Germany's Energy Catastrophe
quillette.com
quillette.com
One of the worst articles I have ever read in my life.
That's completely BS. More French reactors are off than usual because of delayed scheduled maintenance caused by Covid.
But the industry has tumbled into an unprecedented power crisis as EDF confronts troubles ranging from the mysterious emergence of stress corrosion inside nuclear plants to a hotter climate that is making it harder to cool the aging reactors.
The outages at EDF, Europe’s biggest electricity exporter, have sent France’s nuclear power output tumbling to its lowest level in nearly 30 years, pushing French electric bills to record highs just as the war in Ukraine is stoking broader inflation.
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The article also mentioned EDF might need to be nationalized since it's in so much debt, and in fact this was announced a few days ago.
Just few days ago there was a documetary in ARD, a neutral one, about building back plants to green lawn, the cost and the almost century long effort to build them back that is ridiculous (multiple billions) , that is usually never priced in.
Speaking of cost I found it surprising again how much just building even the new ones is.. I mean they had to compare to a dam to find something worse, wtf? ( https://www.westerninvestor.com/british-columbia/saskatchewa... )
And then also that even if we accept all those downsides, the unsolved waste problem, (yeah a lot of people will give me armchair proposals or the new non-existing reactors that would just eat everything and leave nothing behind... not), that it is not cost competitive, the risk (yes, you tell me Russians are stupid, Fukushima was an exception, 3mile and other incidents were perfectly avoided, but please consider also war and terror), there just wouldn't be enough fuel for the whole word to go all-in (yeahyeh we just scrub it from the sea.. in theory, as much as we could just get all the drinking water from the sea or scrub all the CO2 from the atmosphere with current tech..).
But even if you ignore that again and believe it will be fine, even then if the world would now decide to go all in, the time it takes to build means it wouldn't even make a dent in 15 years - WHICH IS TOO LATE.
We could have avoided a lot if the world went all in renewables the 20-30 years back where we already knew what was coming.. and this is the most surprising thing to me. We could do so much suddenly in regard to Pandemic and now the war.. but in relation to the climate catastrophe they are minor annoyances, still we don't start acting but deter us constantly from the right thing by dreaming of the assumed easy nuclear solution out. Humans!!!
I derailed, sorry. But it will be bad, and nuclear just wont help even a bit.
To be more precise: 5 countries represent 96% of EU uranium imports: Niger (24,26%), Kazakhstan (22,99%), Russia, Australia and Canada.
A country like France has 1-2 years of uranium stock for its electricity production.
Dependence on Russia is way less critical for uranium than gas.
[1] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/luranium-importe-en-euro...
Nuclear is so amazing, right? Relatively small, high tech self-contained facilities that rhyme with some of the best science fictions out there.
However, the moment you dive in it you see just how long it gets to build these things, how expensive they get with with each safety failure and you get to see the unsexy parts of it like mining and processing the raw materials and then the nuclear waste that just sits there waiting to be transferred to its final destination.
Working with Russia didn't have to be a bad thing. What makes EU great(you can argue over the other functions of EU) is the peace it creates through co-dependence and shared interest and Russia was very well suited to benefit from it. Russia provides the resources, EU pays for those resources and Russia buys stuff from EU with that money and as a result Europeans get the energy and Russians get the European goods. It's a win-win relationship that fell apart when the head of Russia did not needed to provide with a well being any longer to stay as a head.
I personally wish Russia had stayed a partner. It makes sense to be co-depended with partners but as Europe got the short end of the stick as the relationship fell apart it only makes sense offset any dependence to Russia even at a cost.
nuclear advocates advocate for nuclear when it makes sense.
so any advocate for any kind of energy policy preference is fed up, frustrated, and so on.
green advocates? yeah, completely right with regards to global warming, ecological disasters, fucking up the planet, etc.
based on one's morality we can say that advocates of global fairness are right in their view that currently the "West" has the burden to exert a heroic effort to fix the warming they caused, and help the poor countries to skip the "fossil phase". and anyone pointing out that this effort is basically non-existent is also right. (and so poor countries will be likely more affected by climate change and economic and energy shocks than rich ones. mostly because being rich helps with almost everything, and also because poor countries tend to be located in areas that used to enjoy year-round warm climate with occasional extremely warm days which will now become a lot more frequent)
on top of all this poor countries usually doesn't have the luxury of picking the best long-term solution. (but as we saw even rich countries have been optimizing for short-term nowadays.)
