> Because fossil-fuel power plants cannot easily ramp down generation in response to excess supply on the grid, on sunny, windy days there is sometimes so much power in the system that the price goes negative—in other words, operators of large plants, most of which run on coal or natural gas, must pay commercial customers to consume electricity.
Sounds like they need to encourage EV acquisition so that the extra supply of energy can go to EVs, while the pollution is reduced by taking diesel and petrol cars off the roads. They could also make use of batteries for storage so they can retire coal plants and better handle the variability of energy use.
> The auction system is designed to reduce the rate of new renewable-energy additions and keep Germany from producing too much power. It might seem like an easy way to solve the oversupply issue would be to shut down excess power plants, especially ones that burn coal. But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down. Because German law requires renewable energy to be used first on the German grid, when Germany exports excess electricity to its European neighbors it primarily comes from coal plants. Last fall, the German subsidiary of the Swedish energy giant Vattenfall started up a 1,600-megwatt coal-fired plant that had been under construction for eight years, defying opposition from politicians, environmental organizations, and citizens who want to see coal plants eliminated.
Okay, that's just stupid. This is nothing but a short term problem that could be easily solved with batteries. Anything else seems to be a political problem, not a technical one.
And what about the 20,000 people killed in coal mining accidents every year[0]? What about the 130 million tonnes[1] of radioactive waste[2] produced by coal plants annually? Why are we still building a new coal power plant every other week[3]?
Welcome to germany, land of the green and people who consider their morality to be superior. We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables. We shut down our mostly modern atom reactors to burn more coal. We now spend ~30 dollar cent per kilowatt hour to have much dirtier energy than most of the rest of europe. We pay money to our neighbours so they take away our surplus of energy at peaks and push the energy distribution to the limits which results in instabilities. Newbuild house prices have increased by 40% in the last ten years just because of the extremely high energy standards home builders have to adhere too (insulation, stupid energy exchangers et. al)
And all the while we are the only sane people in our own eyes.
> We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables. We shut down our mostly modern atom reactors to burn more coal. We now spend ~30 dollar cent per kilowatt hour to have much dirtier energy than most of the rest of europe.
This is so wrong I don't know if you're pushing some sort of agenda or just trolling.
We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables.
In 2015, the total power generation in Germany was 559 TWh. Renewables amount to about 121 TWh, i.e. about 22%. [0]
Newbuild house prices have increased by 40% in the last ten years
That sounds like a lot. From what I can find, construction prices have increased by about 20% since 2005 -- that goes for virtually all kinds of construction, including road construction[1][2]. Must be all the heat exchangers in those new roads... I'm not sure if that figure is corrected for overall inflation, it doesn't appear to be (cumulative inflation in Germany since 2005 is about 15%[3]).
Yeah you get nice numbers if you ignore the total energy usage. The numbers you gave are only one fifth of Germanys total energy consumption. I was off by 2% though, 3% is covered by renewables. We are not only talking electric, but total energy: heat, oil etc.
Renewable energy is usually only framed in terms of electrical power generation, but taking a wider perspective is sensible.
Primary energy is 3704 TWh[0], so 3% jives with the numbers I gave (so you were off by a factor of 3). 27% of that is heating, 39% transportation. The key to reducing those is gains in efficiency, ie. things like insulation, combined heat and power, renewable heat on the one hand, more efficient cars and more public transportation on the other hand.
I really hate how irrational green groups are on nuclear power generation. And how much the media stokes irrational fears about nuke plants.
There were no deaths directly attributable to radiation exposure (although 300 Tepco workers were exposed to above lifetime legal limit radiation). WHO estimated life time risk of thyroid cancer for infants in the immediate area increased by 0.5 per cent, relying on the linear no threshold hypothesis (an untested hypothesis that the UN has recently backed away from).
More generally, the IPCC calculated nuclear fission to be the second safest form of power generation in human morbidity and mortality terms end to end, mining to waste disposal (the first being hydro electric). The stupidity of the German decision makes me want to scream.
While Fukushima did not claim lifes, it made a huge area uninhabitable. The public has to suffer the damages, not the company that profited from the plant.
Tsunamis yes. But unfortunatly, quite a few studies have proven that the german nuclear reactors are susceptible to earth quakes, terrorists and floods. With almost no precautions taken, the big energy companies have noone to blame but themself.
