Unstable Frequency in Wind and Solar Energy Bring Germany's Power Grid Collapse

The renewable energy cult raves about the ‘inevitable transition’, pointing to Germany as the shining example, which it is, if your point is that heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar will inevitably drive power prices through the roof and leave hopeful power consumers freezing in the dark.

No country went harder and faster than Germany, when it comes to throwing everything at attempting to run on sunshine and breezes. As STT followers well-know, it hasn’t panned out all that well.

Electricity generation and distribution systems were never designed to accommodate the wide and wild fluctuations in voltage and frequency that’s part and parcel of unreliable and intermittent wind and solar. The electricity grid was designed and engineered as a system. But there’s nothing systematic about sudden surges and equally sudden collapses in power output that accompany sunset, storms and calm or cloudy weather.

As Germans are now learning the hard way. And that their renewable energy transition means a return to the very Dark Ages.

German t-online.de news portal here reports how yesterday large areas of central and southern Germany saw the power fail yesterday due to “snow and storms.”

 In some locations, the power was out for hours, t-online.de reports.

Of course, snow itself has little to do with the power going out. Rather the power outages are signs of an increasingly unstable power grid due in large part to the wildly fluctuating feed-in of volatile wind and solar energy.

Yesterday late evening’s storm and its winds led to wild fluctuation in the European power grid at around 8 p.m. The grid frequency critically dropped well below the 50 Hz value, which meant more power was being consumed than generated.

Austrian power grid expert Herbert Saurugg tweeted:

In English: “And again a record low peak frequency at 8 p.m.: 49.856 Hz. That’s two-thirds of the reserve power used. At 49.80 Hz the first load drops occur.”

That means had the frequency dropped just a bit more, possible emergency grid switchoffs would have been needed, and so a widespread blackout was narrowly avoided.

The blackouts that did occur led to “many disruptions” to rail and auto transportation, t-online writes.

As of the time of writing this article 12:55 CET, hours-long power outages continued to hamper much of southern Germany:

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