Solar farms and wind turbines are increasingly turned off when the sun shines profusely, or when the wind blows hard. According to the platform Energieopwek.nl , the Netherlands is increasingly missing out on sustainable energy by switching off installations. The platform's energy experts do see solutions to combat this wasted capacity: storing more power and using it to make hydrogen.
A power producer shutting down its wind farm while the wind is blowing hard seems contradictory. Yet it is happening more and more often, and there is a logical explanation for this. The number of wind turbines and solar panels has increased so much in recent years that at peak times much more power can be generated than is needed. The power grid can't handle that. Moreover, at such times there is nothing to be gained from all that sustainable electricity, because electricity prices are then temporarily negative: whoever buys electricity gets money.
According to Energieopwek.nl, which is supported in part by Gasunie, grid operator TenneT and the National Climate Platform, some 1,700 gigawatt hours of renewable electricity "has not been harvested" in the past three months. It could be if there were enough batteries and so-called electrolysers to store the electricity and turn it into hydrogen. Gas plants would then not have to run as hard to generate power, and industry could replace some of its gas use with hydrogen, followers of renewable energy production further reason.
"According to the models of Energieopwek, this would have saved 350 million cubic meters of gas in the second quarter. That's enough to heat all the buildings in a city like The Hague with."
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