Comments on: We overlook how renewables can bring people together

By: What bottom-up sustainability looks like - FueladdictsFueladdicts

What bottom-up sustainability looks like - FueladdictsFueladdicts — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 15:35:01 +0000

[…] I wrote about the German politician who said more of his constituents are voting for parties that want to break […]

By: Vivi

Vivi — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 17:47:12 +0000

Is “anti-establishment” really the right term here? That word has a way too left-wing ring to it; it makes me think of the kind of people who protest against corporations-favouring international trade deals or who chain themselves to train tracks to stop nuclear waste transports (and who might have harbored some sympathies for terrorists like the RAF). I.e. the people who might vote for the Pirates, or who do vote for the Left despite the stubborn refusal of the Western wing to work with other left-of-center parties, or would if the Left hadn’t proven to be unable to really change anything while in (Eastern state) governments. “Anti-establishment” certainly doesn’t make be think of the kind of people who want to outlaw immigration and abortion – which are goals not diametrically opposed to what the current conservative establishment wants (i.e. the Christian-capitalist government party, even if Ms. Merkel herself doesn’t fully support the party line on social issues), just different in degree of severity. “Ultra-conservative backlash” or “counter-revolution” (to the social revolution since 1968) seems to be more what’s going on right now.

By: S. Herb

S. Herb — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 21:39:50 +0000

The other side of this is how these projects fit into public regulations and utility rules, and how these can be modified to be more encouraging to the community scale projects. I am very ignorant of these things but I think that it can get pretty complicated and sometimes expensive (I am thinking especially of the US). Financing can also be problematic since lacking PPAs (or FITs as in Germany) it is impossible to predict income 15 years from now, and at some point there is too much solar at noon. Self-consumption off-grid is usually not a good model. So there are a lot of problematic issues here and there will have to be some experimentation to come up with combinations of regulations and community project structures which will work going forward.

By: James Wimberley

James Wimberley — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 12:38:06 +0000

Hear, hear. An economic factor favouring energy cooperatives is that biogas, wind and solar have very limited economies of scale onshore. (Offshore wind is different and inherently large-sale.) The American public lab NREL modelled this for solar – IIRC there is little cost reduction above 1 MW or so, the size of a utility string inverter. The panels are the same from rooftop up to giant farm. The optimum size for an onshore wind turbine is about 2.5 MW (heading for 3 MW), and big projects just consist of lots of the things. Big developers can borrow money more cheaply and raise risk equity capital more easily, but these gains are reallocations of rent not true economic efficiencies. So why not support cooperatives?

One argument against has been the low capacity factors of early German wind farms, many built by cooperatives. Some were badly sited, others inefficiently run, others used unreliable or too small equipment. All these teething problems should have gone away by now with experience. It makes sense for cooperatives to contract out design and O&M to specialists for a fee rather than trying to do it themselves. It they do that, there should be little difference in operating performance compared to Big Solar and Big Wind.