July 12, 2011 San Francisco
Professor Dr. Eicke Weber, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute, discussed several topics including the present and future growth of photovoltaic (PV) solar power, the role of solar and clean energy in solving climate change, and Germany’s decision to abandon nuclear power in favor of renewables during his keynote address at the official opening of Intersolar North America, part of Semicom West. Several other keynote speakers also addressed the assembly including the new San Francisco mayor Edwin Lee, and Prof. Ramamoorthy Ramesh of the DOE.
Slides with video time position: (you may click these links while video plays)
#1–00:00, #2–00:00, #3–00:00, #4–02:15, #5–06:00, #6–07:20, #7–08:30, #8–09:30, #9–11:30, #10–14:30, #11–15:30, #12–16:00, #13–16:20, #14–17:10, #15–17:20, #16–18:00, #17–19:30, #18–20:05, #19–20:45, #20–21:40, #21–22:40,
You can also download the slide show as a .pdf file. (Dr. Weber spoke again on July 14. Here’s the slide show of that Future of PV talk)
Partial excerpts: “But I think we all agree here in this room, that we need the radical transformation of our energy system to efficient use of renewable energies. And the two driving forces are clear to everybody, on the one hand side, the grave dangers of catastrophic climate change. I think the dangers are larger than just the danger of gradual global warming and the slowly increasing level of the sea. The biggest danger will certainly be that we lose the stability of our climate system, and as a matter of fact, nobody, not even the best climatologists can really predict what we are facing when we substantially change the composition of our atmosphere. So it’s a very risky experiment which we are just now undertaking with this planet earth, and I think we should do everything to avoid that it gets too unpleasant for us in terms of storms which blow away all the houses and I think some of the early indications of this we have seen.”
“The second equally strong – and for some people in the business area even stronger driving force – is we all face the shortage of fossil fuels. Peak oil has been already passed a few years ago when we had 92 million barrels of oil taken out of the ground each day. Now we are down to in the upper eighties, and I think we would never ever reach a hundred million barrels of oil which we would need if we want to continue business as usual. So business as usual is no option.”
“But the big problem is, If we only rely on the power of converting the energy system based on the starting shortage of fossil fuels, we will definitely come too late to solve the climate problem. So if we see that we anyway have no choice but to make the transformation of the energy system to a renewable energy system, why not make it quick enough that in this course we as well take care that the climate problem doesn’t get too serious. This is a challenge the world, our generation, is facing and I personally can say it is the most important challenge for many of us.”
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| “100% renewable energy is absolutely possible” |
“Just one word to the nuclear power plant issue, it was raised in a question just shortly ago and you all know that Germany at the moment has gone out on a limb compared to all other countries and almost all other countries of the world. And why has it happened in the aftermath of the Fukushima catastrophe. …”
“The first point is nuclear energy is a technology like some other technologies we are using which will never be a hundred percent controllable. You can control a nuclear power plant, you can predict if you know the starting conditions what will be possible paths of how this thing will behave … But if our fantasy is not enough to think about all possible combinations of starting situations in advance we might enter situations like we had in Fukushima with a combined failure of the external power grid and the emergency generators. And this combination happened as a consequence of a tidal wave and an earthquake, but this combination can as well happen for other reasons. In Sweden was a nuclear power which almost came to a meltdown when there was a failure of the power grid and the first emergency generator failed and the second emergency generator which was identical in construction to the first generator started for reasons nobody understands because these two guys were built in the same way. So if the second generator would have failed too, we would have had in Sweden a few years ago just a Fukushima accident. ”
“…in the case of a nuclear power plant you can endanger hundreds of millions of people. If the wind from Fukushima would have blown in a different direction right after the accident, who would have evacuated 35 million people? It cannot be done. So I think, and we in Germany came to the conclusion, for nuclear power plants, this principle risk of complex technology cannot be tolerated. We endanger potentially millions of people and the damages we are facing is not being paid by any insurance company, the damages as we see in Japan is created is taken care for by the taxpayers. Therefore the Germany policy and this is a very interesting date, just last week in the second chamber, decided to finally get rid of nuclear power in Germany for all time. To shut down eight reactors immediately forever and to shut down the remaining nine reactors gradually till 2022 and to replace most of it nuclear and fossil power as quickly as possible by renewable energy.”
One benefit of rooftop PV solar as part of the renewable energy future:
8:28 “The beauty of the decentralized installations is you need very little changes to the grid, because basically what you do is you take demand off the grid.”
A topic mentioned in Weber’s talk and in other talks at Intersolar, was the accuracy and efficacy of the common term “feed in tariff”:
10:39 “In Germany we have a very good way to show the progress, because in Germany we use a feed in rate. Which simply says anybody who creates photovoltaic energy gets a fair price paid for this. Some people have translated this with the word ‘feed in tariff’ which is a completely stupid translation because the feed in rate has nothing to do with a tax or a tariff. It is just a word-by-word translation of ‘Einspeisetarif’ in German, so someone just made a massive mistake. So the feed in rate is just the fair price for electricity which should be offered to anyone who puts PV or wind or other sources of renewable energy into operation.”
Nearing the end of his talk, the audience in the conference hall, largely comprised of solar business people, applauded Weber in response to his personal call for redirecting funding from military use towards renewables:
“Basically the transformation of the global energy system is the biggest economic stimulus program since the invention of tanks and weapons, because of course the whole defense industry uses exactly the same argument. So let’s get rid – I say this as a person and not as a representative of my institute – let’s get rid of the weapons and use the same thousands of billions of dollars for the generation of jobs in the renewable energy sector.”
Report by James George