The new government tries to accelerate the construction of renewable energy but I think their plans will fail because of worker shortage and supply chain problems.
It is in Russia's best interest to have EU countries dependent on their fossil fuels (natural gas and coal). This goal is being achieved admirably, with Poland burning coal like crazy (buying lots of Russian coal) and Germany burning Russian gas like crazy (through Nord Stream pipelines).
Shutting down the nuclear plants plays straight into that strategy.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
This is so stupid, what are they thinking?
Why does that mean they can't switch it off?
The UK had 30% Coal in 2014 when they announced they would phase it out and did so slightly ahead of schedule.
That requirement makes no sense, though. Do you foresee a massive volcanic eruption that there will be darkness for several weeks? Because it's sort of fact of life that the sun always rises tomorrow. Therefore asking for 100% of storage for weeks never made any sense.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3780688-france-shuts-down-nucl...
Trading the risk of energy supply shortage for the risk of radioactive accidents.
Most of that engineering is done in-house as well. I wonder what explains this different attitude as compared to their neighbors.
Nuclear plants can in some way be seen as fossil fuel plants that store all the waste produced and only release anything if there is an accident. The fossil fueled plants do the opposite, constantly releasing a steady stream into the surrounding area with no risk of an single accident that release a large stored amount in a single instant.
Some storage would be nice to have, preferably more than a weeks' worth.
Do you have any citations for such a theory?
Everything I’ve read on the subject (admittedly not much) tells me that wind power is not only a disaster ecologically (kills too many birds, though not as many as domestic cats) but also unable to produce enough power to govern everything even with interconnects.
Distribution of power is also difficult, but there was notably a “still” winter in Sweden which is driving up prices significantly due to hydro not being enough. (I live here, that’s how I know)
This is not a good basis for a discussion.
“Everything I have read contradicts what you just stated.”
Not sure how I could be clearer. Maybe I made a mistake by admitting my ignorance, but i would rather admit my ignorance than assume I know everything because I read 5 articles and watched a few YouTube videos.
I don't know which five articles you have read but I suggest you read a couple more and more recent ones.
As for 'citation please': that does presume that you have done your own homework, I really don't see why I should do it for you but as to those first two points of yours:
https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-s...
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
Some of those links are well over 1000 km long.
> I really don't see why I should do it for you
Because the burden of proof rests with the person making the claim.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160929143808.h...
So yes, the 'windmills are bird killers' theory has been debunked to the extent that it was previously pushed as a false reason to not install windpower. (See for instance: https://windmillskill.com/blog/windfarms-kill-10-20-times-mo...)
There was a whole campaign around this, including endlessly recycled gruesome material of the same 25 birds that at one time flew into a particular mill. Obviously that stuff has legs because hey, gore and something I don't want in my backyard.
I always wonder what drives people to push these issues for more than they are worth.
Storing a weeks worth of consumption on a 'per person' basis can be done for a fraction of $1m. But energy scarcity will lead to an increase in prices, which in turn will lead to a reduction in consumption. One big problem with energy is that it is still way too cheap.
Another problem is that there are a lot of subsidies involved for large consumers as well as extra taxation on small consumers.
The environmental damage would probably also be much less with nuclear, versus a ton of solar + wind + batteries. But there would be disaster danger. It is unclear to me how the danger of nuclear disaster would compare to the danger of running out of stored energy in a winter month.
> Storing a weeks worth of consumption on a 'per person' basis can be done for a fraction of $1m.
How?
Since the costs of storage are currently so huge, it seems to me that if you want to go the solar + wind route, it makes sense to overprovision energy generation. That would reduce the amount of storage you need, and the extra energy during summer would be somewhat useful. Note however that you would need massive amounts of wind+solar.
For an average household to satisfy its electricity needs, it needs ~10 average size solar panels (assuming perfect storage). However, household electricity use is only 5% of our energy use. So to satisfy energy needs with solar, you need approximately 200 solar panels per household. Even if you round that down to 50 due to reduction in energy consumption and use of wind energy, it's still a lot. But the Netherlands is obviously not a very good country for solar. In countries like Australia, the numbers would look way better.
How much storage would actually be required is not clear to me. It depends on a lot of factors. A week doesn't sound totally crazy to me; we certainly want a good safety margin so that society doesn't collapse in a bad winter. If we take super optimistic numbers and have one day of storage and take your factor of 3 reduction in energy use, then the cost of storage alone would still be about twice what we currently pay for the energy. Expensive but certainly a cost that would be possible to pay.
For cars, the factor of three is not "optimistic", it's simple comparison of the respective primary energies consumed by typical vehicles in their respective categories. 20 kWh to drive 100 km = 72 MJ of primary energy. 6 liters of gasoline to drive the same distance = ~220 MJ of primary energy -- roughly triple of the former number.
> A week doesn't sound totally crazy to me; we certainly want a good safety margin so that society doesn't collapse in a bad winter.
Yes, but that doesn't imply you need the capacity to run the country 100% on batteries for a week. That's just not something anyone would ever do. For example, a gas turbine with a low duty cycle would definitely be cheaper than a battery after a certain period of time. So why would you use a battery for that?
Regarding the second paragraph: if you point is that it would be cheaper to duplicate a significant portion of our energy generation, one based on renewables and one based on fossil fuels for safety...that is perhaps true, but that only proves the original point, so I'm a bit confused why you phrase your replies in an antagonistic tone of voice when we seem to agree.
> if you point is that it would be cheaper to duplicate a significant portion of our energy generation, one based on renewables and one based on fossil fuels for safety...
