It's been dead for a very long time. It's a carrot that Russia was never going to get. If Scholz is smart (which I doubt) he'll restart/keep open the nuclear power plants and cut taxes on gas/electricity for households to neutralise the price hikes.
For the last days, there was a lot of wind in Germany, causing the German wind energy production to sometimes even exceed French nuclear (up to 48GW of wind power). Germany most of all now has to correct the mistakes by the previous government and very quickly has to push for building up more wind and solar capacity.
If we compare Sweden to Germany, almost no homes in Sweden has gas lines connected to them. Swedish homes use heated up water (central or communal heating), or just heat up the air. Sweden has a lot of nuclear and hydro so the electricity prices has historically been low, and importing gas would be expensive. There have been few incentives to spend money and government resources into the infrastructure needed for gas. Germany in contrast seems to have done the opposite, with historical low prices for gas (didn't the coal industry produce also produce gas in the past?), and fairly high prices for electricity. By now there is a pretty large sunk costs into gas infrastructures, and a switch to electric heating would be both expensive for the government and for individual home owners.
On the positive side, a massive investment towards electric heating would be a major boon for the environment. Leaks from natural gas is considered a major contributor for green house gases, and burning it also not very good.
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[1]: This moronic argument is most frequently brought up as "Single-payer health care can't work in the US as it does in [insert any country with single-payer health care], because the US population is [X] times bigger!" Yeah, but so fucking WHAT? That just means the US has X times more health care recipients, and an X times larger economy to supply health care! It's just the same thing, scaled up by a factor of X. Sheesh...
All electricity basically turns to heat at some point. So why not?
Larger energy capture devices can be more efficient. One highly-efficient fuel burning plant providing power to a hundred thousand electric resistive heaters can produce more useful heat per unit fuel than a hundred thousand small-scale self-maintained home furnaces.
Combined cycle power plants can be 64% efficient [1] at turning heat into electricity. And if that power goes on to run a heat pump, 1 watt of electric power can deliver 3-4 watts of heating.
And modern gas combi boilers can be 92-98% efficient [2].
The days of people throwing away 80% of the energy they pay for are long gone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant [2] https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/boilers/article/boiler-energ...
Modern condensing heaters have an efficiency of 90%.
(*estimated number out of thin air, but yes majority is gas or oil)
I can’t verify that easily, but this doesn’t seem disputed, so the retrofitting is maybe not so much of an issue. There is of course the initial installation cost, but also presumably lower maintenance costs.
And that is sure, while keeping the remaining nuclear power plants in service a little bit longer might be a consideration (though unlikely), investing in new nuclear infrastructure for sure isn't. There, renewables are the way to go.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-map-of-Nuclear-Power...
If they're smart they can build support for modern designs, probably small nuclear, as long as they can convince their voter base that the risk of accidents and the problem of waste disposal are much smaller than with the outdated plants they helped close down.
From an economic perspective it's a hard sell compared to solar and wind plus storage, but with the resistance to new windfarms by NIMBYs you can probably justify some subsidies. The timescales involved are still a problem though.
Yes, "Green" Parties are a blight on the political landscape everywhere.
> Restarting or extending the lifetime of existing plants would be political suicide for the current government.
Well, for the bottom of the current "traffic-light" coalition, anyway... (We can but hope.)
Erm, no, that's just not true. Ironically, the best counter to that is... Russia, which successfully supplies a few million with extremely cheap hot water.
[1] https://www.nucnet.org/news/operation-begins-of-qinshan-nucl...
[2] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202112/22/WS61c27b44a310cdd39...
[3] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-nuclear-...
[4] https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newschinese-nuclear-compani...
If any of what you say is true at all, how did France survive for so long on nuclear power?
France uses 40.7 billion cubic meters of gas (0.6 per capita), while Germany uses 86.5 (1.03 per capita). Given that France has a warmer climate the difference is not all that big. France does not survive on nuclear power alone.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37985/umfrage...
This probably explains why Germany is not supporting Ukraine with fists. If they make Russia angry, the Germans will be enemies of Germany due to social unrest. This is a decision of morality vs economics, and the government will choose economics. I think for now, just like China, Germany is just stopping to appease the mass. But after a month they will take Russian gas.
