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Comment by nmehner | Hacker News Reader

How is it the fault of german energy policy if Denmark needs electricity?

France is not free from problems either: https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-power-supply/germany-...

First of all the germans could have used nuclear energy, but since they are closing them down this is only going to increase. Second of all if the alternative energy system was so solid as many of you seem to believe why did they need to use coal? Its amazing to me that people cant see the issue with thier so called green position.

The use of coal is very much a political issue. The social democrats see themselves as the workers party. And historically their strongest base was the coal/steel workers. they have some problems shutting down coal, because this would go against "their own" people (even if there are not many coal worker left). Also some coal mines are in eastern Germany which already faces some unemployment issues and has a lack of industry. But still coal is being phase out. The highest ratio of electricity from coal was 46,9% in 2013. In 2018 it is 38.4%. Not going down fast enough, but still going down.

You are right, that there needs to be some sort of mechanism to stabilize the grid in case renewables are not available. But nuclear energy is not an option for this since it takes days to start a reactor. So what are the options?

* Gas turbines (in the short run, known technologie, fast start-up times, but still creating CO2 even if less than coal)

* Batteries (e.g. https://www.ewe-gasspeicher.de/en/home/b4p )

* Smart Grid (electric cars for example are often flexible in their charging times).

* Pump storage

Nuclear is the ONLY option as it would provide the baseline energy needs and then you can add the others on top.

That's how you do it properly instead of using nonscaleable energy solutions to solve an exponentially growing demand. Again wind and solar is doing around 1% of the worlds needs. They are not even close to being able to solve the basic energy needs.

Coal is used because solar and wind is insufficient not because it's political.

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