How messed up was Germany's energy policy? | Hacker News Reader

How messed up was Germany's energy policy?

jeromeaparis.substack.com

106 pointsguerby213 comments

The author here makes a great point that Germany kickstarted the renewable industry for the whole world, by basically investing in it before it made economic sense. But they managed to invent the future here because now it makes economic sense for everybody. The overall effect of this on the global situation is worth pondering, the numbers in renewables vs everything else in the world are quite staggering in the last years. I think a lot of people didn't catch up on it.

It's pretty clear that investments in renewables will continue to accelerate, especially considering the war. And because they are so fast to deploy, the renewable share has no other option but to go up. The one unanswered question is how high can it go. Realistically until somebody does 100%, there will always be questions. But in my life I've heard "you can't do 10%/20%/30%" etc. and now plenty of countries run on majority renewables and don't have issues.

The issue is very divisive, but I'm glad more and more articles like these are popping up, with some hard numbers that paint a very different picture than "Germany replaced nuclear with coal, madness".

> The issue is very divisive, but I'm glad more and more articles like these are popping up, with some hard numbers that paint a very different picture than "Germany replaced nuclear with coal, madness".

The picture is not all that different sadly. Renewables are intermittent, so renewables without storage or low-carbon baseload (= nuclear) will need fossil fuels.

Germany's policy is to remove as much low-carbon baseload as possible both inside and outside its borders (by pushing anti-nuclear policies). They are doing nothing in storage.

It was basically greenwashing Russian natural gas, combined with typical German attitude of "we are the enlightened us, we know better" that makes it impossible for them to learn from this mistake.

Technically, you can build more renewables than you need to have 100% renewables in almost all circumstances. Then you have something like gas power plants powered by gas generated from excess energy on sunny days to get through the rest of the days.

You're right. Low-carbon baseload, massive overprovisioning, storage or combination of these are needed to make renewables practical.

The problem is, lots of people are working against low-carbon baseload for stupid reasons, storage is not really a scalably solved problem and if you account for overprovisioning, the price isn't great.

Add to that exporting too. Europe has a grid that makes trading electricity between countries possible.

There are plenty of opportunities for interconnectivity resulting in better efficiency.

> Then you have something like gas power plants powered by gas generated from excess energy on sunny days to get through the rest of the days.

Except this is exceptionally hard to do. There's no effective way to creating methane from atmospheric carbon dioxide. The handful of applications for the Sabatier process is using concentrated CO2 formed as byproducts from the chemical industry

Living in Germany I can add: Yes, shutting down nuclear power plants "so early" was naive, however, even the now horrible war in Ukraine boosts the process to migrate to (more) sustainable energy even faster. Also, pretty soon energy prices in Germany might be so much lower and this will be a key advantage.

Also: The war in Ukraine shows what a security liability nuclear plants are in wartime.

Which, in what is surely a coincidence, is good for Russia.

…with the Russian state-owned Rosatom being the biggest (and cheapest) builder of nuclear plants abroad? Occam’s razor applies here, I think; no need for conspiracy theories.

Cheap is not necessarily better, their designs are now outdated.

Most importantly, they are not water sparing, which will be necessary really soon now.

Aren't you all kinda missing the main point: who is the world's manufacturer of nuclear fuel. Hold your laugh when you realize. :)

That is an common misunderstanding. You can't interchange one nuclear fuel for an other. Fuel rods are designed and built explicitly for the kind of plant that will use it, which mean that the fuel mostly used will be for the plant that is mostly built. Guess who holds the patents to the fuel rods design for a specific nuclear power plant design.

Uranium mining however is pretty diversified. about 1/4 come from Canada, 1/4 from Australia, 1/4 from Russia and 1/4 from Africa. It then get processed into a powder, and then shipped to a fuel construction facility. One of the larger site of fuel rod construction is actually Sweden, which has also recently started to expand construction for fuel to Rosatom reactors.

Creating fuel rods from Uranium refined powder is however not the biggest problem that the world has.

I didn't say rods were interchangeable. Also, between powder and tablets lies the most complicated and expensive process - enrichment. I'm not aware of the current way of things, but about 10y ago US was importing fuel, mainly from Russia.

or gas pipelines

or food imports

can't go back to the age of empires, sorry

What security vulnerabilities are they in wartime? Especially when Germany is a NATO member, so basically any war against Germany would result in WW3, where nuclear power plants will be the least of your problem.

The Russians are basically holding hostage a nuclear plant in Ukraine. It is a very convenient position to hold in an offensive war as the defender can't very well attack the place.

Medvedev also threatened to attack or sabotage nuclear plants in the rest of Europe. Sabotage can not only lead to serious blackouts, but also to widespread contamination.

As long as most of the wind-mill and solar components are manufactured in China, it's difficult to call it "sustainable".

You are right about solar panels being built in China, but windmill components are usually built in local factories, because they are very hard to transport.