I didn't say a word about basing something on fossil fuels.
> that is perhaps true, but that only proves the original point, so I'm a bit confused why you phrase your replies in an antagonistic tone of voice when we seem to agree
I don't see how we "seem to agree". The comment I initially responded to was proposing storing a WEEK's worth of PRIMARY energy in TODAY'S amounts in BATTERIES. Nobody would seriously consider such a contrived scenario; it would be completely pointless. So I can't possibly agree with those numbers.
> I didn't say a word about basing something on fossil fuels.
You said: "Yes, but that doesn't imply you need the capacity to run the country 100% on batteries for a week. That's just not something anyone would ever do. For example, a gas turbine with a low duty cycle would definitely be cheaper than a battery after a certain period of time. So why would you use a battery for that?"
> I don't see how we "seem to agree". The comment I initially responded to
Note that I responded to that comment with a calculation showing that that plan is economically infeasible. The scenario is not all all contrived; what that person proposed we need is reasonable, and it would in fact be quite dangerous and insufficient to have only one week's worth. Years in which there is more than a week without wind and hardly any sun (due to winter) occur approximately every 10 years in Germany. Thus calling a week's worth of storage contrived is just wrong. If anything, it's contrived in the direction of not being enough.
I'm pretty sure at the kinds of scale you'd need for a country price per KWH would be significantly less.
It’s sad, and almost infuriating, how an event that would never threaten safe nuclear plant operation in Germany set the stone rolling for “Energiewende”.
Personally i think Germany is making a huge mistake and will regret this course down the road.
Momentum really was gained after fukushima.
Again, my personal opinion, this is a reactionary and short sighted approach answering emotional sentiments not scientific data and facts.
The days of great “german engineering” are mostly (i said “mostly”, ok?) a thing of the past - reality has it that this country lost focus and misses out on vital long-term investements and vision. And unfortunately most of this is driven on a political scale intertwined with classic german big corporations.
The “Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport” has been a joke from the beginning and is a showcase of how incompetent politicians can ruin a country.
Try making a call longer than 20 minutes while driving without it being dropped, charge your car…
Sorry for the rant, but it’s just sad where this is going.
Are there other politicians that are invested into natural gas?
2. The Green party has been born out of the anti-nuclear movement. Without them, Germany would probably use nuclear energy for most of its electricity needs, like France does. If the Green party would embrace nuclear, they would have to admit that the anti-nuclear movement was a huge mistake and it is actually, for a good part, to blame for climate change. Just imagine what the world would look like today if the development of nuclear power plants hadn't been stopped in the 80s and countries used nuclear instead of coal and natural gas.
Countries that need a lot of reserve energy is paying a lot of subsidies to fossil fuels. Year in, year out. First you need to pay them in order to keep the plants on standby when renewables are plenty, and then you need to pay them again when demand exceeds the productions of renewables. The outcome is very large and steady stream of money going into the pockets of those who invest into fossil fuel.
Nuclear would need a lot in order to catch up to the same level of subsidies.
That seems to be proving the oppposite of your point.
It's also interesting that France has generic "electricity" subsidies that are bigger than their "nuclear" subsidies and yet 70% of their electricity is nuclear.
Could you explain the logic behind that idea that France subsidizes to fossil fuel is proof that nuclear is expensive? To me it is proof that the fossil fuel industry will extract its cut as long as the grid is dependent on it.
Also, a technical details. In actually billions, France is not subsidizing fossil fuels more than Germany. France total subsidize is about half of Germany, so the actually money that goes to fossil fuels are quite much smaller as a result.
You said that this was wrong, because countries that deployed renewables needed to pay fossil fuels to standby and then pay them again when there's no wind or sun.
To back this up you pointed to a document about level of subsidies.
That document shows that Germany gives less subsidies to fossil fuels than other countries with nuclear plants, notably France, as a percent of GDP.
You now appear to be trying to wiggle out of this on a technicality because Germany has a bigger economy than France, though even then the final numbers are 12.2 billion vs 11.5 billion.
But, let's pretend that's what you were saying, oh look, countries with nuclear on average subsidize fossil fuels more in absolute terms.
(This is because they are bigger economies, so this is an entirely spurious correlation but even playing by your changed rules, your document doesn't support your argument).
Then she mentioned that she just had bought a new car. I asked what kind, it's a hybrid. I asked why? Well, because her old car was using so much fuel, and with recent price hikes, that became too expensive, so she just bought one that was significantly more fuel efficient.
The _exact_ same person! Just 2 minutes after claiming monetary incentives don't work demonstrated that it actually worked for her!
I have high hopes that price hikes are what convinces people to change their behavior. Not ads, not appealing to ethics or conciousness or "the future of your kids" or pictures of dying polar bears. You need to feel it in your wallet, then you act, plain and simple.
In that case, we should make the price of power relative to your wealth, shouldn't we? I'm guessing you're an academic and work in tech or consulting, so you make two, three times the national average if you live in Germany. Trippling the price of power will barely register on your level, so you have little incentive to conserve energy. However, if we said that e.g. a kwh costs 1/15000 of your personal wealth, you'd have a lot of incentive, because even if you start the year as a billionaire, you'd be broke if you used 15000kwh.
I have a feeling that none of the -typically well-off- proponents of "we must make the people pay more so that they stop consuming" will be a fan of that.
I recently purchased a hybrid vehicle, and I find myself much more conscientious about how much energy I am using.
I wonder: if every house only had a certain allotment of energy each day to use at the “regular” price, would energy consumption go down?
Accelerate what? Wind and solar are at capacity, and storage solutions do not exist at that scale.