No new information in the article that would make this prediction any more likely. We're gonna need real measures if we want to cut use of gas and coal. Extending use of nuclear a bit more would be one. Cutting down subsidies to the meat and dairy industry is another. We need radical measures if we want radical results. But no one is willing to take then, not at a personal level (go vegan) and for sure not at a corporate level.
I would be curious how the meat and dairy production depends on gas and especially coal :p.
But indeed, a lot of things have to be changed quickly to achieve the desired results, but recent events have given a lot of motivation to do so even with those, who are not so much concerned about the environment. Now even the industry is driving this, as they are impacted with high electricity prices and possible shortages.
Do you think cows survive the winter without heating? Weeks and months at sub zero temperatures? It can only partly be covered by biomass for the farm itself. And even indirectly, all energy markets are connected.
It should be 0%. Catch up to what - for what? So we can go do some drone bombing in Africa like a proper western nation? Is that the plan? I guess it's easier to give the guys with the big guns what the want, instead of actually staying true to the values of demilitarizatizing the planet.
It should be 0%? If men were angels, I guess. How do you propose that we demilitarize the planet, without a big stick to whack down the bad players that will inevitably arise?
if you tell russians to take down their weapons, their will be no war. if you tell ukrains to take down their weapons, they will loose their country.
it's not as easy as you wish, besides that I would prefer like you would describe, unfortunatly as long as there are borders/humans/whatever there will always be conflicts.
The NATO alliance - and EU - is going to need a lot of hardware and technology to stop Russia if it's going to arm-up and empire-up, if it plans to take Ukraine with the help of Belarus and then potentially move on to other targets after that (Baltics, Moldova, Poland, Sweden, Finland, whichever). Russia has clearly taken over Belarus here, this is the USSR beginning to march with multiple armies again. If Putin redirects his nation into a persistent war footing, and redirects his nation's resources into war mode (shifting to mass killing the opposition outright as in the old days, Stalinification), then for a stretch of time that will be a very dangerous, very potent effect and will enable Russia to push outward militarily in a way they otherwise wouldn't be able to (and yes it'll run out of fuel eventually, as it's a rapid depletion move, but for N years it'll be a very potent adversary).
$150 billion might not be enough, unless Germany plans to play no role in defending the eastern flank of NATO as Russia marches. They have been badly underfunded for decades, $150b is a down payment on catching up.
Putin's Russia is going to be in an economic and political swamp for a long time for this, it wouldn't be surprising if he chooses to move on to a new target promptly after Ukraine just because why not. The same crazy calculation that gets us here, it isn't too far of a stretch from there to argue (if you're Putin) for trying to take some of Finland's territory.
Germany needs to take this very seriously and I think they're beginning to.
Not German and I have no doubt this is all true. But in light of current events a lot of people who previously objected to things like windmills may see them as a necessary evil vs being reliant on Russian gas.
Energy security is likely one of the most paramount issues in europe now, I expect there will be big changes.
'Things like windmills' are not going to be fit for purpose to power the western world. They produce tiny amounts of energy if the wind is blowing, look hideous and kill a lot of airborne wildlife
In the last 3 weeks it was quite windy in Europe and German wind power production equaled or even surpassed French nuclear production.
Of course, the wind and solar power capacity needs to be built up considerably, but the amounts produced are not tiny at all.
The wind generators produce Gigwatts of power, more than our entire nuclear plants ever did already. They look beutiful like spanish countryside and the wildlife is safe from them due to new technology already implemented in new plants.
They do work just not all of the time. But they're easy and relatively cheap to construct, they can be put up and taken back down again quickly and leave no permanent mark on the landscape.
It's not an either or, europe should do everything and do it now, do solar, do wind, do tidal, do nuclear, do everything and do it now to get off Russian gas.
First of all, all of this was decisions by the previous government, which indeed did not do enough to sustain the switch to renewables. The new government would have changed this anyway, the energy scarcity gives this an additional push - now everyone can see how much cheaper renewable energy is over all.
The payments from the EEG-Umlage are not stopping, it is just the financing of them. One problem of it was, that it was paid mostly by the consumers and small businesses. Basing it on taxes ensures a more fair financing.
I am sure, next will be a lot of law changes to facilitate a quick build up of renewable energies. Especially as now the FDP is also pushing for this, before they were quite reluctant.
Not sure I count as a fan of the FDP either, but they are very close to the industry. If they are pushing for renewables, that means a core influence group has committed to that and together with the greens, they can push for the necessary changes.
Most of the points are from local governments and people's opinions, nothing to do with the colors currently in charge. And don't forget that plenty of those people still voted CDU and SPD this time.
Germany has a lot of Renewable already built out and today they are burning lignite to keep lights on. I do not know what they mean renewable here -- unless they are going to do a France w.r.t Nuclear. This is a pipe-dream.
I think one of Germany's most significant mistake of the past decade was destroying its own energiewende and not creating incentives to invest in long term storage.
Across the entire of Europe there should be enough tidal, offshore wind, solar to provide plenty of power. It's rare that the north, baltic, biscay and med are all becalmed
For storage, there's overbuilding capacity and using excess to generate hygrogen (and thus convert it back), storage from cars, potential for hydro storage in the alps and pyrinees, and in the short term gas provision from UK/Norway for top up, should be more than enough to maintain independence and resilience.
The plan is to use the overshoot energy to electrolyze hydrogen and store it via pressure increase in the extensive German gas network… for use during the "Dunkelflaute" in the gas plants.
No, that is a myth which is repeated frequently. Germany is still a net exporter of electricity and all plans require to be at least neutral in production.
Of course, Germany is part of the European electricity market. This means, in day to day business, there is a lot of electricity exchange. Germany might buy nuclear power from France in the morning and France might buy German solar power over noon or wind power in the evening. How electricity is produced and distributed in Europe solely depends on the momentary balance between consumption and production. The grids are interconnected from Norway to the north and Spain and Italy to the South. Also including the UK and of course the whole central Europe.
Kind of insane that they started shutting down nuclear power plants earlier this year and are now more reliant on Russian gas because of it. How is that more green?
EDIT: i guess MSRs' structural components are subject to extreme corrosion from heat, salt, and radiation that makes them impossible to build for long-term continous operation.
It's not that straightforward unfortunately. Let's leave the whole waste deposal issue aside for now, it seems to be still the case that the free market considers nuclear power plants too risky. What I mean by that is that no operator can currently afford to get private insurance for their plants, which is why plants are insured publically.
Markets are not omniscient of course, and they might be ineffective, but it's something to think about when discussing nuclear energy.
> the free market considers nuclear power plants too risky
the free market is made up of people who primarily watch sensational evening news and follow clickbait social media. the actual statistics are still well on the side of nuclear in terms of safety and externalities (as far as i understand)
Nonsense. The "actual statistics" from the perspective of insurance companies are that if anything bad happens, your insurance company is going bankrupt. It doesn't matter how unlikely that's been calculated to be in some spreadsheet model, no smart insurance company will take that bet.
Even with less regulation, the problem is that it takes a huge amount of capital, and you need a decade or more to get return on your investment.
So it is really not that interesting for a private investor.
While distance can make them safer, it also makes them less efficient.
There are no standard designs for nuclear reactors yet, although this is slowly changing.
Nuclear reactors have always been run at great subsidy.
Only two MSRs have ever been built, over half a century ago and have a huge list of disadvantages. Not saying that can't be overcome, but it takes time, money, and will. There is some movement in this area.
With solar and wind making such great strides, advantages of nuclear are decreasing.
For real. If the airline industry had behaved like the nuclear industry we wouldn't be flying planes today
Also, in typical governmental fashion (see: rocket building before SpaceX) power plants were optimized for (size???) instead of safety, cost and time to build.
Things you don't have to optimize for: efficiency
Make it fast to build and in self-contained modules (economies of scale). Make it failsafe (even if it costs efficiency)
The risk increases non linear with the amount of plants and with the amount of nuclear waste you have. For the waste we have no solution that works, except for storage, which has tons of risk. For the plants itself it is just a matter of possibility when an terrible accident happens. So simply put, there are around 17 meteors every year that hit ground and can cause a disaster, when they hit a nuclear plant of just some storage for waste, not taking tons of other risks like humans, earthquake, war and alike into account. Eventually, a nuclear plant is no more than gambling for your future, because it is guaranteed that an accident will happen, just not when. This does not even take all the other problems into account like the cost. Nuclear powers is unbelievable expensive, compared to solar or wind. They just is cheap on the paper, because you do not care about all the hidden cost.
> For the waste we have no solution that works, except for storage, which has tons of risk
And instead, you burn coal and Gaz which creates even more waste which we can't even store. The difference is that the nuclear waste are localised near you, while the CO2 is spread globally and mostly affect warmer country we don't care about.
> So simply put, there are around 17 meteors every year that hit ground and can cause a disaster
The disaster is made worse because of nuclear infrastructure. But I don't see the point. It is already a disaster to begin with.
Look at Fukushima, the real disaster was the earthquake and tsunami that killed and destroyed lots of homes. The incident in the nuclear plant in the area did make it slightly worse, but not by much. Even though the media seem to blame the whole thing on the power plant.
Building new nuclear plants is no solution, because it takes much more time than building Wind or Solar power plants. Apart of that "I" do nothing, my government does, my only choice is to elect the correct party, which I did and plenty of Germans did as well, which is why the Green party is now the second strongest. When you give a shit about your children, then you are right, in any other case you are totally wrong. The problem is the same with smoking, you do not see anybody dying directly of smoking, therefore this is no problem? However, for things where it helps you argumentation you let this kind of deaths count, like for global warming or* coal pollution. Nuclear waste will be there for the next 100,000 years and our children need to care about it, that should be better than having wind or solar plants?
We still don't have a good answer only if you refuse all the already existing answers.
Geological storage has already been studied extensively and sites are already being constructed.
after decades of studying the German site was discarded, because water was coming in. So where are these places in Germany, that you want to store the waste?
The trade off was fossil fuels though. There aren't good answers to the problems these pose either.
I always thought the security/proliferation arguments against nuclear power were the most convincing, but in germany's case I think the alternative has been worse on this front too.
China said: We give money to each and all Chinese companies, that want to do solar cells.
Germany's conservative government then just ignored the German's companies cries for help, costing 200_000 jobs. Why? Well that were moslty voters for the greens, so their jobs weren't of interest.
> Also after 40 years of nuclear plants we still have not a good answer to the waste it produces.
That waste argument is repeated over and over again and just not relevant. Even if the waste problem is as massive as politics tries to claim (it isn't), that's not relevant for keeping the reactors running or even building new ones.
The absolute volume of waste produced is so low that keeping on relying on fission isn't changing the already existing waste problem in any meaningful way especially when considering breeding type reactors that can recycle existing "waste".
The argument is nothing but anti-fission propaganda and I wish it would stop being brought up as the first line of defense all the time.
Which breeding reactors are available to burn the existing waste? France had some decades ago, but shut them down. Germany never finished its breeding reactor. As far as I know, only Russia has operating ones. Normally I might comment on how Russian nuclear technology might not set the benchmark for safety, but in the current situation, any possibility of nuclear cooperation with Russia seems to be rather small.
Kind of insane that they get 100x more flak for having 25% coal and declining than Poland next door gets for having 75%.
Germany is doing better at decarbonization than most countries, in fact, but still attracts a disproportionate amount of flak for "not doing enough".
