Renewables overtake coal as Germany's main energy source | Hacker News Reader

Renewables overtake coal as Germany's main energy source

reuters.com

78 pointsphilipkglass37 comments

I agree with the commenters saying that Germany should have prioritized coal for retirement before nuclear. Nonetheless, I'm impressed with what Germany has achieved within its self-imposed constraints.

Germany's trying to decarbonize its electricity sector via renewables while having poorer onshore wind resources than the US. And much poorer solar resources. And much higher population density. And it's retiring nuclear power at the same time. Finally, it started deploying solar PV by the gigawatt in 2007 (!), when the equipment was very expensive compared to now[1]. Germany is attempting decarbonization on Nightmare Mode difficulty, so I find it impressive that they're actually making progress. It's also frustrating because they're giving up several years of forward progress on emissions by shutting down working nuclear reactors.

It's doubly annoying that Germany's determination to pioneer solar has provided a canned "bad example" for solar foes elsewhere. "Look how expensive solar made German electricity. I don't want that disaster in Texas." Of course new Texan solar plants will never cost as much as German plants built last decade, and they'll get far more sunlight. But that's not as pithy as "just look at Germany!"

[1] Germany's pioneering large-scale PV deployment may well have been a driver for the much larger, much more economical PV manufacturing base that exists today. It's still surprising to me that solar didn't first grow big in somewhere much sunnier like Australia.

> I agree with the commenters saying that Germany should have prioritized coal for retirement before nuclear.

Coal (actually lignite) is a major part of Germany's plan. I don't expect them to abandon it anytime soon. Solar and wind power are inherently variable, they can't really work by themselves, they need to be backed by hydro (which is limited), storage (still not viable on a large scale) or easily adjustable power plants.

And that's where coal comes in. Germany is actually building new throttlable coal plants in order to complement their renewables. It is a good economic choice: they have a lot of locally available lignite, and it has little export value, so they might as well use it for themselves. It is also good for national sovereignty because they don't depend on imports. Unfortunately, it is also the worst possible fuel when it comes to CO2 emissions, that's why they fare rather poorly despite all their renversables.

Nuclear has no place in their strategy. With their renewables+coal, they don't really need the base load capabilities nuclear powers. Nuclear plants can be throttled to some extent but in order for them to be economically viable, they need to be as close to 100% as possible due to their high capital costs.

A commission has been set up to plan for the phase-out of coal in Germany. Seems like all agree coal will be phased out, the debate is more around the timescale, and compensation for those affected.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-coal-exi...

"Today, the Federal Cabinet decided to establish the Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment. By December 2018, the Commission will prepare a roadmap for the phase-out of coal, which will ensure that the short-, medium- and long-term climate targets are achieved. The Commission will also submit proposals for structural development in the affected regions that will serve to strengthen growth and employment."

https://www.bmu.de/en/report/kommission-wachstum-strukturwan...

Yes, nuclear would eventually have been pushed out of Germany's generating mix as higher renewable penetration demanded more flexible complementary generation. But it wasn't going to happen this soon. In 2010 the German government agreed to extend nuclear plant lifetimes by an average of 12 years, into the 2030s:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-11194117

The German government reversed course less than a year later following the Fukushima accidents. 8 German reactors were shut down swiftly and the 9 others are scheduled to shut down by 2022. German coal consumption and emissions rose above the 2010 level for multiple years after the 8 reactors stopped, and I expect a similar effect after 2022. I understand that the voters wouldn't stand for reactor life extensions after Fukushima, but this reversal definitely made decarbonization slower and more expensive.

The other thing that seems to be impairing German decarbonization efforts more recently is that they're not shutting coal plants as fast as economically feasible. The plants provide too many jobs. Germany has efficient, new, idle combined cycle gas turbine plants like Irsching Power Station:

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-uniper-irsching-notificati...