Yet, a nuclear plant, at a river that frequently floods in autumn, with not-working emergency generators, is in quite a risky position, don’t you think? It’s about the same risky position Fukushima was in.
And most German plants are like that.
Then add the fact that German inspections are a corrupt business regarding nuclear plants, and that the nuclear waste storage was a huge disaster polluting tap water for a large area, and you can see where the problems come from.
Hey I'm not saying that's right. All I'm saying is that responding to Fukushima by shutting down the second safest form of energy production (according to the IPCC), which also happens to emit no CO2, is a special kind of stupid.
The germany decision is not at all stupid once you read up on the Asse II nuclear waste storage site (or, a more fitting name, Asse II ground water contamination site).
One of our largest nuclear waste storages, and it’s all leaking into the ground water.
I read the Wikipedia page but didn't get a great deal of information. From what I gathered, they decided to use a structurally/mechanically unsound abandoned salt mine as an 'experimental waste dump', and now there are concerns that if the mine floods, nuclear waste byproducts will get into the ground water? You're probably more acquainted with the issue so perhaps you can fill in the holes here?
At any rate, shutting down all German nuke plants because of something like this is akin to shutting down all coal mines because someone held a BBQ and accidentally started a fire.
Because we have got a serious issue with finding long-term storage solutions for nuclear waste. And past commission(s) on solving this issue have often ended in a rather public and politically bad fiasco.
Not really. France generates about 70 per cent of their power from nuclear and don't seem to have many problems. For really inefficient solid fission, waste disposal basically consist of digging a swimming pool in a techtonically stable area, throwing in the spent rods, and filing it with concrete.
Heck, as long as it was properly guarded, you could store the waste in my backyard shed without any health issues arising.
I doubt it would stay there for even the next few decades. As crazy as it sounds, I imagine at some point it would become cheap enough to launch into space or in to the sun. I mean, it wouldn't make economic sense. But at some point it would be worth the cost if only so that we don't have to listen to the irrational and ignorant braying of the so called 'green movement'.
They're like the kids in high school who decided they were avowed communists, except now all grown up.
I am not a specialist but the current situation looks complicated and not because of waste disposal but for financial reasons and long term planning issues. Areva, the main civil nuclear actor, made a couple of very bad (and shady) decisions, lost a lot of money, and is currently being restructured and partially merged into EDF, the historical energy French provider. Still they decide to keep betting on EPR power plants and engage a lot of resources in a new Hinkley Point EPR project. None of which have been finished yet. At the same time, inquiries reveal deficiencies or falsifications on quality assesments on supplied parts. The gravity of these is not clear yet. Finally, budget are tightening and plants arriving to their initial end of life dates are being requalifed for a decade or more.
I do not think relying so much on nuclear energy was a bad move but it should have been a transitional thing (to renewable energy, fusion, anything else?). And it requires good forward thinking, commitment and the kind of leader we have not had for decades.
Finally, the EPR looks more and more like a big mistake. Smaller designs might have been more successful and offered more agility in time of crisis.
I think this is a reasonable way to view things. Although I think there is a lot of unexplored potential in fission. We're basically using tech developed in the 60s. And just a little nit pick: fusion is a form of nuclear power generation.
The current solution for nuclear waste is much better than the current solution for coal waste, which is to just dump it into the world and pretend it's not there.
The current solution for coal are testing areas for compressed carbon storage, and they’re less risky than the nuclear waste storage.
The continual leaking of nuclear waste into the ground water at the Asse II underground nuclear waste storage site is a huge issue.
And so, already in '98, the Energiewende was started.
In the early 2000s Merkel tried to roll back the Energiewende, but was forced to roll back the rolling back when Fukushima happened, and people realized we had plants of the same construction type, where continually the emergency generators failed, and everyone said "nothing wrong, even if the generators fail, it can never go up".
German nuclear controls are just as much of a joke as nuclear controls in Japan or the US, and in most countries, they’re even worse.
One nuclear plant in Germany has bribed regulators for years to just sign it off, despite it violating regulations. Then there’s the plant in Belgium, where construction workers drilled through the containment vessel to screw a holder for a fire extinguisher on it.
