This headline would be more true if we had transportation fully electrified and all buildings heated with heat pumps, but last I heard the proposed law to require the latter transition to be started in 2024 was dropped again, and they're also still debating about starting to require transitioning the combustion engine fleets to electric by, what was it, 2030?
I also still see stickers here, calling for the closure of a nuclear plant in Belgium. These people live near one of the biggest coal mines and power plants, but tihange is what scares them.
Looks like we'll have to dig in our own pockets if we want to be part of the solution, government isn't going to do it, even in a principalistic country as Germany. We'll get to +3°C or something but at least you can tell the kids of 2060 that you at least did what you could...
Heating is one thing we have tackle, but also transportation which uses up 27.1% of energy in German. Individual transportation should be a main target, we would all shift from cars to public transport or bicycles. About 40% of distances driven with cars are shorter than 5 kilometers, a distance that's perfect for a bicycle. On top of that, car owners tend to underestimate the cost of their cars[1]
Yeah, targeting individual transport with inefficient public transport and bicycles while restarting abandoned coal power plants and abandoning running nuclear power plants is going to work wonderfully indeed.
Multiple things can be done at the same time on the country scale. Improve bike infrastructure and public transit, encourage EVs for those that have to drive, decarbonise energy generation, electrify heating and industry, etc.
With individual transport, you move ~2 tons of metal for a payload of one person, a weight/person ratio of 2.
With high-speed rail, you move ~400 tons of metal for ~450 people, a ratio of ~0.9. [0]
This does not even account for factors such as inherently more efficient transmission from steel to steel vs rubber/concrete and the more efficient electric engines of a modern train compared to the combustion engine. Neither does it account for the fact that rail goes at more than twice the speed.
How is public transport the inefficient option, again?
How is it a fair comparison to make the automobile have only one person but the rail car completely full? Rail cars are very rarely anywhere near full. Infact, they have to be run nearly empty most of the time in order to have a schedule good enough that enough people to fill the car up are willing to rely on it.
You forget that most people don't live or work next to the rail station. That makes rail inefficient in the only way that matters to most people - their time.
(I say that as someone who takes trains to work most days.)
I think trains going twice as fast as cars and not being impacted by traffic goes a long way in making up for the last mile problem - even if you take a bike for that piece, overall you're gonna be much faster than if you're stuck in rush hour traffic.
Plus, in the context of the looming climate catastrophe and the energy crisis caused by a war of aggression by our former primary energy supplier, that concern seems really petty anyways.
maybe, I was just in Switzerland and people said that Japan is even better in terms of transit. If Singapore has reliable prioritized public transport, then yep, it's cool. What shocked me the most is that in Swiss, all tickets for any transport can be bought in a single app, and if you don't want extra hassle, you don't even need to buy it, just press a button and the app will calculate by gps what you need to pay. This + super precise arrival times...
Literally the 2nd item on your list is C651 made by Siemens which has design and headquarters in Munich, Germany.
Also a quick Kagi search could have pointed you at "Siemens Mobility awarded contract to deliver CBTC on Singapore’s 8th & longest fully-underground MRT Cross Island Line" ;)
Okay I give you that. I was wrong about zero. 19 trainsets out of a total of 594. 3%. And those were manufactured in Austria (like I said), not Germany. But yes Siemens is HQed in Munich. So I guess they bought them from there. True.
Not sure how one can interpret "Singapore because they buy their excellent MRT trains from Germany" and then those excellent trains are a mere 3% of Singapore's trains (with the vast majority being Chinese and Japanese. Even the French trains are more than 3x as many). But hey, whatever.
The linked article might help clarify things. The percentage of power from coal and nuclear power were both down considerably:
“The electricity production from lignite was down 21 percent, hard coal was down 23 percent, natural gas was down 4 percent, and nuclear declined by 57 percent, compared to 2022 values.”
> transportation which uses up 27.1% of energy in German
There is a difference between primary energy and usable energy. An ICE car is 20-30% efficient while BEVs are +90%. Electrifying all transports will vastly lower the primary energy use.
I would like to see you cycling 5 km in the Alps against the wind in the rain. Cycling is fine. I do it 7 km to the work. But only because it is flat. And only when the weather is fine.
I've never really understood the point of comments like this. So, there are conditions where cycling isn't feasible. Sure. Does that mean people in general couldn't use bicycles more? No, of course not. Did GP suggest that everyone that lives within 5km of work must bike every day. No, not that either.
For every solution it's easy to find a situation where that solution doesn't apply. So what? That doesn't mean the solution is worthless. Last I checked, the Alps didn't cover all of Germany - did they move recently?
> I've never really understood the point of comments like this.
As a Dutchman who doesn't enjoy cycling, especially alone (for function rather than leisure), I do see their point. It's just not an alternative for me. I'll put up with it if it's <1km of flat land with safe infrastructure, but beyond that I'm opening up a public transport planner. Also in NL, most trips are >1km and/or carry more freight than fits in a backpack or on the rack (?bagagedrager) (could take the bike in hand and hang your bags from the handlebars, though).
I'm happy to pay a bit extra for Climeworks to take the CO2 out of the air again that was added while building the wind turbine for my electricity-powered method of transportation.
But to each their own. Cycling is also healthy, especially if we'd no longer be surrounded by combustion transportation. I'm all for bicycle infrastructure and promotion.
I use a bike to get around pretty much whenever I can but I'd be the first to admit cars are suitable for a far wider range of journey types, and it's not exactly surprising that in most countries in the world people prefer to drive cars over riding bikes. The best we can realistically hope for is ensuring that whatever barriers exist now that discourage people from cycling (safety concerns typically being #1) are addressed and minimised. Though certainly in the case of Germany you can compare it to two of its neighbours (to the west and north) and reasonably conclude more can be done to promote cycling as a way to get around in towns and cities.
Electrically assisted bicycles are a real game changer for the short to medium commute, especially when the wind or the terrain is against you. Note that biking in the Alps isn't really a problem in Germany, more so in Switzerland or Austria. But even in the Alps the single villages are rather flat because they are built in the mountain valleys.
Oh you picked the wrong guy for your comment: I worked 10km away the winter before and got out the door at 6am, cycled to work and left a 5pm to cycle back home, often when it was dark again.
I'm fine with people in the Alps taking their car when it's raining and windy. That still leaves 99% of the population who can take their E-bike for short trips.
i am german and i find sloppy use of language annoying especially if it invites orthogonal interpretation. people should reread what they write publicly and then fix it if necessary.
This is why so many are fed up with Germany and especially Germany's current government.
You know, maybe people don't want to bike in a country where it's too hot in the summer, too icey/cold/snowy in the winter and where it rains constantly in the other two seasons?
This whole attitude of "I tell you how to live your life because reasons" is preposterous.
Biking all year is perfectly possible in most of Germany. There are enough good clothes to counter bad weather, snow and especially ice keeps getting rarer. Biking adoption depends most of the infrastructure and also whether your peers do it too. It has also many positive health side effects.
People aren't telling you how to live, they're saying that certain current practices are inefficient in a way that causes harm. An extreme comparison would be a murderer-for-hire telling the judge "don't tell me how to live my life, this is a free country!" but that's kinda what that sounds like. You're free to do what you want, yeah... until it harms others.
Individual transportation will always remain an option, but it might be prohibitively expensive for most people to be their main mode of transport when one has to refund the environmental damage it adds.
So? Take the bike when the weather is nice and the car when it's not nice. That still reduces the kilometers you drive by a lot. Nobody forces you to bike when it's 40°C or -20.
In the meantime, Switzerland is installing solar panels on train tracks [0] instead of, I don't know, people's roofs. There is so much promising tech coming out in terms of energy storage and we're seeing almost zero investment from governments. Everything's backwards.
Why are people so obsessed with "solar roadways" or "solar train tracks"? This is a joke, a gimmick, it makes absolutely no sense. Well, except for the startups that are getting massive subsidies and grants for these clown projects.
There are still millions of open-space square meters all over the country. Think of flat-roof warehouses, supermarkets, parking facilities and more. Those places are easy to access, easy to install, easy to maintain. These train track installments however.... hard to install, require non-standardized panel sizes, non-standard wiring, special equipment, are in a dusty/dirty uncontrollable environment, maintenance is only possible in coordination with the train company. My guess is that these things are 4-5x more expensive on a per kwH basis, if you consider the total cost of ownership.
The people from Solar Roadways actually got support from several governments in the US. It's totally bonkers. They never had a proper functioning system. The whole idea is ridiculous and people pointed it out since the beginning. But it generated so much news that governments were so ready to jump on it. And they are STILL at it. So here we are, 10 years later, and still talking about putting solar panels in places where they will: break, get very dirty, be hard to fix and replace. We can't have good things because money and politics talk, not science.
The name's Lanley, Lyle Lanley. And I come before you good people tonight with an idea. Probably the greatest—Aw, it's not for you. It's more a Shelbyville idea.
You get ad impressions from people who read the headline and think "that's a great idea", or "that's a stupid idea" or "wait, is that actually possible?" or "that sounds neat" and they all count towards the algorithm in a way that "Let's put solar on the boring places" doesn't.
On a graph, the money spent or the capacity installed has never been more than a blip of a blip but it gets eyeballs.
As someone from the Alps, I'd really see a source on that. Most alpine roofs are built to survive extreme snow loads. My father just covered his roof in solar and that roof was built in the 70s.
There's a sizeable portion of the voters, also sizeable here in HN (see the discussions StartX vs SLS), which demands a minimal government, no intervention, no trust in them and all that. I guess we cannot both have the cake and eat it.
Solar on roofs kinda sucks. It's way more expensive to install and rarely at an optimal orientation. And they will get covered in snow for months out of the year depending on climate.
Government money would be much better spent on a regular solar installation on the ground. Much cheaper to install and maintain.
Cutting trees to put solar panels is a unpopular idea. Roof is a free space. "Optimal" orientation isn't always optimal for grid because distributing peak output time is a good thing.
"The pilot project, which is expected to be completed this summer at a cost of $560,000, will see Sun-Ways use a regular train to lay down 60 solar panels on a 140-foot stretch of railway track near the city of Neuchâtel"
it's not like all of Switzerland is doing this on all rail tracks. It's 60 small panels. A tiny experiment, nothing more. Who says they are "instead of, I don't know, people's roofs"?
