Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy reform in decades” | Hacker News Reader

Germany boosts renewables with “biggest energy policy reform in decades”

cleanenergywire.org

267 pointsmartin_a303 comments

Here's a more accessible link on the same story:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-boosts-renewabl...

> "By 2030, installed onshore wind capacity should reach 115 gigawatts (GW), the government says. Annual capacity additions therefore have to reach 10 GW as of 2025. Solar PV installations will amount to 22 GW per year as of 2026 to achieve a total capacity of 215 GW by the end of the decade. Offshore wind additions are increased as well to reach a minimum of 30 GW per 2030 and 40 GW by 2035, and 70 GW by 2045. While the government wants to incentivise the production and use of biomethane in highly flexible plants by increasing tender volumes, the use of biomass for power production will be superseded by its use in transport and industry."

In particular there's an anti-NIMBYism provision in there that makes a lot of sense. This has been a huge problem for rolling out renewables in the USA from California to New York:

> "To ensure that these ambitious growth scenarios are not hampered by lengthy planning procedures, local opposition and contradictions with other protected goals, the government establishes the principle that the use of renewable energies is of overriding public interest and will be given priority over other concerns until greenhouse gas neutrality is achieved."

The benefits are obvious: Germany will be able to escape the need to import Russian gas and oil - although the American fracked LNG exporters who hoped to simply seize that market from Russia are doubtless disappointed.

> American fracked LNG exporters who hoped to simply seize that market from Russia are doubtless disappointed.

Germany has a huge industry which won't be able to switch away from gas that easily so I'm sure that the LNG suppliers will have a market for the next 20 years.

A much smaller market than expected if Germany manages to reduce demand for gas for electricity and heating.

In 2021, Germany got 55% of its gas from Russia (the rest from other European countries). Depending on how much overall consumption can be reduced, European suppliers might be able to cover most/all of it.

European suppliers will also be busy covering all the other increased demand inside from Europe [0], the demand that most people tend to forget when they act like Germany is the only country dependent on Russian energy, and resources, imports.

It's also not as easily replacable as "Just go to the other gas supermarket down the street", infrastructure needs to exist and support such supply chains.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201743/russian-gas-depe...

There has already been some progress (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-made-progres... ):

"Habeck said imports of Russian oil now accounted for 25% of German imports, down from 35% before the invasion, and gas imports have been cut to 40% from 55%. Russian hard coal imports were down to 25% from 50% before the invasion."

I've read that short and mid term the renewables boost will increase demand for gas in Germany. This is because gas power plants can be ramped up and down very quickly. Coal and nuclear power is not very dynamic.

The flexibility is needed to compensate for spikes and especially the variable output of renewables.

In addition to that: My rough back of a napkin calculation[1] shows that we'd need almost tanker per day. Is this even realistic at all?

[1] 80E6 m3 / 250E3 m3 = 320. Please correct me if I made a mistake here.

To continue the napkin math and assuming your calculations check out... Lets say the distance is 7000km and the avg. speed is 12 knots. You'd need less than 30 tankers to have a daily delivery of gas.

Something to keep in mind: No one has done anything like this at such a scale yet and Germany has formidable resources, not just a lot of money but also a big and capable engineering base. Perhaps it's going to go like some predict and innovation isn't going to be able to solve the issues along the way and everything will effectively run on overpriced gas and coal, but it might as well become a big success story. As a species, we are in pretty dire need of such a success story, so I'm pretty stoked to see this play out. Besides, it's really nice to see Germany do something visionary and daring once in a long while. The Merkel governments have been dire in this regard.

They used 142 BCM in 2021. That's 339 million cubic meters per day. The biggest LNG carriers can handle 200,000+ per shipment. That's 1695 per day... there's only 170 ships active per world wide out of the 439 currently operating.

I think these numbers are correct but maybe I am wildly off...

Somebody commented that German fertilizer is a large consumer. I doubt it will make sense to turn gas into LNG into fertilizer.

Depends on the plant capacity available for turning the gas into fertilizer before it'd need to be turned into LNG. Those may not exist.

If only those LNG exporters could offer enough LNG quickly to replace the current need of Russian gas in Germany.

Switching to LNG requires special infrastructure (harbours attached to the gas-network) - and there is not nearly enough of that in Germany right now, and it takes a long time to build.

So even if Russian gas COULD be replaced by LNG tomorrow, in terms of pure volume, it would still not possible to Germany to consume it.

Germany really screwed the pooch on their energy policy for the past 15 years...

Others sources have either similar totalitarian governments or human rights violations like russia or damage the environment like transporting the LNG with ships to germany.

Germany could have diversified it's suppliers if the Iran deals weren't killed by Trump, but even then not a good solution.

Hindsight is 20-20, I know, but Russia was the worst choice there was as supplier.

It was not nearly as obvious 15 years ago, as it is today, but all the signs were there. We (I include myself here) were just not listening closely enough to the countries that knew Russia the best: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine.

The decision is also amplified by the meaningless end to the German nuclear program.

German dependency on Russian gas is a lot older than that. Ostpolitik dates back to the ‘60s.

Jein (Yes and no). Helmut Schmidt even advocated for diversification in 1988 (no importer should account for more than 30% - of course more with oil in mind but the principle stands).

https://www.zeit.de/1988/08/sieben-prinzipien-vernuenftiger-...

Contrary to this, Russian gas imports to Germany used to account for 40% of total consumption in 2012 vs 52% as of today.

Who would have been a better choice?

In the pre-Ukraine war world there were none. Gas was comparatively cheap, pipelines and ibfrastructure was there. So Russia was a natural choice. Now that changed and the world will adapt.

At the very least Germany could have said no to Nord Stream 1 & 2.

> It was not nearly as obvious 15 years ago, as it is today, but all the signs were there. We (I include myself here) were just not listening closely enough to the countries that knew Russia the best: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine.

After living in Western Europe for almost a decade it's still shocking to me how much people here do not understand Russia.

In my experience, right here on HN the dominant narrative was that opposing Russian gas infrastructure was just American protectionism for frackers.

Similarly, opposing Chinese built telecom infrastructure is just seen as an attempt at American protectionism. Hopefully that continues to be a viable position, unlike depending on Russian gas.

Contrary to the narrative common now, many European states and particularly a majority of Eastern European states seem to have been more dependent on Russian gas than Germany:

  - Hungary: 110.4 percent 
  - Latvia: 100.1 percent 
  - Finland: 92.4 percent 
  - Estonia: 86.5 percent 
  - Czechia: 86.0 percent 
  - Slovenia: 81.0 percent 
  - Slovakia: 75.2 percent 
  - Bulgaria: 72.8 percent 
  - Germany: 58.9 percent

“Some of the countries have a figure above 100 because they import more than required for domestic consumption and export other energy products.” per https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/326055...

While that is true, Germany is the economical powerhouse of the EU (and the fourth largest economy in the world). I think, these countries' GDPs combined are probably still smaller than Germany's. This gives Germany a special position here which is mainly why they're the center of attention here.

Those all are small countries, with combined population less than Germany.

>It was not nearly as obvious 15 years ago, as it is today, but all the signs were there. We (I include myself here) were just not listening closely enough to the countries that knew Russia the best: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine.

A big part of Germany's geopolitical strategy was (and partly still is) to act as a communication channel between West and East. Similarly to the EU which brought long-lasting peace in Europe through economical ties, the idea was to establish economical relationships with Russia to advance the relationship for a beneficial win-win situation both sides could live with. This, of course, was shortsighted in many ways.

>> Germany could have diversified it's suppliers if the Iran deals weren't killed by Trump, but even then not a good solution.

How does diversifying away from one totalitarian government only to depend on another totalitarian government solve anything?

Well for one thing, that other totalitarian government doesn't have nukes to threaten you if you intervene with them.

yet.

Less power for each of such governments.

Exactly as you say.

> there is not nearly enough of that in Germany right now

To elaborate on that: Germany has no LNG terminals. Zero. They signed the first contracts to build one this year March [1]. If I were a German citizen I would feel very cross with my own government. It's a good idea to have such an infra just in case. Just to hedge the bets.

There is a very real reason why the Floating Storage Regasification Unit serving as the LNG import terminal for Latvia is called "FSRU Independence". [2] These facilities literally provide independence.

1: https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/germany-speeds-pl... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSRU_Independence

Spain has. But youll need pipes.

There exists LNG terminals in Holland, Belgium and Poland: Rotterdam, Zeebrugge, Swinoujscie etc.

They are connected to German pipelines.

This map is excellent: https://www.gie.eu/publications/maps/gie-lng-map/

I know, but I've been told that Spain has the most underused installed capacity.

Does Spain export a lot of electricity? It could produce a lot of solar power. Even some in the winter, a lot in the summer when it's needed for air conditioning. One can think of it this way, if a solar panel is manufactured in or imported to EU, maybe it should be installed in the more sunny regions for maximum benefit.

Spain is also a wind power giant.

As comparison, Germany is not a great location for either wind or solar power.

I heard that France refused several projects to connect the iberian system to central europe properly, not only electricity but also gas.

It isn't that spanish companies can get much help from the government's diplomacy (long topic), so someone else interested in that connection would have to partner with such companies, or a foreign diplomatic body go and do the legwork for the spanish companies, which wouldn't be the first time.

Germany has lots of good locations for wind, the problem is that anyone can block them, because "they don't like how they look, are noisy, too close to their home,..." and plety of other reasons.

Thus Germany could be like we have it back home in the Iberian Penisula, but no, many people are keeping the courts busy instead.