. .
okay, that said, economics of nuclear energy, it all depends on economies of scale. it's basically irrelevant what happens with 1-10 power plants.
if in a given country there won't be a healthy nuclear energy industry, then keeping one plant alive is .. irrelevant. (even if economically retrofitting a 40-50 year old plant is cheap, because the big ticket items are already paid for ~40 years ago.)
renewables got cheaper because they are mass produced. were nuclear plants mass produced they would be drastically cheaper too. (that's the promise of small modular reactors.) but even simply ordering 100+ big plants would push down costs from the ~3rd one. (if they were properly standardized and near identical. it parts were pre-fabricated, and so on.)
basically construction (so housing and transportation ... and healthcare and education) everywhere is getting more and more costly because technological progress is unevenly making other things more cheap. (and also our standards are going up, so we use the old inefficient technology and more skilled labor to build better things, it'll be simply more expensive.)
Nuclear power plants are the most expensive way of generating energy and the least sustainable way.
We don't even have a good way to dispose nuclear waste. We were checking for a "Endlager" which means a place to hoard all the nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Guess what? No one wanted it.
Bavaria tried to keep themselves out of possible regions for waste disposal, while going full PR pro-nuclear.
So nuclear power plants are basically neither a long term solution, nor a short term solution.
We don't even have a good way
to dispose nuclear waste.
Nuclear energy is [...] massively
[subsidized] by the state.
Sounds interesting, would you mind to expand / link some site that goes into details?
> It's not nuclear that's massively subsidized, everything else is.
Germany massively cut funding for solar power being supplied into to the grid (Einspeisevergütung) back in 2012 [1] and it still isn't funded the way it was before.
But it is and was still worth it for most people, if they just consumed most of the electricity themselves. [2]
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2012/37990550_... [2] https://www.kfw.de/inlandsfoerderung/Privatpersonen/Bestands...
I think that the comment was ironic, to show a parallel with how coal waste is "utilized"
I seriously do wish someone would write a book called "The case for a Chernobyl plant in your neighborhood!".
Such a case wouldn't concede the point about the safety paranoia surrounding nuclear power, but instead suggest that we literally power the entire word with pre-Chernobyl RBMK reactor designs. Or hell! Something even more dangerous if we can find it.
We can then assume that we'd have N meltdowns per year somewhere in the world, i.e. a "Chernobyl-level incident", and we'd still be far ahead in terms of safety compared to where we are today.
And that's not just comparing nuclear to coal, just the deaths and injuries from rooftop solar installations are in the ballpark of a Chernobyl incident every year.
Discussions about nuclear are paralyzed by safety concessions[1] beyond all reason. That's the problem with nuclear, not that it's comparatively unsafe or expensive when the costs and risks are fairly evaluated against the alternatives.
1. https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-p...
I think there are basically two problems with nuclear safety:
- one is that a single incident is broadcasted everywhere, no matter if there are causalities or not. This is similar to planes: when one crashes and 200 people die it makes the news. We have in France about 10 people dying every day in car accidents.
- the second one is the nature of the accident. When you fall from a rooftop, well bad luck. The place you fell on is not unuseable for millenia. This may be (and only "may") be the case with nuclear incidents. Now, the newer plants do not explose like Chernobyl did, because physics is going to drive down the reaction. There can be leaks, even dangerous leaks, but they will be quite localized.
xkcd had a wonderful graph on radiation: https://xkcd.com/radiation/
No it doesn't. Not anymore than gas, coal and renewables at least.
The issue of disposal is also simply incorrect. There are plenty of places to store it, France does it, everyone does it. Do you know where the waste from coal goes? Into the atmosphere, where it kills thousands directly and potentially billions indirectly with global warming. So it's comical to criticise nuclear for waste issues.
Barring hydro (which Germany cannot have) and coal/gas, there is no alternative but nuclear. Renewables cannot be a reliable source of energy because they are intermittent. You will always need some stable source, and currently (and for the foreseeable future), it's nuclear.
The question is not, whether there are places or not. It doesn't matter if none of the 16 regions in Germany wants to be responsible to store the waste.
If no one wants to deal with it, the effect is the same.
https://interestingengineering.com/switzerlands-water-batter...
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
> one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia
It is a common false perception that it is a problem, very often pushed by fake news outlets. You might be a victim. Russia produces about 15% of the world's uranium [1], according to UNECE.
[1] https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...
Lastly, nuclear power plants produce a constant base load while the coal and gas power plants have a very dynamic output and it's simply misleading to pretend that a GW of nuclear energy can replace a GW of coal or gas without taking all of the production into account.
