Germany May Offer Model for Reining in Fossil Fuel Use | Hacker News Reader

Germany May Offer Model for Reining in Fossil Fuel Use

nytimes.com

44 pointsprostoalex40 comments

Germany may offer a model.

France has had a working model for the last few decades. It's called nuclear. France gets less than 10% of their power from fossil fuel and could easily move the rest of the way to either gas (half as bad as coal) or completely renewable.

Without nuclear, Germany will have a tough time and reduced outputs + high taxes.

Checked these two charts: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/top2011.tot and https://www.imf.org/

France is making 30 400$/tonne of CO2 while Germany is making 18 200$/tonne of CO2.

Edit: Here is pretty informative chart about energy production in Germany: https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm

that doesn't look like a fair comparsion:

Germany in Square Metres: 357.340,08 km² France in Square Metres: 632.834 km² (without sea: 543.965)

So now you see we are only slightly ahead of france when you compare the square metres which you should.

Germany isn't as good as it seems when we look at CO2.

Also these values are sanitized which means somebody traded CO2 and that makes our actual CO2 Emission system broken. As soon as Countries could trade Emission.

And you need to compare where the CO2 comes from. I would argue that France / Spain have lot's of CO2 even comming from their agriculture. agriculture is pretty strong in these countries. While germany makes a lot of CO2 from car manufacturing.

Square meters don't produce CO2, people do. And Frances population is about 2/3 of Germany.

animals produce as much co2 as cars. so..

So we don't need to worry about climate change then?

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/Supplement_1/11543/F2.large....

Cows produce methane. Here is methane breakdown of U.S. http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.htm...

Cars produce mostly CO2, here's breakdown: http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.htm...

That "Cow farts cause climate change as much as cars" stuff is PETA propaganda. I've seen as high as "52% of all carbon emissions result from meat consumption". Then I read the actual paper and "We are double counting all these numbers because of moral hazard of eating meat. Lying is OK if you do it for good cause."

The 18% share was calculated by combining the direct effect of methane, then counting in some estimation of deforestation. It is true that Amazon rain forests end up as pasture, but that's not necessarily the biggest reason why they cut down the forest. They first try to grow some plants on it, but as the fertility goes down it's only good as pasture anymore. If you want to go from 18% to 8% you only need to stop increasing meat consumption. But that doesn't necessarily work if the driver of deforestation turns out to be something else.

I'm not lying the whole point of CO2 emission is so false, since higher tiered countries always sell their emission and tell others that they are the best.

But that is simply not true. Also mostly our world will always change his clima, that's natural, we soon will see a ice age. however people always think that the mostly we are the reason for that. however that's simply not true, the world is really really good when it comes to compensate such things. she did that million years before, even before there were any human.

I honestly don't understand how nuclear is supposed to be the solution when it is so much more expensive than solar/wind. In addition, nuclear is getting more expensive, while solar/wind have been getting cheaper exponentially (although the wind price improvements have started slowing now).

Because it isn't "so much more expensive"

http://energyrealityproject.com/lets-run-the-numbers-nuclear...

Could nuclear advocates please include cost of insurance in their calculations? Because insurers seem to know a bit more about extreme value statistics and long-tail risk, unlike governments or nuclear power advocates. And then please include the cost of storing nuclear waste...

I don't think that economy growth vs energy consumption is a very useful metric for a country like Germany. We outsource a lot of our pollution to China where all the stuff we sell is actually made.

> where all the stuff we sell is actually made.

I wonder what all the factories here in Germany are doing then...

My washing machine from Miele says 'Made in Germany'.

And if you open it up, how many of its parts also say "Made in Germany"?

I can't tell you that but this is actually one of the few companies that takes their own social and environmental standards serious:

http://www.miele.com/en/com/selecting-new-suppliers-2997.htm

What do you think this Miele factory in Germany does?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmogYhjm4KI

Pretty much all of it, which is reflected in Quality and price.

Actually Germany is one of the few western countries that still produces very much. In fact it has a positive trade balance with China.

When you're in China and you see something that isn't made in China it often says Made in Germany.

A positive trade balance does not imply that we don't outsource the dirty part of the production. If you for example import steel or Aluminium from China and turn it into cars and airplanes and sell them back, a lot of the energy is used in China, but most of the value was added in Germany.

Yep, this was covered about a decade ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/world/asia/21transfer.html...

I'm from a small town near Hamburg. The town has an aluminum plant and a plant from DOW Chemical. Hamburg even has steel production:

http://hamburg.arcelormittal.com

There is lots of dirty industry in Germany. Still. Coal production. Lots of chemical plants and products. Cars are painted in Germany.

Higher standards make some products expensive.

If the aluminum was smelted in Sichuan province or next to three gorges, it wouldn't contribute much to global warming though

>In fact it has a positive trade balance with China.

That doesn't contradict what OP is saying. If you work in any sort of manufacturing in EU - you know Germany makes manufacturing equipment (production lines, automation, etc.) which is expensive but also clean. China imports those to mass produce things which is cheap and dirty. They either do value added stuff or stuff that makes stuff - and outsource the pollution.

> you know Germany makes manufacturing equipment (production lines, automation, etc.) which is expensive but also clean.