A LNG import pier is essentially a pipe where ships dock, connected to storage tanks and from which, in response to demand, liquid gas is reheated by simply letting it exchange heat with air or the sea water.

It's a straightforward piece of technology that can be built quickly by any country, unlike, say, a liquefaction plant or a LNG tanker.

The gas port in Poland [1] took 4 years from start of construction to first delivery. From project start it was 9 years.

I’m not putting Poland as some kind of benchmark for speedy construction, but I think 1-2 years is a minimum even in a hurry.

Fundamentally on the physics level you are right. LNG regasification is not hard tech. It doesn't require unobtanium, probably any technologically advanced country can develop the necessary know how if they need it. Heck, at small scale you just pour the LNG out in a puddle and it will turn back to gas. :)

But building any kind of infrastructure takes time. There are some factors which make it more complicated engineering wise: cryogenic fluids, handling large quantities of flamable and explosive liquids and gasses, being built on the waterfront etc etc. None of these are insurmountable mind you! They just complicate it a bit.

One way we can look at is by comparing how long such plants took to get constructed elsewhere. I looked up a few European examples. From the first announcement to the first ship docking:

  UK/South Hook ~6 years
  UK/Dragon ~4 years
  UK/Grain ~6.2 years
  Belgium/Zeebrugge ~10 years
  Netherlands/Gate ~4 years
  Poland/Świnoujście ~9 years

(I have collected my sources on a spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1md_XfmrpIYhWj72Mu3BJ... )

Probably I made some mistakes in the above, and there are some inconsistencies (do we count until the first commercial ship, or the first ship trialing the facilities?) Also I assume that all of these things can be done a bit faster in case of a dire emergency. But it seems even in that best case it might take multiple winters until a regassification plant is up and running. Which is a bit cold and scary.

Lithuania has Independence, not Latvia. Kremlin troll factory was screaming about money waste for years. Today it looks like a smart investment without a doubt.

Even with the terminal, Lithuania still has a 40% Russian gas dependence [0], barely 10% lower than Germany, while Latvia is over 90% dependent on Russian gas.

The matter of fact is that only very few countries in Europe can "afford" to get by without Russian gas or other resources. After all it is the home to the continents largest concentration of natural resources.

There is only so much global production capacity, so much bandwith in terms of logistics, that can compensate for that. It's not like we can suddenly tap a new continent full of resources to replace Russia, reality ain't working like that.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201743/russian-gas-depe...

All three Baltic countries stopped all imports of Russian gas for its own use this week, a move largely enabled by the FSRU Independence. The only remaining movement of gas across the pipeline through Lithuania from Russia is in transit to the Kaliningrad oblast.

FSRU Independence has sufficient capacity to deliver enough gas to serve 70~100% of the yearly needs of the three Baltic countries, depending on how you count. Of course it remains a question of who supplies the LNG, but it gives the countries a backup, an ability to pick the suppliers and an ability to make politically important decisions, even if it means paying a little more.

Oh you are right. Sorry about that. Even my source correctly says Lithuania. Need to learn to read.

Resilience is inherently wasteful.

>> Germany really screwed the pooch on their energy policy for the past 15 years...

Why? Russia, and the USSR through the entirity of the Cold War, delivered reliably all the gas ordered. If you have a stable relationship with suppliers stretching decades and through all kinds of conflicts you have zero incentive to change. The infrastructure is there. And being in business with your "enemy" keeps channels open and results in intet dependencies.

Putin, in a bout of insanity, through all that out of the window. Once it was clear that's gonna happen, and no that was NOT clear a year ago, it was too late to switch (infrastructure).

It's not like this is out of the blue. NATO has been training the Ukrainians for eight years because of the risks. The Europeans should have been hedging their bets against Russian gas as well.

> NATO has been training the Ukrainians for eight years because of the risks.

Feels a bit like a chicken or egg question. I'm still undecided though, as Russia was funding the green anti nuclear movements in Germany way back when Fukushima happened.

Fwiw, I don't think that renewables plus batteries are a safe hedge anyways. We're simply offshoring the environmental externalities to places far away in terms of energy storage, and China holds all the cards in this instance.

The Green party was funded as, partially, an anti nuclear party. Pushing that after Fukushima was just natural. Russia did support the AfD so, as they did with other far right movements across Europe.

That said, 8 years is a very short time to switch from existing gas pipelines to LNG terminals.

What exactly do you mean by Russia funding the green anti-nuclear movements? Exactly who did this?

All that green agenda, Kyoto and Paris stuff, affects Russia very badly by basically cancelling its fossil fuel export earnings. Just look at those who lobby the green agenda in Russia like Chubais.

This.

As I commented recently on another thread:

This was done on purpose. There was the hope, that strong economic ties would make war between Germany and Russia impossible. While it now looks really stupid, it worked really well between Germany and France after World War II (first with European Coal and Steel Community and then later with the European Union).

There's also climate change though. Building a new gas pipeline while exiting nuclear at the same time seems an odd way to achieve zero carbon.

Why? Cheap renewables and gas is a perfectly good route to zero carbon being used around the world.

I could think of ways to further minimize gas but there's politics involved too.

It also is a big carrot for Putin (or somebody who takes his place) to rejoin the peaceful world.

Build a golden bridge for your enemies to retreat over -- Sun Tzu

Ten years ago only 30 % of European gas came from Russia. In the 90s it was even less. It was a deliberate German strategy to increase their dependence on Russia.

> Once it was clear that's gonna happen, and no that was NOT clear a year ago,

It was clear. He threatened Europe with shutting down gas supplies in the past, more than once. He actually did it with Ukraine in 2014. In response Germany (& Europe) became more dependent on Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYaa5Zp7qBI This was 2018. Germany mocked him instead of listening.

True, who could possibly know they were dealing with an incredibly malicious, manipulative and unreliable dictator before Bucha? /s

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

History. Germany dealt woth every Sowjet leader since Stalin. Arguably that helped preserve peace in Europe. Everybody continues to deal with China, not to mention raw earths and dimonds from various African dictators. And the Wests standards were never that high anyway.

> Putin, in a bout of insanity, through all that out of the window.

How exactly? You just explained it yourself very well; These trade relations even held trough the worst of the Cold War.

Just like Germany kept its trade relations with the US going while that invaded and bombed half the Middle East.

The only side that switched behavior here, throwing all established rules out of the window, is Germany and the US, by making Ukraine this "ultimate lynchpin" everybody shall pick a side over, and those who don't pick the "right" one shall be considered with the enemy.

These are very much 1:1 the same overtones the US bullied the international community with, thus tolerating American imperialist ambitions, on the other side of the planet, even those have resulted in some of the worst global damage since WWII.

It is not only the missing LNG terminals. In the last 15 years gas heating has been been pushed to a degree that roughly half of all buildings are heated that way.

I'm willing to believe that we can build an LNG terminal in a year or two, but replacing the heating systems of our buildings will take decades.

Isn’t the point of an LNG terminal to supply a gas heating system with gas?

> Germany really screwed the pooch on their energy policy for the past 15 years...

If they would have pushed "this overrides all public interests" clause last year, they could have triggered a huge backslash especially among the German climate change deniers and car fans. This in turn could have hindered them from introducing the clause today. So, maybe they did a great job on the energy policy. Who knows

>So even if Russian gas COULD be replaced by LNG tomorrow, in terms of pure volume, it would still not possible to Germany to consume it

Why? Given that Germany has unused North Stream 2 connection to Germany infra they should just build an LNG terminal right where NS2 beaches. An LNG receiving terminal is pretty easy and fast to build.

Current LNG facilities are already saturated as I understand it. It's an energetically expensive process: gas from production in the USA has to be piped to an export terminal, and then has to be liquified (large energy investment), shipped across the ocean, then gasified (another large energy investment) and fed into the European pipeline system. Suddenly expanding all that would require, well, a decade of investment and planning.

Not to mention the environmental damage because of the transport by ship. Climate change seems to be forgotten.

They can't, and even if they could; In terms of climate change it's absolutely counterproductive to ship LNG across the Atlantic.

The amount of extra energy that needs, the extra emission it creates, its a complete enviornmental disaster.

One that's mostly ignored, as it gets into the way of certain foreign policy narratives, where neither "climate change" nor the "enviornment" are even recognized concepts of any kind of priority.

Wind energy is nice and stuff but the moment there’s no wind you have no electricity, it’s not a good energy source if you want to actually remove gas from your grid.

Isn't it a bit naive to assume the planers of these expansions didn't at one point or another had that exact thought themselves? I mean it is certainly not the most far out there idea when it comes to wind power..

No, because that's exactly what happened in Texas during their winter storm crisis.

That was only part of the Texas issue. Many Nat Gas plants were also offline. For nearly the whole time Nat Gas outages were 2x wind outages according to ERCOT.

Here is their own report: https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/04/28/ERCOT_Winter_Sto...

Correct, they were, which reinforces the point.

Buuuut... the problem is that they didn't weather proof their system even though they were informend about the problems this could cause in winter storm scenarios.

The weatherproofed windpower plants as well als gas plants function very well in Germany, Norway, etc. even though it is often a lot colder.

Do weatherproofed wind turbines consume electricity? A common complaint around here is that they need to keep the blades heated to avoid frost and ice buildup, even when the wind is not blowing (we do have a lot of still days in winter).

In bad conditions, if that is still the case, having wind turbines connected to the grid might be worse than having none.

In bad conditions this is the case foe every power plant.

The good thing is, that wind turbines are highly distributed, so the chance for every single one being in bad conditions is slim.