My cynical side says that this is precisely because they're slowly proving that nuclear isnt a necessary component of decarbonization. They are setting an example that threatens the industry's survival.
Germany's per capita GDP is 3x that of Poland's and has been for quite a while. This is why commentators expect better performance from them than they do from Poland.
> " they're proving nuclear isn't a necessary component of decarbonization"
That remains to be seen. We would need to see what their progress is 5, 10, and then 15 years from now. I think the 2035 target would take a miracle to actually accomplish without Nuclear Power.
> Lux expects the global annual Li-ion manufacturing capacity to more than triple by 2024.
That 2TWh or 45 minutes of storage for the whole world added annually.
With this manufacturing capacity it will be possible to have 2h of storage before 2030, which greatly increases the amount of renewable energy which could be utilized.
I'd say if not 100%, then 80% is realistic. Wind and solar combined make up around 30% already, so it's a question of doubling that number and adding appropriate storage.
I'm a supporter of nuclear, but this trope is overplayed. This winter Germany derived 5-10% of their electricity from natural gas - and even that is mostly due to cogeneration of heating, not for electricity needs. This cogeneration runs even if renewables provide a surplus. Calling Germany's electricity grid is "reliant on Russian gas" doesn't reflect reality
Agree, I'm also tired of this. Some variation of this comment has appeared on every story here related to Germany's energy situation for the last few years.
People should get out of the HN/SV bubble where the world view is narrowed to technology, yielding a strong hype for self driving cars and nuclear ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Germany is Russia’s biggest gas customer. CNN has previously reported that Europe relies on Russia for around 35% of its natural gas, Germany over 50%. But with the threat of supply disruption following Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Germany along with other European countries has been looking to ramp up LNG imports.
This is a chicken-and-egg scenario: gas is available so few switch to heat pumps; few switch to heat pumps because gas is so readily available. The goal over time should be to move infrastructure away from gas and towards electric, and part of that is improving the power-generation system. Don't think only about today; think about where things should be moving tomorrow. "Thinking only about today" is part of the reason Germany is still dependent on Russian gas and oil.
WRONG. New residential homes are forbidden to be powered by gas. Old residential buildings have to follow Gebäudeenergiengesetz GEG, so they have to be modernized and isolated.
what you say is wrong. most new homes still are powered by gas. on the 1st january 2025 you need to also have like 45% powered by something else. germany is powered by gas and the alternatives for heating aren't that better (oil and pellets)
For someone who's wrong, you use a lot of caps. Fact is, most German homes are heated with gas and that is partially due to the politicians who have been close to the O&G industry, and partially due to "das haben wir immer so gemacht."
Due to low ownership rate of apartments, why would a landlord invest more money in heating with heatpumps or using more efficient insulation materials when he would bear the costs, but the tenant would get the benefits? So they only do it when forced to, or it is cheaper to use renewables.
Most of Germany, including politicians and home owners would quite gladly stay on fossil fuels aside from some blowhards who talk more than act.
Wind generation slumped 30% in 2021 due to the minor detail of the wind being unpredictable and unreliable and they had to make up for the deficit through hydrocarbon. Sure, saying "gas" which is more peaker power plants instead of "coal" which helps baseload generation may be wrong, but let's not ignore the reality that wind experienced rare seasonal lows and the only replacement was burning more coal than ever.
The reality of relying on things like wind is that you have to either over-produce, or have a backup, and the backup is usually coal.
If Nuclear plants had not been unnecessarily shuttered, Germany would be more prepared to weather the weather, instead of increasing coal burning significantly.
Wind generation is perfectly predictable. It is just volatile. But with enough storage (electrolyze it to hydrogen, then burn it in the gas plants), you can save the generated surplus for days without wind (and solar).
Additionally, new German homes are required, by law, to be build in a way that will not use 1. Gas for Heating 2. a lot of energy at all.
Additionally local energy storage and production in homes is encourgaged with 45% of funding coming from the German state.
It's wrong to characterise gas as "peaker plants", the UK has an enormous fleet of CCGT that would once have seemed like an obvious fit for baseload, but today they ramp maybe from 10% to 90% performing the same function as the Open Cycle turbines in a "peaker plant".
Coal normally makes no sense to back wind, which is why Britain has been shutting coal plants while building ever more wind farms.
> I'm a supporter of nuclear, but this trope is overplayed. This winter Germany derived 5-10% of their electricity from natural gas - and even that is mostly due to cogeneration of heating, not for electricity needs. This cogeneration runs even if renewables provide a surplus. Calling Germany's electricity grid is "reliant on Russian gas" doesn't reflect reality
Do they have the grid capacity to support people using more electric space heaters and less gas for heat?
My home uses gas heat. I suppose if there was some kind gas shortage I have to turn the thermostat down to the minimum needed to keep the pipes from freezing, then use space heaters to bring in-use rooms up to a livable temp.
Space heaters are currently not feasible in Germany due to high electricity cost (which could be fixed by reducing taxes on electricity used just for heating). Nevertheless, the way forward are heat pumps anyway.
> Space heaters are currently not feasible in Germany due to high electricity cost (which could be fixed by reducing taxes on electricity used just for heating). Nevertheless, the way forward are heat pumps anyway.
But you've got to have both tactical and strategic responses, and the tactical solution may entail taking a hit from higher prices (though if that hit can be mitigated by other policy changes, like temporarily reducing taxes, that should be pursued as part of the tactical solution).
Tactical/short term: massively reducing gas use and trying to mitigate the short-term consequences by keeping nuclear online to power electric space heaters:
Strategic/long term: Switching all the buildings over to heat pumps powered by green energy.
This is a mischaracterization, gas for heating isn't converted into electricity first in most cases, so total energy share is likely much more significant than 5-10%, however, if the gas disappears conversions to electric heating are going to sharply increase electricity demand, increasing coal/other fossil fuel consumption.
That was just a coup of Merkel to take the wind out of the Green party's traditional topic in the wake of the Fukushima accident. She applied that tactic to other topics as well - assuming the PoV of your political opponent to weaken their case. To the point that it was unclear if there are any political ambitions left in her CDU party, other than to stay at power under all circumstances.
Now yesterday Robert Habeck, Germany's minister for economic affairs and climate, and vice chancellor, claimed that a return to nuclear and/or coal is economically not viable, even if it were politically feasible (which it is not, since it would be political suicide given he's from the Green party). He's not stupid, so he knows he'll have to answer how in hell people will even heat their homes come next winter. Not only are energy prices up, but so are materials for home insulation (if you can get them at all) and prices for construction.
Right now, the government has plans to penalize landlords renting out homes with low energy efficiency, a plan typical of the SPD party, the Green party's coalition partner. Which won't work, though, because there simply is no way to reach those levels of energy efficiency given the demand in the construction industry, and in a way that decouples the consumer from their consumption, not to speak of constitutional (existing case law) concerns.
Meanwhile, the housing market is as insane as everywhere due to rampant public spending and the decrease in interest that goes with it. Adding ever more energy efficiency requirements means that it's objectively impossible for any average person to own a home.
> He's not stupid, so he knows he'll have to answer how in hell people will even heat their homes come next winter
As a German, I always wonder why the obvious flaw in these kind of discussions is never addressed: The current heating habbits of our German population is luxury heating - that is we heat every room to be comfy and luxurious standards. And people just claim "Germany needs X percent of gas for heating". But the truth is, if we would not have that gas, or prices would be insanely high, people will change their habits regarding heating and we would need less.
I myself had multiple discussion with my better half in winter when she was cranking up the heater in all rooms, to a level she could just walk around in light underwear and comfy dresses. I always rather heat a single room, close the door, and snug into my skiing thermos, sweatpants and sweater - and keep the time on the can short (not taking the smartphone helps) because its cold in there. This is actually sufficient for most time of the year (minus Mountain regions, but which are only sparsely populated). We do not have siberian winters. And I remember as a child at grandmas, there was a single wooden oven in the living room ("Stube"), everybody was in there together. The bedrooms where not heated at all, instead you take a thermos bottle (or even just hot potatoes in a tin) with you into the bed for the night - of course wearing long-sleeved tights and underwear.
I think a winter without heating would make people in our society aware what luxuries we've gotten accustomed to, and also show people how little one needs when things get serious.
Germany hasn't started shutting down nuclear power plants earlier this year. This was a process going on for some years already and was decided ultimately in 2011. Admittedly, currently the timing sucks, but that couldn't be predicted in 2011. Though somehow your comment makes me think, that Putin thought now Germany might be in his hands.
The exit from nuclear power has been planned long ago, but the crucial point is, that in those years the renewables were not expanded enough. Solar buid-up peaked in 2012, Wind in 2017, with steep declines after that because of government decisions. But the government changed last autumn and the new one is all in on renewables. Partially because of the Greens being part of the government and now partially because even industry pushes for this to get cheaper electricity. And everyone wants stable supply and the current situation makes for a huge push towards renewables.
"Germany’s pledge to shut down all coal-powered plants by 2038, and a decades-old decision to aggressively phase out nuclear energy, have made the country reliant on Russian gas, which has been cheaply flowing toward German shores for decades.
Natural gas makes up 25% of Germany’s total energy consumption, and the country relies on Russia for 55% of its gas supply. If these imports were to suddenly cease, the EU’s largest economy and most populous country would find itself in dire straits."
Yeah right. Let me guess. The current politicians will have retired by then.
This is a worse joke than nuclear fusion being 10 years out. They should be aiming for zero new installs (including ICE cars) by 2025, and zero emissions by 2030.
Any idea how to set up a ballot initiative like that in California? We’ve also pushed the internal combustion engine to zero emission vehicle transition out to 2035.
The German economist Hans-Werner Sinn made a presentation a few years ago in which he shows how crazy and futile Germany's mad embrace of renewables really is. You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm9h0MJ2swo (in German)
Germany needs to start building nuclear TODAY. But good luck trying that with the Greens in the government coalition.
Don't understand German. What are the main points? What does he say about energy storage and hydrogen produced from renewables which have gained hype in recent years?
Just like how norway is "environmentally friendly" because they buy so many electric cars, but they are just behind saudi arabia in oil production on a per capita basis.
One thing european countries excel at is producing great PR. Saudi arabia's PR campaign should be : "Saudi Arabia, we are just as environmentally friendly as Norway".
> they are going to offshore most of their energy-intensive manufacturing to china, india, ASEAN, etc.
Why?
A watt is a watt, and renewables are cost-competitive with carbon even before taking into consideration geopolitics.
But, more importantly, renewables don't even have to be cost competitive to keep manufacturing in Germany while transitioning to renewables.
Ukraine has opened up political space for subsidy that may not have existed a year ago. Germany just doubled their defense spending. To say that this was unimaginable even three weeks ago, if anything, under-states the case.
I highly doubt there is political will in Germany to offshore manufacturing, and I'm pretty sure there is newly found political will to transition off of natgas. In particular, subsidizing energy prices to keep German manufacturing competitive while weaning off of RU natgas is likely an easy sell.
I think it's much more likely that Germany shifts off of natgas and in the meantime subsidizes energy for manufacturing, than that Germany allows manufacturing to offshore as a result of energy price spikes due to renewable transition.
> One thing european countries excel at is producing great PR.
Not at all surprising when you realize that the entire political economy of the west -- democracy and consumer/financial capitalism -- is almost by design dominated by people and institutions who are good at PR.
A major geopolitical theme in the 2010s was the fact that open societies have major weaknesses in open information warfare.