Solar panels on rail tracks are an interesting experiment, but mind that they complicated maintenance work on tracks and require quite some maintenance themselves. (Think about oil and other dirt dropping from trains; stones and small tree branches etc being thrown around with the force of the train...)
But even if they are useable and beneficial: That's not an argument not to use other available space as well.
The issue in Germany is that this transition is expensive, even more so after 16 years of decay of everything from the past coalitions.
And that makes the current coalition unpopular, along with an eternaly bickering liberals(in nothing but name) trying to block any spending. Add onto that Conservative tabloids continously firing against green with every scrap they can get, and we're looking at fascists polling over 30%.
I I fear that the scraps of progress the current government achieves will be rolled back by a fascist+ Conservative coalition in three years...
the current coalition did massive ecological damage by not keeping the six nuclear power plants running. In 2021 they produced more energy than all installed solar combined. It would have been an easy move that would have granted us 10+ more years runway for the transformation of the heating systems. It's an illogical move to take that clean energy out and force massive costs on the people they can't really prepare for. The FDP is losing voters left and right, because they do nothing but stopping even worse politics from the coalition. They are the one thing holding back Germany from going into an unstoppable downward spiral. Germany is already rapidly losing parts of our industry, going into a recession while the burdens on social systems will soon explode. And instead of any solutions for the real problems, the SPD and Greens just want to increase taxes, driving away even more highly qualified people.
The current coalition did no such thing. They just came into power weeks before 3 of the 6 were switched off. At which point it wouldn't have been reasonable to reverse the decision to get rid of the last 6 reactors. A decision, which was taken by CDU/CSU and FDP. They decided on the switch off date and did nothing in the following 10 years to reconsider. They also did their best to not grow the renewables instead.
But if you look at the article we are commenting here, that doesn't matter as we now have record levels of renewables, quite compensating for the switched off reactors.
That's dishonest. They had three month to reverse the decision on the first three in time of an energy crisis but refused to do it; they took another year not to switch off the next three. The decision HAD to be revised because of the energy crisis and lack of gas. They didn't.
The production has NOT been compensated. We just produce less and import more. It will take years to compensate the six reactors - a lot of time and CO2 emitted.
It is dishonest to claim the decision could have been reverted in the last 3 months. They were in no shape to be kept running. First of all, the fuel rods were spent and would have to be ordered and would have had long delivery times.
But the biggest concern would have been maintenance. The maintenance schedule was of course planned with the scheduled shut-down in mind. So a lot of maintenance and refurbishment would have had to be done. So we are talking about a possible several-year downtime at least. Which makes the whole idea very questionable.
If a prolonging the life-time of the reactors would have been desired, the previous government should have done it. Then the necessary steps could have been done without a long downtime. And mind you: they were shut down so early because the previous government hat decided to do so. The initial plan allowed for much longer run times.
There would have been NO road blocks for extending the lifetime. Westinghouse offered fuel rods which would have been delivered in time.
They had all the normal maintenance (every 2 years) and were in pristine condition, much better than most other nuclear reactors on this planet. Only the 10 year interval was pushed out, but it's just an additional check to further increase safety over the long term. No downtime would have been required, especially no multi-year downtime.
The previous government did not know that Russia was to attack Ukraine and gas flow was about to stop with all the effects on energy availability and prices.
No, that is not true. Maintenance was done with the respect to the planned life time. They couldn't just have kept running. That the previous government didn't knew about the Russian war onto Ukraine makes no difference. Gas prices have recovered to pre-war levels, so there is no extra need for the nuclear plants compared to before the war.
The article is about shutting down the reactors at the 31.12.22. As you know, they were not shut down at that date but ran some months more. That doesn't say anything about the long term maintenance requirements. And in any case they would have to be inspected before any further decisions to be taken as the article only states "they might be able to run further". But that was only an opinion, not a result of a inspection.
This is the new political landscape in Europe. By including the fascists, the conservatives roughly double their votes and don't need to compromise with the rest anymore. We're seeing this now in Finland and probably next in Germany. To me this is selfish and short-sighted in the short term, and outright dangerous in the long term.
The activist groups like Last Generation, etc are doing a brilliant job of making ecological movements look like complete buffoons at this time
In fact I kinda hope they are a lobby financed agitprop operation because I couldn't think of a more entitled group outside of the London Houses of Parliament
Why does energy used never include the sun directly?
In the summer we use less heat because the sun is giving us the energy instead. So maybe we should be counting the heating we don't use during the summer as renewable heat instead.
I suppose this would help account for efficiency also. If a house is deemed to need X kWh to heat a year. The difference between the gas used can be used to derive a figure for the 'renewable' energy used, whether from renewable electricity, solar heat, or negawatts.
Sorry on the nitpicking - we will have to dig into our pockets even if government does something. Government does not have magic money it is also “our money”.
One would say government would levy fees on big companies but then companies will charge customers more.
Of course yes, but most people seem to be waiting to let the government mop up the problems and aren't spending anything themselves that isn't advertised as a guaranteed investment like solar panels where the electricity company has to pay you for the service of dissipating your excess energy (bluntly put). We need to realise that, at least until the government starts spending big (because it's basically too late for the perfect outcome already, the best we can do is mitigate even bigger disasters), the only other option is do it ourselves.
This is not true. That only happens if the money supply exceeds the productive capacity of the economy.
If the government didn’t issue any money and economies continued growing (which wouldn’t happen because you need slack in the money supply to allow for growth) there would be deflation. So the government could issue money in a growing economy and still see deflation, until the ratio hits a tipping point.
Maybe this is my tech bubble, but try to find a country with higher Linux/PGP/OpenStreetMap use. I am still trying to put my finger on what the culture difference is precisely, but also outside of tech there's more thinking about what the right/correct/fair thing to do is, even if that brings greater net harm in the end.
Example: closing down nuclear because it's not a perfect solution and has risks and waste (ignoring their proportions), in favor of renewables, not caring that renewables are decades away and it'll be replaced by maintaining coal for more years than it takes the world to trip a couple (predicted/expected) points of no return in climate change.
By comparison, I found the Netherlands to be much more yolo. Live and let live, don't care as much if what they're doing is correct
All generalisations, of course. You can find nazis and climate activists in the Netherlands as well as in Germany or anywhere else.
With all due respect, renewables are not decades away, they are at a major inflection point right now. While I deplore the shuttering of Germany's NPPs, nuclear would not have been a solution to the decarbonization challenge, as the times to build NPPs and the costs are prohibitive.
Renewables are the cheapest source of energy right here and now, we should invest way more into researching grid-scale storage solutions.
Also not so sure about NL being more relaxed, they have a cultural war at their hands over nitrogen emissions from agriculture, and it has shaken up their political system.
We did choose to put solar on our roof with heat pump when we built our home only four years ago and at the time, there was no certainty if this investment will be any good. This year we also bought a battery and can run the house with this setup from spring to autumn with small input from the grid.
Only winter sucks because the heat pump is less efficient when it's cold. Would be great to have better storage for the grid to get cheaper energy during that time.
I really hope you're right about it not being decades away
NL and their stikstofcrisis is a legal thing. Individuals (on average) don't care about climate the way people do in Germany (on average). An example involving more than just direct friends and family: I wanted to join friends in NL in a protest on a global strike day a few years ago because nobody in Germany wanted to go with me, only to find that in NL there weren't any protests going on that I could propose for us to go to. A small one in the Hague or Amsterdam I think, nothing close enough for us to reasonably join. There's groups for climate in NL as well, but they're so much smaller.
Renewables are the cheapest source of energy PROVIDED the cost of providing energy when they are generating zero energy is paid for by someone else. This argument keeps coming up and is entirely wrong and very misleading.
Renewable energy due it its intermittent nature creates a problem and does nothing to solve that problem. The cost of that solution must be factored into the cost of energy from renewable generation.
There was a perfectly reasonable transition strategy. Install as much solar and wind turbines as possible and rely on natural gas plants are other times. Natural gas plants are relatively cheap and can in the future be converted to hydrogen.
The big advantage is that solar and wind can directly reduce CO2 emissions, instead of waiting for decades for new nuclear power to come online.
Converting heating of buildings to heat pumps and cars to electrical also directly reduces CO2 emissions even if you generate electricity from natural gas.
There was one part where it went terribly wrong, and that was the idea source the natural gas almost exclusively from Russia...
You're mostly right of course, but keep in mind that "waiting for decades for nuclear to come online" is not a fair comparison.
Nuclear: pick ten locations -> allocate the money for each -> it goes five times over budget but in the end you have 80% of your energy need taken care of. By the time they're done, the remaining 20% is covered by renewables (we're already almost at that point. If only we had kept nuclear...).
Renewables means fighting with nearly every individual land owner in the country separately. Either they need solar panels on them or they need a wind turbine near them. Have fun and good luck arguing millions of individual cases.
The latter is cheaper per MW, people will argue. Faster to build each individual spot and no huge investments needed. All true. I just hope it's going to happen at the speed that people extrapolate from the low-hanging fruit we got so far...
I don't know the projected number for Germany in 2050, but 10 locations could mean that you would need 30 GW per location (just a rough estimate). At todays prices for nuclear power that is an insane amount of money that needs to be put on the table upfront.
Experience in The Netherlands shows that if people benefit, they are a lot less resistant. People are eager to put solar on their own roofs, if it has a good return on investment. But also wind turbines owned by local cooperations meet far less resistance than turbines owned by a big company.
Of course The Netherlands has the advantage that there is plenty of space at sea for wind turbines.
the part where it went terribly wrong is relying on variable energy sources to power a grid designed around the assumption of controllable power generation.
There is a not a single gigawatt scale power grid anywhere in existence that has managed to supply growing load, over extended timeframes using renewable generators.
This is the heart of the problem - we will eventually reach a stage where renewable energy powers entire grids but we are not there yet nor is the end in sight for much of the world. In the meantime, we must eliminate carbon emissions and power sources like nuclear are ideal.
If the government wuold decide to buy balcony solar systems for 1.000 Euro each for every household, that would come down to a mere 41 billion Euro for the whole state and that would solve lots of all of this.
They found 100 billion for the Bundeswehr without any problem in the blink of an eye. If you really wanted, the whole energy topic would be set up and solved in a month, from there on it's steady execution.
Meanwhile in Berlin, the incoming government decided to half the amount earmarked for building and maintaining bike lanes. Climate change is the last thing on the German government's mind, no matter what they claim.
