, when in fact they had a booming solar industry, which got nuked by politicians, who changed the policies, as can be seen in 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us".
Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how.
So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.
The billion spend on renewables in Germany were not "wasted", there were spend on the primary goal of the German Energiewende, to allow Germany exit nuclear electricity power production.
The 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us" is an emotional call to action "We Can Do It!" solar panels everywhere, without showing the other backbone of the German electric grid: the German gas and coal power plants.
I would recommend other CCC video:
"Deaths per TWh"
The Price of Energy and Reducing CO2 Emissions
Solar panel production is extremely energy intensive. Germany has one of the highest energy costs in the world. So there was no way for Germany to maintain a competitive solar panel industry.
They could also just split the Germany into multiple bidding zones, then north parts of Germany would have a lot of cheap wind power, similar as in Sweden.
Over the figurative dead body of Bavaria. They want cheap energy for their industry, they don't want wind power because it's ugly and bad for tourism, they will maybe accept a little well-hidden solar power, they don't want overland cables because they are ugly, and they don't want underground cables because they heat and dry out the ground. There is also some market distortion because energy is traded as if transfer capacity was unlimited, but when Bavaria buys cheap wind power that can't be moved, they still pay the cheap price but the energy is locally "replicated" at e.g. gas power stations, which is paid by... OK, I forgot, but it's a terrible system.
These "they" are different Bavarian persons and groups depending on topic, but the net effect is that Bavaria is Germany's energy bully.
Fortunately, several gigawatt-class HVDC lines are coming online this year. These somehow happened despite the protests, it's a minor miracle.
Sweden has lots of potential for long-term energy storage as hydro power, which makes wind power viable. Northern Germany is mostly flat and there's not even close to enough storage capacity (on the order of ~weeks) to make a wind powered grid economically competitive.
There has been a long standing request to split Germany into multiple price zones[1], because Germany as a single zone does not adequately match the underlying network transmission limitations and there have been multiple occasions where power flowed through neighboring zones, which in turn required both network upgrades[2] in the zones neighboring Germany and expensive redispatch[3] in the south Germany. Industry in the south of Germany fights this back as this would mean the energy prices in the south would rise (and drop in the north), as when the transmission lines are congested, the prices start to diverge.
Keeping Germany a single zone is essentially a subsidy to Bavarian industry. The industry fights this so hard that it has basically become an energy insider joke.
If someone had guts (not the current governments) they would split the Germany into zones and all the Bavarian whining about “ugliness” would fade rather quickly when the prices went up.
Not sure if you're serious, but this was not viable in the 2010s, or even today in Germany at all because of Germany's high latitude: No matter how efficient solar panels become, they will always be more economical to operate closer to the equator. Anyway, the Chinese factories for the most energy intensive parts of solar panel production mostly run on coal power.
> Anyway, the Chinese factories for the most energy intensive parts of solar panel production mostly run on coal power.
That's because China itself is mostly coal, not because of anything magical about particular sources. However, coal is now in decline even in China: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
Before someone (accurately!) says the decline in coal is tiny and one year doesn't make a trend: This is likely to continue until there is no more coal for the same reason the UK also completely stopped generating electricity from coal: cost.
PV's absurdly cheap. China has a lot of land, doesn't need to care about optimal use of the Gobi desert.
They were deregulated on highway for a very long time. Deregulation came to off-highway in 2020 as the loss of demand due to covid made the prices drop. Rusian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent price hikes made the govt regulate the prices again.
Somewhere in between, a feud started between the largest provider Petrol and govt, and govt started regulating the highway prices too for no good reason.
The problem with getting rid of oil is that cars currently in use will be usable even when over 20 years old, replacing them with EVs is expensive, and the good enough and economically accessible EVs are only now starting to get to market.
It's really hard to quickly replace millions of vehicles.
In California my electricity to drive my Chevy Volt is more expensive than gasoline, if gasoline is less than $5 a gallon.
So for basically the last 100k miles I've owned it, electricity was more expensive.
The same goes for many plugin hybrids. Luxury EVs still win out because luxury sedans usually only get 25 mpg mixed max.
$0.44
A first gen Volt takes 10.3kwh. It also uses electricity to cool the batteries while charging. If you leave it plugged in one a hot day it will cool the battery just for health overall but I'll ignore that. Then, add in the losses on the charge conversions.
It easily takes 11kwh to charge a Volt. It'll go about 35 miles in the summer on that charge, and more like 28 in the winter.
It also gets 35 mpg on gasoline, while providing free heat in the winter from the gas engine heat, and for most of the last few years was doing this for $3.50-$4 a gallon.
There are people on Southern California/San Diego that pay more. Over there people say the Prius Prime is WAY cheaper to operate on gas because it gets 50mpg gasoline.
I've even heard people running their home off gasoline because it's cheaper but that would require an impressive gas generator to do long term.
That won't "solve" anything. Car prices will rise, many people can't afford the switch regardless, too much new EV demand could destabilize the grid in population centers, and throwing away vehicles that are already on the road by replacing them with newly manufactured ones is terrible from an emissions perspective.
Yes, but it is not enough. It helps a lot when sunny, and weekend mid-day gross market prices for electricity hover just above zero, but there's not enough batteries, flexibility, and other renewables to avoid price spikes in the morning and evening peak, when hydro and gas plants are still covering a lot.
It's not a free market. Off-highway prices are regulated and were adjusted by the executive govt branch on biweekly basis, now switched to weekly. Slovenia is small and "gas tourism" is common since fossil juices in neighboring countries are priced higher.
Why not raise the prices? Sure, but then don't complain about the inflation, revolt, and stoning of elected representatives.
Yeah, if you're buying a new car, electric makes sense if at all possible. But a lot of people are not buying new cars, because new cars are not cheap. There's a saying that a new car loses half of its value the moment it's driven away from the dealership.
But I agree, operational costs of an EV can be much lower, if you can charge at home rates.
We're looking for a new car. I'd love to go electrical, but there are a few problems:
1) I have no garage and no parking space next to my home. I can't charge it.
2) We have no trustworthy garage for repairs. It turns out the garage regulations require a separate space for electrical forcsafety, and nobody has room to expand.
Apart from that, electricity in Belgium is expensive. I did the math on swapping our gas heater for a heat pump, but I'd pay more for energy even of the amount of watts is so much lower.
Every major renewable grid has installed additional intertia to avoid blackouts.