That's because without the opposition to nuclear, the motivating reason to build up renewables would have been gone, so it wouldn't have happen. Which means Germany would have continued with about 10 % (of primary energy) nuclear and the rest would have been fossil fuels.
Imagine the importance of Russian uranium if there was a nuclear renaissance and the world suddenly built terawatts of nuclear plants, which is what this article is proposing and presumably you too. And also, Russians are one of the last countries that actually builds them including abroad, so a nuclear surge would mean countries lining up to have Russian nuclear plants built.
The article is devoid of not only data, but common sense.
And now almost 50 years later we have way waaay more knowledge, experience and technology to build safe powerplants within a short time.
The hindrance is bureaucracy. Ask anyone who is or have been working for the government how incredibly inefficient it is.
The problem with government inefficiency and nuclear is that the governments are the only ones that dare spend money on it. An example of a private investment was the plant in South Carolina that was halted after 9 billion spent. The reason was that they realized they would not make it in time to cash in on a subsidy, and without that the project would never ever be profitable. And normally you could say it happens, it's the company's money, but the debt is being paid by the utility's customers. They're paying for electricity from a power plant that does not exist.
I don't understand the people that think this is a rational solution.
Russia or Korea build a nuclear power unit in approximately 8 years, China - 6.
I’m open for (re-)discussing nuclear energy here in Germany, but we could run 100% on nuclear or coal and a full gas stop by Russia would still have catastrophic consequences. We need gas for industrial/chemical processes and heating our homes. In fact, if the Energiewende had progressed a bit further, then more houses would have installed a heat pump by now.
It's not like Germany is so poor it can't afford to pay 50% more for gas. Or that it couldn't build an LNG terminal just in case. Poland which is much less wealthy - managed to do it. How come nobody in Germany seriously raised these issues for 3 decades? Mainstream didn't care cause industrial output was the only thing that mattered. And EE countries are russophobic, we Germans are so much smarter. They will understand eventually that it's for their own good.
You have a lot of rethinking of your foreign policy to do. Germany can't continue to be an informal leader of EU with such obvious incompetency (and I'm charitable here, cause if it's not incompetency it's betrayal).
Germany isn't. Many Germans are. If missing gas leads to industry breaking down, more Germans will be.
Germans being made poor, especially for no good reasons other than the decisions of politicians abroad, tends to lead to unintended, but severe consequences. Already, wannabe autocrats are winding up their propaganda. Guess which countries they will have a look at first.
Then pay them with state money if needed.
> If missing gas leads to industry breaking down, more Germans will be.
And if we have to choose between EU falling apart and millions of people abroad dying or some Germans temporarily getting a little less wealthy - we will choose supporting our industry every time cause it's the only thing that matters.
That's the main problem with Germany.
> Already, wannabe autocrats are winding up their propaganda.
Russia was supporting wannabe and actual autocrats all over the world for decades. Including AfD in Germany.
It's not even just secret financial support or propaganda - just last year Russian army helped Lukashenko "pacify" protesters after he faked elections. This year it did the same in Kazakchstan. That's direct military support. Sending Russian army to kill people protesting against their autocratic governments.
Apparently that's fine but if it was indirect support through industry in Germany losing money it would be too much.
If you care about autocrats you should stop paying Putin billions of euro.
But what Germany really cares about is sweet sweet export money. Everything else is an excuse.
We can't. The radical pro-small-state finance minister fights tooth and nail against any additional debt in order to obey the holy debt ceiling that a bunch of idiots wrote into the constitution about a decade ago because they didn't understand the difference between a national budget and a company budget.
Germany has had a relatively strong economy and good growth in the past, which allowed us to spend a bit more lavishly. But with our economy about to break down in the next 20-30 years and our population shrinking massively (worse: with employee-age population shrinking even more), this is no longer the case.
Insofar, I think it is prudent to keep expenses under control. Of course, you can't play international moral police and cause massive inflation if you do so. Which is where Berlin fails right now.
Yeah, let's heat the fire of economic disaster by shovelling some more freshly-printed cash into it. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, right: [1]
> we will choose supporting our industry every time cause it's the only thing that matters.
In the end, it is. Without industry, no wealth, and no wealth to spread around the EU, which is most likely going to make it falling apart as well.
> Russia was supporting wannabe and actual autocrats all over the world for decades. Including AfD in Germany.
True. And now we're about to make them able to stand on their own feet. Great job, another mosaic stone in wrestling control away from Russia!
> Apparently that's fine but if it was indirect support through industry in Germany losing money it would be too much.
