Franz Alt at the excellent Sonnenseite just published a release from VDE, a German private organisation active in the field of safety standards for electricity.

The VDE has published safety standards for small scale electricity generators, DIN VDE 0100-551. People so inclined can download these for the outrageous price of EUR 42.13 at the VDE publishing company’s website (link omitted on purpose).

I have not done so, and I am lacking in specialist knowledge on electricity safety anyway.

According to Alt, the VDE insists that plug&play solar panels are a very dangerous danger and should not be installed. They may cause fires, because the circuit breaker does not know of the additional electricity feed-in if you plug in your 200 W solar panel right into a wall outlet.

As a legal matter, what the VDE says is not directly binding law. The German law on product safety says in its Article 5 that technical standards like DIN ”may be considered” when deciding if a product needs to be taken off the market because of safety concerns.

Again, I am not an expert. But if an extra 200 W from one solar panel is enough to cause a fire anywhere, the circuit breaker in question was seriously lacking in safety margin in the first place.

I think the VDE needs to reconsider their position. And everybody else should ignore them and install plug&play anyway.

The last thing we need in Germany is restricting market access for new forms of solar photovoltaic.

In the long run, circuit breakers need to be redesigned. There needs to be a simple way to plug your balcony solar panel in and have the circuit breaker know about the additional electricity. While I think the VDE is overcautious right now, they are the experts. If they say there is a very dangerous danger of fire, many people may believe them and refrain from buying a plug&play solar panel.

That is an unfortunate state of affairs. The VDE should deploy a new technical standard that solves the remaining safety issues. Right now they are standing in the way of dealing with global warming.

Believe me, that risk is much more serious than that of a 200 W solar panel causing a fire somewhere.

Platts reports in a blog post that renewable energy makes coal and gas power plants in Germany unprofitable.  They note that with more renewable in the mix wholesale prices go down, which cuts into the profitability of fossil fuel power plants.

This of course not news. It was clear a long time ago that solar is eating the fossil fuel and nuclear power plants’ lunch, and wind is eating their dinner.

The Platts blog author doesn’t seem to like that development. He writes about an “oversupply of renewable”.

In my book, there is no such thing as an oversupply of renewable. Even if renewable generation is higher than demand, there will be enough ways of using that extra zero price energy. Load some batteries. Make some hydrogen. Crunch some numbers to make bitcoins. Suck some CO2 out of the air. Whatever. But don’t tell me there is no way to use free electricity.

But I actually agree that it is a problem for coal and gas plants to be unprofitable, though that problem is more serious with gas.

That’s because these plants will still be needed for a couple of decades (if the inept CDU/FDP government stays in power) or a couple of years (if we get back to a government that knows what it’s doing with the energy transition). Note that having coal and gas power plants doesn’t necessarily mean burning fossil fuel. We will make gas from wind energy, and we can make coal from modern plants, instead of burning Tasneem’s mom.

If you don’t understand what “burning Tasneem’s mom” means, that’s a poetic way of saying “burning Jurassic plants”. Fossil fuel is nothing else but ancient biomass. Please read my mad genius science fiction novel “Tasneem” (FREE PDF file here) for more on that particular metaphor.

So how is it possible to keep coal and gas plants running with a profit?

The answer is easy. We need to get rid of the stupid and outdated “merit order” model of organizing the power market. And we need to replace it with a design I call “modified merit order”. I have introduced it in February with this (rather long) post.

To sum it up, in modified merit order, every power plant sets their price as the sum of fixed costs, marginal cost, and profit. Renewable energy gets priority even at higher prices, but these are limited to what we now have as feed-in tariff.

In such a model the prices of coal and gas plants will go up as their shares drop, since a lower capacity factor means more fixed cost per kWh. That’s a good thing, since it will keep alive those power plants for the occasional November night with no wind. It will also be nice to see that renewable beats fossil fuel on price, even without factoring in carbon costs and the costs from global meltdown. It will feel good to see solar and wind prices calculated in a way that make sure they beat the fossil fuel competition.

It is already clear that the present model (feed-in tariff plus merit order) does not work. It needs to be changed. And for the time being I don’t see much of a problem with my modified merit order proposal.

FAZ reports that the proposals of German Environment Minister Altmaier and Economy Minister Rösler to change the German feed-in tariff system have failed definitely. Chancellor Merkel has decided to abandon efforts to get the opposition on board before the elections later this year.

I recall having discussed them in quite a lot of posts on this blog. Most of those proposals were without merit. And it was clear for anyone paying attention that most of these had no chance to make it through the Bundesrat, where the Green and SPD opposition has a majority.

The most outrageous of these proposals was to reduce feed-in tariffs retroactively. That would very likely have been unconstitutional as well as a dumb idea.

In contrast, having less reductions for industry was one proposal that was supported by SPD and Greens as well. Getting self-consumption of systems over 2 MW capacity in the feed-in tariff surcharge system was another proposal the opposition parties supported.

Anyway, that means there will be no big changes in German feed-in tariff law this year. What happens after the election depends upon what happens to the FDP. If the German voters succeed in booting them out of the Bundestag and a SPD and Green majority materializes, the German transition to 100% renewable will be done much faster and cheaper.

Zachary Shahan at Cleantechnica already reported that Germany will start a subsidy program for batteries used with small solar power from May 1st on.

Now there has been an official news release from the German government on the matter. People will be able to get low cost financing from the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, the government-owned development bank. And they will get a subsidy of 30% of the battery costs. Solar PV systems up to 30 kW qualify for the program. This is for the rooftop market.

I recall that I have discussed this on March 3. As already explained, this program was supposed to start in January, and with twice the volume it now has (EUR50 million instead of the 25 million now available). And it was one promise the CDU/FDP government made in negotiations on a package reducing solar feed-in tariffs last year. That promise has been broken until now, and the program starting now is a very tiny small minimal effort.

EUR25 million is about 30 cents EUR per capita for Germany. This stuff is important to get the transition to 100% renewable done faster, saving the World from global meltdown and annoying the enemies of Germany rooting for our failure. The level of investment here is completely inadequate.

Germany already has time slots where demand is not enough to cover the supply of renewable energy. Storing some of the supply makes more sense to me than shutting down perfectly low carbon energy sources. Of course, the majority of storage will come from power to gas in the future. But that doesn’t mean batteries don’t have a place in the system as well. They sure do.

That said, having a very tiny small  minimal program in place is better than nothing. So I guess this is good news in a way.

But basically we need a change of government in the coming elections. With  the CDU/FDP government in charge right now, the transition to renewable will be much slower and much more expensive than with the SPD and the Greens.

Amory Lovins just said everything there is to say about the topic in this post, titled “Germany’s Renewables Revolution“.

I recommend reading it.