You're forgetting that not everyone wants such a thing on their balcony and that you'll need to find someone to manufacture all of that (other countries want their solar still, too; it doesn't help us to deny Australia years of solar panel production only to put many on cloudy north-facing German balconies).
I don't know what the acceptance percentage as well as a realistic manufacturing rate is at such an order size (probably pretty fast), but it sounds like you're assuming the answers are "near 100%" and "a few years".
That's what I mean with let's figure it out and stick to execution. Production will probably not meet demand at first, but we need to get going. And we need to get going big.
- Let's make it mandatory to install fixed solar systems for new development areas and any newly build commercial buildings. The state will subsidize 90% of the cost for the initial setup for private households, for companies it's just a tax deductible expense.
- You want to retrofit your existing house with a fixed solar system? That's 90% subsizidation for you, too!
- You have a multi-party house (details needed) or a professional housing company? You'll have to retrofit your buildings in 5 years of time from now on.
- Let's retrofit all public buildings with solar systems. No excuses, execution asap.
- The state will encourage research and development of energy storage sytems by providing funds to universities etc.
We'll also need to have lots of laws changed and have our energy companies put in to place, but if the cost is low for the individual person, people will just make this happen.
Yeah, it will cost some money, but the money is there, it's just an allocation problem.
The funny thing is that the end result is not that different between Germany and The Netherlands. The Netherlands has only 500 MW of nuclear power, because for historical reasons, The Netherlands didn't bother much with nuclear power to begin with.
Germany has a higher percentage for electricity from renewables, because for a long time The Netherlands didn't really bother with that either.
(The Netherlands is now at around 40% renewable electricity production, unfortunately that is only 15% of total energy use)
> but try to find a country with higher Linux/PGP/OpenStreetMap use. I am still trying to put my finger on what the culture difference is
Those examples stem from Germany's strong care about privacy, which is rooted in the Nazi regime, showing how data can be used to discriminate people and then the surveillance in East Germany by the Stasi.
While there are many aspects to critizise Germany did mostly well to educate the own population about the Nazi crimes (which also kept right wing parties out for a long period compared to other European countries, while that changes currently ...)
In addition the West did propaganda against East and Stasi surveillance which told the West society about the dangers of surveillance (while at the same time CIA, NSA etc had quite some power in Germany ...)
And then, after reunification, they didn't simply burn down Stasi and forget, but again did a huge program to study the surveillance programs and publishing about it and allowing everybody to request their Stasi file.
Thus on the aspect of privacy the society is confronted with the risk.
The other aspect about German culture is the pride about "German Engineering" thus thinking though and trying to avoid problems. This brought quite some industry, however in a highly dynamic field, like modern IT based systems it prevents coming up with solutions compared to the Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" attitude. Germany is. More like "move slow, but robust" Those in the early days, Germany was quite well with IT (think Use, Siemens, Nixdorf) but when the core engineering lost relevance and software took over lost ground, so that basically only SAP survived, which is a very German product, again.
Also the Nuclear exit, I argue, is partially caused by the cold war: Chernobyl caused notable increase in radiation etc in Germany, where children were forbidden to play outside, hunting mushrooms was forbidden etc. and as being located directly on the iron curtain and as one could directly observe how differently the reporting in West and East Germany was (shared language across the fence ...) it was symbolized.
Generally when there's a high pressure system over Europe, the bad air stays trapped over Germany and Poland.
Even right now you can see that Germany is about 10pts higher than the rest of Europe, and Poland another 10pts on top of that. It's a shame that map doesn't have historic data as it would be easier to see.
To save others from looking it up: Germany's footprint per kWh above is about the same as USA (but USA consumption is nearly twice as bad per capita vs Germany).
At the same time France had to buy loads of electricity from Germany in the last year because several nuclear plants had to shut down due to a) maintenance problems and b) low rivers that could not provide sufficient cooling.
Ironically, I hear the ones that were shut down in Germany were some of the best maintained in the world and had very high "capacity factors" even when compared with other nuclear (fraction of time delivering power to the grid). It seems like the solution to poor maintenance is better maintenance? Some of the causes of recent poor French maintenance are analyzed here: https://player.fm/series/decouple/somethings-rotten-with-fre...
I assume you wouldn't seriously argue that rivers are the limiting factor to deployment of nuclear energy.
Being “anti nuclear” made a lot of sense until a madman decided to attack Ukraine.
And with the world economy stabilizing after that mad man’s actions it’s again making a lot of sense as nuclear continues to be far more expensive than other renewable alternatives.
It's cheaper to run your 30 year old, perfectly fine, perfectly safe, well-functioning nuclear plant than to build and run a new natural gas plant - which is what Germany decided to do.
What method of energy generation has a track record of "clean" disposal? Old solar panels usually end up in landfill.
On a per-kilowatt-hour basis nuclear waste is pretty damn clean. The end product is carefully encased in absurdly over-engineered containment vessels. Environmental leaks are rare to non-existent. The aim is to store it underground where it will pose far less of a risk to humanity than the raw ore did before it was dug up.
It's.. complicated. Nuclear is super clean at the consumption site, but not super clean at the mining site [0]. And then there's the problem that France's access to cheap uranium is a relic of extractive colonialism, and these countries don't exactly see the fair profits from France's hunger for energy [1].
So yes, France's energy is cleaner, but it's a complicated picture.
Aside from supply chain inertia (and existing high demand for EVs) there's no practical obstacle stopping many mining operations moving to electric powered equipment, when such equipment becomes available.
> It's.. complicated. Nuclear is super clean at the consumption site, but not super clean at the mining site [0].
It's almost certainly not complicated. The CO2 produced by mining uranium is irrelevant compared to the CO2 produced by burning coal fuel.
> And then there's the problem that France's access to cheap uranium is a relic of extractive colonialism, and these countries don't exactly see the fair profits from France's hunger for energy [1].
Uranium is not a large contributor to nuclear energy cost anyway, so this is no argument against nuclear energy.
> So yes, France's energy is cleaner, but it's a complicated picture.
I don't see how it is "complicated". Nuclear is clearly much better than Germany's coal+renewable. (Renewable-only was not an option since wind and solar are extremely volatile.)
It's complicated in the political sense. They are spelunking former colonies to meet green energy targets, while those same countries struggle to progress.
What are you talking about? Today less than 12% of French import of uranium are coming from Niger a former French colony. The main sources are Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Australia.
> It's complicated in the political sense. They are spelunking former colonies to meet green energy targets, while those same countries struggle to progress.
It is wrong and a lie. Most uranium bought by (EDF) France lately come from Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan and Ouzbekistan. Definitively not countries you can name as "Colonies".
Not only most of the bought fuel comes from other countries, including Canada, but 17% of their electro energy is generated by reprocessed nuclear fuel, also produced in France
Germany actually replaced the nuclear energy with wind & solar. The argument that remains is that instead of phasing out nuclear, reducing coal would have been preferred. The decision to phase out nuclear has long been made (for good reasons). Keeping them active or even building new reactors of that kind is not an economically viable solution. The price Germany pays for this is higher carbon emissions for the time being until renewables push coal out of the mix. What Germany gains, on the other hand, is the removal of the most expensive form of energy from its production and one big step towards a fully renewable and modern electricity grid.
If you could leave nuclear, and "replace" lignite with wind and solar instead, you actually replaced nuclear with lignite.
>The decision to phase out nuclear has long been made (for good reasons).
No, it was made for bad reasons.
>Keeping them active or even building new reactors of that kind is not an economically viable solution. The price Germany pays for this is higher carbon emissions for the time being until renewables push coal out of the mix. What Germany gains, on the other hand, is the removal of the most expensive form of energy
_Existing_ nuclear reactors are the cheapest possible source of electricity. You already had to build them and will have to close them. Left is the cheapest part, of actually operating them.
Just selecting 2023 as a timeframe isn't good data.
You can see here [1] that on a time frame of 2000 to 2022 Germany is yet to replace reduction of nuclear generation (Kernkraft) with renewables. Construction of renewables in 2023 has only accelerated 50% relative to 2022 [2].
I'm not sure at which one of those graphs I should be looking at. The gross power consumption one seems to refute your own claim. The total gross electricity usage of Germany in 1990 was 551 Twh, 587 twh in 2003 and is currently around 550 Twh. Current expectations is that usage will grow to 650 Twh in 2030 and to 750+ Twh in 2050.
Charts are an irrelevant red herring. The argument is simple and indisputable: Germany's collective investments in renewables was not predicated on the closing of nuclear plants instead of coal plants. Had Germany not shut down nuclear, they could have shut down coal. It's that simple.
What Germany gained is more pollution, higher CO2 emissions and a lot of hopium that current energy fubar will somehow be resolved sometimes in the unspecified future using semi specified technology (there is no large scale energy storage solution available for renewables and it will stay like this for some years to come). Shutting down nuclear was a political decision, fueled by pure ideology (and some Russian help because natural gas exports).
What entire EU gained is getting to support often unstable electricity grid in Germany. So we all gained a lot by the looks of it.
The European electricity market is working quite well, imports and exports are expected to happen. Countries prefer to import electricity when it is cheaper than producing it themselves. Germany has more than enough capacity installed to handle its energy needs (even if a lot of this is still fossil). Germany does not have an "often unstable electricity grid", not at all. That information is simply wrong.
In other words, shutting down nuclear plants means a) replacing the energy generation with coal (mostly lignite), or b) importing energy from other countries, which generate it from coal (mostly lignite) like Poland.
Importing will likely be "cheap", because we all agree to collectively pretend that externalities like CO2 emissions or catastrophic pollution from coal plants are not a thing.
Oh no no. Germany loves importing nuclear electricity from France, Czech Republic and others too. Makes the government feel good about having quit nuclear, because somehow when it comes from across the border it's not so bad anymore.
Many of your comments are misleading and are often renewable energy propaganda.
"In 2023, Germany lacks 15 to 20 gigawatt of secured power output”. This comment was from Harald Schwarz, Professor for energy distribution and high voltage technology at the Brandenburg University of Technology. EU Fact check rates this as mostly true.
The claim that germany has sufficient capacity for its energy needs is just wrong.