Different countries have different ideas what is or isn't a prudent way to approach their own interests. Germany has no interest in a war thousands of kilometers away between one party which has proven to be a reliable business partner for decades, and one party that was not a reliable partner, but a constant drain of resources ever since it was created post-1992.
> If you care about autocrats you should stop paying Putin billions of euro.
Personally, I'd much rather have an autocrat in Moscow than one in Berlin.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...
This cannot be overstated. The entirety of German media (excluding niche outlets) across the political spectrum align on every important topic.
As soon as the risk of running out of gas turns into reality, and people won't be able/allowed to heat their homes as usual, many will start plugging in their electrical fan heaters. The gas problem might expand into an electricity problem. How much of a problem, we'll probably find out soon.
We are only going to use more and more energy, generating and lowering energy costs will be a net positive for all. Especially to support EVs.
> As the European Union moves to cut ties to Russian oil and gas in the wake of Moscow’s war on Ukraine, France has been betting on its nuclear plants to weather a looming energy crunch. Nuclear power provides about 70 percent of France’s electricity, a bigger share than any other country in the world. But the industry has tumbled into an unprecedented power crisis as EDF confronts troubles ranging from the mysterious emergence of stress corrosion inside nuclear plants to a hotter climate that is making it harder to cool the aging reactors. The outages at EDF, Europe’s biggest electricity exporter, have sent France’s nuclear power output tumbling to its lowest level in nearly 30 years, pushing French electric bills to record highs just as the war in Ukraine is stoking broader inflation. Instead of pumping vast amounts of electricity to Britain, Italy and other European countries pivoting from Russian oil, France faces the unsettling prospect of initiating rolling blackouts this winter and having to import power.
Nuclear power is so good that France might have to import energy from German coal power plans next winter to avoid large scale blackouts.
It's true that this year France will only produce 300TWh instead of 350TWh last year which is not the gloom picture that you try to make. By Novembre most of the reactors are planned to be backed online.(https://www.francetvinfo.fr/economie/energie/infographies-ba...)
The main problem is that the new reactors that were supposed to come online 10 years ago are still not there, and that the multiple offshore wind generation projects are still blocked!
Which are, at absolute most and at the most pessimistic estimate, at few thousands excess deaths[0]. The same estimates for coal at are thousands.....per year, not for the last 40 years.
[0] https://ascopost.com/issues/may-25-2021/chernobyl-at-35-year...
If you think scale matters - then you should also think that solar is more risky than nuclear by your own logic (because we're not using it on as big scale).
Even if you want to shutdown nuclear, Germany did it in an extremely stupid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#/medi...
Also:
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...
Nuclear power is mainly being replaced by renewables, not coal or gas.
Natural gas only accounts for 15% of electricity production, the upcoming gap could probably easily be filled with alternatives.
But it's main use isn't electricity, but for heating in private homes and all sort of processes in the industry. About half of all homes are heated with gas, you can't simply flip a switch and replace the gas heating in 20 million homes with electric heating.
TL;DR: the pressing problem that needs solving is how to prioritize private homes versus the industry's use of natural gas, even if nuclear power plants would suddenly spring out of the ground for free, they wouldn't help much with this.
Gas isn't a transition to anything.
New plants only qualify as "green investments" if and only if they can be used to burn electrolyzed hydrogen in the future.
Almost a hundred staff died in a hydro disaster in 2009, for some perspective.
> Totally ignoring the climate impact of nuclear power
What climate impact? I though it was CO2 neutral (except for construction, which has similar costs to wind an solar). A quick google doesn't give me anything.
> it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time
I thought nuclear was basically a steam boiler, same as coal or gas plants? Why is the control slower for nuclear?
Nuclear steam boilers are slow to control as their base reaction takes time to cool up or down. Good for base load, not fast coverage of highs.
Maintaining a critical fission reaction is difficult and in a large plant you might have to coordinate hundreds of people in dozens of locations to reduce power. Starting up a plant takes math and precise measurements, and there’s a natural limit to the speed you can do so or else you can cause a runaway supercritical reaction. Also, to be the most efficient, they are designed to run at near capacity for their lifetimes, and reducing the power would cancel that, so it’s simply not designed into the system to be reactive like that, as opposed to a submarine plant which is designed to power up and down a bit over short time frames.
Coal has a similar issue, these plants also can't be turned on and off quickly. In fact, the term "base load" originally was driven more by the minimum amount of power that has to be consumed to keep a plant running. Only now with the move to renewables with varying output the meaning has shifted to the consumption side of things.