This is factually incorrect. The winter issue in Texas was almost exclusively lack of winterization of thermal plants as well as a market setup that was unable to predict and react to the weather. Wind generated more electricity during the event than what was committed in the market, and as such had no negative influence.

This is factually incorrect. Winterization is about half of the issues faced. Page 4 highlights the causes pretty well.

https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/04/28/ERCOT_Winter_Sto...

Page 16 is quite clear: the vast majority of missing generation capacity was natural gas. The lost wind capacity was comparable to lost coal capacity. Whether the cause is categorized as equipment failure, weather, or fuel availability, the most affected generation category was natural gas.

The point of my comment was that the supply chain issue was significant, sorenbs is saying winterization is the exclusive cause. The ERCOT report doesn't support what they had to say. Winterization accounts for ~12-15 GW while supply chain is responsible for ~5-8 GW. (Page 23-25)

The comment I originally responded to said:

> Isn't it a bit naive to assume the planers of these expansions didn't at one point or another had that exact thought themselves?

The answer is no, it is not naive to assume that they didn't think about these things, because even in a state like Texas where energy is king it was not fully thought out.

Edit:

Also to be clear, I'm not ragging on Texas. I love the people of Texas and I miss being there, but I think the state has some important lessons to pay attention to and learn from.

What isn’t fully thought out?

The categories in the report are weather related, equipment failure, and fuel supply issues. These are considered in the report mutually exclusive. But they aren’t, it is just a useful categorization.

You are simply wrong to think that they don’t consider intermittent resources as part of their planning. Wind stops blowing all the time, this is known. The fact that many natural gas generators iced over, fuel was too expensive, fuel wasn’t available, or they couldn’t maintain their equipment when needed was the principal source of lost capacity.

ERCOT sets the price of electricity. There is no 'market' in the traditional sense, unless you count a government price fixing scheme as a market.

In this case the price was set at the absolute maximum as allowed by the system. If the 'market' couldn't react to that absolute maximum price then the market cannot be the problem at hand.

As a German electrical engineer that knows the rigour with which the whole electrical industry works here I am confident this will not be an issue in Germany. Cold winters are not a new thing here.

That’s why energy storage is important.

... and batteries are not the solution at scale to that problem. The current global installed capacity of batteries can barely deliver a handful of gigawatt hours of energy. a medium scale grid like the Netherlands will use that amount in a handful of minutes.

Therefore they will use stored hydrogen in the gas plants. The hydrogen will be electrolyzed using renewable energy when it's too much.

Lakes make for good batteries. Geography provided.

“current capacity” is indeed insufficient, but we’re talking about what ought to be in the future, not about what is in the present.

The technology to do that at reasonable cost does not exist and likely won't be developed in the near future.

The technology does exist. The bottleneck is how fast we can ramp up mining and production of key metals.

Extraction of key metals from batteries (ie.: recycling) does need to be developed further, but in terms of total capacity, that is a bigger future concern than a present one.

What's a reasonable cost? Wind and solar are pretty cheap, and you can spend quite a bit on technology that you only need a couple of weeks of the year without doubling the average price.

Grid-scale batteries are not the solution. Residential solar combined with residential storage either through dedicated batteries (which can be repurposed old EV battery packs or tailor-made residential storage batteries) or electric cars which can feed power back into the home can help more here by limiting peak consumption when people come home from work/school and - given large enough batteries - when they get up and prepare to go to work/school. In the more northern regions the effect will be limited in the winter months due to the limited amount of daylight, the opposite is true in the summer months.

First sentence: I don't think these things are mutually exclusive. Agreed on the rest though!

One of the main advantages of battery storage, apart from decoupling production and consumption, is that it enables delocalization (and portability) of energy sources.

Most of western Europe has an electricity grid to distribute power. When the wind is blowing it covers domestic needs or exports, when it's not blowing it imports nuclear power, or Solar etc.

Denmark (~1% of the world population) has been doing quite well with it's 2GW of wind, powered by "modest average wind speeds in the range of 4.9–5.6 m/s measured at 10 m height." With a mean January temp of 1.5 °C (34.7 °F), wind covered 47% of yearly electric in 2019. (71% yesterday). Plans on 84% by 2035. It also has 1GW of solar. They got started early, and it shows. Too bad for heel-dragging Texans.

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

https://en.winddenmark.dk/wind-in-denmark/current-energy-pro...

Is this a joke? Throttling gas plants is much easier than throttling coal plants. If the wind blows you consume less gas. With coal you have to turn the wind plant off.

Also, fossil fuels appear to be highly unreliable. The moment there’s no gas you have no electricity, it’s not a good energy source.

> In particular there's an anti-NIMBYism provision

The best anti-NIMBYism rule is (for example of the building of new houses): "While the number of new dwellings built is below the target X for the region, all privately-funded plans that involve the building of a new house shall be automatically approved and all relevant permits automatically granted without review".

Obviously no city state or local government wants any plans to be unconditionally approved. So they'll go to massive lengths to meet the target.

Allow the targets to be transferable, so that some really NIMBY place can pay someone else to to do the deed they don't want to do.

We desperately need property rights in the US if we want to build our way out of the housing crisis.

This is how you get 15,000 new 15% profit margin luxury housing units sold to Chinese investors and left empty and 0 new affordable housing units.

We just need higher property taxes. This will mean that these store-of-wealth investments eat losses & stop consuming all the good land while city coffers start to fill up with money that can build public housing.

If you want lessons on how to solve an urban housing crisis look to 1950s Singapore not the building developers salivating over 15% margins on newbuild luxury apartments whining about NIMBYs getting in their way.

I think the problem is generally legal, not administrative. Development in germany would typically be held up by people suing the developers to stop it from going ahead, so the city or state itself wouldn't be in a position to speed things along in a majority of cases.

> the principle that the use of renewable energies is of overriding public interest and will be given priority over other concerns until greenhouse gas neutrality is achieved.

would probably be something like a silver bullet, though, because if it is as strong as it sounds, any judge would basically have to agree to any reasonable planning proposal that was intended to increase renewables capacity.

Not exactly as clean as it sounds. They merely want to take away the burden of the developer to get comments and approval from people before they proceed with planning.

Individuals can still sue and block projects.

This is just talk in my opinion. Like when the government declared in 2010 that they want to have 1 million EV on the road in 2020.

Or when they decided to shut off nuclear and replace it with renewables and instead built out coal and gas.

Or when they decided to phase out coal by 2035…

> Or when they decided to shut off nuclear and replace it with renewables and instead built out coal and gas.

The nuclear phase out was signed and ratified in 2002, since then nuclear has mostly replaced with solar and wind [0], while the share of electricity from coal has has actually gone slightly down.

Germany's 40%+ renewables are an testament to Germany pioneering the sector [1], one that too often gets belittled with straight up misinformation.

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

[1] https://www.trade.gov/energy-resource-guide-germany-renewabl...

>while the share of electricity from coal has has actually gone slightly down

But the electricity generation in general has gone up since then. While total coal has gone down, gas has gone up, and therefore the total amount of electricity generated from fossil fuel sources has only changed slightly. It's clear on this chart[0]. So actual progress in reducing fossil fuel dependency in the last 20 years has been small (the chart is not properly labeled for this, but it looks like something around 50TWh less than in 2002) -- and that's not even counting non-electric heating.

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

In general, when politicians promise something will be done by the different set of politicians in office 10+ years in the future, it mostly means "we're not going to do anything right now".

In Germany, post-war there were three chancellors (prime ministers) that were over 10 years in office - Adenauer with 14 years, Kohl and Merkel with 16 years.

This. Kicking the can down the road for the next generation to deal with is politics 1-0-1.

Got to start somewhere.

At least Germany is reasonably stable politically, not quite on the level of China but far better then the revolving door style governments seen in southern Europe.

Yeah, but this is actually not at all what is happing right now in the German government.

Instead of kicking it down the road (and systematically destroying renewables) like 16 years of Merkel did, they actually started to accellerate and do immediate packages, this article talks about one that will be accepted before easter.

Parliamentarians usually stay in office a long time ( sometimes into the decades). Germany being a parliamentary democracy, there's no limit on chancellor terms.

Also, for such a thing to happen, actions need to be undertaken soon ( invest in building new power plants, ramp up the supply chain, etc.). It's not a vague "in ten years we'll do X", it's "in 10 years we'll have X".

> It's not a vague "in ten years we'll do X", it's "in 10 years we'll have X".

It absolutely is. Nothing will happen. I know Germany, I live here.

Merkel is gone. We're already at 50% renewables.

Just stopping the stopping of renewables will reach the target (for electricity).

> As of 2021, German primary energy consumption amounted to 12,193 Petajoule, with more than 75% coming from fossil sources, 6.2% from nuclear energy and 16.1% from renewables.

You might offset that 6% nuclear that is going away with renewables if you really put your hearts into it, but probably not. Won't be economical.

Most primary energy is wasted as heat when turning it into electricity. The German electrification program means they'll only need about a third of that power from renewables to travel the same distance in cars or heat the same homes.

Waste heat from a power plant in one part of the country can't be sent to heat homes in another. That's the very heart of the matter.

If you could magically get the angry pixies into all the forthcoming electric cars directly with no waste, sure.

It is very nice milestone that the top line numbers are there already, but way too early to declare victory.

By definition, the primary energy input and electrical energy output are equal for renewable sources that don't require fuel.

So the point is that transitioning from thermal electricity generation to sources like solar and wind already reduces the primary energy use.

Electrifying traffic further reduces the primary energy use, as 100% of primary energy from gas turn into something like 40% of power which can be used to drive the car forward. An electric engine is a lot more efficient.