That is true, but it is also not the goal to achieve 100% secured power output, nor is it necessary. The calculations that determine the necessary electricity production to cover Germany's needs at all times are more complicated than just looking at the installed secured power output and involve factors, such as the likelihood of unavailable renewable energy production. And even if the worst case happens, there are solid strategies in place to avoid a blackout, including backup power plants and coordination with high energy consumers to reduce or shut down their consumption.
And all of this still ignores the fact, that there is a highly connected international electricity market, that large scale storage solutions are being prepared, and that the grid is becoming more decentralized.
this is all well and good but seems to ignore the central problem - energy security is a national priority. Hand waving away the problem by pointing to energy markets or a decentralised grid does not address the fundamental issue.
You are right, the goal is not 100% secured energy supply but we have multiple problems at the same time - energy security and climate change to name just two.
Zoom out one more time and you see that the world gained a solution to climate change that is actually competitive economically.
Competitive even without a strong government regulation to enforce people paying for externalities, and even working against the entrenched intests of fossil fuels.
A solution which is rolling out at a truly astonishing rate.
What happens in Germany is irrelevant compared with what has happened globally due, in large part, to Germany.
Yep. We all gained primarily a lower living standard without reducing any CO2 consumption globally at all _and_ without improving the environment locally. Looks like a good policy to continue with, doesn't it?
Total frequency error over time is not a good measure of stability because the frequency is actively adjusted to control this. The grid could fail every day and still have 0 frequency error over time if they ran it faster when it was working to compensate.
It's hard for renewables to replace coal or nuclear though, because coal and nuclear provide baseload power, whereas wind and solar are very intermittent and require basically 100% gas backup (as there will be circumstances with very low wind and solar, which tends to happen in europe on very cold, still, winter nights when demand is the highest).
There is absolutely no reason the (ex-west) German nuclear power plants could not have been life extended. They were extremely reliable and about 10GWe of modern PWRs were finished in the late 80s. They could have easily be extended to at least 2030 had there been the political will at not a huge amount of cost. The RoI with current/previous high energy prices would have probably been 100 fold.
> It's hard for renewables to replace coal or nuclear though, because coal and nuclear provide baseload power, whereas wind and solar are very intermittent and require basically 100% gas backup (as there will be circumstances with very low wind and solar, which tends to happen in europe on very cold, still, winter nights when demand is the highest).
I absolutely agree with you that we need the coal plants and imports for base load. For a fully renewable grid, we need massive storage capacity. This, however, is far from an unsolved problem. The problem is that the economic incentives aren't aligned with that goal yet. There is reason to be optimistic though, and that the money Germany is saving on nuclear, is more sustainably and effectively spent on renewables and storage.
Germany has enough storage capacity for natural gas to last a couple of months. The same can be build for Hydrogen. Some of the existing infrastructure can even be reused.
Yes but you need 10s or 100s of GW of hydrogen electrolyzers, which are expensive, and they will only be running a small % of the the time (when there is excess renewables).
I'm not sure how much existing natural gas infrastructure can be reused given how much lighter hydrogen is and I assume it needs much tighter tolerances on all the equipment compared to natgas.
Yeah, true. But it turned from a "we don't have enough of element XY on Earth to build that" to a "it sounds kind of expensive" problem. As it turns out people did the math already and building the hydrogen infrastructure is probably not prohibitively expensive, in fact it might turn out to be reasonably cheap. There is a tradeoff between overbuilding renewables, improving the grid, making the demand side more dynamic, and storage.
Yes, but my point isn't so much it couldn't ever be done, it's that by the time you upgrade the grid massively, build the renewables, build the electrolyzers, build the hydrogen infrastructure and the infrastructure to convert it back to electricity, it's almost certainly way more expensive than already expensive nuclear to build.
Renewable energy is unpredictable, thus you need a backup source of energy for when there's no wind, sunlight or rain. It's yet unfeasible to store large amounts of energy unfortunately so that means using either natural gas or coal, because you need to be able to rapidly increase/reduce/regulate the energy output. It's coal at the moment for Germany and that means more pollution and dirty politicians that don't care about the environment, just about votes. Actually nuclear power plants can nowadays also regulate their output fast enough, but they got rid of those.
Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine coal was on its way out due to purely economical factors: coal plants are more expensive to operate than natural gas plants.
Of course recent months changed that since a lot of our gas used to come from Russia. If we went all-in on nuclear we could reactivate (East) German uranium mines that were closed shortly after reunification. But (traditional) nuclear also loses on economic factors, on top of being politically untenable.
it's possible to store huge amounts of energy with hydro, but at that point nuclear is not that bad in terms of price and nr of people killed by nuclear vs hydro accidents, so again Germany fkd up
Actually, the death toll from hydro is many orders of magnitude worse than nuclear. It's almost insulting to compare them. (And before anyone pipes up, you don't get to exclude Chinese hydro from the ledger, for the same reason we don't exclude Soviet Union nuclear.)
That this is a big pretend game to make the people responsible of the closing of nuclear power look not that bad in regard of the climate issue. Electricity generation should be increasing as we electrify transportation and heating. If this not what is happening then it means that globally the problem is just displaced. (Which doesn’t work at the planet scale)
Germany has more energy generation capacity installed than it had last year. I certainly wish there would be a push for even more renewable and storage capacity, though. The fact that Germany is generating less energy has nothing to do with the phase out of nuclear though.
Raw energy generation is the bad number if you don’t take into account capacity factor. To replace 1MW of nuclear generation with a capacity factor of 0.9 you need almost 5MW of wind at 0.2. The 21 GW of nuclear energy of 2009 have barely been replaced in 2023 when taking into account the capacity factor.
> more energy generation capacity installed than it had last year
Nameplate capacity of a new solar plant with a capacity factor of 15% (remember, a cloudy country north of the 50th latitude) is not comparable with nameplate capacity of a well maintained nuclear plant with around 90% capacity factor...
A few reasons why people might be pushing against nuclear:
- high electricity generation costs
- "I don't want to live next to a nuclear plant"
- If Japan can't handle it securely, why do we think we can?
- Unsolved long-term waste storage location
- Cost for long-term storage must additionally covered by the society
- We are producing radioactive waste that must be securely stored for thousands of years to feed the energy needs of a couple generations, even though there are more sustainable and cheaper alternatives
-nuclear is realiable and cheap after built
-living next to nuclear vs next to coal plant/hydro dam isn't that bad
-japan wasn't able to handle one plant, and almost none were killed(most deaths were from tsunami
-Long term is solved: Sweden is building a special storage place. Combine with vitrification(solidification of waste) it's going to be ok
-cost is still negligible compared to cost/problems we have now bc of pollution
-France can reprocess 95% of nuclear fuel, actually 17% of their el energy is from reprocessed nuclear, the rest 5% should be stored for ~300 yrs to handle most dangerous radiation. Combined with vitrification, you get a safe way to store a solid form waste in a single controllable place instead of spreading it in the air(fossils)
So yeah, most of the fears are driven by fossil propaganda
" - If Japan can't handle it securely, why do we think we can?"
What does that even mean? There are no large earthquakes, let alone any tsunamis in Germany. And even if there were, most nuclear plants were not at the sea.
This is a misinterpretation of what happened and this comment is just weird.
Coal has been added after nuclear was stopped but what you said is not happening at all. Look at the actual data instead of random Internet comments and populist articles by biased journalists:
While lignite was in fact re-added, Germany only slowed the reduction of overall coal power and did not stop or reverse it as constantly proclaimed by commenters who care more about politics than engineering.
So Germany displaced nuclear mostly by renewable energy - WHILE ONLY SLOWING THE REDUCTION OF COAL when they added lignite. So still less coal than before, just not as fast as before.
Coal use is at a historic low in Germany, thus it is not possible that nuclear plants were replaced with coal. Statistics are reflecting reality, your facts are actually just guesses and opinions.
They were not, there is even less coal used since nuclear plants were shut down than before. Nuclear and coal are getting continuously replaced by renewables. Coal end date is set to either 2030 or 2038 (I forget).
The country people should be complaining about is Poland. It's the worst emitter of co2 in Europe and it will not do anything about it for 10-20 years because it wants to build nuclear plants.
> They were not, there is even less coal used since nuclear plants were shut down than before.
They were counterfactually. This means that if nuclear hadn't been shut down, much less coal energy would have been needed.
> The country people should be complaining about is Poland. It's the worst emitter of co2 in Europe and it will not do anything about it for 10-20 years because it wants to build nuclear plants.
No, people should complain about Germany. Nuclear power can replace coal. Which is why France produces much less CO2 than Germany:
People should complain about emissions and the lack of emission reduction. If Germany is producing a lot more than France, and this concerns you, you should complain even more bitterly about Poland because their emissions are 1) 2x as bad as Germany 2) in contrast go Germany they are not going down since the country is dreaming of nuclear energy.
Renewables can and do replace coal, as they obviously did in Germany. It does not really matter if you are ideologically aligned with another energy source, for whatever reason.
People should complain about emissions and emission reduction. Are emissions too high in Germany? Yes. Are they going down? Yes. Does it have a set date to remove coal from electricity production? Yes. So good things and a bright future, yet a lot of complaints.
In case of Poland neither is the case. I have yet to see an article complaining about Poland, despite it being neither good, nor it having a bright future. Why is that?
I am very interested in this topic and I assure you that nobody complains about Poland. I've seen even praise for their decision to prolong this situation and build nuclear plants. On the other hand, a country very much in deserve of praise like Germany is a constant target of criticism by various nuclear lobby groups, astroturfers and the like. You can see the effect even here on HN, it's a very common topic that "Germany replaced nuclear with coal", which is just simply false.
I do praise Poland for building nuclear plants. This is the only existing solution to the climate catastrophe. Also, it's one of the the most safe energy sources.
This is not "simply false". This is effectively true, even though it might not be the intention. There are many similar discussions about it on HN. See for example this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35819870.
There is no difference between building plants and producing the vast majority of your electricity from coal for the next 15 years. The latter is the consequence of the former.
Harmful are stupid regulations helping coal, and also people who don't get that damage from coal is so strong that even ancient nuclear reactors are safer, including Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Nuclear's long build times help coal plants stay open and are thus bad for emissions. Here [1] an article about Poland deciding to build nuclear plants FOUR YEARS AGO. During that time they did not displace a single molecule of co2 from their worst in Europe electricity production. The construction didn't even begin yet, and when it does it will again take years in the best case. If it takes as much as it did in other European countries recently, we are talking about 20 years easily.
