AFP

The more the sun shines in the southern German town of Aurach, the more likely it is that Jens Husemann’s solar panels will be disconnected from the grid — an exasperating paradox at a time when Germany is navigating an energy supply crisis.

“It’s being switched off every day,” Husemann told AFP during a recent sunny spell, saying there had been more than 120 days of forced shutdowns so far this year.

Husemann, who runs an energy conversion business near Munich, also owns a sprawling solar power system on the flat roof of a transport company in Aurach, Bavaria.

The energy generated flows into power lines run by grid operator N-Ergie, which then distributes it on the network.

But in sunny weather, the power lines are becoming overloaded — leading the grid operator to cut off supply from the solar panels.

“It’s a betrayal of the population,” said Husemann, pointing to soaring electricity prices and a continued push to install more solar panels across Germany.

Europe’s biggest economy is eyeing an ambitious switch to renewables making up 80 percent of its electricity from 2030 in a bid to go carbon neutral.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put a spanner in the works. 

Moscow has cut gas supplies to Germany by 80 percent, in what is believed to be a bid to weaken the European powerhouse’s resolve in backing Ukraine.

As a result, Berlin has been scrambling for alternative sources across the world to replace the shortfall.

This makes it all the more frustrating for Husemann, whose solar panels normally generate enough electricity for 50 households. With the repeated shutdowns, he suspects they will only supply half of their capacity by the end of the year.

– Grid bottlenecks –

Grid operator N-Ergie, which is responsible for harvesting electricity from Husemann’s panels, admits the situation is less than ideal. 

There were 257 days last year when it had to cut off supply from solar panels on parts of the grid.

“We are currently witnessing — and this is a good thing — an unprecedented boom in photovoltaic parks,” Rainer Kleedoerfer, head of N-Ergie’s development department, told AFP.

But while it takes just a couple of years to commission a solar power plant, updating the necessary infrastructure takes between five and 10 years, he said.

“The number of interventions and the amount of curtailed energy have increased continuously in recent years” as a result, according to N-Ergie spokesman Michael Enderlein. 

“The likelihood is that grid bottlenecks will actually increase in the coming years,” while resolving them will take several more years, Enderlein said.

According to Carsten Koenig, managing director of the German Solar Industry Association, the problem is not unique to solar power and also affects wind energy.

Solar bottlenecks tend to be regional and temporary, he said. “Occasionally, however, we hear that especially in rural areas in Bavaria, the shutdowns are more frequent.”

– 2.4 million households –

Koenig agrees the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.

“This will be especially true if political measures aimed at sufficiently expanding the power grid in Germany… drag on for too long,” he said.

Some 6.1 terawatt hours of electricity from renewables had to be curtailed in 2020, according to the most recent figures available. 

With an average consumption of around 2,500 kilowatt hours per year in a two-person household, this would have been enough to power around 2.4 million households. 

A spokesman for Germany’s Federal Network Agency said it did not share the belief that “it will not be possible to expand the network in line with demand in the coming years”. 

Only some aspects of the expansion are seeing delays, the spokesman said — mainly due to slow approval procedures and a lack of specialist companies to do the work. 

According to Husemann there have also been delays to the payments he is supposed to receive in return for the solar power he supplies — or cannot supply.

He said he is already owed around 35,000 euros ($35,600) for electricity produced so far this year that has never found its way into a socket. 

Millions of boxes of oranges are spoiling in containers stranded at European ports as South Africa and the European Union lock horns in a dispute over import rules, citrus growers have said. 

South Africa, the world’s second largest exporter of fresh citrus after Spain, filed a complaint with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) last month after the EU introduced new plant and health safety requirements that orange farmers say threaten their survival.

The measures came into force in July as ships were already at sea carrying hundreds of containers full of South African fruit to Europe, resulting in them being held up on arrival, South Africa’s Citrus Growers’ Association (CGA) says. 

“It’s a complete and utter disaster,” CGA’s CEO Justin Chadwick told AFP by phone.

“Food that has fantastic quality and is safe is (just) sitting there — and this at a time when people are worried about food security.”

The EU rules aim at tackling the potential spread of an insect called the false codling moth, a pest native to sub-Saharan Africa that feeds on fruits including oranges and grapefruits.

The new measures require South African farmers to apply extreme cold treatment to all Europe-bound oranges and keep the fruits at temperatures of two degrees Celsius (35 degrees Fahrenheit) or lower for 25 days.

But the CGA says this measure is unnecessary as the country already has its own, more targeted way of preventing infestation. 

In its WTO complaint, South Africa argued that the EU requirements were “not based on science”, more restrictive than necessary and “discriminatory”.

South African citrus growers say the requirement puts undue extra pressure on an industry already in dire straits. 

