Germany is doing it: reliable distributed power based on 100% renewables

Scientists from the University of Kassel prove that Germany can power itself entirely by clean renewables in a secure way. In an ongoing experiment called the KombiKraftwerk ('Combined Power Plant'), they link 36 decentralised biogas plants, wind, solar and hydropower installations in a robust network to demonstrate that distributed power can replace both fossil fuels and nuclear power. The network is just as reliable and powerful as a conventional large-scale power station.

The companies Schmack Biogas AG, Enercon GmbH and SolarWorld AG teamed up with the Institute for Solar Energy Supply Systems (ISET) at the University of Kassel, to defuse arguments against renewables by showing that they can secure 100 per cent of energy supplies in accordance with fluctuating demand - both continuous baseload and peakloads.

The Combined Power Plant shows that renewable energy sources can supply sufficient electricity, can be controlled at any time, function in combination and can be balanced out across the grid. - Ulrich Schmack, Board Spokesman of Schmack Biogas AG

The joint project supplies electricity around the clock regardless of weather conditions and electricity demand. It takes advantage of the unequally distributed energy potential across Germany and of a permanently stored source of solar energy, biomass.

The Combined Power Plant is scaled to meet 1/10,000th of the electricity demand in Germany. This scale corresponds to the annual electricity requirements of a small town with around 12,000 households. The Combined Power Plant therefore shows in miniature what is also possible on a large scale: 100 per cent electricity provision using renewable energy sources.

The wind and sun cannot be influenced and are 'intermittent' sources of power, which places particular importance on bioenergy, which is stored solar energy able to provide a desired amount of power ad hoc and at all times. It is this secure biomass baseload that makes the other renewables viable and debunks the 'baseload fallacy'. It also disproves those who say that wind and solar power stimulate the use of climate destructive fossil fuels like coal:
energy :: sustainability :: climate change :: energy security :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: biogas ::renewables :: distributed power :: decentralisation :: Germany ::

But the real secret of the system lies in the simple fact that the whole - its distributed and regenerative nature - is more than its constituting parts.

Explaining the Combined Power Plant’s central control unit, Kurt Rohrig from ISET says the decentralised network enables wind, solar and biogas installations to be controlled like a conventional large-scale power station and thus meet Germany’s fluctuating energy requirements.

Germany has committed itself to phasing out all nuclear power plants within two decades. But Europe's largest economy still heavily relies on coal and imported oil and natural gas. The Combined Power Plant shows that the arguments against the 'intermittent' renewables (wind and solar) can be countered by coupling them to biomass systems.

The question now is whether distributed power systems can be scaled up. Projections show Germany has enough domestic resources to replace all fossil fuels and nuclear power, and the scientists think the country can achieve full renewables based energy autonomy by mid-century.

The renewables utilized in the demonstration system are all carbon neutral, helping in the fight against climate change. But in the future, the concept can be pushed even further and instead of merely avoiding the release of new carbon emissions, it can begin to take emissions from the dirty past out of the atmosphere. This can be achieved by coupling the bioenergy plants to carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies.

In such 'negative emissions' or 'carbon negative' energy systems, the energy crops used for the bio-power then act as machines that store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is consequently captured and buried under the ground in geological formations. Scientists project that if such systems were applied on a global scale, they could cool the planet and take us back to pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 levels by mid-century.

The Combined Power Plant project is part of 'Unendlich Viel Energie' (Endless Energy), an initiative to demonstrate the viability of large-scale distributed power generation in Germany and to speed up the transition towards renewables.

Video couresty of KombiKraftwerk.

References:
Unendlich Viel Energie: KombiKraftwerk - Background paper [*.pdf].

Unendlich Viel Energie: Technical summary [*.pdf]

Dedicated website: KombiKraftwerk.

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