Holes stayed open for many years.
Nuclear is a nice concept in theory, but in any capitalistic society, it can not work, because greed will end up with companies trying to save money, and if bribes are cheaper than following the laws, they will do that. If lobbying is cheaper, they’ll do that. If they can just leave the country and can’t be held liable, they’ll just do that.
You can easily find millions of people with serious health problems due to coal waste. The problem is so bad that it's recommended that sensitive populations limit their intake of seafood because of the mercury in it, much of which comes from coal. How many can you find with serious health problems due to nuclear waste? How many large categories of food have cautions on them for children and pregnant women due to nuclear waste?
You can talk about possibilities all you want, but the fact is that as they are done coal waste is a lot more dangerous. So it's weird to put so much emphasis on closing nuclear plants first.
Filter all the pollutants out, and use Compressed Carbon Storage for the CO2. We already are enforcing the first on all existing plants, and working on the second.
Nothing works 100%. How many nines does "all the pollutants" consist of? This is important because the amount of waste produced by coal is vast, many orders of magnitude more than nuclear, so even many nines can still result in more harm than from nuclear.
Also, how do you store the pollutants, and why doesn't that technique work for nuclear waste? I'm guessing that storing the pollutants consists of putting it in good, strong containers, which works fine for nuclear waste too. It's not perfect, but it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it's mercury or uranium leaking.
This picture was taken just prior to these two engineers jumping to their deaths rather than being burnt alive. I assume the turbine spontaneously catching fire is not an intentional design feature, but rather the result of inadequate quality control during manufacturing?
The problem here is not renewable energy sources, it's buffering their output. Improvements to battery technology and short-term energy storage are key to cracking this problem.
If energy is free or even profitable to consume you'd make money pumping water uphill during the day and using that potential energy later to produce power through conventional hydro-electric means. This is completely insane if you have to pay for power at conventional rates, but we're entering a new era where time of day costs might go all over the place without arbitrage like this to even things out.
At least one of the early large scale pumped storage plants[1] was financed by power companies to optimize their internal costs. So it's long been the case that time arbitrage is a good idea for power production.
That said, for reliable baseline energy, you're not going to beat nuclear for a while. Modern nuclear "waste" is usable as fuel in Breeder type reactors (LFTR, Traveling Wave reactors) and the waste from those is containable with modern technology.
From start to finish, bringing a nuke plant online is a 30 year proposition, assuming there are no snags along the way. There are no shortcuts in the offing.
Oh, that's just ridiculous. You can't count 27 years of lawsuits in the "real" cost of building a plant, if people actually wanted to. If we were going to start building lots of plants, there's been plenty of proposals to standardize the designs.
Can you link to a source where she says that and not just her bio page? Googling this for me yielded no results which contained supporting evidence for you, but that may just be bad searching on my part.
Yes, and every new nuclear plant has to be mothballed for decades as a vital element to its construction. It's so the concrete can cure properly, right?
You're going beyond advocacy into sheer lunacy. Nuclear power plants do not take longer to build than the WWI, WWII (including incidentally the entire Manhattan project), and the Korean, Vietnemese, Iraqi, and Afghanistan wars combined. And I could probably jam some more things in there, since I'm not really looking up the time frames and just eyeballing it... because that's how stupid your claim is.
I don't know whether to hope that you realize the degree of BS you're spouting and that you're being deliberately mendacious, or to hope that you actually believe it and are at least being honest to what you think about the world.
It is sad to see that nuclear advocacy has simply become telling people they or their ideas are stupid because they point out the political reality of the world.
It doesn't matter that it takes far less than 49 years to actually construct the physical manifestation of a nuclear power plant.
What matters is why it took so long to build.
You can't solve those problems by insulting people.
China disagrees with you. They're building a bunch of AP-1000s, the same new GenIII+ design we're building in the U.S. "The timeline is 50 months from first concrete to fuel loading, then six months to grid connection for the first four units, with this expected to reduce significantly for the following units."
There are also a bunch of companies working on small modular reactors built in factories and shipped to the install site, which I think would qualify as "shortcuts in the offing." Some of this work is supported by the DOE.