“This is going to add a lot of costs… and at the moment, that is what no grower in the world can afford,” said Hannes de Waal, who heads of the almost 100-year-old farm Sundays River Citrus.

De Waal, whose company has orange, clementine and lemon trees straddling 7,000 hectares (17,000 acres) near the southeastern coast city of Gqeberha, said revenues were already squeezed by high shipping and fertiliser costs. 

Freight costs have rocketed since Covid-19 struck, and so has the price of fertilisers due to the war in Ukraine — Russia being one of the world’s largest producers.

– ‘Under pressure’ –

Europe is the largest market for South Africa’s almost $2 billion citrus industry, accounting for 37 percent of all exports, according to the CGA.

The new rules hit at the height of South Africa’s orange season, during the southern hemisphere’s winter, when export operations were in full swing.

This gave fruit growers too little time to adapt, said Chadwick. 

Some 3.2 million cartons of citrus worth about 605 million rand ($36 million) left port with paperwork that would be wrong on arrival.

The South African government was scrambling to issue new documents for shipments that met the new criteria, but hundreds of containers could be slated for destruction, said Chadwick. 

South Africa already has an effective anti-moth system, the CGA says. 

“Our system does involve cold treatment, but targeted at the risk, whereas the EU measure is a blanket measure that covers all oranges,” Chadwick said.

“The higher the risk, the more extreme the cold treatment,” he said, of the South African measures.

The dispute is now with the WTO. The parties have 60 days to negotiate a solution. Failing that, the complainant can request the matter be decided by a panel of experts.

The EU said it was confident of the “WTO-compatibility” of its measures.  

“The objective of the EU’s plant and health safety criteria is to protect the union territory from the potential significant impact on the agriculture and the environment, should this pest establish itself in the union,” a spokesperson for the EU Commission said in a statement. 

Chadwick hopes that “sense” will prevail and a quick fix can be found.

“Our industry is under pressure. It’s basically a year of survival,” he said. 

A major operation to rescue 10 trapped Mexican coal miners was approaching a crucial moment on Saturday, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said, raising the hopes of desperate relatives.

“Today is a decisive day because, according to the experts, we’ll know if it’s possible for the divers to enter safely,” he tweeted.

More than 300 soldiers and other personnel, including six military scuba divers, have joined the rescue effort in the northern state of Coahuila following Wednesday’s accident, the government said.

A camera was lowered into one of the mine shafts to evaluate the conditions inside, civil defense authorities said, but there was no news of significant developments as nightfall approached.

Five workers managed to escape from the crudely constructed mine in the initial aftermath of the disaster, but since then, no survivors have been found.

The focus has been on pumping out water from the mine in Agujita in the municipality of Sabinas to make it safe enough to enter.

Authorities said that the three mine shafts descended 60 meters (200 feet) and on Friday the floodwater inside was reported to be 30 meters deep.

“The main problem is the flood, although the pumping equipment is sufficient,” said Lopez Obrador.

Coahuila’s state government said the miners had been carrying out excavation work when they hit an adjoining area full of water.

– ‘Trust in God’ –

Experts detected a leak coming from nearby mines and aim to find its exact location so they can stop water flowing into the area where the workers are trapped, Coahuila’s labor secretary, Nazira Zogbi, said.

A French company has provided equipment to assist in the task, she said, without naming the firm.

The arrival of more powerful pumping equipment was also a reason for optimism, Zogbi added.

“Major progress has been made. It looks like we’ll have better news,” she said.

Water was seen flowing from the mine through drainage channels, lifting the hopes of relatives who spent a third night waiting anxiously for news.

“The last two days we didn’t see any progress with the water, but now we see that a lot of water has come out,” Elva Hernandez, mother-in-law of one of the trapped workers, told AFP.

“We’re still hoping that they’re in a higher part (of the mine), although there’s too much water… but we trust in God,” the 71-year-old added.

The state prosecutor’s office said that it had conducted interviews with the five miners who managed to escape.

“Apparently they were expelled by a torrent of water,” Coahuila attorney general Gerardo Marquez told the press.

Prosecutors have requested information from the landowner and mine concession holder, he said.

Coahuila, Mexico’s main coal-producing region, has seen a series of fatal mining accidents over the years.

Last year, seven miners died when they were trapped in the region.

The worst accident was an explosion that claimed 65 lives at the Pasta de Conchos mine in 2006.

Only two bodies were retrieved after that tragedy.

Miners and their relatives painted a picture of a precarious profession fraught with risks due to lax safety standards.

“When everything’s fine, you don’t think about the danger, but when things happen you think about quitting,” said Luis Armando Ontiveros.

However, looking for a new job does not seem like a viable option for the 48-year-old, whose father taught him to dig for coal at an early age.

The father-of-three said he needed the monthly salary equivalent to about $500 to pay for his children’s education so they do not have to follow in his footsteps.