Those that praise this strategy are either naive, misinformed, or funded by the nuclear lobby.
You can build both nuclear and solar and wind at the same time.
Poland will stick to coal because of local economic interests, it has nothing to do with nuclear.
> They were not, there is even less coal used since nuclear plants were shut down than before.
Well.. there is no reason why there shouldn’t be zero coal use before anyone starts shutting sown nuclear power plants. For one thing the issues with nuclear waste storage are a joke compared to the radiation and other pollution continuously emitted by burning coal…
Grids in Europe are interconnected. So you can build nuclear and and import wind/solar from the surrounding countries which would effectively be the same.
When the first wave of decomissions came in 2011, the number was
2011: 150 + 112 [1]
Straight question, to see if you can answer it: is it going up or down? Furthermore, even in the data you are posting, it's going down every year except last. And it went up last year because France's nuclear energy failed and needed to be supported [2].
About 100%: perhaps, but the proof is in the pudding. Historically, the naysayers have been incorrect for decades. Here [3], an advertisement from the German nuclear lobby from the 90s, that makes a case for young people: don't be against nuclear, we need it, renewables can NEVER account for more than 4% of our total production.
Electricity generation is decreasing year over year in Germany since 2015… but the fact is that it should be increasing to electrify heating and transportation. What is really happening is that industries are moving out of Germany to help pretend that the country CO2 emissions are better as no one really count imported CO2 in finished product.
Perhaps, but it was until now not electrifying heating and transportation, so reduction is obviously a positive thing. Nothing beats emissions of a kWh you saved. The question might be, was there something sacrificed to do that, e.g. did economy suffer? This would be bad, but it's not the case, the GDP is still going up. The savings are related to energy efficiency and this will reap benefits basically forever.
There is no saving (or marginally) it’s just heavy industries and energy consuming process leaving Germany (BASF for instance). Overall just a displacement of the problem. We don’t care about GDP, what matters is global CO2 emission. In 2023 13.4% of new cars are electric in Germany but electricity production is the lowest in 15 years, go figure.
> BASF is already reducing production of ammonia, which relies heavily on natural gas, and sourcing some it its ammonia needs from outside Europe, where gas prices are lower.
Basic fact you don’t seem to grasp is that electricity price in Europe are directly dependent on gas price as the price is governed by the price of the last capacity called which in Europe are gas driven…
Chemical plants but not only as the articles mentioned but glass ceramic etc are using large amount of electricity. The current decrease in electricity usage(that’s not only happening in Germany but throughout all Western Europe) is caused by industrial process moving out of Europe.
You seem to be hopping from one vaguely connected argument to another. I am aware that gas price sets the electricity price when deployed, but it has nothing to do with BASF, they were hit hard by specifically gas prices because they use gas. I already posted the link(s). And furthermore, that BASF went to China in 2023 did not affect electricity use in 2020, nor is BASF responsible for 50TWh of electricity per year. There is no grand scale industry movement out of Germany.
And before teaching lessons to Eastern European countries, remember that the West had 50 years after the WWII to build up the economy and infrastructure. It would be only fair to let Eastern European countries to develop for the same period, without demanding them pay the costs of higher energy prices.
What's wrong in terms of emissions is that they take forever to plan and build. During which time, Poland will continue to produce its electricity almost exclusively from coal. These are real emissions that can't be made up for once the nuclear plants are finished. The alternative is to replace a lot of the coal really fast with renewables. Further more, it's cheaper so you can replace a lot more than with nuclear.
There was a very good article on HN about how nuclear reactors only seem to have gotten harder to plan and execute in Western countries since the 1980s due to ever-increasing regulations. Building a nuclear reactor doesn't have to take decades.
> This is the only practically infinite source of CO2-free energy not relying on weather, geographical position or large area.
Okay? You haven't shown that an energy source not relying on weather, geographical position or large area is necessary to solve the climate crisis. Don't just throw around more attributes.
> It is safer than almost all other sources (taking into account Chernobyl and Fukushima)
Is it a physical fact of life they are safer (as in, you can't to do anything wrong) or is it our regulations that make them so safe? The regulations you want to remove?
> The climate catastrophe is considered obviously very dangerous by all scientific organizations
> You haven't shown that an energy source not relying on weather, geographical position or large area is necessary to solve the climate crisis.
Are you serious? Germamy can't abandon coal until 2030 because of that.
> or is it our regulations that make them so safe?
Did you read my comment? Even Chernobyl's regulation were sufficient to be safe, according to my link. I suggest to stop producing more regulations and build on latest working model.
> Are you serious? Germamy can't abandon coal until 2030 because of that.
Can you show me that renewables couldn't hit the same targets with enough investment?
> Did you read my comment? Even Chernobyl's regulation were sufficient to be safe, according to my link. I suggest to stop producing more regulations and build on latest working model.
I don't think you understand correctly. First off Chernobyl is in no way an argument in your favor, as it shows that nuclear energy isn't even safe with regulations. Yet you want to remove even more regulations which would increase dangers. Remember, GP wrote:
> There was a very good article on HN about how nuclear reactors only seem to have gotten harder to plan and execute in Western countries since the 1980s due to ever-increasing regulations. Building a nuclear reactor doesn't have to take decades.
Based on what you've said you either want to roll back to 1980s regulations, or before that. Both are unsafe.
Here is an article [1] by the American Nuclear Society detailing all the improvements that happened since the incident at Three Mile Island happened. It does not list these as negative, but positive, since they improve safety. So the industry thinks safe is correct, but then some like to pretend that removing these would make things only cheaper, never less safe. It cannot be true.
> The country people should be complaining about is Poland. It's the worst emitter of co2 in Europe
I don't have the numbers with me so I cannot check this right now, but I believe your comment to be incorrect. Germany must have more CO2 emissions than Poland from Coal alone since Germany is the largest user of energy from coal burning in Europe.
Sure, but we are not talking about per capita co2 emissions but the worst emitter, and that is Germany and not Poland. The world does not care about per capita anything, it cares about absolutes.
So I guess the problem might be solved if Germany dissolves into 16 smaller countries, this will surely reduce its emissions drastically. I haven't thought of that brilliant angle of tackling the climate crisis, just reduce the size of countries.
Do you have other ideas? At this rate we might solve the problem within a couple hours.
The renewable push in germany came because the greens (and other parties) wanted to shut down nuclear and replace it. If the exit from nuclear was never started, germany would have been much less willing to invest in renewables. German invesments in the early 2000s were one of the steps towards renewables being viable.
If germany kept nuclear as-is the counterfactual might look worse due to the expansion of renewables not happening.
> The renewable push in germany came because the greens (and other parties) wanted to shut down nuclear and replace it. If the exit from nuclear was never started, germany would have been much less willing to invest in renewables.
Investment in renewable energy is not a value in itself. France has much lower CO2 emissions because they invested in nuclear energy which can replace both coal and renewable energy.
> If germany kept nuclear as-is the counterfactual might look worse due to the expansion of renewables not happening.
But an expansion of nuclear could have happened, replacing coal. Wind and solar themselves are highly volatile and require an additional stable energy source like coal or nuclear.
As Germany went into renewables, France doubled down on nuclear, creating the EPR program and starting to build Flamanville 3 as a prototype that would lead to development of replacements for their current plants.
20 years later Flamanville 3 is still not finished and the EPR has been a disaster overall. Their current plants are starting to fail, they are producing less and less every year and had to rely on neighbors to supply electricity for them last year.
So there is quite a real and possible alternate timeline where Germany invests in nuclear instead of renewables and now it's still producing more than half of its electricity from coal because the nuclear plants are not finished and at huge cost.
Very unlikely. Nuclear (in the West) hasn't been expanded in the last 30 years, partially due to overblown safety concerns but also due to cost issues. There has been no hugely successful nuclear build, all that tried took almost as long as the renewable industry has existed in any real sense and cost absurd amounts of money. Looking at other large german projects during that timeframe, it's unlikely there would have been more than one plant opening. The hope of nuclear advocates is that by increasing economies of scale in production and reducing it on the individual plant level the economics of NPP will work out in future. I'm highly doubtful but hope they're successful.
> Wind and solar themselves are highly volatile and require an additional stable energy source like coal or nuclear.
For wind and solar to make sense, you need complimentary power sources. Wind and solar do have very complimentary characteristics (night/day as well as winter/summer), but not perfectly. This means "base load" power sources which should run as much as possible like (lignite and somewhat black) coal or especially nuclear work very badly (economically), due to the high cost of the plant and low utilization factor. B
In a fully renewable grid, most of the day power will solely come from wind and solar, probably with batteries filling the gaps during morning and evening and some form of long term storage like P2G/Hydrogen/... will cover dunkelflauten (time spans without solar nor wind) during winter. There should be overproduction during most of the time.
In an almost fully nuclear grid, solar might be used during summer to cover ACs or similar things, but storage is still required to avoid needing build enough NPPs to supply peak power usage. France uses large amounts of hydrostorage on the alps and the european power grid to reduce the NPP overcapacity needed during the day.
This is in contrast to gas, most forms of hydroelectricity, batteries or (hopefully) P2G/Hydrogen, whose costs primarily scale with the amount of energy, not power.
Building an grid almost only based on nuclear and wind/solar without some form of flexible generation is economically nonsensical. Both can be used in the same grid to some amount, but don't complement each other well.
Strong disagree. That would imply that Germany should be criticized more than the US, but this cannot be. The US did not close its nuclear plants, but is still at 60% fossil fuels.
I don't think this is a coincidence because when Diablo Canyon was extended, the first thing that happened is that they asked for a billion dollars so they are able to even run. Nuclear is an expensive distraction and a hog of resources (time and money)
Is it that more expensive if you take into account all the externalities from burning coal? Increased cancer risk due to high radiation, other pollution etc. CO2 is just the cherry on top..
> That would imply that Germany should be criticized more than the US, but this cannot be.
This is tangential and there is also no need to resort to whataboutism for no reason.
There's no whataboutism, I wasn't saying Germany might be bad, but look at someone else. I'm asking a question about the logical conclusion of what you're saying: the most important thing is to keep nuclear plants alive before coal is removed. Sure, but it can't be right. Many countries are doing that, e.g. the US, and failing to decarbonize as quickly as Germany. So it's illogical and irrational.