Improvement in battery technology is relative. You do not need superlight lithium-something batteries for general energy storage. The only questions for such systems are price per kWh, life-time and somewhat good input/output ratios. But especially the last may become unimportant as energy becomes really abundant. It is the same reason why power2gas may become interesting: only 40% energy efficency are sufficient when you produce 5 time your domestic need in a winter storm.
>Improvements to battery technology and short-term energy storage are key to cracking this problem.
Between perpetually 10 years' away jesus-tech grid-scale batteries and letting the invisible hand catch up and fix the demand side of fluctuating supply, I'd bet on the latter, personally.
Especially since it's already happening (c.f. aluminum smelters time shifting electricity demand).
Negative prices means the market is heavily subsidized, hence non competitive hence non sustainable.
Transforming renewable energy in electricity is anyway pretty ... stupid (lot of loss) and counter productive (handling surge, storing, grid complexification, poor capacity planning that requires even more fossil energy in high power mode to adapt to peak in demand)
The real solution maybe to adapt our lives to the seasonality, and maybe to use wind power ... well to make wind mill for instance. Mechanic to mechanic energy transformation is not stupid.
Right now, renewable energy is a big scam that can not sustain and that is used by thieves to still tax money in the name of good intentions.
> The real solution maybe to adapt our lives to the seasonality, and maybe to use wind power ... well to make wind mill for instance. Mechanic to mechanic energy transformation is not stupid.
What are you even talking about? Have you invented a new mechanic energy transmission process with no losses? If we are calling names, I'd say that mechanic energy transmission is even more "stupid". If your mechanic energy collection gizmo is not right where you want it, then you'll have tremendous losses transmitting it.
Not that it matters too much in case of renewables. You just need a bigger collecting system.
Also, electric energy is fungible. You can convert it into almost anything you need, including mechanical power. Good luck posting to hacker news with your mechanical energy.
The solution is not going back to medieval era. It is to figure out better solutions. Renewable energy is not a scam. The market may be heavily subsidized (not everywhere), but that's how you jump-start an industry. Market forces may prevent development, but that's a different problem.
Not to mention that everything is subsidized in some way. Coal power plants should be paying for the pollutants (including radiation) that they are releasing in the atmosphere. In fact, all current power plants (including hydro) are subsidized. If not by money directly, by the law.
Well, the most basic thing is: renewables are completely helpless alone, they need actual, real power generation (baseline, which are not dispatchable). If you let negative prices run too long (coupled with other incentives that skew the market), the baseline companies might go bankrupt and you won't have power when renewables decide not to work.
Negative prices also more or less mean that your grid is overstressed and in risk of damage.
Those are just the two most obvious (to me!) reasons.
Base load simply means you can't cheaply turn a power plant on and off to meet demand, which is the opposite of what you want with renewables. You want peaking power plants and energy storage.
It seems bizarre that industries that like low energy prices aren't taking advantage of this. I think that's fertilizer production, aluminum production, bitcoin mining, and I assume a lot of other things.
I assume the reason is that these "negative prices" are just fictions, only available to a few select existing customers, ie artifacts of regulation.
But the article is actually too vague for me to understand what the actual regulatory and political constraints of the situation are.
I think it's mostly that they are transient. So not yet enough to build an entirely new business model around. Possibly it acts as a minor incentive for coal plants to invest in upgrades to let them ramp down faster, or for industries to sign up for demand response, as they can make money by both increasing or decreasing demand when asked by the grid.
Our energy policy is a disaster. Anyone telling you something else is trying to sell you something.
We have decades of high spending (contractual obligations) ahead of us, spending unbelievable amounts of money (see my other post). The low hanging fruits have been picked (roofs facing south, areas with much wind ...) yet we cover only one single percent of our energy usage by renewables.
The energy policy is only one example of our total misbehaviour. In ten years we will face multiple existential crises because of our current policies. It feels bad to see so much money in so many areas being wasted.
There are just soo many factors why the 'Energiewende' failed.
It's because of the politics made. Eventually we would've running green already but once in a while Angela Merkel just stops a already running process, but then Fukushima happened and she made the decision to go 'all in' into green. But! She didn't actually. Most 'bigger' companies didn't even pay a cent more for the green energy, only the consumers or the main pillar (our middle industry) needed to pay the 'Energiewende'. That was freaking akward since the bigger Companies would've probably paid the biggest pillar of the 'Energiewende'.