Gas plants however can be turned on and off and easily, they work similar to aircraft engines. In Germany, the heat produced is then used for district heating, which gives these plants almost perfect efficiency. It's not a coincidence that Germany picked gas as supplement for renewables during the transition to 100% green energy. Gas (in the form of hydrogen directly ~ methane made from hydrogen) is also a key contender for very long term energy storage (in Germany, you have to save energy produced in the summer for use in winter, the batteries needed for that would be roughly in the order of ~50 million Tesla Model S (100kWh) batteries). The cost of overbuilding renewables and storing the energy in gas, with a lower round-trip efficiency, seems to be lower than building the big battery that would be needed. Wind is also better in winter than solar, which is why wind is such an important and hot topic in Germany. Solar doesn't bother anyone, but wind turbines are huge and people can see them in the landscape. Solar does not have this problem, but during the winter, the output goes down to almost nothing.
The waste heat can be used for district heating no matter how you produced the heat (in my city they use coal powerplant for this). It's not just gas. And it's not "perfect efficiency", it's about 80% for the best cogeneration powerplants compared to 60% without cogeneration. It's a little less in practice cause most powerplants aren't as modern and as efficient.
All of these is usually used on regular (not peaker) powerplants, because it's only useful if you use your powerplant for long periods of time.
There are also peaker powerplants. They work differently, and they are optimized for quick reaction time (so the energy they produce is more expansive and efficiency is lower). Reaction time is about 15 minutes. They don't only burn gas - they can also burn any liquid fuels (but gas is indeed the most common). Usually the efficiency of peaker powerplants is about 30-40%, can be almost as good as the regular ones but it's not worth it to install cogeneration if your plant runs for few hours a day.
I'm not sure which kind you were talking about. If they use cogeneration it means they must run for long time, and peaker powerplants running constantly is wasting money and fuel. Do you know what reaction time (from 0 to 100%) they have? 15 minutes or more like 1 hour? Or maybe less (then they are piston engines - and efficiency is even worse).
Anyway - there are also grid-scale batteries that can deal with power fluctuations on the order of milliseconds. That's why if you have lots of renewables and reasonably free energy market - grid scale batteries economically beat the crap out of peak powerplants (like gas plants).
In USA and Australia grid scale batteries already made building new peak powerplants unprofitable. It will soon happen in Europe too (unless lobbying stops this). Here [1] you can read more about how it works. It's basically the same advantage that High Frequency Trading has over regular traders on regular stock market. Just the difference isn't 1 second vs 10 milliseconds but 15 minutes vs 10 milliseconds. Before gas powerplant start up to produce the missing energy - the battery supplied it and shut down again. So now energy price lowered and gas powerplant has to either to produce that energy anyway and sell it for a fraction of price, or to shut down wasting fuel and not earning any money. And gas peak powerplants aren't designed for producing energy cheaply, they are designed for producing energy when there's shortage so energy is expansive.
So when you have grid scale batteries - they drive peak gas powerplants out of business :)
[1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl...
That's actually not been true for the last 40 years or so. In France, nuclear power plants have been doing load following without problem. They are apparently able to adjust their production by 80% over 30 minutes. One such episode is explained here: https://lenergeek.com/2019/03/07/mix-electrique-nucleaire-tr...
Well, France has been doing it just fine for the last 33 years:
> [...] flexible operation of nuclear reactors is possible and has been applied in France by EDF’s 58 reactors for more than 30 years without any noticeable or unmanageable impacts: no effects on safety or on the environment, and no noticeable additional maintenance costs, with an additional unplanned capability load factor estimated at only 0.5%. EDF’s nuclear reactors have the capability to vary their output between 20% and 100% within 30 minutes, twice a day, when operating in load-following mode
From here (pdf):
Sure, we could have replaced every boiler with a heat pump in the last 10 years, but we didn't. So we need gas for half of all buildings and that cannot be replaced by nuclear power. And we need a steady supply, as many gas boilers have old fuses that kick in if the gas pressure changes, bricking the boiler until a specalist resets it. So we can't even realistically ration it. :(
I don't know how prices compare, but UK is on a big drive to replace gas boilers in private homes with heat pumps. The main obstacle is actually poor general building standards and insulation. I believe German standards are quite a bit higher. Basically, the peak temperature produced by air-source heat pumps is lower than that from a boiler, so without better insulation they don't work so well (or something like that).
But as said, all the companies are booked out and parts aren't available fast enough, thanks to outsourcing to China...
By the way: using coal as an emergency backstop if there is no gas was always the official plan.
Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine are much closer to Chernobyl than Bavaria is, and the populations there regularly pick and eat mushrooms without suffering a wave of extra cancers.