The next decade of the global info war will be interesting. I think we'll learn that, although you can easily cause petty chaos and divisiveness in the west, the institutions and core values are very robust. After all, those institutions and values are subject to -- and always have been subject to -- constant and open assault.
I think we'll also learn that authoritarian states have almost a mirror opposite dynamics of the west -- fueling petty divisions in much harder, but once you gain a foothold the whole system is much less robust to total collapse.
That was my point. And pollution is pollution. Shifting it to a third world country and clearing it off your books doesn't make you virtuous nor environmentally friendly. As I pointed it out with the european "recycling" scam.
> renewables are cost-competitive with carbon even before taking into consideration geopolitics
I think it's highly unlikely that Germany will offshore its Mittelstand.
> The largest source of renewables is biomass.
I'm not really sure what point you're making here.
> Also why take this into a bizarre geopolitical tangent?
This is 100% your tangent... why mention Saudi Arabia and Norway PR on an article about Germany?
e: generally speaking, we're not disagreeing about much, so I think this exchange is possibly due to your confusion regarding what this article is about. You seem to think the article is primarily about Germany posturing around climate change and GHG. It's not. This article is about German energy independence and European geopolitics. This policy change was announced on the eve of war in Europe, not as a follow-up to a climate conference.
> I think it's highly unlikely that Germany will offshore its Mittelstand.
I didn't say they will.
> I'm not really sure what point you're making here.
A significant portion of renewables aren't as environmentally friendly as we think.
> This is 100% your tangent... why mention Saudi Arabia and Norway PR on an article about Germany?
Norway releases tons of PR about how environmentally friendly they are especially by how much EVs they buy. But on a closer look, they produce as much oil as saudi arabia on a per capita basis.
I picked Saudi Arabia because they are the closest per capita producers to norway. I provided the source. Sort by "per capita" and you'll see norway right below saudi arabia. I picked saudi arabia because nobody in their right mind would say saudi arabia is "environmentally friendly". And yet we pretend norway is.
My point is that european countries aren't as environmentally friendly as their PR says they are. Shipping garbage to china and claiming you recycle 100% of your garbage is not environmentally friendly. Producing as much oil as saudi arabia and buying a few EVs doesn't make you environmentally friendly. Releasing PR saying you are environmentally friendly doesn't make you environmentally friendly. Not sure why you are injecting geopolitics, democracy, etc into this.
As always, it has to be noted that pertains to ELECTRICITY only. Quitting fossil fuels for all other uses is decades away, at least 2060. It will still go a long way though and probably bring TFS share of renewables from ~19% today to about 45%, so shouldn't be discounted, but it is not in any way "quitting fossil fuels" as the article says.
It will be a slow grind to electrify everything. The technology exists but virtually no one is going to rip out their perfectly functioning gas heating for a heat pump or electric water heater. Trade-in their working combustion engine car for a new electric one. The move to electric-only versions of these things will take decades, so maybe Germany can ban the sale of all consumer gas-burning equipment by 2035 but there is no way energy use will be 100% renewable by then.
Gas heating for residential homes is scheduled to be band in 2023. New buildings have to use heatpumps or alternatives. Adding isolation and making buildings energy efficient buildings are subsidized with up to 45%.
Replacing oil heating is subsidized by 45%
Replacing gas heating is subsidized by upto 30%.
The world is going to need some low-cost energy breakthroughs by 2035 if mere existence is going to be affordable, imagine the cost of living. Housing, food, medical, etc.
I assume Germany/Europe is having or will have the same housing rental/ownership price explosion as USA? Or is this just a US money-grab kind of thing?
I can't see what will change that cost spike except cheap energy.
>I assume Germany/Europe is having or will have the same housing rental/ownership price explosion as USA?
Ha, joke's on you. Home ownership in Germany (and most of the developed EU) is far more expensive than in the US when you factor median wages to median real estate prices ratio.
Americans complain a lot but real estate there is far more in reach for the average skilled worker than it is in Germany for example. The price per square foot/meter in Munich or Paris is nearly the same as in the Bay Area yet wages here are half to a quarter of that of the US workers. It's insane.
Rentals in Germany are more affordable, but that's only if you get a place in the 80 person queue who signed up for the apartment viewing within the first hour since the listing went up online. Apartment hunting in places like Germany or Sweden is a meme on its own.
The plan is to double onshore wind, build more offshore wind, and triple solar. That can certainly offset a lot of nonrenewable production and seems entirely possible in the given time-frame.
But what gets offset? Before last week, I would've assumed coal/lignite/oil. The real development is a shift in priorities -- namely, from decreasing GHG to weaning off of Russian natgas.
What I don't quite understand is how all of this additional renewable energy production is supposed to offset natgas... electrifying the entire country's HVAC infrastructure seems like almost a bigger hurdle than increasing renewable production?
Use the overshoot energy to produce hydrogen en mass. store it in the German gas grid. Use the "hydrogen-ready" gas plants (only they are considered "green" btw).
We've all raised our concerns about the opinions of Germans before on these threads. A brilliant scientific nation that seems to have become recently confused. Sort of like the British.
Green Gas? Nuclear is bad because it produces waste despite that waste often being the size of a can of coke after a year of service? Buying Russian gas is actually making Russia more democratic and drawing it in to the West?
The past week will have a lot of Germans revising many silly opinions they were originally able to afford but not anymore -- so I'm going to wait for that tide of opinion change rather than try to persuade anymore. Being naive sometimes is a luxury some can simply afford while others can't afford it. Climate change is happening and it's not going to wait for Germany, Russia has always been like Russia -- corrupt and unreliable. Amazing that Germany have considered the US a poor partner under Trump but a reliable one with Russia/Putin. France seems have better answers on how to solve energy problems than Germany.
France doesn't have any good answer on how to solve energy problems. Yes, they currently have a large amount of nuclear reactors - probably the most nuclear industry nation on the planet. However, most of them are aging and so far they fail to build new plants at a rate to sustain their production long term. They have 1 in construction, much delayed and with huge cost overruns. Even if they build another 10 that only delays the switch, they would have to replace 50 nuclear power plants. Their nuclear future so far depends on prolonging the run times of the existing plants.
France has 50 plants? They need to go headfirst into modular reactors.
Usually I would say that nuclear research and development dollars are wasted: they just displace purchasing solar/wind/storage. But with that big of an extant installed base, with approved/regulated sites and various other infrastructure, they may be the only country that can save money staying nuclear.
Of course, being a LFTR stan I would push for mass manufactured LFTRs the size of a couple shipping containers that can be decommissioned on a regular basis. 50 big nuclear plants replaced with about 1000 or more shipping container sized reactors on a replacement schedule.
LFTR would reduce waste, and separation of other fission products could be done elsewhere.
WHat is the French resistance to LFTR? I know that the US has strange bureaucratic resistances to LFTR built into academic funding and their regulatory agencies as an artifact of the ORNL reactor vs PWR reactor politics from the 1950s.
If France just piggybacking on the solid fuel rod reprocessing industry of the US and its same resistance to new reactor designs?
Its 56 even. That is a huge fleet to replace. I am not in the details of their decisions, but I think one can simply conclude that if a nation, which is so all-in on nuclear like France, doesn't have a good answer yet, it seems to be a non-trivial problem. France has their own fuel reprocessing industry and had breeding reactors in the past but gave up on them.
Yes but even those problems are far easier to handle than the ones of renewables. On one side we have investment problems, large scale planning issues, political issues, workforce issues. On the other side we simply have the tech ... just not existing at all (and nobody knows if it will).
Current rollout of renewables in France has also been a financial disaster and I don't see many people talking about that.
>Yes but even those problems are far easier to handle than the ones of renewables.
I don't think so. Look at UK's recent transition to renewables. They're making big moves nowadays, but we only talk about Germany. France is going backwards (it was an excellent idea to build nuclear plants after WW2, but not so much today compared to renewables' plunging cost and progress in energy storage).
France's renewable story has also been a disaster, 120 billions euros invested (half of the total cost of the whole nuclear grid (!) ) for 5% of the electricity production. Even Flamanville isn't as bad as that, there's hope it'll be good for future plants, that was just completely wasted.
France needs renewables, if they don't want to ruin themselves and build 150 additional reactors. If they want to become carbon neutral at some point...
"On the other side we simply have the tech ... just not existing at all (and nobody knows if it will)."
What tech doesn't exist in your opinion?
P2G is tech with "large scale planning issues".
> France needs renewables, if they don't want to ruin themselves and build 150 additional reactors. If they want to become carbon neutral at some point...
As I said in another comment, France's investment in renewable has actually been even worse in terms of results than Flamanville. 120 billions euros (half of the cost of the whole nuclear grid) for 5% of the production, you can't really go lower than that.
In terms of carbon, the other European countries have a lot to catchup to reach France's level. They currently fight very hard against carbon pricing because well, that would mean the french industry would have an edge compared to them...
P2G just isn't good enough for now, let's be fair.
It looks like solar capacity has been ramping up fairly steadily[1] in France in recent years, from near-zero around 2007 - perhaps that's a sign of progress?
(and regarding apparent investment issues: is that definitely a case of poor financial results, or could it be that large up-front investments were required in order to foster development, and that the returns are just beginning?)
Per capita I believe they do, total amount the US has about 50% more capacity(which is a shame given how much bigger we are than France). we should have a lot more if we were serious about global warming.
The discussions in the Bundestag streams the last couple days were pretty unified in their decision making. Germany is now going to up their military defenses, and that seems to be the highest priority.
The dependency on gazprom kind of put us in "Schach", so we as a country can't do anything (as the chancellor kind of admitted in his speech).
Historically, Schroeder has always been the direct bridge to Putin. And he knows how to hold the mutual respect that Putin expects from others.
It seems as the current ruling parties don't realize that this is a game of strategy, not a game of moral or emotions. You can't win against Putin with moral code, so I kind of fear that they make it worse and he'll hold a grudge against Germany.
Sometimes the threat of war and invasion cuts through a bunch of cruft and corruption. This is another miscalculation on Putin's side. Ukraine was the comfort blanket for Europe keeping them complacent.
This crossed an emotional line with the entirety of Europe. Heck, I feel it in the United States. Russia/Putin are nuts and not entirely rational. They are actual palpable evil: a direct threat to your survival and prosperity.
Remember the dogs thing with Merkel and Putin? I'm sure the "elites" of the EU have wanted to get more coordinated against Russia, but the populace was a bit ... soft.
Putin may have motivated far more people than just the populace of the Ukraine.
Looking at the map and the conduct of the war so far, this is a massive geopolitical opportunity for the West. Set fleets of drones into Ukraine and repulse the forces. Actually, I would sucker Belarus into invasion (they've already announced it, have they actually done it).
That would provide a casus belli for Ukraine (ahem NATO) forces to then invade Belarus, the other major buffer state between the NATO and Russia. Topple their autocrat.
Then put Belarus and Ukraine into NATO. Then there is a wall of NATO states at the doorstep of Russia.
I was thinking something similar recently. When an army leaves the safety of its homeland to invade another country, it becomes vulnerable to its supply lines being cut off and being stranded in a foreign country with lack of fuel, food/water, and/or ammo.
We’re already seeing scattered anecdotal examples of this happening to the Russian invasion force even without their supply lines being directly attacked. I wonder how difficult it would be for Western powers to assemble a fleet of drones, stick a bunch of Ukrainian flag decals on them, and then attack and disrupt the main Russian supply lines into Ukraine.