Furthermore there can't be whataboutism because Germany is a leader in fossil fuel reduction this century. So there's nothing "bad" to accept and to do whataboutism about.
I don’t follow. I mean you might be right. But using US as an example hardly make sense because they didn’t really try to ‘decarbonize’ that hard..
> because Germany is a leader in fossil fuel reduction this century
Germany was emitting ~500 grams per kWh back in 2000 and 385 in 2022. That not that spectator at all considering they weren’t at all trying to change this until the mid 2010s.
EU wide CO2 emissions have continuously decreased from around 520 grams to less than 250 in the same period.
So not only Germany wasn’t a leader throughout 90%+ of this century, they it was much worse than average…
And also by buying electricity from Sweden, which causes my bills to explode. (Because we've also shuttered half of our nuclear facilities.) So when Germany buys enough, we start our oil powerplants to cover :)
That last part of the sentence is not true. Coal usage is down overall since they started closing nuclear plants over a decade ago. There are a few new gas plants though. There was a shift from gas to coal last year for cost reasons.
And coal is scheduled to be decommissioned completely. We'll see if Germany can stick to the schedule of doing that by 2035. But that's the official plan so far.
Oh, we also started importing nuclear electricity from France at scale to bridge the gap. So, it’s not as bad as you put it. Nuclear waste is now somebody else’s problem…
You might not be serious, but, for others' benefit, nuclear waste is not a problem. One just has to not be a complete moron about it. And, most of the spent nuclear fuel will be reusable in the future.
those didn't appear out of the thin air, but because of underfunding driven by the greens. Problems were fixed, and now, just like in the past, France is exporting energy
The total amount of electricity generation is decreasing which is a sign that energy transition is not taking place in Germany (it's just displacement). In 2019 the first half of year Germany produced 264000GWh vs 224000GWh in 2023. In fact total electricity production is decreasing since 2015 when it was over 273000GWh. You can increase your renewable share if you are producing less. If you look carefully you will see that nuclear generation was just not replaced.
Given the lower amount of energy generated by coal compared to when the nuclear plants were still running, it would be more accurate to say that they were replaced by solar and wind power since they are the only forms of energy creation that increased their output since nuclear was shut down.
No, we didn't. Germany constantly reduced the am amount of coal in the mix. Admittedly starting at a way to high level, but it was constantly reduced. One can argue that the reduction could have been faster, but that are the mistakes of the past. Germany is now aggressively expanding renewables and as the article shows, successfully so.
The 57.7% figure seems to be a bit misleading in this context. I searched for statistical data on how much idle coal power is held on standby and not included in these statistics, for example, but I didn't find any. Does anyone know where to get full raw data?
I swear, sometimes HN users can be so pedantic, they'll demand source that the earth is round or that the water is wet.
I used to be afraid that ChatGPT would make our jobs redundant, but seeing how people can't find basic info by themselves and need to ask humans to spoon feed them, I think I can breathe easily that our jobs are safe.
The poster can't know what is ostensible to you and what isn't, and nor does everyone here have the time to post sources for absolutely every single statement they make as if they're writing a university research paper.
As a reader, if you're unsure of something, use common sense and in the age of powerful internet search engines and LLM chat bots at your fingertips, it's up to you to quickly check for yourself, and only ask the poster for sources when you were unable to find the corect information by yourself, otherwise it's a waste of everyone's time.
That was December last year, the last plants were closed this year, the comeback of coal was minimal an mostly caused by the need of France to import electricity, since their nuclear plants failed.
Why does OP need to provide a source? Why you don't look for the info yourself?
It is common knowledge in Europe that Germany shut down its nuclear plant (15/04/23 the last one), and they compensated with a lot of coal this winter.
Just that those things have no relation to each other. Coal is used to replace gas, not nuclear plants. And AFAIK in mid of April there is no winter any more anyway.
The question is valid, as there is a huge amount of misinformation going around those topics.
Nuclear plants in Germany only deliver electricity, and only where the grid is connected. But coal is used also used for heat and chemical processes, and outside the grid. No source of electricity can cover that yet in a short timeframe. And even if we are just talking about electricity in grid-connected locations, with the high cost of nuclear plants, it makes more sense to just buy it from others, and wait until new renewables sources were added to the grid, and long term build other replacements for heat and the chemical processes.
isn’t coal more expensive if you take all the negative externalities into account? Specifically increased rates of cancer and other diseases caused by pollution on top of CO2 emission?
Maybe, but that's irrelevant today, the original plans were crushed by reality, and now we must accept the mess and move on. Germany could have been in a better situation, if politicians did a better job a decade or two ago. But complaining today about the mess from yesterday, because of the fails from 12 years ago is pointless.
All that most Germans want to do, is to drive in their SUVs and park everywhere. That is what they vote for. Meanwhile they vote against nuclear (I'm scared) and wind (Verschanden meine Landschaft)
Temporary or not, coal is being burned to produce electricity in Germany
> and mostly not for nuclear plants.
electricity is fungible.
It doesn't matter what electricity the coal is intending to replace, as long as _any_ coal is being turned into electricity, that's coal that could not have been burned if a nuclear plant was generating that electricity instead
The argument is that we could have kept nuclear running and shut down all coal. In 1990, nuclear power plants were producing 153TWh in Germany. Today, coal+nuclear together is producing about as much.
5 years ago it was significant higher. And in 5 years it will significant lower again. Germany is in a process of change.
> The argument is that we could have kept nuclear running and shut down all coal.
Which is wrong. Nuclear can't replace gas, which coal is replacing. And Nuclear plants have no fuel anymore and lacking up-to-date certification. There was zero chance to continue running since 2019, even if we ignore all the other problems.
Most of the population changed their mind and is pro-nuclear. But sadly the only party really supporting nuclear energy is the AfD, which is a far-right party most would never consider to vote for.
Nuclear phase-out is part of the Green party identity; the CDU had Merkel going against nuclear after Fukushima and can't really go back, the FDP agreed, the SPD is also against it.
I'm afraid you're not realizing the impact of your echo chamber. The bulk of german voting power lies in the age group of 40 to 70, measured by voter turnout per age group. People aged 45 and up felt the imoact of the Chernobyl disaster, whole forests in Germany are still not allowed to be foraged for mushrooms because of ground contamination. Those people have their fear of nuclear power ingrained in them and as usual there's not a lot you can do to convince them. As such "Most of the population changed their mind and is pro nuclear." is definitely not true, at least not right now and I doubt it will ever change.
And as we've seen recently in the state of Thuringia, AFD has garnered the top with 35%, that's far from "most people would never consider to vote for".
Yeah but they didnt shut it down because of some safety concerns, in truth nuclear is just too cheap for infinite growth of the German electricity corpos, and those pay all the politicians. Highest electricity prices on the planet, that's good old corruption that rotted Germany to the core.
And their politics is all neoliberal, of course they drive people to the right, it's the only alternative that doesn't threaten capital.
Left-right is an inadequate system for classifying politics, but the AfD is certainly not center, and it's ridiculous to classify them as "left", either economically (where there are mostly neoliberal) or socially (where they are as conservative as you can get).
And that's exactly proof of how immensely far left Germany's politics have shifted. In absolute terms, the AFD is a left leaning party. They still support "immigration" for example.
Could you explain how the AfD is left leaning? Their positions align with the right:
- stopping immigration
- stronger rights for police and authorities
- emphasis on classical gender roles, ban of LGBT "propaganda" (as they call it)
- lowering taxes and reducing government size
- leaving the Euro zone and creating a new currency
And since they are taking these positions to their extremes, it seems entirely fair to call them "extreme right". No other parties would keep literal Nazis among their leadership.
You did not understand me correctly. They are taking extreme versions of these positions. It doesn't matter whether the positions themselves count as moderate in other countries or not.
But then you would have to claim that the mainstream parties of many, if not most, countries are "right extremist". Japan would probably count as significantly more "extremist" than the AfD.
Right now, Germany appears to be 85% renewable [0], but is still pretty mediocre on CO2 emissions compared to many of its neighbours (Poland excepted!). That 8GW of coal still hurts, but the trend is pretty good.
Yes, but there's little point in electrifying heating until you have a cleaner grid. Right now, the marginal source of power in Germany is coal and in the UK is mostly gas (occasionally coal). If you switch your heating to electric heating, that's how the electricity would be generated. With gas as the marginal source, if you switch from a modern condensing gas boiler to an air-source heat pump with a COP of 2.5, you might come out a little ahead in CO2 emmisions once you factor in generation (50% thermal efficiency) and transmission (9% losses for the UK) losses, but not a lot. With coal as the marginal source, you come out behind in CO2 emissions from switching from gas heating to a heat pump. If you switched from gas to resistive heating, it's a lose all round.
> but there's little point in electrifying heating until you have a cleaner grid
That's not true. Both endeavours are long - if you wait to start electrifying heating until the grid is fully decarbonised, you'll be waiting for a decade before starting another decade-long thing. If both are done in parallel it sill, of course, be much faster.
I guess you're talking about as a country. But as an individual in the UK, I'm better to wait. Switching now doesn't help CO2 emissions and sometimes hurts, prices will likely be lower in future as production scales up, I can invest the money in the meantime, and I can get a brand new heat pump at the point it actually does help. Instead I've focussed now on better insulation.
If you are in Germany or the UK, you would expect a COP of around 4 from a serious system. Or at least, COP4 is what we expect in the Netherlands, and the climate is not that different. COP 2.5 is a sign of a poor setup.
We don't have time to do things one after another, we have to switch heating, transport and most everything else to electric while simultaneously improving electricity generation.
First, if demand is not there, installed capacity isn't fully utilized. Since production costs of existing renewable installations is lower than carbon-based plants, a lull in demand will automatically increase the renewable percentage, that's neither good nor bad. But in fact, installed capacity is rising: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/installierte-leistung-zu..., so no, the record is not only due to lower production.
Second, until 2022, renewables were actively hindered by the various Merkel cabinets. The roadmap going forward is way more aggressive, but of course planning takes some time. So a "rapid build-up" is still a multi-year thing.
I did not claim it is only to lower production - it's mainly due to it. Which is exactly my point.
Renewables were not actively hindered, Germany just decided to stop paying 30-50 cent per kwh in subsidies because it's stupid. Also, this is a seperate discussion.
It's not a separate discussion, in fact it's at the core of the current problems.
