Germany’s Wind Power Debacle Escalates: Nation’s Grid on the Brink of Collapse
Calamitous Planning: German Wind Parks Overload Power Grid … “At Its Limits” … Record 50,000 Grid Interventions In May!
NoTricksZone
Pierre Gosselin
1 July 2015
Online German NDR public radio here wrote last week how northern Germany’s power grid had suffered a major bottleneck that led to the overload of the Flensburg-Niebüll power transmission line in Schleswig Holstein last week.
North German transformer stations constantly overloaded by wind power.
The overload resulted from a power surge from North Sea wind parks when winds picked up a bit. What is unusual in this case, however, is that there was no storm present and the overload was caused by normal wind fluctuations. Thus the incident illustrates the increasing volatility of wind as a power supply, even under regular weather conditions.
At its limits
It turns out that intervening in power grids to avert a widespread power supply breakdown is nothing new in Germany. NDR writes that nowadays power engineer Stefan Hackbusch at the grid’s control center in Northern German increasingly has to intervene even when there are even moderate breezes. The north German public radio media outlet writes: “Because of the strong growth in wind park installations, the power grid up north is at its limits.”