Germany does not only make manufacturing equipment, but also manufactures things. Cars. Wind turbines. Power plants. Aircrafts.

In many cases Germany has invested money into research to make production cleaner to keep in the country. A lot of money.

Example: The world's largest chemical plant is still in Germany.

http://www.ipt.org.uk/industry-visit-to-the-worlds-largest-c...

Germany more likely outsources a small portion of its pollution to China. Germany's top five import sources:

Netherlands: €87b

China: €79b

France: €66b

US: €49b

Italy: €48b

So €79 billion in imports from China in a €3 trillion economy.

Assembled in Germany Metall forged in china

Real problem with energywende is that you have a point to point infrastructure (powerplant to city) and have to convert it to a n-to n infrastructure.

Every consumer can now be producer. This results in partially absurd rewards for powering off your mini-plant to stabilize the network.

Also the lack of storage, at the moment. Currently some companys consider, forging giant conrete containers, sink them out in the ocean, and pump them dry when there is a energy surplus. When there is higher demand, the undersea storage seas, can be flooded and energy released on a controlled basis.

That actually sounds like a really clever solution to the energy storage problem.

It's a neat extension to the concept of using water towers or higher-altitude reservoirs for similar effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

This results in partially absurd rewards for powering off your mini-plant to stabilize the network.

Being paid not to output electricity or, similarly, being paid to consume electricity -- which is also a thing -- is absurd only at first glance. But really, it's just transparent pricing.

And it incentivizes people to come up with ways to exploit it, either by storing power when it's cheap and releasing it when it's expensive, or by only consuming it when it's cheap. I think it's pretty neat.

It's not a new thing, either: power has always been cheaper at off-peak (during the night), because big power plants such as nuclear plants can't (or couldn't, or wouldn't) scale up and down based on time of day. This was exploited by making things such as a night storage heater, which truly is absurd, because it's both impractical (slow to react to human capriciousness) and inefficient (energy losses during initial electricity generation and power transfer).

Selling back your power by slowing or stopping production is an old technique. Large factories that buy power on long-term fixed-price contracts will often sell that power back to the electric company when rates are high. It might be more common now, but "powering off ... to stabilize the network" existed long before the push for renewables.

> Currently some companys consider, forging giant conrete containers, sink them out in the ocean, and pump them dry when there is a energy surplus.

Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) is nothing new per se. CAES plants have been operational in Huntorf, Germany, since the late 1970s and in McIntosh, Alabama, since the late 1990s.

The problem with current technology CAES is that it is not energy-efficient (around 30% for the existing installations, though there's room for improvement) and not carbon-neutral. The underlying problem is that compressing air generates heat, which is then dissipated; however, that means that during decompression, the air has to be reheated, usually with natural gas.

There are currently projects underway with both Adiabatic [1] and Isothermal [2] CAES to improve efficiency and make the process carbon-neutral. Google "SustainX" and "ADELE RWE" for examples of current projects.

[1] http://energystorage.org/advanced-adiabatic-compressed-air-e...

[2] http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/isother...

> China and India, which rank among the top greenhouse gas emitters globally

Gosh.

They rank top in absolute numbers. Germany ranks top per citizen. The western model is not a model for the world.

Source: Matthews et. al, national contributions to observed global warming https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/1/014...

According to that paper (table 3), the UK is number one per capita, and Germany is rank 5.

The complete table is

Warming per billion people: 1. United Kingdom 0.54, 2. United States 0.51, 3. Canada 0.41, 4. Russia 0.41, 5. Germany 0.40, 6. Netherlands 0.34, 7. Australia 0.30, 8. Brazil 0.26, 9. France 0.26, 10. Venezuela 0.25, 11. Argentina 0.23, 12. Colombia 0.21, 13. Poland 0.19, 14. Thailand 0.14, 15. Japan 0.10, 16. Mexico 0.09, 17. Indonesia 0.07, 18. Nigeria 0.05, 19. China 0.05, 20. India 0.04

The country that is shutting down nuclear power stations to burn more coal instead? Yeah, it's a great model...

They try to shut down nuclear and coal at the same time, with an emphasis on nuclear. This actually means that coal mostly stays the same.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Energiem... (Black and brown are coal)

The nuclear exit also isn't really an exit. The reactors are already over their lifetime they were first built. It's just that nobody replaces old reactors because building new ones is prohibitly expensive.

The latter is not true.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/swedish-e...

"Japan's Fukushima disaster in 2011 precipitated Germany’s "Atomausstieg" (nuclear exit), a program to close down all German nuclear plants by 2021. The eight oldest nuclear power stations were closed down immediately. Two of these power plants are owned by the Swedish state-owned energy giant Vattenfall, which also operates power plants in several other European countries.

In 2012 Vattenfall filed suit at the Washington-based International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), demanding $6 billion in compensation."

Not quite. It was decided in 2000 to stop building new plants and phase out the existing ones. In 2010, the phase-out period was increased by 8-14 years. Then, in 2011, this increase was undone again. So it was mainly about how long the remaining plants are being kept online.

(see here (German) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomausstieg#Deutschland )

Oh good, they're replacing nuclear with biomass...

The shut-down nuclear capacity has been more than replaced by renewables generation. [1]

[1] www.energypost.eu/energiewende-dark-side/

http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage

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