It would only take a few days of that before the Russian army runs out of material to fight the war with. Then Ukrainian troops can force a surrender, round them up, treat them appropriately under the Geneva Conventions, and then offer and encourage them to accept political asylum in the West. (Same with Belarus if they invade). Destroy or confiscate the materials.
Then boom, Russia no longer has an army. And without the West ever directly attacking the Russian (or Belorussian) homeland.
It seems last year one in five Russians were interested in asylum. Too bad the military likely avoids conscripting gays or domestic abuse victims or the Ukraine population would be increasing by every soldier sent in.
There is sort of a brother/sister relationship between the two countries and I suspect if the US agreed to float a basic income for a half a decade to defectors a good pamphlet drop on enemy troops could have them switching sides.
I look forward to the day when renewables provide >90% of our energy, and old men on the Internet are still bloviating that it can't be done. As for me, I'm looking at pallets of solar panels on eBay to expand our PV system.
The tech exists today with solar, wind, batteries, transmission, hydro (pumped and otherwise), demand response, and electrification using heat pumps and EVs.
We're not waiting on anything groundbreaking, no heroic technologies are needed. There is no magic. It's just a matter of manufacturing/install capacity and funds. It's like insulation for buildings: not sexy, but it works and it's a known quantity. Work backwards from first principles based on how much energy the Sun delivers to the planet.
Yes, but in the winter wind is quite strong. There will be large storage needs, but mostly in the range of days. The electricity networks are connected all over Europe and production and consumption is already handled on an European level. This will extend more and together with the built-up of much capacity mean, that storage needs are not as high as some put them.
With wind they are other issues, it's very unpredictable far ahead, you need a lot of places to put them and it's already at maximum theoretical efficiency already after 100 years of evolution so there's not even a hope it will improve unlike solar.
At the end yeah you can get out of all of these issues by building 10x the required capacity, but that is reflected on the price and the space to build all of this though.
Wind generators still are getting more efficient - partly because they are still improving, especially in the generator part, but mostly because they are becoming larger and the wind gets stronger the higher you are above ground.
And yes, we will need to build more of them, many more. We don't need 10x of the required capacity, but more than the required capacity and then put the excess energy into storage. And of course it always will be a mix of wind and solar.
There was an article a while back talking about running a transmission line from Chile to China so summer, desert sun in Chile could be used to generate solar energy to heat China during the winter. I read (was an HN posted article) either within that article or in the comments that transmission losses would only be ~30%. I wonder if solar panels in North Africa could generate electricity to be consumed during German winter?
As an owner of a small domestic p.v. system, with lithium storage (not for economical reasons but to protect against eventual long blackouts) I with who say tech does not exist.
First there is a bit stability issue: when a load start to consume (zero feed in or on-battery/autonomous scenario) the solar inverter demand time (seconds!) to ramp up, when the load stop the solar inverter still feed too much power and we do not have ready available "super-condenser" (when a load pops-up) and "energy sponges" (when a load stop), the result is a not stable microgrid. IF we have a large enough grid where spike loads are not really spike than perhaps we can have stability but such kind of grid for solar and wind it's not there, the so called "smart grid" do exists only on paper.
Secondly all p.v. systems I know are sold as commercial product, but they prove to be more like initial prototypes, to make the microgrid stable software is much used, and in general it's correct name should be crapware. ModBUS RTU is the most monitoring-and-control universal protocol, in most cases with a crappy load of various kind of "bridge" (generally from classic serial to USB or to TCP) and being pull-based it's normally not suitable at microgrid scale. CanBUS is used for quicker communication and is used much like car's ODB: there is a standard, but almost all vendor "extend" it as they wish so interoperability is crappy. Even the most open of the p.v. systems I know of (Victron, witch base it's system on Debian and publish all the code) is an incredible pile of python glue code and scripts that can't be really considered "production ready". All such systems also are designed to live connected to the OEM, some are even hard to use without internet connectivity to their "home". Some even have hard-coded passwords with non-deactivable wifi, hard-coded per entire model series, like BYD batteries, an ideal target for a casual wardriver.
First: something can be "stored", for instance I have enough hot water to heat it just with solar (as long as there is enough day-to-day production), that's very good and ultimately easy, it's just about have enough space for a big boiler. Electricity on contrary can't be stored much: batteries are hyper-expensive and do not really last that longer. Most stressed batteries last 5 years, most 8 years, few perhaps can arrive at 10 but I'm not much convinced. Long story short, there is enough tech to power up few homes, built with proper insulation and implants etc to run that way, there is almost nothing at industry demand scale, not even to made such systems themselves.
> The past week will have a lot of Germans revising many silly opinions they were originally able to afford but not anymore
Honestly, as a German myself I'm rather doubtful of that unfortunately. Some? Maybe. Many? Probably not. I cannot even convince my parents (who grew up in Germany during the time when the anti nuclear sentiment really started) to rethink their anti nuclear stance (despite having a great relationship with them). I say that as a physicist that absolutely sees there are flaws with aging nuclear plants.
But people who are not able to a) appreciate the energy density of nuclear and b) see that climate change is an urgent problem we face, whereas any issues from nuclear waste are long term problems (not even talking about future reactor technologies etc. etc.) is just... I don't know? It sounds insane, but indoctrinated? I just utterly fail to understand.
I mean, what's the point of a "nuclear waste free Earth" if our civilization collapses due to climate change?
Why oppose nuclear and renewables? It's about getting rid off fossil fuels isn't it? It's like focusing on competition among EV manufacturers when they are tiny compared to ICE. Take a step back.
Maybe the problem with the "green" nuclear energy is that we still do not have a final waste site for it. This stuff may not be much in terms of size, but it is bad for hundreds of thousands of years and can contaminate a lot of water.
> I mean, what's the point of a "nuclear waste free Earth" if our civilization collapses due to climate change?
That is a bit panic-fuelled and frankly even religious, while completely ignoring the immediate threat of radiation, which cannot be reversed for hundreds of thousands of years.
PS.: Climate change is going to happen whatever we do. This happened even before we existed.
> while completely ignoring the immediate threat of radiation, which cannot be reversed for hundreds of thousands of years.
Waiting hundreds of thousands of years is the simplest way to reverse the "threat of radiation". Each radioactive isotope has a half-life; if you wait ten half-lives, the "threat of radiation" is reduced by a thousand times, and the isotopes with very long half-lives aren't that radioactive to start with (roughly simplifying, the shorter the half-life, the more intense the radiation).
I guess you mean fusion. Fission is what we currently have/use for power plants. Even there research might end up in a better solution, because nuclear energy is actually a good source of energy because it is so dense. But current implementations of fission are really hard to recommend over even coal power plants.
I can not see, technologically, how we could have a functioning 100% renewable world today. I can see this with nuclear. It's that simple. That is why I'm backing anything that brings more nuclear power online.
Regardless, it's not either nuclear or renewables. It should be a combination that works.
You need to back up Sun and Wind with either some type of Battery or Nuclear/Carbon based solution. If not you have no energy reliability when sun/wind conditions are bad. More sun and wind renewables won't help in this case as they have this built-in problem.
Apart from that, it is not like big windmills and sun farms have zero impact on the environment. In this case a nuclear factory might be big and ugly, but globally its immediate impact on nature might be a lot less than the aforementioned renewables.
1 kg of natural uranium gives 45,000 kWh of electricity; so the extraction of raw materials for nuclear has less impact on nature as well compared to many other solutions (e.g. for the same amount of electricity you would need nearly 10,000 kg of mineral oil or 14,000 kg of coal). [1]
Of course with nuclear you have problems with storage of waste and possible accidents, but its positive impact on climate change, great capacity for producing electricity and lower impact on nature than many other solutions, might make it the best solution we have at the time being?
Because renewables alone don’t replace nuclear or fossil fuel plants. Renewables with enough battery backup could, but then it’s no longer as available or cheap.
Nuclear is much better suited for base load power than solar and wind. Take a look at this graph of German energy by source and Tw/H.
For all their good intentions of replacing nuclear with something cleaner and safer, you can see wind and solar grow, but not enough to offset the nuclear decrease. Natural gas consumption grows more to replace it. “Solar and wind instead of nuclear” is a false dichotomy because one can’t just swap out one with the other, at least not until grid batteries are far more available.
Nuclear works now. A 100% renewable grid will require energy storage. We have small scale options for energy storage, but none of the current energy storage technology we have now scales large enough to meet the demands of a 100% renewable grid.
Remember that heating in most of Europe is provided by natural gas. The primary need for heat is during the nighttime. Solar works only during the day, wind works great at dawn and dusk but not particularly well at night, and both of these systems have inherent unpredictability. You never know that there isn't some weather pattern that's going to take all your solar/wind down to 30% of its normal capacity for a week. Hydro and geothermal may fit the bill, but AFAIK Germany and Europe in general doesn't have the capacity.
The ultimate goal is a 100% renewable grid consisting of an energy storage system which will work all night, and will be recharged by solar and wind when those systems are operating at peak capacity. Natural gas heating will be replaced by heat pumps with a fallback to electric resistive heating when temperatures drop too low for a heat pump to be effective. Right now, there is no such energy storage system that will scale to meet these needs.
We'll get there one day, but until then, we need an energy generation technology that works all day every day with no dependencies on weather, and scale to the size of a continent. The only -- the only -- technologies that currently exist which do this are coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Pick one. You must pick one -- platitudes about renewable energy and technology which may or may not exist in a decade will not prevent the pipes from freezing tonight.
Right now, Germany has chosen coal and natural gas, and has phased out nuclear. IMHO this was the wrong choice.
(Before anyone says Germany has phased out coal, they have not phased out coal. Germany mines coal, selling coal to Poland, Poland uses coal to produce electricity, Germany buys electricity from Poland.)
> (Now, fission would be a different story. I am all for researching this intensively).
I suspect you meant fusion; I don't normally point out typos, but in this case, I think it's important.
There is also https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/datteln-4-coal-fir... , delivering about 400MW into the 16 2/3Hz electricity net of the Deutsche Bahn. Though apparently it uses most modern, efficient and environmentally friendly technology. At least they say so.
/me thinks of the green instead read stripe of some Inter City Expresses and giggles :)
There are quite a lot of valid concerns against nuclear power. As you wrote, the current generation was aging and would not have operated much longer anyway. There are valid concerns about nuclear waste (we just don't have a solution, but if that was the only thing, I would also argue, lets solve that problem another day). There are valid concerns about operational safety and due to recent events, even huge concerns about what happens when a nuclear reactor gets hit by a rocket. Lets hope we don't find out in Ukraine.
But the argument which makes the discussion now mostly irrelevant is simply: all available and reasonable designs are vastly expensive and take at least a decade to build, if not two including planning. That makes the question just moot. Not even France, which is all-in on nuclear has an answer to that.
Renewables are comparatively cheap and can be set up quickly. Germany already depends to a large part on renewable electricity. That is the cheap and efficient way forward. On top of that, nuclear power plants don't work well together with renewables, as they can't switch their output level enough.
Gas is the ideal partner for renewables and eventually will also be produced from renewable energy. Just recent events messed up the plan a bit, but not too much. We have to push quicker for renewables and pay a bit more for gas.
Please point me out to any operating breeding reactor and how much nuclear fuel it can process. The French shut down their breeding reactors long ago, the only existing ones I know of are Russian, right now they are an even worse reference.
I don't doubt they could be built, but the question is, what would they cost?
Please point me out to a nuclear reactor design that can be switched from 100% to 0% in the matter of hours and back again.