Short term it's disruptive for sure but it is already leading to huge public spending. Which of course also is the classic recipe to mitigate the risks of any potential recession and might actually set Germany up for huge economic growth soon after. That recession is arguably already happening. I don't think it will stay limited to Germany either. We've experienced those before. It will be fine.
Russia may or may not pull the plug on German gas revenue. Hard to tell right now and they don't seem to be very rational right now. But by merely putting the threat on the table, they've set a few things in motion already. Their gas revenues are going to shrink a lot as the result of their recent actions. It's just going to be a function of how badly they need the cash by how quick that process will go.
It's more than a little bit academic for me as I live in Berlin which is very dependent on Russian gas for heating and warm water. There's a very real chance I will have to deal with some level of heating and shower issues in the coming winter. I'm fully confident that whatever happens, Germany will figure it out though.
Now that it has come this far, I'm actually in favor of ripping off that band aid and get it over with. Putin is threatening me personally with a cold shower. I'll take that cold shower when/if it comes to that. Putin might be good chess player but his poker game sucks. His bluff has been called. And now, we'll see if there ever was more than that. So far it just looks like a country self destroying its economy for no good reason at all.
Also, Russia needs more than just cash to fuel the war. They are currently cut off from a lot of essential imports and the international market and their army clearly is under-performing because of apparent logistical, supply, and morale issues.
I think Germany might prove to have a lot more stamina than Russia. Riding out the next winter without Russian gas won't be fun but it will be able to deal with it. On the other hand, I don't think a second winter in the Ukraine is going turn things around for the Russians either and I think they are well aware of it. So, Putin can commit economical suicide or he can come back to the negotiation table. The question is what he has to bring to the table. It's not looking like he has much to offer.
China has claimed it wants to reduce its reliance on oil, particularly starting from the 2030s, but that all gets tricky if Russia will be supplying very cheap oil and gas or if China will be wary of relying so much on Russia as a matter of policy.
It's possible that Europe will spearhead ways to reduce the reliance on gas and oil, not replace, but figure out various new strategies and technologies around renewables and alternatives. Conventional nuclear doesn't seem to be on the table, because of the very long construction times, unless we are talking something like SMR nuclear.
1. Nuclear energy is no solution. See here for an example how things turn out in real life (in German): https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Deutsche-Solaranlagen-haengen...
2. Germany doesn't really lack electricity. You cannot replace gas in industrial processes that need heat just like that with electricity. If you could, you could also use renewable energy. Things change very slowly on this side.
... yet.
There is an interesting report on the ARD Mediathek [1] right now in which - among other nuclear-involved people - the guy responsible the flow of electricity talks about power production and consumption. He points out that while it is true that at some points in time, renewables provided 95% of our consumption, there are still other times where they make up less than 1%. He then proceeds to explain that we do not have the energy storage to survive that, and that such an energy storage - with our current technology - will not be technically feasible, and that our neighbouring countries will not be able to support us if bad comes to worse.
His prognosis is that if we proceed with the nuclear shutdown, we will perpetuate coal burning for the foreseeable future.
Oh, right, some genius also decided to stop that.
We like to think of ourselves to be enlightened trailblazers. But maybe we should take a step back and consider if we might be wrong.
[1] https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/dokus-im-ersten/dokumentar... - the part I'm talking about starts at about 35:35, German only (unfortunately)
A fully renewable grid really is terra incognita, no one's done that before, of course there are a lot of open questions. But being a trailblazer might pay off handsomely if it does work out well, as others will want such a grid too.
Those power plants and the Berlin airport went the way they did because of the immense corruption around such extremely large, expensive, long-term construction projects. There's a whole sector in construction exploiting the inane legislation around these things. There's no way that's going to change anytime soon, and it's not a purely German issue either (as the European nuclear projects demonstrate).
At least so far, the push into renewables looks like it will require very few such monolithic large-scale projects at all, and even then, they should be a lot less complex and cheaper than the current generation of nuclear plants (and a lot faster to build). A lot of the concepts for storage are also well-suited to a distributed build-out, and that involves making people order a bunch of things from China, set them up and network them, which we're all doing all the time anyway and which tends to works pretty efficiently. The whole thing is by no means a guaranteed short-term success, but I'd say the chances of this working out nicely aren't bad at all.
Either we got a lot worse at building complicated stuff, or the real reason for building delays is NIMBYs protesting and lawmongering.
I also expect this quantity to be much lower than it would've been last year, as I also expect significant effort to be put into both improvements (e.g. home insulation) and alternatives (e.g. renewables).
If we can insulate 1% of the worst houses and apartments, that's still an improvement, in that less money goes to Russia.