Given the downward trend of European gas prices it seems like shutting down some old coal plants and buying fuel for these modern gas plants would be a pretty affordable way to reduce emissions at the margin. The gas plants are also more flexible than coal. But gas plants need only 20 or 30 people to operate where coal plants of equivalent output need hundreds. So Germany delays the retirement of dirty, inefficient coal plants as a sop to the economically depressed regions where they are concentrated.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/world/europe/germany-coal...

> Storage (still not viable on a large scale)

You may have been missing the last few years of development. My city (Lünen, Germany) has 2 battery storage systems, one with a capacity of 13MWh and the other (built from EoL smart ED batteries) with 16MWh.

Unfortunately they don't post many (any) updates, but I haven't heard any complaints either.

> Germany is attempting decarbonization on Nightmare Mode difficulty

Your comment was very clear about Germany's nuclear v. coal issue, but you cannot call it decarbonization. Germany has no fixed plans phasing out coal. It's denuclearization. And it should absolutely not be deemed an example for other countries. Still, Germany's renewables adoption is commendable.

While nuclear power has its problems (particularly for waste disposal), they should slow down the phasing out of nuclear and speed up the phasing out of coal: coal burning is much more of an environmental threat than nuclear power is.

This is the common dogma but I'm not so sure. Assume it takes 50 years to figure out how to get infinite solar power in space. In the meantime, would you prefer higher temperatures and more fires, or a lot more nuclear waste? C02 levels and global temperatures will be easily reversible once we have infinite energy. However even in a world with infinite energy, nuclear waste will still be extremely dangerous, for basically an indefinite amount of time.

Nuclear waste can be buried away (relatively) harmlessly, while higher global temperatures and the extreme weather + fire they cause represent a large-scale potentially irreversible environmental alteration. I know which I'd pick.

Does Bill Gates’ TerraPower use nuclear waste?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower

Depleted uranium is waste or otherwise a byproduct of production of enriched uranium, yes.

I'm no expert on the issue, but the decades lasting and still ongoing discussions about a atomic waste location in Germany seem to contradict your statement.

Burring something for a few years is easy, but what about hundreds, thousands, ten thousands? The earth moves and this stuff is way more concentrated than anything found naturally. What if it hits ground water?

Except that Germany has exactly zero suitable locations to bury nuclear waste safely for a few thousand years. Many would have a danger of contaminating ground water or have some other issue.

They have been trying to find something for decades and come up empty.

More nuclear waste please!

Nuclear waste is comparatively easy to handle. A single country is capable of handling its own nuclear waste and keeping it safe (as France does, for example). The same is not true of CO2 emissions and global climate, which require transnational concerted effort to manage.

I think unlimited energy means a pretty immediate heat death for a society that has such an unhealthy relationship with dumping externalities.

People confuse heat with energy but they are not the same. With enough energy we could cool off earth, like a refrigerator (same concept, different implementation).

What people forget is how useful energy is, because we all take it for granted. There is 0 downside to infinite clean energy, as long as it's not weaponized, obviously. Don't let the climate change alarmists trick you into thinking human technological progress needs to be constrained.

I think you are being overly optimistic about the (both technological and practical) capacity we would have to recapture CO2 from the air, and overly pessimistic about the dangers of nuclear energy. The dangers of CO2 are killing our habitat, and we are going to have to expend much more energy removing it than it took to put it there in the first place, among other things. Plus you can store nuclear waste compactly, and more people are harmed by the radiation emitted in coal plants than are harmed by nuclear power, anyway.

Umm, all energy consumption eventually ends up as heat in the environment. If you are bringing "infinite energy" in from space, you will be dumping infinite heat into the environment. Not exactly good for cooling the planet.

Heat and energy are not the same. Heat generated from human activities does not significantly impact atmospheric heat compared to the heat generated by the sun and absorbed right inside the atmosphere. Also, if you have infinite energy, there are many things you can do to cool off. Everyone will be able to set their own preferred temperature.

> Also, if you have infinite energy, there are many things you can do to cool off. Everyone will be able to set their own preferred temperature.

Jesus. Someone failed thermodynamics.