This is just math and doesn't yet include efficiency gains through insulation, heat pumps etc.

> By definition, the primary energy input and electrical energy output are equal for renewable sources that don't require fuel.

When you think about it, this is unfairly disadvantaging renewables due to an unfortunate choice of primary energy. For renewables, the primary energy is solar radiation! Suddenly the primary energy of solar panels would go up 5 fold just because of changing the definition of primary energy. Then everyone would be talking how unfair primary energy is to fossil fuels.

You can go even further. All "natural" processes are completely excluded from primary energy use.

If you include the energy used by agriculture (as in: photosynthesis) you will get a number that human energy use is something like 99% powered by the sun.

If you include ambient heat, non-solar energy sources become a rounding error. This may seem obvious and silly, but especially in residential heating using the ambient heat with heat-pumps, solar collectors, large sun-facing triple insulated window fronts, will be key for energy usage reduction.

I would recommend the books by Professor Volker Quaschning (well-known climate scientist in Germany), he goes into lots of stuff like this in detail.

For electricity, which is a small fraction of energy consumption overall. Most of the other sources are much harder to switch economically, and raise serious health and safety issues if storage and capacity is not increased dramatically.

For instance, for Germany to be self sufficient in the winter using electric heating, even if using high efficiency heat pumps, will require massive capex. Likely on the order of 7x all they’ve already spent on their entire electric grid.

I note you don't mention how much lower is the opex or when they'd start making money on that investment? A weirdly short term view.

What percentage of German GDP are we we actually talking about to get there?

What percentage of German GDP are we talking about saving every year after that?

It isn’t much better near as I can tell for most scenarios, but you’re welcome to provide some links to analysis if you’d like. I’ve posted a number of them in other threads.

A key attribute of those analysis is the interest rates for financing, which used to be near zero - and likely will not be for quite awhile, but good luck predicting that.

> and likely will not be for quite awhile, but good luck predicting that.

It will stay at 0% or go lower. Since when did Germany stop exporting? Since when did Germans stop saving? In fact, it gets easier to save with lower interest rates because it means people don't have to pay interest to the rich. 0% debt is much easier to pay off than debt that is growing exponentially at 10% per year.

I honestly think using interest rates as a throttle is a stupid idea. It would be more logical to introduce a minimum yearly payment to principal ratio and let the central banks control that instead, it would most likely be at 3% during normal times and 6% during inflationary times. Paying interest doesn't reduce the money supply only paying off the principal reduces the money supply and inflation. Raising interest rates is actually an ugly hack to create a recession which then reduces demand for loans. If people borrow anyway, like when a government borrows to service interest, it will actually feed itself and inflation will get worse than if the government lowered interest rates and just paid off the principal to reduce the money supply. When you look at Turkey they are forcibly lowering interest rates but not paying off their debt which is weird as hell, an increased minimum payment would be more effective at removing inflation.

If you take this further and introduce a debt brake or austerity, you will most likely get deflation which then means the interest rate must be negative to avoid a recession.

Well, there are fixed principal payments - it depends on the term on the loan, and is weighted in various ways when it gets paid, but generally it’s set when the contract gets written. Otherwise, how would the lender know how long the cash would be out of their hands?

Interest rates are supposed to cover the lender by compensating them more than they lose by writing the loan (due to things like the time value of the money, inflation losses, etc).

If no one pays interest worth writing the loan for (aka they get more money than they think they would lose at the end) then who is going to write it?

Maybe the gov’t as a policy thing? But ugh. Talk about a recipe for bad loans.

And if Germany writes themselves a bunch of Euro denominated loans for $20 trln worth of electrical equipment and infrastructure that would certainly bottleneck on a few, often foreign manufacturers? Then you’ll see that trade balance get weird quick.

There is a lot of interest in the private sector to build renewables, which has often been hampered by regulation. This reduces those regulations significantly. Why do you think nothing will happen then?

Sure, it's a little late and not enough. But it's a start for now.

> Germany being a parliamentary democracy, there's no limit on chancellor terms.

Average CDU (conservative) Chancellor Term: 10.4 years - with three of them around the three-term mark.

Average SPD (socialdemocrat, including the current one) Chancellor Term: 6.7 years (not including the current one)

Germany is a conservative country, things take time, actions take decades, and chances are the next, conservative government will gut them (look up what happened to Germany's solar panel industry).

Germany solar industry killed itself. It was run by greedy subsidy collectors that cried for anti-dumping tariffs once they realized they were out produced by Asian manufacturers (and out funded by Chinese state backed banks). Germany did help to propel the solar manufacturing industry to what it is today so.

Meyer Burgers seems to be doing well.

The article describes a proposed law that has significant concrete effects. That's what you judge.

Yeah but this is not the case here. They speak about the Easter Package, which has its name from this easter.

But the title is misleading, the article talks about how the libertarians (FDP) plan to water down the target from 100% renewables till 2035 to 80%.

2035 target is not that far in the future - given the scale - and will require taking immediate steps. We should see if they are serious soon.

We already have 50% generation of electricity from renewables this year

I know it takes forever to do big projects, and diminishing returns are very much a thing, but 80% by 2035 feels like a really low bar.

Looking through various targets, it's far better than most countries[0], and Germany might not have the best geography for domestic renewable energy generation other than wind. (Not that it needs to be domestic. Being dependent on Russia for gas was a mistake. Being dependent on France for nuclear or Spain for solar feels a lot safer.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_renewable_energy_tar...

That's true, but many German's reaaaaaaallly love renewable energy.

Just go to any rural area in north-west Germany in google maps and look at the solar on the roofs of all the farms.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/26655+Westerstede/@53.2438...

Took me 3 seconds.

I certainly do, but a lot of people I know don't really care.

... but we used to have a policy that made it profitable to install solar power (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz).

Now it's all about the Eigenenergieverbrauch and avoiding CO2-tax, my friend. Have you heard of Leben mit der Energiewende TV?

On a sunny march day currently about 18% of all electricity is generated from solar.

Also there is a lots of wind in winter and solar works better in summer so the combination works quite well.

> 80% by 2035 feels like a really low bar.

Is this even possible? Doesn't it mean that renewable production fluctuates no more than 20%, throughout the whole year? Or, are you talking instantaneously, daytime, ideal conditions? It seems like grid scale storage that could handle these massive fluctuations (like nighttime) are pretty far off.

It would be interesting to see the cost analysis of that vs nuclear.

Oh, I assume it's much more expensive than nuclear. Personally, I tend to think of nuclear as renewable, though I guess it's not really; just carbon-neutral.

But even without nuclear I'd think it's viable, albeit expensive. You have to overbuild, add a lot of storage, and interconnect the continent (and maybe northern Africa) with high voltage transmission lines.

Domestically, night time isn't the big deal for Germany. They're 20% wind and only 8.5% solar[0]. They just need to be able to trade their wind output with countries whose wind blows at a different time.

Their geography seems like it would be good for pumped hydro storage, but they only have ~6GW capacity as of 2019[1], so maybe it's not.

[0] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...

[1] https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/germany

The ecosystem impact of damming up valleys is quite strongly disliked by many.

Germany has passed a series of laws over the past ~30 years under the umbrella of the Renewable Energy Act (EEG), and decade by decade, that's resulted in strong renewable energy growth in Germany:

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

Big energy projects of all kinds generally have at least a decade of preparation going into them before they come on-line. For solar and wind, this means everything from building more factories for solar PV and wind turbines, to devising and building better grid distribution systems, to incorporating large-scale storage into the system to account for intermittency.

It's astonishing how democracies can get anything done at all, right?

As if there was an underlying force, something beyond the person in charge, signing laws and making speeches.

Something like, you know a society, that can make things happen (or not).

A modern democracy is not just the ability to change leaders once in a while. It's also the fact that you get a society with clear rules, that empower people to make things happen and empower other people to back the things they like.

If enough Germans are pissed at the situation they let themselves into, they will back attempts to solve this problem, whether they come from some hand-wavy politician or by an utility company offering a green energy plan (even if it costs a bit more)

It's like a regime change, but by the people, if you so will. Regime change by vote is called democracy.

The question when evaluating long-term claims is whether there are shorter-term benchmarks specified. I'm not an expert so I don't know what specific short-term benchmarks make sense. "70% by 2030"? "Implementation underway by 2025?"

I do think it's best for the law to be a broad "this is the target" with the nitty-gritty "how to" being figured out by experts. The target should have been established by asking those experts, but I want the people tasks with implementing it to have flexibility to update the plan if things change.

If a highly-prescriptive law has been passed and suddenly we have a major breakthrough in fusion/batteries/etc., or a geopolitical event suddenly changes the availability of certain resources, the implementation details should be adjusted without having to run back to the politicians for an updated law.

Also I only see wind and sun mentioned. How do they plan to deal with the volatility of the supply?

storage in hydrogen and allow a 80% devaluation of the energy that was used. That doesn't matter because the energy would be thown away otherwise like it is today.

Electricity->Hydrogen->Electricity loses about 60%, not 80%.

even better!

Electricity -> gasoline or kerosene has lower losses, easier transport, and safer storage.

Easier transport than existing gas pipelines and existing/to-be-built gas caverns?

You need to upgrade those to be able to use hydrogen, but you don't lose a lot more efficiency if you upgrade the hydrogen to methane afaik.