If we can get 1% of our needs from LNG terminals built in the next 6 months, that's still 1% less fuel trade with Russia.
If fuel oils, benzine, diesel, biofuels, and new wind turbines combined can substitute 1% of Russian natural gas, that's 1% less money going to Russia.
The USA put speed limits on their highways in response to a fuel crisis, if we do that with the Autobahns and it only reduces Russian imports by 1%, that's 1% less of our money that ends up funding the Russian government.
While coal is much worse for the climate than natural gas, a short-term political need to deal with a warmongering fuel supplier can override that, so burn it and starve the Russian government.
Etc.
It adds up. Even if Germany sill buys 90% as much Russian natural gas in December 2022 as in December 2021, that's still better than buying 100%.
I'm relaxed about nuclear power, but unfortunately this is not the majority position and hoping for them here is wishful thinking. Also, nuclear just can't be constructed fast enough to be relevant for this winter, not even with a major increase in their political acceptability.
2. It's more efficient to burn gas and collect the heat for industrial processes that go through an intermediary step of converting heat into electricity. I don't think it has anything to do with gas being irreplaceable as a source of heat. Gas can be necessary as a chemical precursor in some reactions - which can't be replaced by electricity - but that has nothing to do with heat.
Like how dumb can you be?
Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania and probably others warned Germany and the rest of EU about this for decades.
Polish president in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia said "Today Georgia, tomorrow Ukraine, and then, perhaps, my country - Poland". It wasn't some genius foresight- this was mainstream opinion in Poland and many other EE states for over a decade already. We warned about Russia using the pipelines for blackmail and about their ambitions to recreate USSR against the will of the people in post-communist states.
By 2010 Russia already shut down gas for various EE states on several occasions to blackmail or punish them. Germany knew this and just ignored it. Probably cause it "couldn't happen to Germany and fuck EE".
In 2014 Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time and annexed Crimea. Also supported dictator Assad in murdering his own citizens and used hybrid warfare on EU by helping him push refuges to EU which created a huge political crisis.
Germany knew this and still sucked that gas like there's no tommorow and continued to build Nord Stream 2.
Last year Russian agents blew up a big ammo warehouse in Czech Republic. Germany still continued with Nord Stream, cause you know, who cares about Czech Republic (their ally in NATO and EU).
Oh, BTW - Germany also sold weapons to Russia and helped them train soldiers all through that time. They were supposed to stop after 2014 but they didn't.
All the warnings and pleas to stop doing business with Russia and especially to stop sending them weapons and increasing energy dependency were dismissed by Germany (and other EU states to a lesser degree) as "russophobic" because these countries were "understandeably traumatized" and "didn't understand modern global politics". Basically Germany treated us like dumb kids while commiting slow extended suicide.
It's mind-boggling how a big European state like Germany with big ambitions and supposedly independent media could be so ignorant for 3 decades with nobody in the country taking the warnings seriously.
That's a warped perception. There has been a huge controversy (also in the media), it was the government and primarily chancellor Merkel who pushed for a adopting a soft line with Russia.
Critique was small since the Left traditionally sided with Russia, the Right was very sympathetic to authoritarian regimes in general, and the libertarians saw nothing but economic opportunities (cheap resources). Since military strength hasn't been a focus ever since the early 90s, economic ties were seen as both an effective measure to keep peace and an advantage to the domestic industries.
EE states have of course their own concerns, but let's be real here: every country is first and foremost focusing on their own interests and tends to ignore or downplay the interests of others, especially "small fish" like states that have little economical and political weight. Sounds harsh, but that's the reality of politics everywhere and not particularly surprising.
The funniest thing is - Germany trades more with Poland ( $92.3 billion) than with Russia ($31.5 billion). In fact Germany even trades more with Czech Republic than with Russia. If you add up all EE states it's orders of magnitude more. Yet somehow Russia is more important to them.
If it was just realpolitik I would be outraged but not astonished. But it's not a rational foreign policy. German foreign policy is not only morally wrong - it's also irrational.
But agreed that this boggles the mind. The only explanation I’ve been able to come up with is lobbying by German industry.
It is a shame that it will come at such price, though. Who could have predicted that? Literally everyone.
But that's just the last 7 years out of 33 years that we're independent, and even the current government mostly did the right thing when it comes to Russia.
Poland was in much worse situation than Germany. In 1989 we got independent and all of our infrastructure was tightly coupled with USSR. We were also dirt poor and had infrastructure in shambles. Since then we decoupled a little, built interconnects with other countries, an LNG terminal which provides about half our our gas, this year we also finish Baltic pipe to Norway and when it's ready we'll be fully independent of Russian gas.