And also probably because we don't want a war on our borders? Ukraine was supposed to be a buffer state between NATO and Russia, and then US promised that Ukraine would have joined NATO, and back at the time Germany and France pushed back[0]. But US has only to gain with disorders in the old continent, so here we are...
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03nato.html
Russia actually does have an argument for protecting former Russians in some countries. These are people that suddenly lost their nationality with the collapse of the soviet union and don't want to relieve it in favor of the new countries. That puts them in a situation where they are not allowed to travel because of lacking passports. There is additional discrimination that the population faces. Of course that is not at all an excuse for an invasion. But if you deny that Russia has security interests in that region, you basically are asking for a war. And the Russians have made it very clear that it is seen that way and made their reaction very predictable. Yet, western nations ignored that completely.
After what the US media conjured as Russian election interference it certainly drove more animosity towards Russians. Completely irresponsible behavior and not a lesser extend of state propaganda than you would hear from Kremlin media. But people will completely deny this reality due to a religious self-image, even if they know it was bollocks. Shame on those that reiterated that message which was not restricted to the US at all.
The US might have some obligations towards Ukraine, as has Great Britain. But I don't think the involvement of the US has been very helpful. Bush wanted to be seen as strong everywhere after 9-11 and that extended to giving Ukraine and Georgia hope of Nato membership. At that time Russia didn't even react much. But the course for the escalation was set.
One common factor of those that asked for a strong response, which the west mostly gave with the exception of Germany perhaps, was being profoundly ignorant in how to talk to Russia and its interest. Ukraine has interests too, but there is no solution for them without a dialogue with its neighbor.
And just promising to not include Ukraine in a military alliance (it is not just a defensive pact) would have mostly ended the conflict and most arguments. Yet, some people decided not to do that.
They put themselves in that situation by not getting new passports, so if there's any "additional discrimination" it's done by themselves. If they didn't want to become citizens of their newly independent ex-Soviet Republics but remain Russians, they should have moved to Russia.
> Of course that is not at all an excuse for an invasion.
It certainly is being used as one, just as it has in the past.
Russia's "security interests" are, as they have ever been, aggressive unilateral expansion. Nobody else was "asking for a war"; nobody needs to, because Russia is always only too willing to serve one up unasked. So yes indeed, "their reaction [is] very predictable". It always is, and it's of course even easier to predict when it's a "reaction" to circumstances they themselves engineered.
> Yet, western nations ignored that completely.
So WTF were they supposed to do? Acquiesce and appease, as so many times before? There has to be a limit somewhere. Putin cannot count on Munich 1938 going on forever.
Because normal international diplomatic relations and norms don't apply to Russia; one has to "talk to" Russia in a special way? How about fucking Russia just come down off its high horse, in stead?
> Ukraine has interests too, but there is no solution for them without a dialogue with its neighbor.
There is no solution for them with such a neighbour.
> And just promising to not include Ukraine in a military alliance (it is not just a defensive pact) would have mostly ended the conflict and most arguments. Yet, some people decided not to do that.
Here's what people with a dictatorial mindset[1] just can't seem to get: It's not a matter of what other powers should "promise" or "decide", but what the people of the sovereign nation of Ukraine themselves WANT to do. If they feel that they need to belong to an alliance in order to preserve their national security, then who the fuck is Putin to say they can't? He has his own nation to run; he is not the dictator of the Ukrainians. (Yet. :-( )
[1]: Like you are so convincingly demonstrating here.
No, these people are occupants. They should either deported or jailed.
Letting them stay is a democracy glitch that now terrorists like Putin is exploiting.
Never going to happen. I would expect looking for alternative suppliers of gas, and developing renewables further.
What's their reasoning?
Overall, rounded: 48% natural gas, 25% oil, 14% district heating
https://www.bmwi-energiewende.de/EWD/Redaktion/Newsletter/20...
Electrical heating is rare, because it's inefficient. And considering the former energy mix of Germany: not ecological.
You don't have to like Scholz, but talking about nuclear in this context and calling the head of a state dumb... ?!?!... doesn't make much sense.