Slide Overview for the speach:


Global Renewable Energy Potential

- Approaches to its Use -

Dipl.-Phys. Gregor Czisch (ISET)

held in Magdeburg
Germany
September 2001





See also A Comparison of Intra- and Extraeuropean Options for an Energy Supply with Wind Power and Folien und Daten über regenerative Energien.


Contact: Gregor Czisch



To see details, please click on the small slides!

Slide
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Spoken text with some remarks
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In my talk I would like to introduce you to the worldwide potentials of renewable electricity production. The techniques we will discuss are electricity production via photovoltaics, solar thermal power plants, hydropower, biomass, hot dry rock geothermal power plants, energy towers and finally we will focus on wind energy. For each of these options of power generation I am going to point out the characteristics with regard to their specific temporal behaviour and the costs to be expected.

We will see that the temporal behaviour significantly changes with the size and the selection of the catchment area used for the power generation.

We will also touch on the topics of backup and storage needs and the subject of grid capacities.

After this I consider wind energy as major source of power production.

And last but not least we will reflect on a possible combination of climate protection and development aid.
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Here you can see the potential production of PV panels mounted in such a way that the orientation of the surface is parallel to the latitude and has a fixed slope equivalent to the latitude towards the sun. The output is calculated from data of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) and additional data from the National Centre for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). (The panels are considered to have an efficiency of 14 % at peak radiation and standard temperature reduced to approx. 13 % efficiency due to system losses.)

The best conditions are found in arid zones of high mountainous regions. Here the potential production is more than twice as high as we can expect in middle European countries.

In Poland the production of a photovoltaic system will lie in the range of 130 kWh / (m² a) or approx. 900 Full Load Hours (FLH).
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With the underlying economic assumptions based on today's technologies and prices shown in the upper right tables the costs of solar thermal electricity production are calculated for some selected sites. The results are listed in the table on the left side.

Using today's High Voltage DC (HVDC) technology to transport the electricity to Europe (e.g. Kassel GER) the costs of electricity would even for the furthest distance mentioned only increase by 30%. The underlying economical assumptions for HVDC technology are shown in the lower right table.

The costs of electricity in Kassel do not seem to be very unreasonable. The option to import solar thermal electricity from Northern Africa to Europe becomes even more interesting if the investment costs for solar fields, the most costly part of SEGS power plants, are reduced. A reduction to roughly 50% of the today's field costs is expected as soon as a capacity of 7 GW of SEGS is erected world-wide. This will reduce the costs of electricity in Kassel to approx. 60% or below 12 DPf/kWh.
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In the upper table biomass potentials estimated by Thomas Dreier ("Lehrstuhl für Energiewirtschaft und Anwendungstechnik, Technische Universität München") are given. The secondary biomass potential is the potential of residues and waste, while the total potential includes the possible biomass production on unused land and within western Europe also 15% of the today's farm land is considered to be usable for this purpose.

Assuming an efficiency of 30% for biomass power plants the secondary resources would be sufficient to e.g. deliver roughly one third of the annual Polish electricity consumption.

The lower table exemplary shows a calculation for cost of electricity from Biomass.
  • The investment costs are quite strongly dependent on the efficiency of the power plant, on the environmental standards within each country and on the size of the plant. The given costs may fit for German conditions.
  • The fuel costs strongly also vary. E.g. some residues are much cheaper than the given example others may have negative costs since they contain substances harmful to the environment (This again could strongly influence the investment costs). The given prices of 2.4 DPf/kWhth are consistent with today's firewood prices and can even be achieved by biomass production for energetic purposes.
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    Economically the option of wind power import is interesting even when new transport capacity is included.

  • The table shows cost calculations for the selected regions.
  • The underlying assumptions for the transport system and the wind parks can be found in the lower table. As an example I now want to focus on Southern Morocco.
  • The mean potential production is 3400 FLH.
  • The costs within the region is 3 €c/kWh.
  • To transfer the power to Kassel the length of a HVDC line would be 4400 km with 40m km sea cable.
  • The total costs in Kassel are calculated to be 4.5 €c/kWh.
  • Thereof 0.5 €c/kWh are due to the losses of 10%.

    But not only the low population density and the low costs of imported wind power are notable.
    The temporal behaviour of the power production changes with the size of the catchment area and with the different kinds of climate conditions.
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    At the end of my talk I want to switch the point of view to an other aspect of the Extraeuropean option for an energy supply with wind power. I roughly want to sketch the idea to combine CO2 reduction and Development aid. Therefore I will compare to potential partners within a new electricity system.

    Morocco and Germany:
    The population of the developing country is about 36% of the German population.
    In Morocco the electric consumption per capita is 7% of the consumption in Germany.
    The GDP is just 1.7% of ours. It really is a poor country.
    In Germany we spend 2.2 % of our GDP on electricity, which is more than the total Moroccan GDP.
    If the EU decided to produce 10% of its electricity in Morocco (equivalent to 40% of Germany's consumption), the total investment in wind parks is on the one side only 3.3% of Germany's annual GDP or 1 ½ times our annual expenditures for electricity. On the other side it is 2 times the actual GDP of Morocco.

    So the decision for us would mean to get relatively cheap electricity and for Morocco it could provide development aid that would last for some decades.
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    Annex

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