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Comment by aianus | Hacker News Reader

That's very short-sighted and reactionary. Shame on them. What about the every-other-day Beijing/Shanghai smog scare?

And what about the 20,000 people killed in coal mining accidents every year[0]? What about the 130 million tonnes[1] of radioactive waste[2] produced by coal plants annually? Why are we still building a new coal power plant every other week[3]?

[0]http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595235...

[1]https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics

[2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

[3]http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/as-u-s-shutte...

Welcome to germany, land of the green and people who consider their morality to be superior. We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables. We shut down our mostly modern atom reactors to burn more coal. We now spend ~30 dollar cent per kilowatt hour to have much dirtier energy than most of the rest of europe. We pay money to our neighbours so they take away our surplus of energy at peaks and push the energy distribution to the limits which results in instabilities. Newbuild house prices have increased by 40% in the last ten years just because of the extremely high energy standards home builders have to adhere too (insulation, stupid energy exchangers et. al)

And all the while we are the only sane people in our own eyes.

We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables.

In 2015, the total power generation in Germany was 559 TWh. Renewables amount to about 121 TWh, i.e. about 22%. [0]

Newbuild house prices have increased by 40% in the last ten years

That sounds like a lot. From what I can find, construction prices have increased by about 20% since 2005 -- that goes for virtually all kinds of construction, including road construction[1][2]. Must be all the heat exchangers in those new roads... I'm not sure if that figure is corrected for overall inflation, it doesn't appear to be (cumulative inflation in Germany since 2005 is about 15%[3]).

[0] https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_de.htm [1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/Preise/B... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baupreisindex#/media/File:Baup... [3] http://www.zinsen-berechnen.de/inflationsrechner.php

Yeah you get nice numbers if you ignore the total energy usage. The numbers you gave are only one fifth of Germanys total energy consumption. I was off by 2% though, 3% is covered by renewables. We are not only talking electric, but total energy: heat, oil etc.

http://m.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article156130737/Energie...

Renewable energy is usually only framed in terms of electrical power generation, but taking a wider perspective is sensible.

Primary energy is 3704 TWh[0], so 3% jives with the numbers I gave (so you were off by a factor of 3). 27% of that is heating, 39% transportation. The key to reducing those is gains in efficiency, ie. things like insulation, combined heat and power, renewable heat on the one hand, more efficient cars and more public transportation on the other hand.

[0] https://www.bmwi.de/BMWi/Redaktion/PDF/E/energiestatistiken-...

> We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables. We shut down our mostly modern atom reactors to burn more coal. We now spend ~30 dollar cent per kilowatt hour to have much dirtier energy than most of the rest of europe.

This is so wrong I don't know if you're pushing some sort of agenda or just trolling.

Read the facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

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