Depends on how decentralized you can inject hydrogen from overflowing renewables, then. If you could do so at the city's connections to the main long-distance network, it might not be economical to have the infrastructure to create methane from it, and, on top, the hydrogen fraction would be CO2-free even if burnt in a normal boiler/stove. I wonder what upgrades would be needed, though? Are they not already using one of the steel alloys that is resistant to hydrogen embrittlement?

I doubt the efficiency, do you have sources? What are the chemicals you start with?

Are you talking about renewable assisted oil extraction? There are some oil extraction methods that have a EROI below 1 which can ironically only be powered by renewables.

I mean that's a technology that could be used, but I don't see mention of it in the article. Is it in the law?

Yeah, hydrogen's the only storage medium that makes sense at that scale.

I'd expect some - actually probably quite a lot - of excess CAPEX on wind+solar, and some deficit (less CAPEX, but buying some electricity at retail) so you don't have electrolysers and thermal plants just lying around.

You're still stuck with the investment issue: either you pay (Hinckley-scale!) fees to providers to just lie around, or the public sector runs it itself, and the "private more efficient" bollocks is exactly that, because the private sector isn't providing the value. The people providing SLAs are.

The point of hydrogen is not mainly energy storage but hydrogen is the only viable way to clean up two of the most carbon intensive industrial processes: steel smelting and ammonia (fertilizer) synthesis. Smelting steel requires coal to reduce the oxygen from raw iron to carbon dioxide. The coal can be replaced by hydrogen, which will then react to water vapor. Synthesizing ammonia needs elemental hydrogen which is as of now extracted from methane (natural gas) using steam reformation. This leads to CO2 as waste product whereas electrolysis crates hydrogen and oxygen directly/cleanly from water.

You need huge amounts of "base load" hydrogen generation capacities for these industries alone. Flexible generation, i.e. produce more to soak up excess renewable energy which you can then export or turn back into electricity (at a huge loss) later, is just the cherry on top.

The initial funding will absolutely come from the steel and chemical industry (and also government subsidies to get the transformation started).

Hydrogen is not at all required for steel melting. Look at Boston Metal. In fact I would argue its the worst solution of the two by a big margin.

For ammonia this will eventually be required.

Smelting isn't just melting, it chemically reduces Iron oxide and needs a reducing agent (hydrogen, CO etc.)

Aluminum is reduced through electrolysis. I think he means that method can be used for iron which means you don't have to use electrolysis on hydrogen.

You can purify iron by electrolysis too. You don't need hydrogen for that.

But you still must get a way to put carbon in it. This is usually done by mixing the steel with CO, and the easiest way to get from renewables to CO is by reacting CO2 and H2.

The Salzgitter AG certainly thinks hydrogen is the way to go.

Well, hydrogen is a way to go.

I don't think anybody has enough information to know what is the way to go. But well, I'm an outsider with very little information.

As always the much better solution would be to build dedicated nuclear plants that operate at really high thermal energy and use that to make they hydrogen.

Nuclear neat is totally green, you actually get 100% utility out of the plant rather then having constant highly inefficient 'start-stop' operations.

And its actually a better less complex process then electrolysis.

But I guess its much better to absurdly gigantically over-provision renewables so one in a while we can run electrolysers and then by inefficent fossil fuels to drive inefficent electrolysers the rest of the time.

And its not at all clear that hydrogen as storage is actually a good idea, and its also not at all clear its the only thing that scales. It very much unproven at the kind of production scale AND storage scale you suggest. And even in the best case its incredibly inefficient and incredibly expensive make/store/produce.

Something like Iron based batteries will likely turn out to be a better solution.

Japan is going down this path.

> hydrogen's the only storage medium that makes sense at that scale.

There's more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline than in a liter of liquid hydrogen.

Electricity to gasoline produces a safe product that is easily storable for years and easily transportable requiring only minor safety precautions. Not something that can be said for hydrogen.

- mix of supply sources

- over provisioning

- geographic distribution

- biomethane

- international grid ties

Hum. Over provisioning doesn't help when you have a month without wind (or you have to overprovision by like a factor of 100), neither does geographic distribution (cf UK electricity grid last year, the whole country goes down to a small production [1]).

Is biomethane considered as green? Isn't it like natural gas?

International grid ties basically means you are using coal/nuclear/etc from your neighbours, who will likely have shortage at the same time given they also have their own share of sun and wind.

[1] https://gridwatch.co.uk/

It's ok...we're over provisioned on solar generation capacity. So it doesn't matter that it is night :P.

Do you work in the factory at night, bally0241?

I do sometimes work nights, but not in a factory. But your missing the point, there are lots of industrial processes that you don't just turn off for 12 hours because the electricity is not there or more expensive. Spooling them back up can take far in excess of that, so a 50% duty cycle is a non-starter.

I'm sorry we can't all be laptop-class software devs, someone has to make the 'stuff'.

There has never been a single hour in the last 30 years where the wind has not been blowing somewhere in Europe.

Which is great when everyone likes each other. Which traditionally is a dubious bet to place in Europe when losing it results in serious things like ‘will all the old people freeze to death tomorrow because we don’t have enough electrical capacity’.

Well, the wind blowing on some hill somewhere in europe isn't of much help, it needs to be diverse enough that some countries can make up for the entire lack of production of other countries.

I am not convinced there is much diversification. I just did some back of the enveloppe analysis to convince myself. I am using hourly wind electricity production data from this source [1] which is referenced on the europa website [2] (first source I found, I don't necessarily vouch for it). I only looked at 2014-2015 (the last two years of this time series), took the daily production at 2pm (seems to be peak production and peak demand), and then calculated a weekly average of the 2pm production by country for every day. I took the low points for the UK (arbitrarily, that's where I am now), and looked at the percentile of each country for those UK low points.

So the way you read this is for the week ending 28 June 2014, when the UK was at its 1% worst wind production across 2014-2015, at that time Norway was at its 15%th worst production, Sweden 9%th worst, etc. "15%th worst" means that the norwegian production for that week was below that level only 15% of the weeks in 2014-2015.

                     2014-06-28    2014-09-09    2014-09-16
  United Kingdom             1%            1%            2%
  Norway                    15%           21%           20%
  Sweden                     9%            0%           11%
  Netherlands                1%           19%           18%
  France                     2%            9%           15%
  Germany                   23%            1%           41%
  Italy                     63%            9%           18%
  Portugal                  32%            5%           60%
  Greece                    55%            5%            8%

so you do get some outliers (Italy and Greece in the first column, Portugal in the last), but overall, all the major countries are down at the same time, so it's not Portgual that will produce the wind energy for all the other countries.

[1] https://zenodo.org/record/4803353 [2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/jrc-emhires-wind-gener...

I've looked at studies from researchers running simulations on weather data sets, and yes, you need some dispatchable sources in Europe. The question is how much you need.

Generally, the biggest issue seems to be heating in the winter. Heat is actually much cheaper to store than electricity. If you have a district heating system, you can even store it seasonally (storing solar heat in the summer) and be competitive with gas, even before the recent price increases.

I think the main reason we don't see a lot of cheapish long term electricity storage yet is that it's not needed. Once we start producing it, economies of scale will kick in. That's at least how it worked for PV, wind turbines, li-ion batteries.

Europe is windier in the winter, so if you choose a week in the summer, they're all going to be low. This is not unknown or unexpected. It's also neatly complemented by solar which has the opposite yearly cycle:

https://mobile.twitter.com/ntsafos/status/148056006004465254...

I have done all this research in like 2017 and I am so tired of all the idiots slowing down humanity's progress.

International grid doesn't mean "import whatever is on offer". You can contract for renewable energy, and fund international production capacity. Depending on Russian oil was a geopolitical (and environmental) mistake. Depending on French nuclear or Spanish solar seems much safer.

International grid ties also means:

* When it's cloudy or calm, you can import from somewhere sunny or windy. When it's sunny or windy, export to somewhere cloudy and calm. Shortages a thousand miles southwest aren't going to correlate strongly with shortages where you are, and if you if you have multiple sources a thousand miles in each direction you should be able to balance demand far better. Weather conditions are reasonably local. Demand patterns will also vary a bit.

* You can import solar from somewhere sunnier, or sunny at different. You're not going to transmit your electricity 12,000 miles east/west, but Madrid has sunset an hour later than Berlin, and demand tends to be closer to 7pm than 2am.

Yeah, it's a hard engineering problem, and there will be downsides, but we can do it if we seriously commit to it.

if you look at my response to a sibling comment, I am not convinced there is that much diversification in europe [1]. And you can tell annecdoctically, when you have heatwave news stories in one european countries, you typically get similar stories in other european countries. Europe is not that big geographically.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30934588

Wow, thanks for putting together that data!

I'm not surprised to see Germany, UK, Norway, Sweden, and Netherlands all be similar, since (I assume) they're all using the North Sea. I am surprised to see Germany's output is so similar to Italy, Portugal, and Greece. It does look like there's a decent separation between places I expect to use the Mediterranean vs. those I'd expect to use the North Sea, but yeah, we likely need a lot of excess capacity, a lot of storage, or a lot of not-wind-or-solar. (Or I guess a lot of flexibility on energy usage.)

A recent study on Germany based upon 35 years of weather data [0] shows that we would need about 24 days worth of storage to cope with this weather conditions.

[0] https://twitter.com/QvistStaffan/status/1427625795355349004?...

It's always interesting to see what ridiculous limitation they place on these to make them not work out.

Popular ones are:

Refusing to allow energy to be traded with neighbours.

Refusing to allow demand response.

Refusing to allow over building (so the installed capacity exactly matches the yearly required energy and storage needs multiply).

Refusing to target efficiency measures.

Refusing to use existing low carbon power sources (hydro, biogas).