The next part is storing energy or producing energy by yourself. Even if you bought a big sun collector you NEED to pay taxes for your energy produced (not just for the collector), also for the energy you will produce and use for your own goods and storing the energy will costs you taxes as well.
While maybe a lot of people can live with that, there was another thing, which is that building energy plants is regulated by our government. If you maybe are a rich guy and want to do something good, you can't since the plants are going through a really painful and akward regulation like a planned economy.
Innovation won't win here since the government won't ever shutdown the last coal power plants since there is so much lobby going on when it comes to energy that even if you have a good idea how to solve the last problems (i.e. by innovating into battery grids or some other stuff) you won't succeed.
The german government has their own plan, even when they need to raise taxes for all the consumers, they don't even care what happens with the prices on the market since the german consumer market is totally regulated.
> Even if you bought a big sun collector you NEED to pay taxes for your energy produced (not just for the collector), also for the energy you will produce and use for your own goods and storing the energy will costs you taxes as well.
You pay taxes on the income that you make when you sell your power "into" the grid, which makes sense as you're acting in a similar role as the utilities.
I think it comes from a more collectivist mindset. To an individualist, this seems pretty foreign. I think it goes something like "If you're able to do lots of stuff for yourself, you should have to do something for your less able neighbors as well". The danger is as pointed out, if the burden becomes too high or feels to intrusive, you'll get "well screw it then, I'll just be like everyone else".
Intentionally or not, taxes are a way of discouraging an activity. If you tax solar, then there is less economic reason to use it. At least until the benefits become higher than the taxes.
> In fact, Germany is giving the rest of the world a lesson in just how much can go wrong when you try to reduce carbon emissions solely by installing lots of wind and solar.
Germany did much more than that. But: the purpose of the Energiewende was not to reduce carbon emissions first. The purpose was to get rid of the nuclear power plants asap. Phasing out coal is the next goal. Getting rid of nuclear had several advantages (for example one can stop early investing even more billions into a failed and costly technology. Nuclear is only provided by large monopolistic utilities, which had to get out of the way. The Energiewende is as much an experiment in getting a much more diverse landscape of energy producers and opening up the huge monopolies for competition from companies of all sizes). Getting rid of coal is also politically difficult, since coal production and usage has a long tradition in Germany and it employed a lot of people and local politicians block closing coal production where they can. But the coal phase out is already starting.
So already the description of the goal of the Energiewende is wrong.
> And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal.
"Is phasing out." But hasn't yet. There are several nuclear power plants running.
> The country is now the world’s largest solar market. Germany’s carbon emissions in 2014 were 27 percent lower than 1990 levels.
Which is already basically half from US carbon emissions per capita.
> Because fossil-fuel power plants cannot easily ramp down generation in response to excess supply on the grid,
Actually fossil fuel plants can. But those who can are not profitable currently.
> on sunny, windy days there is sometimes so much power in the system that the price goes negativ
That's because there is not enough grid capacity to transport the electricity to South Germany. The grid is being expanded to do so, but this is taking time.
> Germany’s Parliament is expected to soon eliminate the government-set subsidy for renewable energy, known as a feed-in tariff, that has largely fueled the growth in wind and solar.
It is expected that local government in Germany will block this.
> But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down.
Actually coal power plants in Germany are no longer lucrative and many many of them are losing money. Energy companies are threatening to close those. The mentioned Vattenfall coal power plant is a dinosaur planned long ago. It doesn't fit into the current energy landscape and is a very costly investment which looks like a huge failure.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadSounds like they need to encourage EV acquisition so that the extra supply of energy can go to EVs, while the pollution is reduced by taking diesel and petrol cars off the roads. They could also make use of batteries for storage so they can retire coal plants and better handle the variability of energy use.
> The auction system is designed to reduce the rate of new renewable-energy additions and keep Germany from producing too much power. It might seem like an easy way to solve the oversupply issue would be to shut down excess power plants, especially ones that burn coal. But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down. Because German law requires renewable energy to be used first on the German grid, when Germany exports excess electricity to its European neighbors it primarily comes from coal plants. Last fall, the German subsidiary of the Swedish energy giant Vattenfall started up a 1,600-megwatt coal-fired plant that had been under construction for eight years, defying opposition from politicians, environmental organizations, and citizens who want to see coal plants eliminated.