Well, talk about not updating your info. The vision of reprocessing + breeder reactors is straight out of 1960. Several countries spent many billions and many decades trying to make it work, and discovered that it was safer and cheaper to keep using conventional light water reactors. Nothing has really changed that makes this concept more feasible.
If we can not put some m3 into a robust container and burry it some km underground safely we really should reconsider our capability of running an advanced civilization.
This is a much harder problem than it might seem. You would need to find an underground storage site, where you can rule out any geological effects for a hundred millennia. In those time frames, even rigid rock moves quite a bit. There is no container solid enough, it can't be crushed. You would need to prevent any water coming to that place and carry the contamination away.
Germany stored some nuclear waste in a salt mine, that turned into a huge debacle after only 30 years requiring now an immensely expensive recovery operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
They did put it in a salt mine that was prone to water intrusions and not stable because it was mined/hollowed out. Maybe just dont do that without giving up the whole concept.
Over those time frames that you mentioned the waste mostly the toxic properties are important. Btw how are we handling all that toxic chemical waste that is going to be toxic and dangerous not only for hundreds but thousands of millenia. Maybe we could just put it there.
It is difficult for me to judge what exactly were wrong and why they thought it was a good idea to put that stuff there. But I do think they honestly thought it was a good idea and that scares me. That it is so easy to make severe mistakes which in hindsight might look silly. We don't have any long time experience with this and won't have it, as we basically have to deal now with the waste.
Exactly this. All justifications for nuclear are always qualified with "if done properly|safely|correctly..." and no nuclear reactor incident was predicated with any sort of warning about safety or impropriety.
The reality is that our world is inherently too unstable for the half century commitment necessary for each reactor. External influences always drive risky decisions which ultimately result in less than completely safe outcomes for both the operation of the reactor and the containment of the waste.
>Honestly, as a German myself I'm rather doubtful of that unfortunately. Some? Maybe. Many? Probably
There has been a historic reversal in German foreign and security policy this week! Germans are already revising their opinions about Russia, climate, energy, defense and what the government and media espouse since they may have been the original impetus in forming their opinions.
I think its more likely that we find a technical solution to radioactive waste then find a technical solution to a destroyed world (aka 3 Celsius hotter)
> Nuclear is bad because it produces waste despite that waste often being the size of a can of coke after a year of service?
The history of the German anti-nuclear movement is quite long, Chernobyl has essentially put a stop on new investments and killed any ongoing research for good (see THTR-300). This is also due to the ecological impact it had on Germany.
And now, because of this stop in new investments, Germany ended up with reactors stuck somewhere in between 1960 and 1980. Critical issues went unaddressed, the control rooms are cold war era time machines, incidents were swept under the rug for fear of it finally dropping the sword of damocles on the industry. Operators showed gross negligence all around (especially Vattenfall, who are now suing the German government over the phase out) and it's a small wonder we've not had a more serious incident (though significantly larger incidence of leukemia around Krümmel should probably be considered serious).
Nuclear is not happening here. The best we can hope for is keeping our fossil fuels mostly off and buying nuclear power from France until renewables are viable on their own (if ever).
There are some factual errors in what you stated.
She isn't becoming the Secretary of State, but a high ranking official in the state department. Her role is to be a special envoy to discuss climate related topics with foreign states. Which absolutely makes sense as to stop climate change, an international effort needs to be made. The state department would be the obvious administration to conduct these talks and puts them on the same priority level as previously economical and military topics.
But indeed, she needs to take up a German passport to become a state official.
The actual secretary of state is from the Green party, Annalena Baerbock. She just deployed some great pragmatic & lateral thinking. They have an American lobbying as their official representative for their cause on the international stage and the US (obviously). And they export renewable tech to America. Win win. Move the cause further while doing some business.
I wouldn't necessarily have voted for the green party in Germany (I live here but I am not a German national), but this is both very rational and very smart. Loving it.
The following about the sentiment towards nuclear power in Germany:
- Germany is a densely populated country and Germans have always been sensitive towards environmental pollution.
- Nuclear fallout is a reality as every consumer of mushrooms from Bavarian forests knows that are still today contaminated with caesium-137.
- Finding a secure final storage for nuclear waste has failed. The front-runner in Gorleben proved to be unreliable after decades of serving as a temporary storage.
- Most Germans believe that their country would have been obliterated if a nuclear war between East and West had turned hot.
- Most Germans find that nuclear power generation comes with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
From this vantage point, nuclear is not all that attractive.
Tell me about the answers of France
They have more than 50 plants, partly very old and due for shutdown, supplying 70% of ELECTRICAL energy.
They want to build up to 14 new ones.
Well and don't expect them before 2040
So now tell me how this answers going climate neutral.
Preferably react it again in a 'fast' reactor and get the other 90% of the energy out. And after that bury it for a much shorter amount of time than traditional waste requires, since it isn't as high in energy.
In a more considered manner than the billions of tonnes of carbon and crap polluting our environment causing the greenhouse effect. A small bit of nuclear waste can be buried deep in a secure location.
Completely agree however that was the line German government officials were trotting out to justify buying fuel from Russia when other EU countries were rolling their eyes.
You are mixing topics here and please restrain yourself with the "royal we" here. Some of us don't simply don't share your beliefs.
The mistake the Germans made, which they are now correcting, is over reliance on Russian gas to bridge the brief gap to energy neutrality. Though, in fairness, until Putin's melt-down last week, he could have saved that deal and kept on milking the Germans for billions for quite some time. Such melt-downs have not been seen in international politics since Trump reluctantly disappeared from it last year. You might say that Putin (whom Trump referred to as a 'genius' just last week) has trumped Trump in that respect.
Basically, the fix for Germany is importing expensive natural gas from the US and elsewhere as a stop gap solution while accelerating the move away from burning that to clean up the energy sector and lower cost.
That's what they just announced. 80% renewables eight years from now and 100% five years later. They are over 50% right now. Also, a recession is a great time to inject some capital into your economy. And of course the Germans have a healthy economy and low debt; unlike certain other countries. And of course they export a lot of their renewable tech to others; like the US.
Also, France and Germany have connected grids. So, with Germany producing lots of wind powrr and France providing nuclear base-load, both will be fine. No need for Germany to build nuclear plants. And no need for France to build a lot more plants either when they can import cheap German renewables to complement their expensive nuclear supply. The math to get rid of coal and natural gas in fifteen years actually adds up.
Maybe that is the end goal of this nonsense. Make Jan 6 look like a forgivable hiccup compared to loosing 200k armed conscripts. Suddenly Trump looks rational by comparison.
Importing gas from the US looks difficult given how polluting cargo ships are and the complete lack of capacity.
It's not nonsense if they get it done. 2035 is only 13 years away. That might be within the governing period of the current chancellor.
Importing gas even with the pollution associated with shipping it in is still better than burning lignite; which actually affects the health of lots of people in Germany and France (depending on winds). That's what they are trying to get rid off in the next eight years or so. Shutting down coal is the number 1 priority as it is by far the most polluting. If they could have done that with Russian gas that would have been better indeed. But that ship has sailed. Shutting down gas becomes the next priority after coal has been removed as a source of energy.
You keep on dragging in Trump. I'm not sure what your argument is other than that he did not do anything productive here other than promoting coal; which I would argue is indeed pure lunacy. Capacities can be scaled up if the price is right.
I read that methane can be produced at about 60% efficiency - if that’s true can’t we just accept that and build the required storage and enough extra renewable capacity?
That is basically the plan. Build up renewables, and as soon as there is enough capacity, produce "green" gas - either methane or hydrogen (personally I think methane wins, because it is easier to handle).
Which also was the point why there was such a large push for gas in recent years. Not only is it cleaner than coal, but facilities built up for gas can be used for green methane and also possible use with hydrogen was considered.
Okay so it’s just capacity and will to do it? Should be relatively straight forward no? It’s not like we don’t have the technology or does it need too much capacity?
Right. If the previous government had not throttled down the built-up of renewable sources, we probably would be close to phasing out coal already. The technology is fundamentally there, we just need to build way more wind generators and set up solar cells. Germany installed 10GW of solar peak power in 2012 and 5 GW of wind peak power in 2016. Compare that to a grid load of up to 80 GW.
The technology to produce green gas is existing too, but not rolled out widely - which hangs on having enough renewable electricity.
Yes, yes, we've heard that, let's close all nuclear plants, buy gas from Russia and planet will be saved. Great time for this post, indeed.
Energiewende is an extremely expensive project that is simply not going to work, what is clarify to some extent for example here [1]. It is economical absurdity, it is as if someone would try to built Perpetuum mobile, but breaking laws of economy. In fact, anyone can find in the internet sunny days stats for Germany and check by themselves if this has any chance to work on a truly large scale without existing efficient energy storage.
In addition Energiewende considers gas as green energy source, what is a joke, and, what is even more ridiculous, "biomas" is also green energy source, no idea how burning wood and corn is not emitting CO2, but, hey, ecologist are not doing something totally nuts for the first time, so not a big surprise.
Fighting nuclear energy for last 60 years worked so well for Greenpeace and others that we are in the today's crappy situation, but still nobody is saying, hey guys it seems you were dead wrong about nukes, it seems that's the only clean and practical, CO2 emission free energy source, isn't it?
If Germany didn't waste all those trillions of dollars for Energiewende of solar and wind power plants, but built reactors instead, they would have practically CO2-free economy now, but former chancellor, Mr. Gerhard Schröder, would not get a nice job in Gazprom in that case.
Religions are belief systems that cause all sorts of wacky outcomes in the real world because the beliefs are based on the way they wish things were instead of the way things are. If more people understood that this is simply a novel religion, this would at least start making more sense.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadAdditional details: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-aims-100-green-...
For those interested in this topic further, Our World in Data project has an energy profile for the country: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany
Let's hope at least a part of that amount would be used for achieving an energy independence, as the military goal number one.
I hope they make sure, municipalities can't wiggle their way out of building windparks anymore.
But indeed, a lot of things have to be changed quickly to achieve the desired results, but recent events have given a lot of motivation to do so even with those, who are not so much concerned about the environment. Now even the industry is driving this, as they are impacted with high electricity prices and possible shortages.
- Harder laws to build renewable energy source
- windmills that create electricity are banned and protested against in villages.
- solar parks are not build because they look bad
- EEG-Umlage which should be a tax to create more renewable sources will be terminated this year
- RWE is destroying villages to mine coal
- north stream 2 needed a war to not be finished
Hope this explains why it sounds like a joke
it's not as easy as you wish, besides that I would prefer like you would describe, unfortunatly as long as there are borders/humans/whatever there will always be conflicts.
I don't see how you can claim defense is a useless industry while the world is watching a sovereign nation defend itself against an invading army.
$150 billion might not be enough, unless Germany plans to play no role in defending the eastern flank of NATO as Russia marches. They have been badly underfunded for decades, $150b is a down payment on catching up.
Putin's Russia is going to be in an economic and political swamp for a long time for this, it wouldn't be surprising if he chooses to move on to a new target promptly after Ukraine just because why not. The same crazy calculation that gets us here, it isn't too far of a stretch from there to argue (if you're Putin) for trying to take some of Finland's territory.
Germany needs to take this very seriously and I think they're beginning to.
Energy security is likely one of the most paramount issues in europe now, I expect there will be big changes.
The wind generators produce Gigwatts of power, more than our entire nuclear plants ever did already. They look beutiful like spanish countryside and the wildlife is safe from them due to new technology already implemented in new plants.