Often they use low volume prices for a massive rollout but at least in this case they're estimating storage capacity rather than price so they won't have done that one.

edit: reading through it now, they cite other people who didn't do the above, and then state that they know some of their choices will overstate things:

> the fact that we model Germany as an island may lead to an overestimation

Guess that bit didn't fit in the tweet.

I don't fully understand this next one, but their headline number is based on running biogas as a constant baseload, which seems utterly ridiculous. They also claim that allowing that to flex with supply and demand has this impact:

> "Adding other sources of flexibility for the example of bioenergy, the duration of period that defines storage requirements lengthens to more than one year."

That's a very strangely worded sentence, with a very counterintuitive plain reading. Are they trying to intentionally confuse people? I'm not sure, can't figure out anything reasonable from the article. How can adding 8GW of flexible biogas generation increase storage requirements? Are they counting the storage of biogas?

I am not trying to defend the study, but I don't think any of your points actually mitigate the issue of volatility.

1. trades with neighbours: most european countries face similar weather conditions at the same time. The french will need their own nuclear capacity to make up for their own lack of wind.

2. demand response: switching off factories or heating when you need it? That's no solution

3. over building: the problem is that the volatility of wind is massive, if you look at the uk grid website [1], it can go to nearly zero for more than a week. If the volatility was smaller, over provisioning could be a solution (provided the economics work).

4. efficiency measures: you only make the size of the problem slightly smaller, but you still have a volatility problem. And with cars going electric and us not relying on russian gas for heating, I don't see the demand for electricity going down

5. hydro, biogas: there is only so much hydro you can build. And the places where you can build some (Sweden, Norway) leave you at the mercy of a russian submarine cutting the cable. Biogas: isn't that co2 emitting?

[1] https://gridwatch.co.uk/

Biogas is carbon negative, since you make it with manure and food waste that would otherwise give off methane.

EVs and heat pumps are over 4x the efficiency. 75% of your energy just not needed anymore to do the exact same work.

The real clincher is that most of the storage they predict is hydrogen and at the end they calculate that the crazy amount of storage required for Germany as an island is in fact, the same size as the existing gas storage facilities which can be reused for that purpose.

Which I think really rams home how utterly boring this allegedly insurmountable challenge is.

I am so tired of pretending things that aren't impossible aren't. Just do it and then reach the next level of civilization. Honestly the only reasoning I can come up with is that a handful of individuals would rather be kings than let everyone live a more advanced life.

>2. demand response: switching off factories or heating when you need it? That's no solution

It's a solution for charging the batteries inside your vehicles.

This excludes connecting further to Germany’s neighbours, e.g. using Norway’s hydro exports as a battery.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid

Ireland and Britain has massive offshore wind potential that is only being slowly ramped up, for example. Macron has announced a new nuclear reactor building program, so potentially more carbon-free electricity to nuclear-adverse Germany. The massive Danish offshore wind park/energy island has yet to come online but will supply northern Germany.

And if you want to go even more exotic, you could get 24/7/365 renewable energy by piping geothermal to continental Europe from Iceland which has an oversupply. Or even building enormous solar parks in the Sahara (geopolitical risks notwithstanding).

There are plenty of options enabled by geographic distribution of supply without even looking at storage. The main problem is the lack of political will until now, which is changing with the realisation in Germany that Russia isn’t a reliable partner.

Edit: none of these rely on any technical breakthroughs either, merely ramping up the interconnection of grids and renewable sources of electricity.

> we would need about 24 days worth of storage

Couldn't you just burn fossil fuels for those 24 days, and then do atmospheric carbon capture for the other 341?

Even if pulling the carbon out of the air takes 10 times as much energy as was released during those 24 days, that could still be achieved over the course of the year, with a reasonable amount of over provisioning.

In principle, yes.

In practice, it's far more efficient to capture right when you burn, as each ton of CO2 capture is many times cheaper then.

And batteries. This is only viable for a few days at most though, it doesn't work for seasonal differences.

If every country main argument is 'we just use the international grid for balance' non of this will scale.

Over provisioning one thing just means its not in another place for the first decades.

One way to deal with volatility is dynamic minute-by-minute adjustment of prices, and appliances (like car chargers, water heaters, HVAC systems, etc.) that turn themselves on and off based on the price.

Like a lot of articles about power or energy as related to 'green' or renewables, this article is about electricity and not total power. Only a fraction of energy consumption is from electricity.

From [1], total energy consumption in Germany in 2021 was 3364 TWh. Total electricity consumption was 581 TWh. That's quite a difference. Electricity at around 20-30% of total energy consumption is in the ball park for developed/industrial economies.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany

That's why Germany is planning to do Sektorenkopplung. Don't know the english word.

Basically everything is switched over to electric. Transportation, Heating, …

I could be wrong, but I thought the point of the GP comment was that there are many industrial processes like smelting that don't have good electric replacements. For example, it's nigh-impossible to maintain the temperatures required to run a steel plant with no combustion and only resistive heating elements.

There are steelmaking processes using hydrogen for reducing the ore and arc furnaces for heat. They are currently a bit more expensive than using coke.

For those, one would use H2 or methane created with the use of electricity.

Arc blast furnaces are a thing - just more expensive. The electrode (typically graphite) is consumed, so technically not zero carbon, but the gas could be captured.

One major category of such processes is calcination, both for cement (CaCO3 >> CaO) and alumina (Al(OH)3 >> Al2O3). This can be done with concentrated solar heating:

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/gc/c7gc0058...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X1...

But building enough plants to actually do this at scale could take a while. Supposedly there was an anode developed for electrolytic iron reduction:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12134

but there have been problems with scaling it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349905

Between calcination, smelting and heating, you've addressed a pretty big chunk of fuel-burning processes. The question is whether we can get these kinds of technologies online in time without Manhattan-Project levels of government support, since that does not seem to be forthcoming.

Calcination can also use low-duty-cycle electric kilns that soak up spare solar panel electricity (from overprovisioning), at least once you have 2-3 days of storage to level solar fluctuations and day/night (big, cheap ovens take a while to heat up).

In general, they are quite amenable to using electrically heated air in place of methane/air combustion exhaust.

They all have good replacements, but if their competitor is allowed to pollute without paying for externalities, they'll struggle in the market.

The EU had, as pointless as it was, anti dumping tariffs on solar modules. Such tariffs can be used to protect domestic non-poluters against their foreign competition.

They've been talking about exactly that for a while but recent events seen to have nudged it along:

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2022/3/15/eu-countries-ba...

Looks like the translation is "sector coupling" or "integrated energy", but I think the real key in translating this is that we typically use a different framing in English.

German "Sektorenkopplung": We're explicitly unifying all sectors to a single source of energy, and it's implicit that this source is electricity.

English "electrification": We're explicitly switching sectors to electricity, and it's implicit that this will ultimately tie every sector to a single source of energy.

Disclaimer: I don't speak German.

The English-language podcasts I listen to have dubbed it the "electrify everything" movement.

To be honest, English most often sounds way cooler than German.

I've just assumed Germany is working towards electrification for heating. From a cursory search, this appears to be both de-facto the case[0] and an official policy goal[1].

I agree this should be explicitly mentioned when talking about renewable electricity generation targets, but the good news is that it is being addressed. (I mostly looked at heating, but I'm sure industry is also a huge portion. Presumably that's also being worked on.)

[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/heat-make-german-buildi...

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-launch-emergenc...

I dunno about de-facto, my anecdata is my heating is in the process switching from L-Gas to H-Gas, have not heard any mention of replacing gas in the near future for existing properties

Wonder what the stats are for new builds being with gas heating vs without

Am not optimistic about German electricity handling the switching of heating and transport (cars) on top of existing usage+growth as long as we're antinuke (:

Yeah, its pretty unrealistic to imagine any zero-Carbon approach which excludes nuclear. But the greens would rather cover their eye/hears about that, and imagine that it can all be done with wind and solar (in northern europe of all places).

It’s certainly possible, just very very expensive due to capacity factors and storage. Like ‘multiples of GDP’ expensive depending on the napkin math used.

Is the carbon footprint being taken into account regarding batteries, windmill blades, and solar panels? These are all very expensive consumables, with no good way to reuse or recycle. Specifically the windmill blades and solar panels.

How does nuclear help with heating homes? The last time I checked we put nuclear plants far away from people, not use them for district heating.

Ever hear of electric heating? How on earth would you expect solar or wind to be used for heating. It's far from the cheapest option currently, but you're not getting rid of fossil fuels without electric heat.

Northern Europe has a lot of offshore wind capacity.

Electric heating and transport both help introduce renewables faster as they are both effectively storage. EVs are literally batteries that can charge off peak and electric heat pumps can work near continously to store heat in the building fabric and pause when demand is high.

Good insulation is another super boring technology that really helps too.

Additional anecdata, my landlord will replace the old oil-based boiler with a gas-powered one in ~ two months. Gas is sadly not dead, even in "new" installs. :D

(And jacks the rent up 30 euros per month because of it, while the "official" estimated monthly savings on the heating bill are 0.1 cent (yes, cent, not euros) per month per m², probably negative now, amazing ^^')

Ask for a heat pump

Are we neighbors? My landlord has the same plan.

How much of that 3364 TWh is lost fighting Carnot's theorem and similarly futile endeavors?

The year Germany reaches ~100% renewable energy for electricity, will also be the year they install the most renewable capacity in history. It is very unlikely that the year after will see 0 renewable capacity installed. Instead, prices will start to fall steadily, dramatically accelerating the electrification of remaining sectors.

