The Power of Renewables

This August I took a few days off to experience the great outdoors with my son. This time, we took the train on a fully electrified route from Munich to Zurich to reach the Swiss mountains. Afterwards, we crossed several mountain pass roads. I was overwhelmed when I saw how far the deployment of renewable energy generation has already progressed in this country. On the way up the mountains, we saw the past, the present time and the future of our electrical energy supply. Down in the valleys a lot of houses had photovoltaic panels on their roofs. In northern Switzerland in particular, many PVs were integrated into the facades or installed in place of roof tiles. However, this only applies to newer houses and not to the old, often listed, beautiful houses, of which there are still so many in Switzerland. Climbing up just one valley – in this case the Grimsel mountain road – we saw numerous hydroelectric power stations (several of them pumped storage plants) at elevations of about 600 m, 1400 m and 2000 m. This year they are celebrating the 100th anniversary of hydropower generation in this valley while currently raising one of the lake’s dams by 23 m to increase the storage capacity in this lake by more than 80 % which will increase the energy content from 270 GWh to 510 GWh.

At the dam wall of a reservoir, at an altitude of around 1,800 meters above sea level, I was amazed to see a 250 kWp PV system stretching across the entire crest of the wall. Together with another dam-mounted PV system in this area they can “harvest” 600 MWh every year. With snow reflecting from the frozen lake in wintertime the operator is able to “produce” almost 50 % of the PV energy during winter. Then we reached the Grimsel crest which also marks the continental divide between the North Sea (Rhine River) and the Mediterranean Sea (Rhone River).

Slowly driving up the hairpin curves of the Nufenen Pass road (the highest mountain pass road purely within Switzerland) to its crest at 2500 m we additionally discovered several wind power plants – of course, in addition to hydropower. These are just two examples out of many that we saw. By the way: Only at the cobblestone! St. Gotthard mountain road we didn’t encounter any trucks because there are three tunnels underneath the mountain: a road tunnel (17 km) and two train tunnels of 15 km (built in 1882 already!) and 57 km (completed in 2016 – the world’s longest and deepest traffic tunnel). And on the St. Gotthard crest they have set up an educational hiking trail between the wind power plants. On this vacation it became clear that we at Bodo’s Power Systems made a good decision to dedicate a major part of this issue to renewable energies. But you may be assured that renewables will also play an important role at Bodo’s Wide Bandgap event on December 2 and 3 in Munich/Germany.

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My green tip of the month:
Choose an electricity contract for your home which guarantees a 100 % supply out of renewables. I know that it is still slightly more expensive than the standard energy mix but it also shows your commitment to the future of our planet and enables your energy supplier to make the appropriate customer-demand driven decisions.

Kind Regards,
Alfred