You might call the dominance of the Chinese solar manufacturers a national security risk, but as long as we have the knowledge and resources to theoretically build them in the West (albeit more expensively), they are easier to replace than for example Saudi-Arabian oil or Russian natural gas.

I'm also talking about the very large amount of Neodymium magnets needed for the very large generators of wind-mills.

It's the most dirty part to mine and is exclusively from China (95% of worldwide production).

Uhh, I didn't know about that and will read up on it - thank you!

> Also, pretty soon energy prices in Germany might be so much lower

Jürgen Trittin (2004): Eine Kugel Eis... (costs for "Energiewende" )

There is the infamous saying, "Fusion is always twenty years ahead." But renewables seem to be trying hard to live up to that saying (AND getting more expensive along the way)

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/13020/umfrage...

I am not sure if these lower costs are ever projected onto the end users. the energy prices weren't lowered since ~2000

They talk about dependency on Russia being a "mistake". But with so many high-rank people (including former Chancellor) being paid by Russia openly (and who knows how many secretly beyond that) - does it look like a "mistake" or a deliberate policy on Russia's side and widespread corruption being ignored on Germany's side?

There is no proof of corruption. What do you know? Bring it to the press.

There are no proofs. Those with proofs have suicide waiting at their doorsteps.

That has already happened. Try looking for Schwesig and her Klimastiftung, and that’s just a tiny part of the picture.

I think the standard formula is "no evidence". Incidentally, check out https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

But I think that the position of "until we have a court decision proving corruption, one could not reasonably talk of a possibility of corruption, and discuss appearance of conflict of interest" is naive at best, and completely boneheaded at the usual case. Corruption is notoriously hard to prove, especially "soft" corruption where there's no direct bribery but more like alignment of interests diverting the interests of corrupt functionaries from serving the people (who even knows that that means?) to serving their private wallet and/or ideology (well, that one is much clearer).

And there's tons of the press talking about German politicians being too cozy with Russia, even pre-dating the war. So what? It's not like German voters cared.

The plan to shut down all the nuclear plants was misguided at best.

Seventeen plants were able to supply almost a quarter of Germany's total power [1] for their lifetimes, and then the cost from reimbursing investors into nuclear power is added onto those of having to build more wind and solar.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

The author ignores another important part: betting on Russia was a bet on domestic security. Tying European countries together through commercial interdependence had a demonstrated track record of causing the longest period of peace in Europe in over a millenium. Well, why shouldn't that work in the case of Russia as well?

Well we all know why is didn't work in the case of Russia. As this article well shows, Germany made a number of mistakes that amounted to not hedging this bet.

But given the philosophies of Europe and the USA in the late 90s-mid 2010s, this approach can't be called utterly foolish.

Interdependence does tend to promote peace, but only up to a point. Past that point it becomes a weapon, as anyone who has been anywhere near a messy divorce has seen.

Imperialist Russians clearly knew this, but apparently only saw the offensive angle. (At least, they either didn't see or discounted the risks to their own exposure, or they would have held reserves elsewhere.)

It sort of makes sense - until 2008 (invasion of Georgia). Or at least 2014 (first invasion of Ukraine).

Top German politicians were/are tied closely to Russian interests. Like former Bundeskanzler (chancellor) Gerhard Schröder, who still to this day refuses to distance himself from Putin/Russia. He was literally paid by Putin-controlled entities to lobby Russian interests in Germany/Europe.

The amount of money that flowed from Russia to Germany in corruption and sweet-heart deals is staggering - and I am sure much more will be revealed in the coming years, of what really went on behind the scenes.

Reading The Romanovs - I found it interesting how many Germans were influential in Russia in the 17th and 18th century.

Seems like there's a long history here.

And now EU is betting its future on the dictator of Azerbaijan (who is known to bribe German and european politicians) for gas and Saudi arabia for oil. Couldn't think of more iconic duo

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-eu-azerbaijan-gas-deal-i...

My biggest worry is that they are going to open NordStream 2 this winter "just to fill the emergency gap" -- and then it never gets closed.

I honestly don't know how likely that would be.

Why is it a worry? That would reduce the cost of living dramatically again.

Because I think we need to continue sanctioning Russia for their invasion of Ukraine.

Why?

Because murdering people and taking their land is wrong.

The faster Germany remove the dependency on Russian gas/fossils, the faster it can cut a critical source of income for Russia and their war-machine.

A temporary slightly increased cost of living is a cheap price to pay.

Slightly? Have you looked at the energy prizes lately? I think the approach, pain now, sustainanble energy and independency of fosssils later, is highly risky. What if the alternatives are not ready for the winter?

I pay the high energy prices as well.

The alternative is continued financial support of Russia, which feeds their unacceptable invasion of Ukraine, and the murders of civilians and countless war-crimes.

Increased energy-prices is a price I am willing to pay. If you prefer supporting Putin to save some money, that is your opinion, which you are free to have.