Okay, that's just stupid. This is nothing but a short term problem that could be easily solved with batteries. Anything else seems to be a political problem, not a technical one.
Easily? The engineering challenges in doing this at utility scale are formidable.
[0]http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595235...
[1]https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics
[2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...
[3]http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/as-u-s-shutte...
And all the while we are the only sane people in our own eyes.
This is so wrong I don't know if you're pushing some sort of agenda or just trolling.
Read the facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
In 2015, the total power generation in Germany was 559 TWh. Renewables amount to about 121 TWh, i.e. about 22%. [0]
Newbuild house prices have increased by 40% in the last ten years
That sounds like a lot. From what I can find, construction prices have increased by about 20% since 2005 -- that goes for virtually all kinds of construction, including road construction[1][2]. Must be all the heat exchangers in those new roads... I'm not sure if that figure is corrected for overall inflation, it doesn't appear to be (cumulative inflation in Germany since 2005 is about 15%[3]).
[0] https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_de.htm [1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/Preise/B... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baupreisindex#/media/File:Baup... [3] http://www.zinsen-berechnen.de/inflationsrechner.php
http://m.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article156130737/Energie...
Primary energy is 3704 TWh[0], so 3% jives with the numbers I gave (so you were off by a factor of 3). 27% of that is heating, 39% transportation. The key to reducing those is gains in efficiency, ie. things like insulation, combined heat and power, renewable heat on the one hand, more efficient cars and more public transportation on the other hand.
[0] https://www.bmwi.de/BMWi/Redaktion/PDF/E/energiestatistiken-...
It was a, if not the major topic in the first federal election I was allowed to vote in.
There were no deaths directly attributable to radiation exposure (although 300 Tepco workers were exposed to above lifetime legal limit radiation). WHO estimated life time risk of thyroid cancer for infants in the immediate area increased by 0.5 per cent, relying on the linear no threshold hypothesis (an untested hypothesis that the UN has recently backed away from).
More generally, the IPCC calculated nuclear fission to be the second safest form of power generation in human morbidity and mortality terms end to end, mining to waste disposal (the first being hydro electric). The stupidity of the German decision makes me want to scream.
And most German plants are like that.
Then add the fact that German inspections are a corrupt business regarding nuclear plants, and that the nuclear waste storage was a huge disaster polluting tap water for a large area, and you can see where the problems come from.
One of our largest nuclear waste storages, and it’s all leaking into the ground water.
At any rate, shutting down all German nuke plants because of something like this is akin to shutting down all coal mines because someone held a BBQ and accidentally started a fire.
It was Angela Merkel's decision. She's a physicist.
Heck, as long as it was properly guarded, you could store the waste in my backyard shed without any health issues arising.
They're like the kids in high school who decided they were avowed communists, except now all grown up.
I do not think relying so much on nuclear energy was a bad move but it should have been a transitional thing (to renewable energy, fusion, anything else?). And it requires good forward thinking, commitment and the kind of leader we have not had for decades.
Finally, the EPR looks more and more like a big mistake. Smaller designs might have been more successful and offered more agility in time of crisis.
The continual leaking of nuclear waste into the ground water at the Asse II underground nuclear waste storage site is a huge issue.
And so, already in '98, the Energiewende was started.
In the early 2000s Merkel tried to roll back the Energiewende, but was forced to roll back the rolling back when Fukushima happened, and people realized we had plants of the same construction type, where continually the emergency generators failed, and everyone said "nothing wrong, even if the generators fail, it can never go up".
German nuclear controls are just as much of a joke as nuclear controls in Japan or the US, and in most countries, they’re even worse.
One nuclear plant in Germany has bribed regulators for years to just sign it off, despite it violating regulations. Then there’s the plant in Belgium, where construction workers drilled through the containment vessel to screw a holder for a fire extinguisher on it.
Holes stayed open for many years.
Nuclear is a nice concept in theory, but in any capitalistic society, it can not work, because greed will end up with companies trying to save money, and if bribes are cheaper than following the laws, they will do that. If lobbying is cheaper, they’ll do that. If they can just leave the country and can’t be held liable, they’ll just do that.