It's not an either or, europe should do everything and do it now, do solar, do wind, do tidal, do nuclear, do everything and do it now to get off Russian gas.
We will still need some big law changes to make this happen. I don't see it happening this fast as it should be to reach a goal of 100% in 2035.
For storage, there's overbuilding capacity and using excess to generate hygrogen (and thus convert it back), storage from cars, potential for hydro storage in the alps and pyrinees, and in the short term gas provision from UK/Norway for top up, should be more than enough to maintain independence and resilience.
But there's more money in burning fossils.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/correction-ge...
IMO nuclear is the only real way out of the current mess.
any idea why we dont have several operational MSRs at this point?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
EDIT: i guess MSRs' structural components are subject to extreme corrosion from heat, salt, and radiation that makes them impossible to build for long-term continous operation.
Markets are not omniscient of course, and they might be ineffective, but it's something to think about when discussing nuclear energy.
the free market is made up of people who primarily watch sensational evening news and follow clickbait social media. the actual statistics are still well on the side of nuclear in terms of safety and externalities (as far as i understand)
While distance can make them safer, it also makes them less efficient.
There are no standard designs for nuclear reactors yet, although this is slowly changing.
Nuclear reactors have always been run at great subsidy.
Only two MSRs have ever been built, over half a century ago and have a huge list of disadvantages. Not saying that can't be overcome, but it takes time, money, and will. There is some movement in this area.
With solar and wind making such great strides, advantages of nuclear are decreasing.
Also, in typical governmental fashion (see: rocket building before SpaceX) power plants were optimized for (size???) instead of safety, cost and time to build.
Things you don't have to optimize for: efficiency
Make it fast to build and in self-contained modules (economies of scale). Make it failsafe (even if it costs efficiency)
These are called "blueprint reactors", because designing a nuclear reactor is easy, but building one is hard.
They exist in nuclear subs. There needs to be investment and research to make them commercially viable.
That means that it’s not a near-term solution, and also may turn out to not be viable at all.
And instead, you burn coal and Gaz which creates even more waste which we can't even store. The difference is that the nuclear waste are localised near you, while the CO2 is spread globally and mostly affect warmer country we don't care about.
> So simply put, there are around 17 meteors every year that hit ground and can cause a disaster
The disaster is made worse because of nuclear infrastructure. But I don't see the point. It is already a disaster to begin with. Look at Fukushima, the real disaster was the earthquake and tsunami that killed and destroyed lots of homes. The incident in the nuclear plant in the area did make it slightly worse, but not by much. Even though the media seem to blame the whole thing on the power plant.
the reactor near Hamburg was either broken or not running for some other reasons.
Also after 40 years of nuclear plants we still have not a good answer to the waste it produces.
I always thought the security/proliferation arguments against nuclear power were the most convincing, but in germany's case I think the alternative has been worse on this front too.
World best solar panels but yeah for some reason they solid it to other countries or companies.
So no fossil was not the only way of going forward and it still isn't
Germany's conservative government then just ignored the German's companies cries for help, costing 200_000 jobs. Why? Well that were moslty voters for the greens, so their jobs weren't of interest.
That waste argument is repeated over and over again and just not relevant. Even if the waste problem is as massive as politics tries to claim (it isn't), that's not relevant for keeping the reactors running or even building new ones.
The absolute volume of waste produced is so low that keeping on relying on fission isn't changing the already existing waste problem in any meaningful way especially when considering breeding type reactors that can recycle existing "waste".
The argument is nothing but anti-fission propaganda and I wish it would stop being brought up as the first line of defense all the time.
These are pretty old reactors from the 80s or earlier.
Calling it propaganda tells me just one thing: its a waste of time discussing this more.
Germany is doing better at decarbonization than most countries, in fact, but still attracts a disproportionate amount of flak for "not doing enough".
My cynical side says that this is precisely because they're slowly proving that nuclear isnt a necessary component of decarbonization. They are setting an example that threatens the industry's survival.
That remains to be seen. We would need to see what their progress is 5, 10, and then 15 years from now. I think the 2035 target would take a miracle to actually accomplish without Nuclear Power.
https://www.luxresearchinc.com/blog/li-ion-manufacturing-in-...
> Lux expects the global annual Li-ion manufacturing capacity to more than triple by 2024.
That 2TWh or 45 minutes of storage for the whole world added annually.
With this manufacturing capacity it will be possible to have 2h of storage before 2030, which greatly increases the amount of renewable energy which could be utilized.
I'd say if not 100%, then 80% is realistic. Wind and solar combined make up around 30% already, so it's a question of doubling that number and adding appropriate storage.
https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-news-02-...
This entire concept is called Sektorenkopplung.
Due to low ownership rate of apartments, why would a landlord invest more money in heating with heatpumps or using more efficient insulation materials when he would bear the costs, but the tenant would get the benefits? So they only do it when forced to, or it is cheaper to use renewables.
Most of Germany, including politicians and home owners would quite gladly stay on fossil fuels aside from some blowhards who talk more than act.
https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1737041/wind-genera...
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
The reality of relying on things like wind is that you have to either over-produce, or have a backup, and the backup is usually coal.
If Nuclear plants had not been unnecessarily shuttered, Germany would be more prepared to weather the weather, instead of increasing coal burning significantly.
Additionally, new German homes are required, by law, to be build in a way that will not use 1. Gas for Heating 2. a lot of energy at all.
Additionally local energy storage and production in homes is encourgaged with 45% of funding coming from the German state.
Coal normally makes no sense to back wind, which is why Britain has been shutting coal plants while building ever more wind farms.
Do they have the grid capacity to support people using more electric space heaters and less gas for heat?
My home uses gas heat. I suppose if there was some kind gas shortage I have to turn the thermostat down to the minimum needed to keep the pipes from freezing, then use space heaters to bring in-use rooms up to a livable temp.
But you've got to have both tactical and strategic responses, and the tactical solution may entail taking a hit from higher prices (though if that hit can be mitigated by other policy changes, like temporarily reducing taxes, that should be pursued as part of the tactical solution).
Tactical/short term: massively reducing gas use and trying to mitigate the short-term consequences by keeping nuclear online to power electric space heaters:
Strategic/long term: Switching all the buildings over to heat pumps powered by green energy.
Now yesterday Robert Habeck, Germany's minister for economic affairs and climate, and vice chancellor, claimed that a return to nuclear and/or coal is economically not viable, even if it were politically feasible (which it is not, since it would be political suicide given he's from the Green party). He's not stupid, so he knows he'll have to answer how in hell people will even heat their homes come next winter. Not only are energy prices up, but so are materials for home insulation (if you can get them at all) and prices for construction.
Right now, the government has plans to penalize landlords renting out homes with low energy efficiency, a plan typical of the SPD party, the Green party's coalition partner. Which won't work, though, because there simply is no way to reach those levels of energy efficiency given the demand in the construction industry, and in a way that decouples the consumer from their consumption, not to speak of constitutional (existing case law) concerns.
Meanwhile, the housing market is as insane as everywhere due to rampant public spending and the decrease in interest that goes with it. Adding ever more energy efficiency requirements means that it's objectively impossible for any average person to own a home.
As a German, I always wonder why the obvious flaw in these kind of discussions is never addressed: The current heating habbits of our German population is luxury heating - that is we heat every room to be comfy and luxurious standards. And people just claim "Germany needs X percent of gas for heating". But the truth is, if we would not have that gas, or prices would be insanely high, people will change their habits regarding heating and we would need less.
I myself had multiple discussion with my better half in winter when she was cranking up the heater in all rooms, to a level she could just walk around in light underwear and comfy dresses. I always rather heat a single room, close the door, and snug into my skiing thermos, sweatpants and sweater - and keep the time on the can short (not taking the smartphone helps) because its cold in there. This is actually sufficient for most time of the year (minus Mountain regions, but which are only sparsely populated). We do not have siberian winters. And I remember as a child at grandmas, there was a single wooden oven in the living room ("Stube"), everybody was in there together. The bedrooms where not heated at all, instead you take a thermos bottle (or even just hot potatoes in a tin) with you into the bed for the night - of course wearing long-sleeved tights and underwear.
I think a winter without heating would make people in our society aware what luxuries we've gotten accustomed to, and also show people how little one needs when things get serious.
The exit from nuclear power has been planned long ago, but the crucial point is, that in those years the renewables were not expanded enough. Solar buid-up peaked in 2012, Wind in 2017, with steep declines after that because of government decisions. But the government changed last autumn and the new one is all in on renewables. Partially because of the Greens being part of the government and now partially because even industry pushes for this to get cheaper electricity. And everyone wants stable supply and the current situation makes for a huge push towards renewables.
The previous chancellor was in power for more than 16 years.
Natural gas makes up 25% of Germany’s total energy consumption, and the country relies on Russia for 55% of its gas supply. If these imports were to suddenly cease, the EU’s largest economy and most populous country would find itself in dire straits."
https://fortune.com/2022/02/25/ukraine-invasion-russia-germa...
This is a worse joke than nuclear fusion being 10 years out. They should be aiming for zero new installs (including ICE cars) by 2025, and zero emissions by 2030.
Any idea how to set up a ballot initiative like that in California? We’ve also pushed the internal combustion engine to zero emission vehicle transition out to 2035.
Germany needs to start building nuclear TODAY. But good luck trying that with the Greens in the government coalition.
I won't go into details. The math simply doesn't add up, not technological and not economy-wise.
Just like how europe "recycled" their garbage by shipping it to china who just probably dumped it god knows where.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-recycling-china-trash...
Just like how norway is "environmentally friendly" because they buy so many electric cars, but they are just behind saudi arabia in oil production on a per capita basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...
One thing european countries excel at is producing great PR. Saudi arabia's PR campaign should be : "Saudi Arabia, we are just as environmentally friendly as Norway".
Why?
A watt is a watt, and renewables are cost-competitive with carbon even before taking into consideration geopolitics.
But, more importantly, renewables don't even have to be cost competitive to keep manufacturing in Germany while transitioning to renewables.
Ukraine has opened up political space for subsidy that may not have existed a year ago. Germany just doubled their defense spending. To say that this was unimaginable even three weeks ago, if anything, under-states the case.
I highly doubt there is political will in Germany to offshore manufacturing, and I'm pretty sure there is newly found political will to transition off of natgas. In particular, subsidizing energy prices to keep German manufacturing competitive while weaning off of RU natgas is likely an easy sell.
I think it's much more likely that Germany shifts off of natgas and in the meantime subsidizes energy for manufacturing, than that Germany allows manufacturing to offshore as a result of energy price spikes due to renewable transition.
> One thing european countries excel at is producing great PR.
Not at all surprising when you realize that the entire political economy of the west -- democracy and consumer/financial capitalism -- is almost by design dominated by people and institutions who are good at PR.
A major geopolitical theme in the 2010s was the fact that open societies have major weaknesses in open information warfare.
The next decade of the global info war will be interesting. I think we'll learn that, although you can easily cause petty chaos and divisiveness in the west, the institutions and core values are very robust. After all, those institutions and values are subject to -- and always have been subject to -- constant and open assault.
I think we'll also learn that authoritarian states have almost a mirror opposite dynamics of the west -- fueling petty divisions in much harder, but once you gain a foothold the whole system is much less robust to total collapse.
That was my point. And pollution is pollution. Shifting it to a third world country and clearing it off your books doesn't make you virtuous nor environmentally friendly. As I pointed it out with the european "recycling" scam.
