🚨Wind speeds in🇪🇺Europe are at the lowest in the last 90 years, right when WWII started 💨The phenomenon, which could have something to do with the implications of the climate change on weather patterns, is raising energy costs all over Europe and risks for the wind sector

So you think the big AI players are going to spend $2 trillion on data centres by 2030, like Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman says? Not going to happen. mliebreich.substack.com/p/ai…

Estimated electric heating demand in Europe. France at 29 watt per celsius degree and person, almost 5 times more than in Germany. Central and western Europe would go from 301 to 845 TWh/yr (including hot water) if all achieved same level of electrification as France

Tämä vuosi tulee olemaan huikea kaukolämmön sähkökattiloille - niiden kapasiteetti tulee tuplaantumaan. Kehitys jatkuu lähivuosina hyvänä, vaikka tuleekin hidastumaan. Miksi tämä on niin hieno asia? 1/8 #sähkö

Curtailment is good. (in the right proportion) It is unreasonable to expect any power plant to be able to sell 100% of the electricity that it possibly could have produced, especially at high penetrations. No amount of storage or flexible demand is going to eliminate curtailment. We curtail solar before it even gets to the grid. In order to have zero curtailment, you have to spend way more money on everything else in the system. You will get more solar power by spending more on panels and curtailing some at peak production, than by overspending on inverters and grid capacity and batteries and electrolyzers and everything else needed to take curtailment to zero. It is not wasteful to curtail solar. It's wasteful to never even capture it in the first place. The sunlight we waste on parking spaces could generate as much electricity as all other sources combined. Rooftops could generate a comparable amount again. You could curtail 25% of the output of a modern panel, and it would still generate more electricity per square meter than a panel from 10 years ago with "zero" curtailment. Especially in a world where panels are cheap, minimizing curtailment is a bad goal. You want to maximize the value produced for the amount of capital you have to spend. As you add more batteries and flexible load to the system, curtailment goes down, but then the incentive to install more panels goes up. If solar if 50% cheaper than alternatives, we will install solar until the marginal unit is curtailed at 50%. You will never eliminate curtailment and you shouldn't want to. Anybody who is bullish on solar should expect curtailment to rise in the future, even if you're super bullish on batteries and flexible demands. cheap solar -> curtailment Curtailment is good.

Long-term trends in German capture rates for wind and solar energy So far, this year has been a good one for wind. And a devastating one for solar. 64%! A big contributor to the fast drop is solar power that keeps generating despite steeply negative prices. What a waste.

Fierce competition to export solar today in the afternoon (below for 2 PM). Record for Belgium in 2024: -140 €/MWh.