I have a BS in Physics from Johns Hopkins and dropped out of PhD in Applied Math from Stanford. Where did you get your degrees from smarty pants?

The problem isn't heat in the general sense of the word, it's heat trapped in the atmosphere. Heat trapped in the core of the earth isn't a problem at all, for example. Most human generated heat can be absorbed by matter on the surface and has a negligible impact on atmospheric heat. And if you had enough energy and low cost launch to space you could do things like cheaply send solar reflectors into space.

Ummm... if you have infinite power to pull carbon from the atmosphere, don't you also have infinite power to launch radioactive nuclear waste at the sun using mass-drivers? Sounds like that would be a lot more efficient than what you're proposing, too, since it's all fairly concentrated.

The whole infinite power from space argument seems problematic. Even assuming you just meant "a large, globally significant amount of power", I'm guessing that the inverse-square law and heat buildup would sink the idea. I can only imagine the dead zone surrounding the location where we beam petawatts of radiation down from orbit. It would make our worst ecological disasters look like a joke in comparison.

I don't know about you, but sending nuclear waste into space sounds hard! Much harder than sending a large number of satellites to collect space solar power and beam it down to earth. You'd need really large rockets.

Heat buildup in general isn't the problem, it's heat buildup in the atmosphere that's the problem, and infinite clean energy would allow us to reduce carbon emissions to 0, as well as do lots of crazy geo-engineering that today isn't feasible because the cost of electricity is too high.

Waste disposal is basically a nonissue for nuclear power. The amount of waste is minuscule, and there are ways to break it down to generate power as well using a fusion-fission hybrid.

This is kind of goofy accounting. They clump all hydroelectric, solar, and wind together into one category, then split up brown coal, black coal, and gas into individual categories.

Still, well done, Germany.

Yeah, it's really difficult for people to understand how much fossil fuel is still used today with all the headlines of 100% renewable here and there. Even that almost always means 100% of electricity, which is generally 40% of total energy, the rest being heating and transportation (very fossil dominated).

This is great progress but we're not out of the woods. We need all the low-carbon energy we can get, and quite urgently. This leaves no room to rule unpopular but quantifiably safe and clean sources like nuclear.

For Germany, renewables is not just an environmental issue, it's a national security issue. Being dependent on, say, Russia and Ukraine agreeing on how to send natural gas to Germany, is not something you want to rely on.

Nordstream pipe fixed that issue few years ago.

Not if you regard Russia as an unreliable energy supplier.

*main electrical energy source. Like other developed nations, electricity is < 15% of Germany's primary energy consumption.

Problem here is, that it is 40% of German customers using renewable energy, but the overflow in energy produced in Germany is simply exported, so you can not calculate that less non-renewable energy is produced. It's the same with diesel cars, you can sell your old car with bonuses etc in Germany, but the car don't get off the road, it gets sold to other countries and drives there with same pollution. So Germany is lowering it's own emissions by just export them. Globally seen, nothing improves.

How are they dealing with energy storage and peak demand. I don't see how they are going to get there with solar and wind. Without some kind of big buffer in the system to smooth out the peaks in demand and the lows in production.

Now: natural gas

Future: batteries, including those in electric cars, smart grid (appliances and factories)

Now & improving: pan-European grid averting our local fluctuations

Thermal energy storage will almost certainly play a big role. Germany constructed a test facility in 2017 focused on reducing the cost of these types of plants, and there are already dozens in operation in other countries.

Germany is also making a major push for in-home battery installations (recently surpassing 100k units, up from around 5k units in 2013).

Hydroelectric power stations are already used as environment-friendly energy storage: if there is a surplus of energy, water is pumped into the reservoir. During peak demand, the power station provides additional electric energy.

There are long-term considerations to increase this capacity significantly by including hydroelectric power stations in Scandinavia, as part of a European grid.

They should have invested in new nuclear research too. Too bad that populism efficiently killed any future of nuclear power in Germany. I hope that France will be wiser.

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