> renewables are cost-competitive with carbon even before taking into consideration geopolitics
The largest source of renewables is biomass.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/renewable-sources/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/30/wood-pel...
> Not at all surprising when you realize that the entire political economy of the west
I didn't say it was surprising. Also why take this into a bizarre geopolitical tangent?
I think it's highly unlikely that Germany will offshore its Mittelstand.
> The largest source of renewables is biomass.
I'm not really sure what point you're making here.
> Also why take this into a bizarre geopolitical tangent?
This is 100% your tangent... why mention Saudi Arabia and Norway PR on an article about Germany?
e: generally speaking, we're not disagreeing about much, so I think this exchange is possibly due to your confusion regarding what this article is about. You seem to think the article is primarily about Germany posturing around climate change and GHG. It's not. This article is about German energy independence and European geopolitics. This policy change was announced on the eve of war in Europe, not as a follow-up to a climate conference.
I didn't say they will.
> I'm not really sure what point you're making here.
A significant portion of renewables aren't as environmentally friendly as we think.
> This is 100% your tangent... why mention Saudi Arabia and Norway PR on an article about Germany?
Norway releases tons of PR about how environmentally friendly they are especially by how much EVs they buy. But on a closer look, they produce as much oil as saudi arabia on a per capita basis.
I picked Saudi Arabia because they are the closest per capita producers to norway. I provided the source. Sort by "per capita" and you'll see norway right below saudi arabia. I picked saudi arabia because nobody in their right mind would say saudi arabia is "environmentally friendly". And yet we pretend norway is.
My point is that european countries aren't as environmentally friendly as their PR says they are. Shipping garbage to china and claiming you recycle 100% of your garbage is not environmentally friendly. Producing as much oil as saudi arabia and buying a few EVs doesn't make you environmentally friendly. Releasing PR saying you are environmentally friendly doesn't make you environmentally friendly. Not sure why you are injecting geopolitics, democracy, etc into this.
Replacing oil heating is subsidized by 45% Replacing gas heating is subsidized by upto 30%.
I assume Germany/Europe is having or will have the same housing rental/ownership price explosion as USA? Or is this just a US money-grab kind of thing?
I can't see what will change that cost spike except cheap energy.
Ha, joke's on you. Home ownership in Germany (and most of the developed EU) is far more expensive than in the US when you factor median wages to median real estate prices ratio.
Americans complain a lot but real estate there is far more in reach for the average skilled worker than it is in Germany for example. The price per square foot/meter in Munich or Paris is nearly the same as in the Bay Area yet wages here are half to a quarter of that of the US workers. It's insane.
Rentals in Germany are more affordable, but that's only if you get a place in the 80 person queue who signed up for the apartment viewing within the first hour since the listing went up online. Apartment hunting in places like Germany or Sweden is a meme on its own.
By 2007 this had increased to 7.1, then the crash happened. It had bounced back to 7.7 by 2020 and it's well over 8, maybe 8.5 today.
A US house is of course far larger. An average European house is about 1000 square foot. An average American bathroom is about that size*
* slight hyperbole
But what gets offset? Before last week, I would've assumed coal/lignite/oil. The real development is a shift in priorities -- namely, from decreasing GHG to weaning off of Russian natgas.
What I don't quite understand is how all of this additional renewable energy production is supposed to offset natgas... electrifying the entire country's HVAC infrastructure seems like almost a bigger hurdle than increasing renewable production?
- Law of physics
Green Gas? Nuclear is bad because it produces waste despite that waste often being the size of a can of coke after a year of service? Buying Russian gas is actually making Russia more democratic and drawing it in to the West?
The past week will have a lot of Germans revising many silly opinions they were originally able to afford but not anymore -- so I'm going to wait for that tide of opinion change rather than try to persuade anymore. Being naive sometimes is a luxury some can simply afford while others can't afford it. Climate change is happening and it's not going to wait for Germany, Russia has always been like Russia -- corrupt and unreliable. Amazing that Germany have considered the US a poor partner under Trump but a reliable one with Russia/Putin. France seems have better answers on how to solve energy problems than Germany.
Usually I would say that nuclear research and development dollars are wasted: they just displace purchasing solar/wind/storage. But with that big of an extant installed base, with approved/regulated sites and various other infrastructure, they may be the only country that can save money staying nuclear.
Of course, being a LFTR stan I would push for mass manufactured LFTRs the size of a couple shipping containers that can be decommissioned on a regular basis. 50 big nuclear plants replaced with about 1000 or more shipping container sized reactors on a replacement schedule.
LFTR would reduce waste, and separation of other fission products could be done elsewhere.
WHat is the French resistance to LFTR? I know that the US has strange bureaucratic resistances to LFTR built into academic funding and their regulatory agencies as an artifact of the ORNL reactor vs PWR reactor politics from the 1950s.
If France just piggybacking on the solid fuel rod reprocessing industry of the US and its same resistance to new reactor designs?
However, what has happened is that many many people have taken a swing at scalable reactors for a long time in the design phase.
And we do know the test ORNL reactor for MSR/LFTR practically fit in a closet, at least for the actual reactor.
So there is an opportunity.
Current rollout of renewables in France has also been a financial disaster and I don't see many people talking about that.
I don't think so. Look at UK's recent transition to renewables. They're making big moves nowadays, but we only talk about Germany. France is going backwards (it was an excellent idea to build nuclear plants after WW2, but not so much today compared to renewables' plunging cost and progress in energy storage).
"On the other side we simply have the tech ... just not existing at all (and nobody knows if it will)."
What tech doesn't exist in your opinion? P2G is tech with "large scale planning issues".
As I said in another comment, France's investment in renewable has actually been even worse in terms of results than Flamanville. 120 billions euros (half of the cost of the whole nuclear grid) for 5% of the production, you can't really go lower than that.
In terms of carbon, the other European countries have a lot to catchup to reach France's level. They currently fight very hard against carbon pricing because well, that would mean the french industry would have an edge compared to them...
P2G just isn't good enough for now, let's be fair.
so what? France inefficiently invests into renewables, thus renewables aren't the answer and we wait for a miracle?
> P2G just isn't good enough for now, let's be fair.
what does good enough mean? not as cheap as burning subsidized natural gas?
(and regarding apparent investment issues: is that definitely a case of poor financial results, or could it be that large up-front investments were required in order to foster development, and that the returns are just beginning?)
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_France
The dependency on gazprom kind of put us in "Schach", so we as a country can't do anything (as the chancellor kind of admitted in his speech).
Historically, Schroeder has always been the direct bridge to Putin. And he knows how to hold the mutual respect that Putin expects from others.
It seems as the current ruling parties don't realize that this is a game of strategy, not a game of moral or emotions. You can't win against Putin with moral code, so I kind of fear that they make it worse and he'll hold a grudge against Germany.
This crossed an emotional line with the entirety of Europe. Heck, I feel it in the United States. Russia/Putin are nuts and not entirely rational. They are actual palpable evil: a direct threat to your survival and prosperity.
Remember the dogs thing with Merkel and Putin? I'm sure the "elites" of the EU have wanted to get more coordinated against Russia, but the populace was a bit ... soft.
Putin may have motivated far more people than just the populace of the Ukraine.
Looking at the map and the conduct of the war so far, this is a massive geopolitical opportunity for the West. Set fleets of drones into Ukraine and repulse the forces. Actually, I would sucker Belarus into invasion (they've already announced it, have they actually done it).
That would provide a casus belli for Ukraine (ahem NATO) forces to then invade Belarus, the other major buffer state between the NATO and Russia. Topple their autocrat.
Then put Belarus and Ukraine into NATO. Then there is a wall of NATO states at the doorstep of Russia.
We’re already seeing scattered anecdotal examples of this happening to the Russian invasion force even without their supply lines being directly attacked. I wonder how difficult it would be for Western powers to assemble a fleet of drones, stick a bunch of Ukrainian flag decals on them, and then attack and disrupt the main Russian supply lines into Ukraine.
It would only take a few days of that before the Russian army runs out of material to fight the war with. Then Ukrainian troops can force a surrender, round them up, treat them appropriately under the Geneva Conventions, and then offer and encourage them to accept political asylum in the West. (Same with Belarus if they invade). Destroy or confiscate the materials.
Then boom, Russia no longer has an army. And without the West ever directly attacking the Russian (or Belorussian) homeland.
There is sort of a brother/sister relationship between the two countries and I suspect if the US agreed to float a basic income for a half a decade to defectors a good pamphlet drop on enemy troops could have them switching sides.
We're not waiting on anything groundbreaking, no heroic technologies are needed. There is no magic. It's just a matter of manufacturing/install capacity and funds. It's like insulation for buildings: not sexy, but it works and it's a known quantity. Work backwards from first principles based on how much energy the Sun delivers to the planet.
US: https://gspp.berkeley.edu/faculty-and-impact/news/recent-new...
Australia: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2017.05.168
Europe: https://www.energyplan.eu/smartenergyeurope/ | https://www.irena.org/publications/2018/Feb/Renewable-energy... | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...
Central/South America: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173820
(if anyone has other resources for geographies I didn't mention, please comment with them to contribute to the knowledge graph!)
Why would this be necessary except in extreme environments (which don't exist in Germany)?
If solar produces 0 watts in Germany for an entire month we're all dead anyways.
Right now https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE as an indication, Germany is at around 30% production of their solar capacity.
At the end yeah you can get out of all of these issues by building 10x the required capacity, but that is reflected on the price and the space to build all of this though.
First there is a bit stability issue: when a load start to consume (zero feed in or on-battery/autonomous scenario) the solar inverter demand time (seconds!) to ramp up, when the load stop the solar inverter still feed too much power and we do not have ready available "super-condenser" (when a load pops-up) and "energy sponges" (when a load stop), the result is a not stable microgrid. IF we have a large enough grid where spike loads are not really spike than perhaps we can have stability but such kind of grid for solar and wind it's not there, the so called "smart grid" do exists only on paper.
Secondly all p.v. systems I know are sold as commercial product, but they prove to be more like initial prototypes, to make the microgrid stable software is much used, and in general it's correct name should be crapware. ModBUS RTU is the most monitoring-and-control universal protocol, in most cases with a crappy load of various kind of "bridge" (generally from classic serial to USB or to TCP) and being pull-based it's normally not suitable at microgrid scale. CanBUS is used for quicker communication and is used much like car's ODB: there is a standard, but almost all vendor "extend" it as they wish so interoperability is crappy. Even the most open of the p.v. systems I know of (Victron, witch base it's system on Debian and publish all the code) is an incredible pile of python glue code and scripts that can't be really considered "production ready". All such systems also are designed to live connected to the OEM, some are even hard to use without internet connectivity to their "home". Some even have hard-coded passwords with non-deactivable wifi, hard-coded per entire model series, like BYD batteries, an ideal target for a casual wardriver.
First: something can be "stored", for instance I have enough hot water to heat it just with solar (as long as there is enough day-to-day production), that's very good and ultimately easy, it's just about have enough space for a big boiler. Electricity on contrary can't be stored much: batteries are hyper-expensive and do not really last that longer. Most stressed batteries last 5 years, most 8 years, few perhaps can arrive at 10 but I'm not much convinced. Long story short, there is enough tech to power up few homes, built with proper insulation and implants etc to run that way, there is almost nothing at industry demand scale, not even to made such systems themselves.