The original idea was to get rid of nuclear and coal and use gas as an intermediate step till renewables would be competitive. Then Merkel happened and all of a sudden, renewables were neutered and complacency set in: gas would be "good enough", and Russia a reliable supplier.
Please tell me again how that has to do with my root post on this thread.
but - okay, if you want to play this game - that has nothing to do with this thread: the renewables were built faster under Merkel than under the current coalition. Germany has the (one of) the highest electricity prices on this planet. The german electricity - after putting in $500bn+ - is still 5x dirtier than French electricity. We have not yet even started to build storage, which we will need a lot of. Finland, Sweden, France, Belgium and others are successfully combining nuclear power with RE. Germany is alone on this stupid quest and paying dearly for it.
For a fair judgement one must look at the bigger picture for example by looking at the CO2 emissions in general per capita. The latest data I could find is of 2021.[1] Germany is 8.09t, while Australia is 15.09t, USA is 14.86t, Canada is 14.30t. Germany is not so far away from countries which are very "green" on the map you linked, such as Iceland (9.11t -- more than Germany!) Norway (7.57t), Austria (7.24t) and Finland (6.79t).
This is only an example. Also CO2 emissions per capita does not provide us with a complete picture. (For example, if a country emits CO2 in the production of export goods, to what extent should the emissions actually be attributed to the importing countries?) By phasing out nuclear energy, Germany has made a major contribution to environmental protection. However, since this is a completely different category of environmental protection, it cannot objectively be offset against presumably associated CO2 emissions. In an open democratic society, such considerations are therefore not the task of a technical elite, but of the people as a whole. As an individual, of course, one can always take a different view of such majority opinions on the matter and campaign for them to be revised. However, one should always be aware that the weighing of such alternatives is fundamentally opinionated.
A lot of Iceland's CO2 emissions seem to be from tourism and metal production for export, particularly aluminium. It obviously doesn't make too much sense to think about this in per-capita terms since they're a tiny country population-wise and there's not really much relationship between their population and the amount of energy used for those things. Also, a large part of the reason that Iceland has so much aluminium smelting is that they have a lot of cheap, low-CO2 power that makes it both more viable and less polluting to do it there than elsewhere. (By comparison, China also has a lot of aluminium smelting these days, but it's so inefficient and high-CO2 compared to the alternatives that it shouldn't be viable - the general reckoning is that it's heavilty subsidised by the government there.)
I guess that's because most of the non-renewable electricity is generated with lignite so even with the 85% renewables generation the map shows at this moment, there are still significant CO2 emissions.
Germany is “green” same as California: high air pollution with most energy imports of any state in the nation. Blood diamond economics applied to energy. I predict that France will become an international leader in nuclear energy, while Germany will kill the most birds.
Germany is a net exporter of electricity, and has been for over 20 years. Last year, France actually had to import electricity because their NPPs kept failing (too much heat, too little rain, no water to act as coolant).
Retail prices still seem at a record 40c/kwh or more. Perhaps tolerable with a C4 professor Fraunhofer salary, adjusted for inflation (unlike the salaries of the plebs).
If you don't speak fluent French and want to live there (as a tourist is fine, although outside MTL + Quebec City, English proficiency by the residents should not be assumed), your government dislikes you and is generally trying to make your life harder in as many ways as it can think of. I would expect that to continue getting worse.
On the HN/startup crowd note, that includes mandates that business in the office be generally conducted in French if you have 25+ employees, and there's significant enforcement powers to those mandates now.
Beyond that, the economy has lagged that of other provinces over past decades, although in recent years that's been less true - remains to be seen if that performance is a break with the long-term trends or not.
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More subjective:
It's generally going to be the "big government" model. Highest taxes on high earners in Canada, generally a reputation for more social services, more regulations.
Climate's pretty rough to many, although not extreme by Canadian standards. Still, it's a big difference from Southern Ontario or Vancouver.
Montreal is basically the only major "world" city, Quebec City is about the only other one of some national/international significance.
While it may look big on a map or as a number, in reality nearly the entire population lives in a relatively small corridor and much of the land area of the province is virtually uninhabited and in many cases basically inaccessible short of a helicopter or serious wilderness expedition. It will not feel anything like being 4x the size of Germany even if it technically is, for an example.
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Anyway, the power is cheap because it all comes from large hydro plants up north, they're blessed by geography in that sense.
In southern Germany, at the end of 2022, i got a letter from the electricity provider that prices were going up from 27c to 48c per kwh in a single bound.
Revisit this in December, please. This headline is a problem, not an achievement. The amplitude in output of renewables in good vs. bad weather makes it impossible to install photovoltaic panels in many places already now.
I think renewable energy disruption is happening faster than many can fathom. A few breakthroughs in storage technology and things might actually turn into optimism from Climate fears in 1 or 2 decades. Hopefully entrenched interests do not let free market disrupt them this time.
According to the modeling of the Fraunhofer (base assumption), we will need to double our capacity from gas (yay), double renewables to eventually achieve twice the carbon footprint of France by 2030. The base load is so high in Germany and renewables are so unreliable, that we need >100% installed capacity from “conventional” sources. The storage and “smart grid” is not really feasible or likely to happen imho.
Disclaimer: I have PV, use ground heat in my house; I’m totally pro zero emission but Germany’s ideological decision making makes it impossible whilst pumping up prices beyond affordable.
Gas generation capacity is different from GHG and other pollutants caused by actually burning fossil gas. Don't be fooled by people implying they are the same.
And Germany is actually a world leader in capturing biogas, which has negative GHG emissions even after being burnt.
Having said that, Germany still burns black and brown coal so a switch to more gas instead would be a positive for them. They'd have plenty of supply if they shift to heat pumps for heating and decarbonise industry currently using the rest.
Well a) you can indeed literally replace gas by biogas, b) your article suggests that we can't quickly replace Russian gas with biogas, which is true. But there's nothing that can quickly replace Russian gas, we can do a whole bunch of things (imported gas, imported electricity, imported chemicals, renewables, efficiency, heat pumps) but even that isn't a perfect short term fix.
But it's already at 5% of the electricity grid, and that's about what would be needed in a mostly renewable grid. That's the only use of gas we want long term, the rest should be phased out anyway. It's a big, epensive engineering project, but not as big and expensive as building lots of nuclear.
As your article says, think of it as a way to get rid of methane emissions from farming, with storable energy as a bonus.
You need to support 50% of the grid with new gas plants.
You *CANNOT* phase out gas plants , coal plants and nuclear and solely rely on renewables as of today (and the next 30, 50???) years in an industrialized nation like Germany.
And maybe don’t paraphrase the article like “hey its a challenge but possible”. We don’t have enough agricultural space to cover our demand. The number of (ethical,infrastructure,price) problems is so long that the idea defies reality. But you are talking about IDEOLOGY and in Germany, if you have the right IDEOLOGY, reality doesn’t matter any longer. That’s other people’s problem.
Jan Seven rechnet damit nicht. „Aus volkswirtschaftlichen Gründen ist es nicht darstellbar und auch nicht zu rechtfertigen, Biogas in dem Maße weiter zu fördern oder bestimmten Umbauszenarien zu folgen.“ Biogas sei verglichen mit den anderen erneuerbaren Energien die mit Abstand teuerste Energieform. Auch, weil Lebensmittel, die in Biogasanlagen zum großen Teil genutzt würden, teurer geworden seien. „Deswegen sehen wir beim Biogas eigentlich überhaupt keine Kostenreduktion, die wir bei Solarstrom und Wind massiv gesehen haben im letzten Jahr.“ … “ Diese Energiepflanzen belegen 15 Prozent der deutschen Ackerflächen. Insgesamt 1,5 Millionen Hektar, die eigentlich dringend benötigt werden, um dort Lebensmittel und Futter anzubauen, sagt Jan Seven. „Auf diesen Flächen wachsen keine Lebensmittel, es wachsen keine Futtermittel für die Tiere, die wir in großer Stückzahl halten. Die Futtermittel importieren wir aus Brasilien. Wir haben eine direkte Konkurrenz zwischen Teller und Fermenter.“ In einem Fermenter werden in einer Biogasanlage die Rohstoffe erwärmt und zersetzt, sodass Biogas entstehen kann.”
The article is saying that we can't expand biogas to replace all our current gas usage. Which is fine, as electricity meets most of those needs better anyway (e.g. heat pumps for home or industrial heating/cooling, renewables for the majority of electricity).
But the article also states that non-food based manure biogas could be expanded to 3x current with no impact on food (well, except to make German meat and dairy more GHG friendly). Food waste is another source that doesn't compete for land. Coal mines and landfills leak methane. New satelitte tech can pinpoint small sources and fine people that don't capture it, providing both a stick and a carrot.
So, the small amount of unavoidable gas usage, can be met by capturing stuff that would otherwise be released as methane. We already have gas storage and gas turbines. We can mix in green hydrogen too if need be.
50% is the capacity we need, not the amount of energy that needs to be supplied.
Here's a Wartsila projection for Germany suggesting 8% "flexible gas" is what's required, with 59% of peak capacity. That is, a very small amount of the year, it's used a lot. Luckily we already have large amounts of gas storage built. (Also, we've done a complete loop on this thread: "Gas generation capacity is different from GHG and other pollutants caused by actually burning fossil gas. Don't be fooled by people implying they are the same.")
You need to provide >100% installed capacity with gas as you phase out coal and nuclear. Because renewables aren’t reliable and you kind of need a conventional backup today.
We are missing 50% in gas plant capacity.
Your happy collection of “nice happy ideas” isn’t gonna cut it at the scale we need it to happen within 7 years. I’m so tired of this nonsense by people like you.
This isn’t some elementary science fair project. It’s people gambling away the economic foundation of Germany over some “would be nice” ideas.
>we will need to double our capacity from gas (yay)
Notably, green gas, not fossil gas. You can call that conventional, but it's not adding CO2 emissions. According to their study, the CO2 factor would fall from 460g/kWh in 2020 to 150 in 2030 and between 3 and 9 in 2050. You can't just go "meh, twice as much as France" and ignore that the scenario starts at 15x France.
I think (and I might be wrong, but the ballpark should be right), we will have 600% capacity installed in renewables and 100-150% installed in conventional capacity by 2030. So shifting to renewables means like 700+% installer capacity, which means that when sun shines and wind blows, you will only be able to use 1/7 of the electricity produced during the day whilst also potentially running the gas turbines full steam at night. We have observed this a lot this year in Germany (e.g. wind was taken off grid because solar produced too much whilst gas and coal only delivered a minimal (?) operational load).
