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Comment by firebaze | Hacker News Reader

Germany is acting kind of funny. Coal: bad (granted!). Gas: bad (even worse when from russia) (kind of granted). Nuclear: very very bad! (?). Solar: good, nimby. Wind: good, nimby.

Electric cars: cool, must have. Additional energy requirements for electric cars? Wait, what? (https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/wirtschaft-wachstu...)

This is getting out of hand. I'm really interested in the upcoming years, and very glad I'm not personally affected if energy prices raise by a few hundred percent, and sad that I have to be glad about that.

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Once you understand that environmentalism is more about punishing people for their lifestyle than helping the environment it will start making more sense.

And here I thought it was about the undeniable climate change that is an existential threat to human existence.

I thought in this context it’s pretty much irrelevant what Western countries do now - the ball is in China’s court. We can all stop driving and flying tomorrow and it won’t make a difference.

I would guess there is not an insignificant overlap between modern environmentalists and the people who have been campaigning against nuclear power since the 1970s and 80s.

Nuclear power is another existential threat. We’ve had plenty of time to switch from fossil fueld since the 70ties with methods which didn’t require nuclear. All that time (half a century!) was mostly wasted however and now even many environmentalist are pro-nuclear as they see that climate disruption is a more immediate threat than nuclear.

Did we? IIRC solar was prohibitively expensive until last decade not sure about other renewables but I'd assume they were significantly less efficient back then. I think it's a bit too late to be pro-nuclear (barring any technological breakthroughs) but had investment into nuclear continued after the Three Mile Island accident at the same rate it did before I'm sure we'd had at least a decade or two head start in decreasing CO2 emissions compared to the current situation.

The obvious solution that was available since the 70ties is the reduction of energy usage...

Or not starting to use fossil fuels in the first place, imagine how great the world be now... In the US per capita CO2 emissions have decreased by around a quarter since 1970, it's similar in Germany and other developed nations (besides France.. there it's only around 50% of what they were back then). This means that emissions mainly grew in developing countries and I'm pretty sure this was tied with the massive increase in quality of living, life expectancy etc, access to healthcare, education etc since the 70s.

The West has gone through widespread deindustrialization in the past 50 years, that was the biggest reason for localized decreased emissions (i.e. they were simply moved offshore).

It's clearly visible on charts such as this one: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-co2-emiss...

So western countries should have sent their armies to prevent developing countries from building factories and power plants? Refused to trade with them?

Given the economic and social incentives at the time (and to a large extend currently) simply reducing energy usage was not really feasible. It's not at all reasonable (and in my opinion largely unethical) to expect people to sacrifice their wellbeing due to some theoretical global threat they hardly knew anything about at the time.

If climate change is an existential threat to the human race, then why have we not been building Nuclear Power plants for the last 20 years whereupon we have enough energy to supply us for 1000 years, carbon-free?

Why are the very loud climate change voices not pushing for what is at least a major piece of an obvious solution?

The reality is the commentor is correct:

Climate Change is a form of populism and it has to be understood from that frame of reference.

The actual Science is real of course, however the entire system from academia, the media, public policy (i.e. even green politicians not doing very green things) - including those 'opposing it' are caught up in that populist game.

And the same people pushing for climate change - and often against Nuclear - have a whole other set of correlating convictions upon which they are just as religious.

So the challenge is to understand the impetus and dynamic of popular trends.

'Nuclear Energy' is a big one because it's something the Green movement is against - but - most regular centre-left (and other) politicians would go for, if there was popular support.

Politicians (except maybe Greens) don't talk 'Nuclear' not because they're against it, but because they're afraid of the consequences.

Germany is facing an energy crisis which is leading to a military crisis with the empowerment of Russia.

The Greens are now a part of government and it's entirely possibly their 'well intervention beliefs' may be severely damaging Germany's prospects.

Imagine a Germany without Greens: maybe it would have dozens of Nuclear Power plants well on it's way to being Carbon Free - and - Putin wouldn't have any leverage to force Germany's acquiescence on the Ukraine issue.

How's that for a political paradox?

It's actually not a paradox when you consider it through a populist lens, it's the sad reality of people not believing in vaccines, thinking that the US election was thrown etc..

Hopefully, these energy prices will force people to take a more pragmatic look.

Germans are money-sensitive and rational, this will be an interesting political issue.

This is one government with bad policy, do you also make sweeping generalizations about every single ideology, especially ones trying to save the world

Ha, and Germany sells Russian gas to Poland and Ukraine.

bonkers

I think this is partially due to non-stable political leadership. The gas crisis could be eased by opening the valves for Russian gas - this was the plan of Merkel's CDU party. The new government has a strong green touch. For some reason, the Greens ended up in the foreign affairs ministry (instead of in the transportation ministry, which would have been an excellent fit but is just not as "fancy"). Now we have green foreign politics which lead to further tensions with Russia, no North Stream 2 gas, hence, the gas crisis will likely continue. Instead, "dirtier" LNG gas is imported from the US, but the Green Party made its point.

The German plan was to invest and heavily subsidize the construction of renewables, wind and solar, since that was declared the cheapest way to generate power. Are you saying the actually plan by the CDU was all along to build a dependency on Russian gas, and only use renewables when the weather allowed it?

That seems like a terrible plan and quite expensive. Why was that the plan?

