Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DocTomoe | Hacker News Reader

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> Germany doesn't really lack electricity.

... 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)

It's amazing how many well intentioned people cannot grasp this very simple point. There is no way to run a grid solely on solar and wind. Therefore the choice isn't between those and nuclear, it's between nuclear and coal/gas.

And now the fourth largest economy in the world with a huge and extremely capable engineering base is committed to finding a way. Given that storage and other supporting tech for renewables has so far received hardly any serious funding at all, I think it's quite realistic to expect a success story there. Just consider what the many billions invested into fracking tech did to the US accessible gas reserves, and that wasn't thought to be technologically and economically feasible by most knowledgeable people either.

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.

Germany will just no longer have the fourth-largest economy in the world. There is no way to substitute gas short term, long term you can replace it with electric alternatives. But these electric alternatives do not run on a grid with just wind and solar. I live in Germany and I have no hope. Our heating bills for the next winter can already exceed $900 per month for a 4-person household, electric costs also at $200 per month. The whole economy will just collapse.

I expect Germany to import the smallest amount of natural gas that the government can be confident will prevent economic collapse.

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).

Germany doesn't have the infrastructure to import from other sources. The LNG terminals don't work yet, and the capacity is too low and LNG is much more expansive than the Russian pipeline gas. And even if we have the LNG infrastructure, we have to buy a big chunk of the world market, which screws poorer countries. Our home insulation is already pretty good and renovating all old buildings is expansive, and we don't have enough craftsman to do that. Renewables brought us this mess the plan was to use natural gas, this is now over. We need to go back to coal and build new nuclear plants to phase out coal, but this will never happen under the current government, at least until the winter.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

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.

Germany has been funding renewables for decades now. Even then, they are not competitive with China, for solar panels for example.

There hasn't been much funding for storage though, at least compared to what went into e.g. solar panels, not to speak of nuclear (which is dual-use, hence unlimited money). There are tons of promising concepts that haven't seen any realistic trials yet. Competing with China will be difficult, but it's the same for the whole western tech sector.

Sure, I support that. But one thing doesn't preclude the other. Invest in nuclear now to get rid of coal, and at the same time invest in research that may or may not pay off.

Olkiluoto is bound to be 13 years late at four times the budget, the other ones in France and the UK look like they're going the same way, and Germany demonstrably sucks at these large-scale projects (think BER airport), so any new reactors probably wouldn't be ready before the 2040s, but they would be ridiculously expensive. That kind of money buys a lot of storage research and solar capacity.

Ok, so since Germany is slow at building existing stuff, it will somehow be better at building non-existing, future tech stuff. Until then, gas and coal and we kill thousands.

> it will somehow be better at building non-existing, future tech stuff

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.

Between a green pasture and Biblis going online at that location, it took 6 years.

Either we got a lot worse at building complicated stuff, or the real reason for building delays is NIMBYs protesting and lawmongering.

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