Actually China seems to be ahead of their own plans and Chinese emissions might peak in 24 and decline from that point on as they are rolling out renewables at an astonishing pace.
I believe some of the acceleration maybe due to local generation decreasing distribution losses and the summer PV generation decreasing peaker plant ramp ups.
I think those are subtitles are hard to judge and most likely downplayed by incumbents.
I think people can fathom a lot and demand as much. Even if the renewable energy transition happens faster than we think, we are still a decade or so late. It cannot happen quickly enough at this point.
In the past 2 decades Germany has blown hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy. Now we have the highest electricity price in the world.
It is all socialism. Zero market :-(
Oh, but you are aware that we need to DOUBLE our installed capacity for gas by 2030 in order to be able to manage our electricity grid towards renewables, right? Page 25:
Nowhere on p 25 can I find this. Maybe you mean p 27, and I don't get what argument you are trying to make. Yes, there would be more gas capacity, but for green gas.
Like an unproven technology at industry scale to power 50% of Germans electricity need reliably - all within the next 7 years? We don’t even have fast internet. Yeah.
Where do u get the hydrogen from and how do you transport it at the scale required is one of these “questions for starters”.
Megawatt scale isn’t really gonna cut it - the largest one in Germany has 110 MW (?) so we would need almost 1000 of them to cover our need when the sun doesn’t shine or there aint no wind
Come back with "market" once the CO2 price hits the real costs. Estimates I've seen range from 200€-700€/tCO2e. Until then we're borrowing billions of Euros from the future every year to burn more fossil fuels.
Living in Germany is leaving any big city and seeing loads of wind turbines everywhere.
I know very little of its economics, like that it typically takes 7 years to pay it back and lasts 20-25 years, but looks like a good way to generate renewable energy and will likely soon take Germany to 100%.
It's a goal for the government and for many years it has been pushing forward. I dislike many things here, but I can't say I don't admire the country's ability to execute on this and other subjects.
I really don't get why the US and other strong countries don't invest as much on it.
There is some environmental impact(birds etc) and downsides, but overall looks like one of the best ways to generate energy until we have fusion energy. Also creates many jobs.
The US does invest in it, almost all new capacity added is renewables, has been for several years now, and this will not change unless something happens. The fastest grower is Texas of all places simply because it's really cheap.
Birds are not an environmental issue, it was just a made up talking point that was debunked. Windows and cars are responsible for an order of magnitude more bird deaths.
Furthermore, offshore wind farms are great for birds. They provide more surface area for algae and other stuff to grow underwater, which then feeds to the rest of the ecosystem.
> Birds are not an environmental issue, it was just a made up talking point that was debunked. Windows and cars are responsible for an order of magnitude more bird deaths.
It is not viable, because renewables do not provide basic load for the grid. It is "stochastical" energy. There are no economical viable ways to store that "random" energy. There are several times in the year, where there is not enough wind and sun to feed the grid.
Failing to provide details smells a lot like „wonder weapons will turn the war around“. There is currently no battery tech that is remotely economical, and other more obscure solutions haven’t made a lot of impact either, presumably for economic reasons too.
There isn't a lot of storage because there isn't a lot of surplus energy to store right now. It's more economical to build more generation capacity. But storage is really not hard: just store hydrogen. No magic technology is needed. You can buy Megawatt range electrolyzers today.
The wind turbines are only there to hide the giant, coal-powered power plants that Germany had to restart because the tree-huggers who run that country decided to ditch nuclear.
Ditching nuclear doesn't make wind less important for Germany. I also do hope that this situation also changes, nuclear > coal.
I don't doubt the veracity of the article. We've been seeing similar and growing numbers for years. I don't get the hate to wind and how energy generation can easily become a political subject.
All kind of idiot (objectively) environmentalists were fighting against nuclear for decades in Germany and other countries. They weren’t the only factor but nuclear was already effectively dead by 2011 in Germany.
> Living in Germany is leaving any big city and seeing loads of wind turbines everywhere.
I know very little of its economics, like that it typically takes 7 years to pay it back and lasts 20-25 years, but looks like a good way to generate renewable energy and will likely soon take Germany to 100%.
At the same time, no animals are living in and near wind farms. Plants that require pollination don't grow because no bees can live in or near wind farms. Building wind farms, also means less space to grow crops, so there will be a food problem. Wind turbines aren't producing energy when the wind doesn't blow.
Nuclear plants would have been a much better solution to the problem.
The price of electricity has been falling in Germany since the beginning of the year, the share of renewable energies in the electricity supply has risen to 65%. The level of gas storage is 20% higher than in recent years, even though there is no more gas flowing from Russia. Nevertheless, the price of gas and heating oil is falling in Germany. It seems to me that the catastrophic news regarding energy blackout etc. in Germany of the last year were slightly exaggerated.
Interesting development announced in the Netherlands last week.
We're going to create massive hydrogen infrastructure where we produce it from sea water of the North Sea and then transport it inland using a pipe system to reach a low number of mega hubs, where high energy industry will plug in. Included will be some pipes crossing the border, surely into Germany.
On top of this, our king went to Portugal to secure massive deals with Portugal. Apparently it's easier/cheaper to produce Hydrogen in the Mediterranean. Some of it will be produced there and then shipped to Rotterdam, and then fed into the pipes.
We're the gods of big infra and also very cheap, so you can be sure that this is going to work.
Porche, Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Volkswagen. They are the German darlings. Hard to shake them to move to full electric since they are knee deep invested in ICE engines.
Germany also shot themselves in foot by shutting down all nuclear plants and started burning coal.
Lol. If I'm reading the article properly, renewable energy production actually went -down- in 2023 compared to 2022: 97TW compared to 99TW one year earlier.
But: non-renewable energy production in GE went down even more, due to, amongst others, the shutdown of nuclear plants.
Did GE then start consume so much less energy compared to 2022? No it did not. GE -produced- less energy, in particular less non-renewable energy. But to compensate, it imported more energy. And all this imported energy was non renewable; much of it was LPG that was imported from oversea.
Germany should be shamed when it comes to green energy. They actively lobbied to make nuclear energy be excluded from green energies, and they have shut down their nuclear power plants to replace them by coal powered plants.
We now have the highest electricity cost in the world. In my city the price currently is at 40 USD cents per kilowatt hour.
The policy of the current government is radically anti climate change. Foreighn investments into Germany have plummeted in the last year.
Energy prices are rising in all of the industrialized world, and cars are reaching "prohibitive prices" everywhere. Does that mean the whole world, not just Germany, is deindustrializing?
Industrial companies have been the backbone of the German economy for the longest time. They provided decent living wages for a large section of the blue collar workforce.
The reality is that not everyone is built for a office job, not everyone has the skills, education or intellectual capacity to work in a service-based economy. Yet, these folks could make a decent living for themselves.
"Decent living" for the standards of year 2000 perhaps. Real wages stagnated for a long time while rich got relatively even richer. Furthermore, the structure of the economy has been changing, it's just that Germany is slow to adapt (perhaps more so because of its aging population).
Germany's energy consumption per capita has dropped about 20% since its 1980s peak and has been trending down fairly sharply since 2007 [0]. AfD is polling extremely well on the back of a "stop this madness" environmental platform.
German renewable energy policies have been a failure at securing human prosperity.
The developed world has coordinated energy policy and they're all failing together. France and the US are both tinderboxes with mass riots in recent memory; likely linked to the lifestyle squeeze that poor people are undergoing. Germany and Japan are both deindustrialising due to lack of energy. Japan is accompanying this with a state of breathtakingly rapid population decline and they are still seeing per capita energy drop.
That is a graph of countries with failed energy policy. It has been a long time in the works.
Order of magnitude, what specific efficiencies do you think are causing this?
because I think that is just completely silly. Efficiencies will trigger Jevons' paradox and result in energy use rising. What we're seeing in these graphs is a squeeze as Asian nations outcomplete the developed countries combined with a series of policy failures in the West as we choke out our own energy and industrial bases.
> what specific efficiencies do you think are causing this
Depends of the place... Improvements in computers & electronics (new TV uses less than half what the old one used 10 y ago), new transportation technologies, better building insulation, diminishing meat consumption... The high energy prices and regulations are two good pushers on that.
> Efficiencies will trigger Jevons' paradox and result in energy use rising
Picking on this as the most obvious example - the first thing you mention is consumer electronics efficiencies as being linked to a reduced energy use in the last 10 years, but then you linked an article showing that German per-household electricity use rose in the last 10 years. It is a challenging to connect those things.
The issue you have here is you're pulling ideas out of your hat with no evidence. If you do some order of magnitude estimates and have any statistics on hand, you're going to find that you're just wrong. The evidence points to Europe being midway though a deindustralisation and likely going through a big drop in living standards as industrial capital starts to decay.
Their energy policies are likely to be somewhere between shattering the living standards of the poor in Europe through to plain old catastrophic as the consequences of relying on Russian gas and Chinese manufacturing start to bite.
> Overall, how do you propose to fight climate change in the coming 5 to 10 years?
I don't. The Europeans are fighting climate change and their standard of living is starting to collapse. There are riots in France and war has come to the continent again. The Chinese embraced fossil fuels and got something like 40 years of peace and prosperity where their lifestyles improved a jaw dropping amount.
The people "fighting" climate change
(1) Achieved nothing.
(2) Are suffering for it.
If they'd gone all-in on prosperity in the 80s and tried to make nuclear reactors work, ironically they would have done more for climate change and for their own citizens. Unfortunately, the environmentalists carried that battle and now everyone gets to suffer.
This headline would be more true if we had transportation fully electrified and all buildings heated with heat pumps, but last I heard the proposed law to require the latter transition to be started in 2024 was dropped again, and they're also still debating about starting to require transitioning the combustion engine fleets to electric by, what was it, 2030?
I also still see stickers here, calling for the closure of a nuclear plant in Belgium. These people live near one of the biggest coal mines and power plants, but tihange is what scares them.
Looks like we'll have to dig in our own pockets if we want to be part of the solution, government isn't going to do it, even in a principalistic country as Germany. We'll get to +3°C or something but at least you can tell the kids of 2060 that you at least did what you could...