Remember that both wind and solar follow very predictably cost-reduction curves. Starting a few years before 2030, electricity consumers will start to see reduced energy bills because of this.

turbines and solar panels will need to be replaced after 20 years of use..

If one assumes the current trend [1] of the last 13 years, Germany should be at 84% in 2035 by simply not slowing down the transition. So honestly not overly ambitious

[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...

The target as mentioned in the article is 100%, which the FDP (libertarians) want to water down to 80%.

Given your projection, I don't wonder why

The FDP is not libertarian by any measure. Much like the CDU they claim the social market economy of Germany as one of their achievements, which would be called outright socialist in some American circles. From an American perspective they can be compared with the Democrats in the US. Of course the whole political spectrum of America is further right than that of Germany.

I would hardly call the FDP libertarian.

So neither liberals nor libertarian. What are they then?

Conservatives for the rich with a modicum of backbone to appeal to people who wouldn't vote for corruption scandal parties like CDU but Christian Linder seems to be losing his backbone as well.

I think the last 2-3 years it has somewhat stagnated (for example [1]), driven by conservative politicians fishing for votes with NIMBY policies (while at the same time increasing dependence on Russian imports). Hopefully the new government can pick it back up, though.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-build-no-new-of...

Even without politics it would have slowed in the last 2 years due to shortages.

I don't know of it was NIMBYism, but a few years ago the relatively simple feed in tariff system was replaced by a kind of a bidding system designed to allow new capacity addition to the most efficient producer. But by design they tried to limit the amount of new capacity added. Honestly I don't know all the details, but it's not very far fetched that there was a fair bit of politics involved, and protection of interests of a lot of non renewable energy producers.

Some details here https://m.dw.com/en/german-cabinet-puts-brakes-on-clean-ener...

A big NIMBY-issue is Bavaria (and others) famously blocking addition of above-ground north/south transmission capacity, causing expensive buried cables across farmlands and forests.

Contrary to popular belief and assumptions in many papers, adoption of a technology doesn’t follow an exponential curve but often follows an s curve and we can reasonably assume that Germany is in the spot where growth accelerates at the strongest. Massive efforts might be needed to not see the growth rate of the transition to slow down.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00863-0.epdf?shar...

Headline here doesn't match the article headline and is contradicted by the article. There is no passed law.

While it does not match the article headline, that's the core aspect of the passed law.

The FDP will surely want some (more) help for the industry but the point made by the parliament stands.

There is no passed law. There is a proposal for a new law that has not been presented to parliament yet, so "German parliament passes law" is just flat out wrong.

The only mention of parliament in the article is one of the government parties stating that it in its current shape won't be able to pass parliament.

Flagging this, you can't distort content like that, especially if the majority of readers has to rely on machine translation. But congrats, you now have a clear falsehood top of the front page, well done.

The important thing is that it says something HN users agree with therefore it’s true.

Not to mention that the title here on HN is in English while the article itself is in German, so you're right, not matching at all.

That too, but I'm not 100% sure if there is an explicit rule about foreign language content or not. But especially if most readers need to rely on machine translation it has to be precise.

EDIT: per dang 23 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30663877

> We have deep respect for languages, but HN is an English-language site, so posts here need to be in English.

> That may require waiting until a good English-language article appears, but the more significant the topic is, the more (and sooner) this is likely to happen.

Additionally it appears to only be about electricity and now addressing the bigger users of energy, transportation and heating.

That is huge, heating with gas seems to be very very common, on the order of 50% of all households use it, or about 460TWh per year. The electricity production is 580 TWh per year, so its a sizeable proportion of that. Now heatpumps are efficent so not sure how much electricity will be needed, but it will be a lot.

Transportation and heating will be electrified. Electric car share in new cars is 15% and climbing fast. New gas/oil heating installations will be (almost) forbidden from 2024 on (65% of heating energy must come from renewable energies).

So electric energy is what is relevant for the future.

How far in the future, though? The majority of cars on the road will still be non-electric for years even after EVs take over 100% of the market, because cars are so long-lived.

By 2025 probably the majority of new cars in Europe will be electric and by 2027 >80%. After that the share of electric cars in the fleet will increase by about 4-6% every year. Almost complete electrification will probably take until 2040.

If robotic cars take off and people stop owning cars in larger numbers, things might be faster. Also old combustion cars might still exist, but these are often cars that are not moving a lot.

Your assertion does not seem realistic. Germans won't let go of the combustion engine easily nor have demonstrated the correct investments to be able to ramp production up to those numbers in only the years.

Daimler stopped development of combustion engines almost three years ago: https://electrek.co/2019/09/19/daimler-stops-developing-inte... . Volkswagen will not develop new combustion engines: https://paultan.org/2021/03/23/vw-to-stop-developing-interna... Opel (as part of Stellantis) is going all electric in 2026.

The combustion engine was let go some time ago.

BMW still making advancements: https://www.bmwblog.com/2022/01/14/bmw-working-on-new-combus...

The first article says "Daimler has previously announced plans for Mercedes-Benz and smart cars to offer electric versions of all car models by 2022."

Has that come to pass? No. So their claims of maybe making most cars electric by 2030 should also be suspect. And that's definitely not 2025.

Mercedes-Benz EQA Mercedes-Benz EQB Mercedes-Benz EQC Mercedes-Benz EQS MERCEDES-BENZ EQV MERCEDES-BENZ eSprinter MERCEDES-BENZ eVito ... are already being sold.

Are all being sold. EQE will be released this year. Smart is already all electric.

That is simply impossible. We won't have the manufacturing capacity to produce that many electric cars in 3 years.

Stellantis (Opel/Citroen/Fiat/...) will be all electric by 2026: https://insideevs.com/news/570731/stellantis-electric-europe... Volvo will by all electric by 2030: https://www.autoserviceprofessional.com/articles/8910-volvo-... Mercedes will be all electric by 2030: https://electrek.co/2021/07/22/mercedes-benz-go-all-electric... Volkswagen is converting three factories (Emden, Chattanooga, Hanover) to build electric vehicles this year alone. Ford will be selling 600000 EVs/year in Europe by 2026 (https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/14/ford-plans-9-electric-c...)

There is a lot of capacity going online.

That first article is incorrect. Look at the source. Even the picture they include contradicts the headline, saying "there will be a battery OPTION by 2024 for all models". Great, but far from majority electric by 2025.

"Stellantis has announced its commitment to sell only electric vehicles in Europe from 2026, following in the footsteps of several other manufacturers that revealed similar moves."

So an option in 2024 and all electric by 2026. What is incorrect in this article? If they stop selling combustion cars in 2026 they will start phasing out much earlier.

Electric miles driven is the more important metric.

People who only drive once a week can probably cope with high fuel prices for their second hand car, and their CO2 output is minimal.

People running a business e.g. deliveries, taxis or otherwise high mileage uses will be passing up a lot of money if they don't switch to EVs with low fuel and maintenance cost. They're already competitive in TCO for these users and only going to get cheaper.

Probably shouldn't have closed all those nuclear plants.

Germany hasn't build new nuclear plants for ages, even under the conservative governments that were ruling before last year.

The plants still running are very old and have become hard to maintain as they have reached EOL.

It's not like we are shutting down perfectly good new plants.

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

You're shutting down perfectly good old plants, ahead of schedule for no engineering derived reason. InderRealitätbleiben.

> Most nuclear power plants have operating life-times of between 20 and 40 years.

> The main ageing effects of concern are changes in physical properties (e.g., electric conductivity); irradiation embrittlement; thermal embrittlement; creep; fatigue; corrosion (including erosion and cracking assisted by corrosion);

> Ageing is certainly a significant factor in determining the limits of nuclear plant lifetime or life extensions. No nuclear plant, including those still under construction or being mothballed, should be considered immune from its effects.

https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/29402043133.pdf

If we have not, by accident, built some super long-lasting nuclear power plants, they are at EOL as the remaining plants were built in 1982. Which is exactly 40 years ago.

Would you take the responsibility for running those things any longer?

They are still perfectly safe for at least 20, 30 years. Nuclear plants last a really long time. Germany is just acting very dogmatic.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=19091

Yes, of course I would. Why throw out the baby with the bathwater.

True, nuclear power plants age - whether you can extend their life or not is an engineering question for engineers. Do an inspection and come up with an answer what needs TLC.

Shutting them down because standards demand is one thing. Shutting them down early because of a political games is another.

Fukashima went boom, some fear mongering occurred, this helped the political careers of some people who have no idea how any of this works. Harmed some others. Consultants made money. And firms won sunset contracts.

Lets not pretend otherwise.

If Japan had shut down all of its plants, decommissioned them and built new plants it would have spent less money than cleaning up Fukushima.

The fact that nuclear advocates keep saying newer generation power plants are safe is basically useless because they also advocate for keeping all the unsafe ones online. Tanks have modular power plants that can be replaced and serviced outside the tank. Why isn't the same true for nuclear power plants? Why not just update to the latest version instead of keeping old versions with vulnerabilities? Oh right, because they are monoliths that are a pain in the ass to upgrade. You need to rewrite them from scratch.

Austria did.

https://youtu.be/WUVZbBBHrI4

Germany is going to need nuclear weapons soon as well. The U.S. is not a long term stable partner, the UK is out of the EU so now they can only depend on France for deterrent. That’s probably not enough with a hostile neighbor in the east.

> the UK is out of the EU

Wouldn't NATO be more relevant in terms of defence?

If the US becomes more isolationist NATO becomes a bit meaningless since NATO is basically the US guaranteeing everyone. And that is looking to happen even with Biden. The next president will almost certainly be an America First republican that will be more friendly to Russia than to western Europe.