Honestly, as a German myself I'm rather doubtful of that unfortunately. Some? Maybe. Many? Probably not. I cannot even convince my parents (who grew up in Germany during the time when the anti nuclear sentiment really started) to rethink their anti nuclear stance (despite having a great relationship with them). I say that as a physicist that absolutely sees there are flaws with aging nuclear plants.
But people who are not able to a) appreciate the energy density of nuclear and b) see that climate change is an urgent problem we face, whereas any issues from nuclear waste are long term problems (not even talking about future reactor technologies etc. etc.) is just... I don't know? It sounds insane, but indoctrinated? I just utterly fail to understand.
I mean, what's the point of a "nuclear waste free Earth" if our civilization collapses due to climate change?
I'm not sure anyone here will have a good answer for you, but anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is incredibly strong.
> I mean, what's the point of a "nuclear waste free Earth" if our civilization collapses due to climate change?
That is a bit panic-fuelled and frankly even religious, while completely ignoring the immediate threat of radiation, which cannot be reversed for hundreds of thousands of years.
PS.: Climate change is going to happen whatever we do. This happened even before we existed.
Waiting hundreds of thousands of years is the simplest way to reverse the "threat of radiation". Each radioactive isotope has a half-life; if you wait ten half-lives, the "threat of radiation" is reduced by a thousand times, and the isotopes with very long half-lives aren't that radioactive to start with (roughly simplifying, the shorter the half-life, the more intense the radiation).
Risks aside, renewables are cheaper. So why use an outdated technology like nuclear?
(Now, fission would be a different story. I am all for researching this intensively).
Regardless, it's not either nuclear or renewables. It should be a combination that works.
Apart from that, it is not like big windmills and sun farms have zero impact on the environment. In this case a nuclear factory might be big and ugly, but globally its immediate impact on nature might be a lot less than the aforementioned renewables.
1 kg of natural uranium gives 45,000 kWh of electricity; so the extraction of raw materials for nuclear has less impact on nature as well compared to many other solutions (e.g. for the same amount of electricity you would need nearly 10,000 kg of mineral oil or 14,000 kg of coal). [1]
Of course with nuclear you have problems with storage of waste and possible accidents, but its positive impact on climate change, great capacity for producing electricity and lower impact on nature than many other solutions, might make it the best solution we have at the time being?
[1] https://www.euronuclear.org/glossary/fuel-comparison/
Nuclear is much better suited for base load power than solar and wind. Take a look at this graph of German energy by source and Tw/H.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/Fil...
For all their good intentions of replacing nuclear with something cleaner and safer, you can see wind and solar grow, but not enough to offset the nuclear decrease. Natural gas consumption grows more to replace it. “Solar and wind instead of nuclear” is a false dichotomy because one can’t just swap out one with the other, at least not until grid batteries are far more available.
Remember that heating in most of Europe is provided by natural gas. The primary need for heat is during the nighttime. Solar works only during the day, wind works great at dawn and dusk but not particularly well at night, and both of these systems have inherent unpredictability. You never know that there isn't some weather pattern that's going to take all your solar/wind down to 30% of its normal capacity for a week. Hydro and geothermal may fit the bill, but AFAIK Germany and Europe in general doesn't have the capacity.
The ultimate goal is a 100% renewable grid consisting of an energy storage system which will work all night, and will be recharged by solar and wind when those systems are operating at peak capacity. Natural gas heating will be replaced by heat pumps with a fallback to electric resistive heating when temperatures drop too low for a heat pump to be effective. Right now, there is no such energy storage system that will scale to meet these needs.
We'll get there one day, but until then, we need an energy generation technology that works all day every day with no dependencies on weather, and scale to the size of a continent. The only -- the only -- technologies that currently exist which do this are coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Pick one. You must pick one -- platitudes about renewable energy and technology which may or may not exist in a decade will not prevent the pipes from freezing tonight.
Right now, Germany has chosen coal and natural gas, and has phased out nuclear. IMHO this was the wrong choice.
(Before anyone says Germany has phased out coal, they have not phased out coal. Germany mines coal, selling coal to Poland, Poland uses coal to produce electricity, Germany buys electricity from Poland.)
> (Now, fission would be a different story. I am all for researching this intensively).
I suspect you meant fusion; I don't normally point out typos, but in this case, I think it's important.
/me thinks of the green instead read stripe of some Inter City Expresses and giggles :)
But the argument which makes the discussion now mostly irrelevant is simply: all available and reasonable designs are vastly expensive and take at least a decade to build, if not two including planning. That makes the question just moot. Not even France, which is all-in on nuclear has an answer to that.
Renewables are comparatively cheap and can be set up quickly. Germany already depends to a large part on renewable electricity. That is the cheap and efficient way forward. On top of that, nuclear power plants don't work well together with renewables, as they can't switch their output level enough.
Gas is the ideal partner for renewables and eventually will also be produced from renewable energy. Just recent events messed up the plan a bit, but not too much. We have to push quicker for renewables and pay a bit more for gas.
Yes we do. I post this is almost every thread about nuclear power, and it seems I find new people each time.
If you combine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor you have essentially zero nuclear waste, and you also need something like 98% less Uranium.
This is a completely solved problem.
> On top of that, nuclear power plants don't work well together with renewables, as they can't switch their output level enough.
This isn't true either.
It's like everyone's opinion of nuclear power is stuck in the past, and no one can ever update their info.
Please point me out to a nuclear reactor design that can be switched from 100% to 0% in the matter of hours and back again.
Germany stored some nuclear waste in a salt mine, that turned into a huge debacle after only 30 years requiring now an immensely expensive recovery operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
Oops.
Over those time frames that you mentioned the waste mostly the toxic properties are important. Btw how are we handling all that toxic chemical waste that is going to be toxic and dangerous not only for hundreds but thousands of millenia. Maybe we could just put it there.
The reality is that our world is inherently too unstable for the half century commitment necessary for each reactor. External influences always drive risky decisions which ultimately result in less than completely safe outcomes for both the operation of the reactor and the containment of the waste.
There has been a historic reversal in German foreign and security policy this week! Germans are already revising their opinions about Russia, climate, energy, defense and what the government and media espouse since they may have been the original impetus in forming their opinions.
I think its more likely that we find a technical solution to radioactive waste then find a technical solution to a destroyed world (aka 3 Celsius hotter)
The history of the German anti-nuclear movement is quite long, Chernobyl has essentially put a stop on new investments and killed any ongoing research for good (see THTR-300). This is also due to the ecological impact it had on Germany.
And now, because of this stop in new investments, Germany ended up with reactors stuck somewhere in between 1960 and 1980. Critical issues went unaddressed, the control rooms are cold war era time machines, incidents were swept under the rug for fear of it finally dropping the sword of damocles on the industry. Operators showed gross negligence all around (especially Vattenfall, who are now suing the German government over the phase out) and it's a small wonder we've not had a more serious incident (though significantly larger incidence of leukemia around Krümmel should probably be considered serious).
Nuclear is not happening here. The best we can hope for is keeping our fossil fuels mostly off and buying nuclear power from France until renewables are viable on their own (if ever).
What impact did it had on the environment in Germany?
Maybe she is being granted German citizenship to become Secretary of State.
The actual secretary of state is from the Green party, Annalena Baerbock. She just deployed some great pragmatic & lateral thinking. They have an American lobbying as their official representative for their cause on the international stage and the US (obviously). And they export renewable tech to America. Win win. Move the cause further while doing some business.
I wouldn't necessarily have voted for the green party in Germany (I live here but I am not a German national), but this is both very rational and very smart. Loving it.
- Germany is a densely populated country and Germans have always been sensitive towards environmental pollution. - Nuclear fallout is a reality as every consumer of mushrooms from Bavarian forests knows that are still today contaminated with caesium-137. - Finding a secure final storage for nuclear waste has failed. The front-runner in Gorleben proved to be unreliable after decades of serving as a temporary storage. - Most Germans believe that their country would have been obliterated if a nuclear war between East and West had turned hot. - Most Germans find that nuclear power generation comes with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
From this vantage point, nuclear is not all that attractive.
So now tell me how this answers going climate neutral.
Because Nuclear energy emits a tiny fraction of the Co2 that fossil fuels emit for the same energy.
Right now, autocratic Russia and Saudi Arabia are actively colluding to drive up oil prices during the invasion of Ukraine.
https://theintercept.com/2022/02/23/ukraine-russia-gas-price...
EDIT: I misread the tone of the original comment, and have updated my comment to reflect it.
The mistake the Germans made, which they are now correcting, is over reliance on Russian gas to bridge the brief gap to energy neutrality. Though, in fairness, until Putin's melt-down last week, he could have saved that deal and kept on milking the Germans for billions for quite some time. Such melt-downs have not been seen in international politics since Trump reluctantly disappeared from it last year. You might say that Putin (whom Trump referred to as a 'genius' just last week) has trumped Trump in that respect.
Basically, the fix for Germany is importing expensive natural gas from the US and elsewhere as a stop gap solution while accelerating the move away from burning that to clean up the energy sector and lower cost.
That's what they just announced. 80% renewables eight years from now and 100% five years later. They are over 50% right now. Also, a recession is a great time to inject some capital into your economy. And of course the Germans have a healthy economy and low debt; unlike certain other countries. And of course they export a lot of their renewable tech to others; like the US.
Also, France and Germany have connected grids. So, with Germany producing lots of wind powrr and France providing nuclear base-load, both will be fine. No need for Germany to build nuclear plants. And no need for France to build a lot more plants either when they can import cheap German renewables to complement their expensive nuclear supply. The math to get rid of coal and natural gas in fifteen years actually adds up.
Importing gas from the US looks difficult given how polluting cargo ships are and the complete lack of capacity.
Importing gas even with the pollution associated with shipping it in is still better than burning lignite; which actually affects the health of lots of people in Germany and France (depending on winds). That's what they are trying to get rid off in the next eight years or so. Shutting down coal is the number 1 priority as it is by far the most polluting. If they could have done that with Russian gas that would have been better indeed. But that ship has sailed. Shutting down gas becomes the next priority after coal has been removed as a source of energy.
You keep on dragging in Trump. I'm not sure what your argument is other than that he did not do anything productive here other than promoting coal; which I would argue is indeed pure lunacy. Capacities can be scaled up if the price is right.
Energiewende is an extremely expensive project that is simply not going to work, what is clarify to some extent for example here [1]. It is economical absurdity, it is as if someone would try to built Perpetuum mobile, but breaking laws of economy. In fact, anyone can find in the internet sunny days stats for Germany and check by themselves if this has any chance to work on a truly large scale without existing efficient energy storage.
In addition Energiewende considers gas as green energy source, what is a joke, and, what is even more ridiculous, "biomas" is also green energy source, no idea how burning wood and corn is not emitting CO2, but, hey, ecologist are not doing something totally nuts for the first time, so not a big surprise.
Fighting nuclear energy for last 60 years worked so well for Greenpeace and others that we are in the today's crappy situation, but still nobody is saying, hey guys it seems you were dead wrong about nukes, it seems that's the only clean and practical, CO2 emission free energy source, isn't it?
If Germany didn't waste all those trillions of dollars for Energiewende of solar and wind power plants, but built reactors instead, they would have practically CO2-free economy now, but former chancellor, Mr. Gerhard Schröder, would not get a nice job in Gazprom in that case.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/06...
All fossil power was once energy given by the sun.
Gas is only considered green when the generators can be used for hydrogen later.
The hydrogen will be produced by electrolyzers using overproduction of renewable energy.
Gerhard Schröder is an idiot, we agree.