Gas is a temporary measure until renewables can stand on its own. Maybe some plants will stick around forever because peakers are nice to have, but the dependency should reduce over time.

We’ve been waiting decades for renewables

Coal for electricity globally is at record highs.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/12/20/coal-fired-power-generat...

it really appears that we aren’t going about this in an effective manner

That's not so surprising, total energy usage keeps increasing. Renewable energy only supplies a small part of that, but it's rapidly increasing.

Waiting for a technology to be viable is risky and potentially very costly, and using Russia as your temporary measure without any alternatives seems like a irresponsible decision that should require public support. Did Germans actually want this, or was renewable presented to the public as something that already could stand on its own?

They're aware. Merkel didn't want to close the nuclear power plants but was forced to shift policy after Fukushima due to public pressure. Germany's policies basically made solar and wind a viable option for everyone from a cost perspective, it wasn't when they started and took the leap. All in all, they knew.

Few major Western parties are as ossified as the CDU. The fact that they have been pushed out of goverment after spending 16 years under a single leader there(!) does not mean that German politics suffers from instability.

Not just that. Before Merkel, sure there was a brief period of an SPD chancellor (Gerhard Schröder), who after that went to work for Gazprom!

Before that Germany had 16 years of Helmut Kohl, who was Angela Merkel's "political father".

    Helmut Kohl (1982–1998)
    Gerhard Schröder (1998–2005)
    Angela Merkel (2005–2021)

Non stable political leadership ? Wait, Germany, right ? Do you know Angela ?

It's almost as if Germany is not a hive mind, but has different actors with different interests ;)

Coal: Bad, yes. This is being phased out: https://www.bmu.de/en/topics/climate-adaptation/climate-prot...

Gas: Mostly used for heating in Germany. Should be replaced with heatpumps/better insulation. Bad for heating, but since gas power plants are cheap, new gas plants will be used to generate electricity during the "Dunkelflaute" (no wind, no sun) until better solutions are available. So good for emergencies since plants are cheap and gas can be stored.

Solar: Good, many people have it in their back yards and I'm not aware of any protests.

Wind: Good, but most wind is in the north and Bavaria is blocking SuedLink, since the North will profit from it: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/kampf-gegen-stromtrassen-waru... So currently adding additional wind power in the north does not make a lot of sense, if the energy cannot be used. This is why a lot off offshore wind power is being delayed.

The new government is planning for 680-750TWh (80% renewable) of electricity in 2030 compared to 560TWh in 2020 (https://dynamic.faz.net/download/2021/Koalitionsvertrag2021-... ). So they are planning for electric cars as well. Electric cars are also interesting, because you can charge the cars based on prices / grid load thus making the grid more stable.

There are projects like NordLink (https://www.tennet.eu/our-grid/international-connections/nor... ) that use pumped storage in Norway for storing energy (capacity: 87TWh https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftpr... ).

Also the high electricity prices in winter are aften caused by France, since a lot of electric heating is used there (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-01/france-fa... ).

Interesting times indeed, but I guess the new government will be more forward looking than the previous one.

A few hundred percent differences in spot prices is ok, since only a small amount of electricity is traded there. And these differences will make battery storage viable.

That list is incomplete without the world 'Nuclear' which is the Elephant in the Room in terms of Energy Availability, Emissions, Safety and how it contrasts with political perspectives.

For Germany that boat has sailed. I personally would have preferred to shut down coal before nuclear, but now nobody is going to touch nuclear with a ten foot pole. There is simply no discussion. For any party a demand to build new nuclear plants is political suicide (even on the right wing).

It is hard to get any unbiased information on cost, but to me it seems that even today renewable + storage is cheaper than building nuclear (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy#/medi... ).

So there is neither the political option nor an economic case for nuclear. Other countries will be subsidizing nuclear and make different decisions. It will be interesting to watch, if France will be able to build nuclear reactors in time and on budget and if Germany will be able to keep the grid stable. Both approaches carry some risks.

Wind + storage has yet to find acceptance as being commercial viable. The general plan presented by the green in Germany and nearby country is to wait for green hydrogen to become economical viable and use natural gas in the mean time.

Last time I checked, the current numbers is around 20x in cost to turn wind into hydrogen, compared to current hydrogen prices. It should be noted that hydrogen itself is not commercial viable to be burned for energy, which puts green hydrogen far from being cheaper than nuclear. There exist several other experimental and research experiments into storage for wind but so far nothing has research the point of commercial companies buying renewables energy when it is cheap and selling it when it is expensive.

For solar, renewables + batteries is cheaper since the batteries only need a few hours of capacity and they get a charge cycle each day. Since you can calculate the ROI very simply, you can find how many days (or rather nights) a lithium battery need to discharge in order to back the initial cost. For wind you got low wind conditions that last weeks or even months, occurring maybe a few times a year, and so capacity need to be very high and you get very few charge cycles. Thus the need for a storage medium that provide very high capacity at low costs, while at the same time being commercial viable compared to nuclear.

If wind + storage was cheaper than building nuclear than people would be building and investing into it right now. Instead they invest into natural gas and build pipe lines to Russia, which hints towards the economical reality that Germany is in. Those natural gas plants and pipe lines has a life expectancy of many decades, and unless a major shift occurs will be a central part of the energy grid until probably early 2100. What people build today is what they intended to use in the future.

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