Western Europe from now on needs to defend itself.

@dang: Could you fix the link, please? Should be: https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2022-04/habeck-geset...

Title is wrong. The parliament doesn't have passed anything. And the article states that immediately at top!

The administration (Bundeskabinett) formed by SPD, GREEN, and FDP has decided they want to follow the draft plans worked out the ministry of economy and need to request the parliament to pass it. Furthermore Die Zeit is a recognized newspaper but with strong bounds into the SPD.

I don't know where to add this question without it seeming off subject, but seeing as we're heading into spring, seeing Germany has quite a wealthy economy with a good QOL, that many if not most workers get 5 weeks of holiday, the chip shortage is leading to slowdowns in the automotive industry etc etc... why doesn't the government just go cold turkey, give people a month or 2 free holidays while drastically reducing public lighting, telling businesses to stop heating their premises at night etc ... I mean we had a dress rehearsal 2 years ago with the onset of Covid, this would be easier as people can still go outside it'd befor a good cause and probably give a boost to domestic spending .... also curious I heard a lot of gas is used to make fertiliser... of course it's over-simplification but maybe a lot of that fertiliser is used to grow grain, corn to feed the meat industry....so maybe eating fewer bratwurst would be a healthy, ecological and ethical step which would send a f...U to the rest of the world saying we too can think outside of the box :-)

EU has common energy market. In reality it means Germany can be VERY grean, while importing atomic energy from France and coal from Poland and Balkans.

Who will loose in this are poor EU nations, 10x higher energy cost compared to local production cost. Germany is basically outsourcing negative impacts of its energy policy to its neighbors.

We also export our Energy to the other countries when we have a surplus and France Nuclear plants cannot run because the river's are to warm again.

I am surprised that someone mentions this. I think thermal power plants are quite amusing. You build this huge monolithic power plant and then the rivers can't cool it because it's too big. So you instead place it near the ocean and then get hit by a tsunami instead. Wonderful.

Germany becoming laughing stock with ignoring and shutting down nuclear plants

This has sadly been decided about a decade ago. Reversing course would (apparently) be more expensive and take longer than building out renewables, especially considering that nuclear power arguably presents more problems than it's worth longer term.

I don't think so. Here in France, we have our share of troubles. 27 of our 56 nuclear plants are offline and we were asked to reduce heating and electric consumption earlier this week to avoid power cut and keep the grid on.

We have lots of difficulties keeping our plants on, due to badly designed and/or maintained plants, and this won't improve with global warming (e.g warmer river and sea in hot summer will make reactors more difficult to cool). Our failure to build our EPR in time and within budget is not reassuring either (from EUR 3.3 to 19.1 billion! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...)

I'd much prefer than we switch to solar and wind as fast as possible and as nuclear energy becomes less needed, we retire the big, old plant as safely and cheaply as possible (mmh). Of course, we'd better focus on retiring the most polluting plants first (coal ones in Central / East Europe) but the faster the transition, the better.

For context: The FDP is a German liberal party, part of the ruling coalition, which is traditionally (with the CDU - "christian democratic union", now in the opposition) very close to the industry with all its lobbyism.

For that reason they _must_ be against some of the industry-relating "cuts" but even they have realized that times are changing.

---

translation via DeepL

The FDP parliamentary group demands significant improvements in the planned legislative package to accelerate the expansion of green electricity in Germany. "With the Easter package, Federal Minister of Economics Habeck is taking a first step in the right direction. However, due to time constraints, all important reform steps could not yet be included in the package," FDP parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr told the dpa news agency in Berlin. FDP parliamentary group vice-president Lukas Köhler said: "We have to use the upcoming consultations to substantially improve the current draft in line with the joint coalition agreement of SPD, Greens and FDP."

Shortly afterwards, the federal cabinet approved the comprehensive legislative package for the faster expansion of green electricity from wind and sun. According to the plans of Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection Robert Habeck (Greens), the measures are intended to help Germany achieve its climate goals more quickly - but also to make the country less dependent on Russian energy supplies as quickly as possible. It is called the "Easter Package" because the cabinet is expected to adopt the planned legislative changes before Easter.

Renewable energy has become a "matter of national security", according to the core content of the energy emergency measures. Several laws are to be amended. The main point is the amendment of the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), in which the expansion target for 2030 is raised to 80 percent. The Wind Energy at Sea Act is also to be amended and now also provides for higher expansion targets.

FDP calls for "a more realistic target".

In general, the electricity supply is to be based almost entirely on renewable energies as early as 2035, and industry is to be supported in entering climate-neutral production processes.

Even before Dürr's official statements, the dpa had reported that the FDP only wanted to approve the comprehensive legislative package with reservations. There was talk of a "special procedure" because important issues had not yet been decided by consensus. However, the way should be cleared so that no time is lost.

After the cabinet's decision, the FDP parliamentary group called the new EEG an "important building block" to accelerate renewables and make Germany less dependent on Russian energy supplies. However, the draft was still "far from finding a majority in the Bundestag", it said. Central aspects still had to be clarified in the parliamentary procedure, said parliamentary group deputy Lukas Köhler. Earlier, he had said that the cabinet would decide this Wednesday on an "initial basis for discussion" in order to move forward quickly. "A climate-neutral electricity system by 2035 is desirable, but practically impossible to achieve in Germany."

Environmental organisations are also calling for improvements - albeit towards an even faster and broader expansion. Greenpeace, for example, called for citizens to be more involved in the expansion of renewables. For Deutsche Umwelthilfe, the lack of land available for the expansion of wind energy remains a shortcoming. At least two percent of the state's land "must be reserved for the expansion of wind energy alone", the organisation demanded.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

> The FDP is a German liberal party

"Liberal" in this case means economically liberal, going in a libertarian direction (though they're more moderate about it).

I applaud such efforts, but the fly in the ointment is that the acceleration of renewable energy sources will not only require more capital, sooner, but also different energy sources to be built more quickly. Accelerated timelines for such capital-intensive projects almost always require intense short(er)-term demand for energy which will likely need to come from fossil fuels.

I completely agree that we need to be vastly more aggressive in terms of ditching fossil fuels: fossil fuels are just plain stupid even when you ignore the climate catastrophe that we are causing by using them.

However, At this point, assuming we make no more improvements, we have successfully avoided turning Earth into Venus.

> require intense short(er)-term demand for energy which will likely need to come from fossil fuels.

We're actually starting to trend away from this[1][2].

[1]: https://www.gem.wiki/Category:Proposed_coal_plants_in_the_Un... [2]: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/new-coal-plants-dwindle-amid-wa...

Can this be avoided/mitigated at all?

No one sees the obvious solution here.

Nuclear energy and Crimea gas and more fierce support for Ukraine in the east.

Pipelines are existent and building LNG terminals probably take longer. Renewables won't cut it. Reverse the halvening of domestic energy production from the last 10 years ( https://www.acer.europa.eu/gas-factsheet )

Germany did some crazy energy re-work during WWII, I recall.

Or they could start fracking the tremendous amounts of oil and gas reserves that exist in Europe that they just refuse to use as a holdover until all this green tech actually finishes becoming available. Do both.

… and turn the nuclear power plants back on until then?

Not a feasible option by any means. Fuel supply is not secured and takes a long time to prepare (apparently fuel rods a custom made for reactors and have a lead time of 2+ years). On many plants, demolition has already started to an extent. Also many operators apparently skipped certifications that would be necessary to operate beyond the timeline that was set 10 years ago.

The problem is not that they did switch perfectly fine nuclear power plants of, the problem is that they didn't build replacements for old power plants which have to go out of service normally.

Many(all?) of the remaining nuclear power plants are already operating well beyond the time they have been designed for.

Same situation as in Sweden.

You cannot simply do that. This was planned for years and there is no training for staff, contracts like insurance, a location to put the additional waste etc. to prolong the usage of nuclear power plants.

The nuclear plants in Germany are not insured, because the estimated 10 Trillion Euro a catastrophic failure would cause is out of question for any insurer.

Therfore the German state takes the risk.

Conspiracy theory - the Russian attack on Ukraine is actually a ploy to help combat climate change by moving people off of Oil faster.

That's how the west is behaving but that would go against Putin's interests. He would be slaughtering his proverbial golden goose. It would be more appropriate to think that he is monopolizing fossil fuels in Ukraine and benefiting from higher oil prices during the chaos.

Under the conspiracy theory there would be a secret cabal of people (insert Illuminati, lizard people, etc.) that are (in some unspecified manner) influencing the people that surround Putin to convince him to go to war, despite it not being in his best interest.

For those interested, here is the primary energy use of Germany. There is still a long way to get rid of coal.

https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/chiffres_en...

That is totally outdated, here are more current numbers: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...

Looks like there's a lot of opportunity to install geothermal heating systems.

Using geothermal energy is surely a niche thing in Germany, yet. I've heard about two or three people who used it for their homes, but nothing large at all.

Here's a German article from two months ago on that: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/geothermie-in-deutschland-roa...

440.000 installations so far, mostly surface-near (around 100 m depth).

It's very common in Sweden to heat single family houses this way (300k installations). It costs about 15k EUR to install, and according to ads can lower you heating costs by "up to 80%".

You're right, coal has really jumped in 2021

Ugh, wind dropped ~11% in 2021? I heard new capacity has paused for some reason. Is this just that + old capacity being retired? Or just some temporary downtime for maintenance? Or is it just that 2020 was super-windy and 2021 was calm? Seems like a big change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com