You can talk about possibilities all you want, but the fact is that as they are done coal waste is a lot more dangerous. So it's weird to put so much emphasis on closing nuclear plants first.
Filter all the pollutants out, and use Compressed Carbon Storage for the CO2. We already are enforcing the first on all existing plants, and working on the second.
But long-term, renewables are the only solution.
Also, how do you store the pollutants, and why doesn't that technique work for nuclear waste? I'm guessing that storing the pollutants consists of putting it in good, strong containers, which works fine for nuclear waste too. It's not perfect, but it doesn't really make much of a difference whether it's mercury or uranium leaking.
For instance, wind power: http://i.imgur.com/xHyOoc9.jpg
This picture was taken just prior to these two engineers jumping to their deaths rather than being burnt alive. I assume the turbine spontaneously catching fire is not an intentional design feature, but rather the result of inadequate quality control during manufacturing?
Why do you think regulations around coal generation are any easier to enforce than regulations around nuclear generation?
If energy is free or even profitable to consume you'd make money pumping water uphill during the day and using that potential energy later to produce power through conventional hydro-electric means. This is completely insane if you have to pay for power at conventional rates, but we're entering a new era where time of day costs might go all over the place without arbitrage like this to even things out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor...
That said, for reliable baseline energy, you're not going to beat nuclear for a while. Modern nuclear "waste" is usable as fuel in Breeder type reactors (LFTR, Traveling Wave reactors) and the waste from those is containable with modern technology.
https://www.iaea.org/about/leadership/janice-dunn-lee
You're going beyond advocacy into sheer lunacy. Nuclear power plants do not take longer to build than the WWI, WWII (including incidentally the entire Manhattan project), and the Korean, Vietnemese, Iraqi, and Afghanistan wars combined. And I could probably jam some more things in there, since I'm not really looking up the time frames and just eyeballing it... because that's how stupid your claim is.
I don't know whether to hope that you realize the degree of BS you're spouting and that you're being deliberately mendacious, or to hope that you actually believe it and are at least being honest to what you think about the world.
It doesn't matter that it takes far less than 49 years to actually construct the physical manifestation of a nuclear power plant.
What matters is why it took so long to build.
You can't solve those problems by insulting people.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...
There are also a bunch of companies working on small modular reactors built in factories and shipped to the install site, which I think would qualify as "shortcuts in the offing." Some of this work is supported by the DOE.
Between perpetually 10 years' away jesus-tech grid-scale batteries and letting the invisible hand catch up and fix the demand side of fluctuating supply, I'd bet on the latter, personally.
Especially since it's already happening (c.f. aluminum smelters time shifting electricity demand).
Even MIT outlets don't bother to explain why this is a bad thing, just stating that a price is negative is enough to demonstrate there's a problem.
Transforming renewable energy in electricity is anyway pretty ... stupid (lot of loss) and counter productive (handling surge, storing, grid complexification, poor capacity planning that requires even more fossil energy in high power mode to adapt to peak in demand)
The real solution maybe to adapt our lives to the seasonality, and maybe to use wind power ... well to make wind mill for instance. Mechanic to mechanic energy transformation is not stupid.
Right now, renewable energy is a big scam that can not sustain and that is used by thieves to still tax money in the name of good intentions.
What are you even talking about? Have you invented a new mechanic energy transmission process with no losses? If we are calling names, I'd say that mechanic energy transmission is even more "stupid". If your mechanic energy collection gizmo is not right where you want it, then you'll have tremendous losses transmitting it.
Not that it matters too much in case of renewables. You just need a bigger collecting system.
Also, electric energy is fungible. You can convert it into almost anything you need, including mechanical power. Good luck posting to hacker news with your mechanical energy.
The solution is not going back to medieval era. It is to figure out better solutions. Renewable energy is not a scam. The market may be heavily subsidized (not everywhere), but that's how you jump-start an industry. Market forces may prevent development, but that's a different problem.
Not to mention that everything is subsidized in some way. Coal power plants should be paying for the pollutants (including radiation) that they are releasing in the atmosphere. In fact, all current power plants (including hydro) are subsidized. If not by money directly, by the law.
I assume the reason is that these "negative prices" are just fictions, only available to a few select existing customers, ie artifacts of regulation.