Germany went the other way and increased their dependency on Russian gas in last 3 decades.
In the end, this shopkeeper attitude burst into their face very hard and I don't feel sorry for them.
Well, several of those countries are using Russian designed nuclear reactors, where only Russian fuel is authorized to use. Why did they not change that in the last.. idk.. 30 years or so?
The Energiewende (so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility) here in Germany is working just fine. It is a reasonable investment in our future.
The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy. The lack of gas is problematic because it is a preliminary product used in chemical processes. This is where a looming recession might derive from.
On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7.
On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint.
Grid-scale storage (apart from hydro, but that's basically maxed out or unsuitable for most geographies) is still an unsolved problem for renewables, even the largest lithium-battery ones are basically a rounding error. You'd need multiple weeks worth of battery capacity to really run on renewables. Not even sure if there's enough lithium to make this work theoretically with current tech.
> On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated
Same is true for every other power source as well. Energy storage for renewables is never included, so you need backups, the €100 billion German defence package announced a few months ago is a direct consequence of "cheap" Russian gas, the millions of people suffering/dying from air pollution related issues from using coal.
There's no perfect solution, but nuclear is definitely a strong contender for the best way forward.
A year is probably more than is needed, but I don't know how low storage can go before it causes problems. If I guess a week is sufficient then every million German residents need a 43m cube.
This isn't unbuildable if there is sufficient political will.
Absolutely! But:
Nuclear was approximately as cheap as the equivalent LiIon storage a few years ago, but the batteries are getting cheaper and the reactors are not.
There are also other chemistries, and other storage options, which I'd include under the banner of "no perfect solution, so let's do everything".
> You'd need multiple weeks worth of battery capacity to really run on renewables.
I have no idea why this meme propagates. How many people live where there is no sunlight for multiple weeks at a time? And it's not like we don't already have some long distance power lines.
PV is so absurdly cheap that overproduction is seriously not a bad solution if you're just concerned about cloudy weeks.
More probably you‘re running on green (washing) electricity certificates from Norway…
German companies claiming to get their energy through renewable sources are primarily buying credits from Norway and a few other sources in Europe.
You can stick your head in the ground and pretend all of the electricity you use is being generated by renewable resources, but as long as plants in Germany are producing power using coal and natural gas, it means you're using that energy.
Your argumentation is wrong. What you say is: There is no use in limiting pollution, because there will still be some pollution left anyways. I bet you never clean your place, because it will get dirty soon after.
Yeah, I stopped reading here. This is just a flat out untruth. I'm sorry if this article doesn't agree with how you wish the world could be, but simply saying things like this that aren't true doesn't help.
The whole "Energiewende" feels a bit like that: Electricity production was privatized and more than 300 billion € in subsidies went into investors' hands. Now the infrastructure that was created is mostly privately owned and even though renewable energy production currently peaks the prices go through the roof because consumer prices align with the stock market price of electricity and not the cost of production. It really matters how you create renewable energy.
This is true for gas (heating) and electricity, btw.
So you're connected directly to a co-op's green power plant; neither your house nor that power plant are on the national grid where your "100% green energy" gets mixed up with all the other -- non-green -- electricity being produced nationwide?
How can you receive energy purely from renewable energy sources when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? Germany doesn't have any significant capacity for electricity storage. It's such a bold statement but it seems physically impossible.
Your argumentation is similar to suggesting Tesla should stop developing electrical cars because there is no charger infrastructure. So 2010.
No you don't. Just because you pay for Ökostrom or whatever doesn't mean that the electricity you actually use was produced by renewables. It's one grid. You use the electricity produced by coal plants just like everyone else.
Only if you
a) Pretend that the electricity you get doesn't come from the same grid as everyone else's, where the input to that grid is a mixture of renewable and non-renewable energy, and
b) Don't look too hard at how many others make that same boast: Being "green" is "in", so lots of people's consumption "is completly covered by renewables"... Perhaps a larger proportion of electricity consumers than he proportion of electricity actually generated by renewables?
I mean, if you can happily -- and unthinkingly -- echo the empty promise on your electricity bill, so can everyone else.
Your claim is point-less.
> On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint. Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint.
False dichotomies. See for example Flugplatz Brandenburg-Briest: https://goo.gl/maps/WATEJANE9wiHk7UAA
And pastureland can continue to be used as pastureland simultaneously with both PV and wind.
Please omit swipes like this from your HN comments. They're against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and they weaken your argument.