But the article is actually too vague for me to understand what the actual regulatory and political constraints of the situation are.
They seem pretty press-shy about it though - possibly because this is serving as a kind of covert subsidy that wouldn't look too good under WTO rules.
We have decades of high spending (contractual obligations) ahead of us, spending unbelievable amounts of money (see my other post). The low hanging fruits have been picked (roofs facing south, areas with much wind ...) yet we cover only one single percent of our energy usage by renewables.
The energy policy is only one example of our total misbehaviour. In ten years we will face multiple existential crises because of our current policies. It feels bad to see so much money in so many areas being wasted.
In other words, he’s a troll.
EX: US 13%, Germany 30%. (Home solar power not necessarily counted in these numbers.)
There are just soo many factors why the 'Energiewende' failed. It's because of the politics made. Eventually we would've running green already but once in a while Angela Merkel just stops a already running process, but then Fukushima happened and she made the decision to go 'all in' into green. But! She didn't actually. Most 'bigger' companies didn't even pay a cent more for the green energy, only the consumers or the main pillar (our middle industry) needed to pay the 'Energiewende'. That was freaking akward since the bigger Companies would've probably paid the biggest pillar of the 'Energiewende'.
The next part is storing energy or producing energy by yourself. Even if you bought a big sun collector you NEED to pay taxes for your energy produced (not just for the collector), also for the energy you will produce and use for your own goods and storing the energy will costs you taxes as well.
While maybe a lot of people can live with that, there was another thing, which is that building energy plants is regulated by our government. If you maybe are a rich guy and want to do something good, you can't since the plants are going through a really painful and akward regulation like a planned economy. Innovation won't win here since the government won't ever shutdown the last coal power plants since there is so much lobby going on when it comes to energy that even if you have a good idea how to solve the last problems (i.e. by innovating into battery grids or some other stuff) you won't succeed. The german government has their own plan, even when they need to raise taxes for all the consumers, they don't even care what happens with the prices on the market since the german consumer market is totally regulated.
So, they own the sun now? Ridiculous.
> In fact, Germany is giving the rest of the world a lesson in just how much can go wrong when you try to reduce carbon emissions solely by installing lots of wind and solar.
Germany did much more than that. But: the purpose of the Energiewende was not to reduce carbon emissions first. The purpose was to get rid of the nuclear power plants asap. Phasing out coal is the next goal. Getting rid of nuclear had several advantages (for example one can stop early investing even more billions into a failed and costly technology. Nuclear is only provided by large monopolistic utilities, which had to get out of the way. The Energiewende is as much an experiment in getting a much more diverse landscape of energy producers and opening up the huge monopolies for competition from companies of all sizes). Getting rid of coal is also politically difficult, since coal production and usage has a long tradition in Germany and it employed a lot of people and local politicians block closing coal production where they can. But the coal phase out is already starting.
So already the description of the goal of the Energiewende is wrong.
> And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal.
"Is phasing out." But hasn't yet. There are several nuclear power plants running.
> The country is now the world’s largest solar market. Germany’s carbon emissions in 2014 were 27 percent lower than 1990 levels.
Which is already basically half from US carbon emissions per capita.
> Because fossil-fuel power plants cannot easily ramp down generation in response to excess supply on the grid,
Actually fossil fuel plants can. But those who can are not profitable currently.
> on sunny, windy days there is sometimes so much power in the system that the price goes negativ
That's because there is not enough grid capacity to transport the electricity to South Germany. The grid is being expanded to do so, but this is taking time.
> Germany’s Parliament is expected to soon eliminate the government-set subsidy for renewable energy, known as a feed-in tariff, that has largely fueled the growth in wind and solar.
It is expected that local government in Germany will block this.
> But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down.
Actually coal power plants in Germany are no longer lucrative and many many of them are losing money. Energy companies are threatening to close those. The mentioned Vattenfall coal power plant is a dinosaur planned long ago. It doesn't fit into the current energy landscape and is a very costly investment which looks like a huge failure.
Doesn't look like the author did its homework...
One's (much) filthier than nuclear ( but without the 1950s sci fi horror movie aroma ), the other belongs to Vladimir Putin.
Enjoy. Now don't say fracking,, don't say fracking, don't say fracking....