Honestly, they should open NordStream 2 now and at the same time focus on getting the alternatives online ASAP.

Opening NS2 doesn't make any sense from a German perspective. NS1 is far from being at capacity, the only reason there isn't more gas flowing from Russia to Germany (and subsequently to for example Poland), is Russian state policy. It would only weaken NATOs/EUs strance against the Russian attack against Ukraine.

This isn't some supply and demand free market problem, it's political policy on both sides.

It seems unlikely that Russia would send any meaningful amount of gas anytime soon.

Nord Stream 1 is operating at 10% (with a bunch of nonsense given as reasons) and while they wanted NS2 in the beginning, they are now asking for the sanctions to be lifted (which again doesn't make sense from a technical perspective).

So opening NS2 would do nothing but give Putin a political win and maybe(!) a trickle of gas

"The share of renewables in actually generation has gone from essentially nothing in 2000 (a bit of hydro), to 40-50% of the total (depending on how you count biomass and waste-to-energy)"

Based on that, it's one of the only sane energy policies on the planet! Minus the premature closure of nuclear plants.

For sure growth at renewables is great. However the overall percentages you gave are all-year averages. It goes down to single digit % on dark windstill winter days.

Considering this and the fact that nuclear energy (Fukushima), coal (climate change) and now gas (Putin) are effectively „banned“, it’s really quite a mess.

Those percentages are just shares of electricity.

Their share of energy is more dire.

Natural gas is just 15% of German electricity production, but nearly half of residential heating. Then there’s gas-obligatory fertilizer production, on-premise electricity generation (campuses), cooking fuel, etc.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-much-does-germany-n...

We should be so lucky to live in a world where most nations had achieved even a third of electricity generation from renewables. We'd be vastly better off than we are now! So I am happy to give credit in those few cases where credit is due.

I think carbon-intensity (gCO2eq/kWh) is a much more important metric than the use of specific generating technologies. Looking at the data [1], Germany has one of the dirtiest electrical grids in western Europe.

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

We all know that electricity can be utilized for purposes currently monopolized by fossil fuels, including heating and automobiles. Which means that the end game necessarily includes a rapid transition towards electricity generation from renewables. Germany has gone much father down that road than most nations, even if they have an unfortunately massive amount of electricity still being produced from coal.

Storing heat is actually much easier than storing electricity. In relatively dense areas with district heating, you can even establish storage that retains heat from the summer.

Yes, it requires investments and scaling up of the production of these solutions - the reason these investments haven't been made yet, is plainly that it wasn't deemed necessary yet. Continuing burning fossil fuels was cheaper.

Why would gas be obligatory for fertilizer production? I've dug into some industrial uses in my country (bakeries for instance), and in all the cases I looked into, gas was not actually required, just a bit cheaper or more convenient. If you put a tax on gas, all of them would switch within a few years. It looks like you need hydrogen for fertilizer, so I guess switching to (more expensive) hydrolysis would be the solution there.

Gas is needed for fertilizer production because it's one of the input resources - Haber-Bosch capture of ammonia (nitrogen) requires a source of hydrogen and that's usually natural gas since it's rich in hydrogen.

As such, lumping in the gas that's used for fertilizer production in with gas used for energy production makes limited sense - it's not fungible and can't just replaced with nuclear (or any other) energy. In the future, it would be possible to use hydrogen generated via hydrolysis, but we're pretty far off doing that on industrial scale.

Relatedly, Russia is a top exporter of fertilizers: https://thehill.com/policy/3513855-why-the-fertilizer-market...

Interestingly, while over the past 10-15 years the U.S. condemned Germany for importing natural gas from Russia, the U.S. was methodically displacing some of its domestic fertilizer production with imports, a substantial fraction coming from Russia and Belarus--in particular, 12% of U.S. potash consumption comes from Russia, and 93% imported overall. See https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/03/war-in-ukraine-and.... It seems small but it turned out to be a significant direct short-term lever, and presumably a much bigger lever with many other countries; and that's not even considering indirect leverage from Russia's ability to manipulate global market prices and thus U.S. domestic prices.

Perhaps the only thing that hits harder than an increase in energy prices is an increase in food prices.

(OTOH, for all I know the USDA, etc, may have actually been diligently working to minimize foreign dependence without being too disruptive--politically or economically--and the current percentages and source country distributions were the best they could accomplish.)

> 12% of U.S. potash consumption comes from Russia, and 93% imported overall

Sounds like the Canadians wanted to charge too much and US finally gave in and sourced an intercontinental supply. I don't think USA is at risk of losing a secure potash supply. Rail transport from Saskatchewan is too cheap into agri America.

There are hydrogen and methane generation processes that also do some small carbon capture, to manufacture ammonia ultimately.

The problem is that they require too much heat and electricity and currently are not yet viable. They would be viable in a slightly oversized grid with at least 75% renewables.

More likely your domestic fertilizer production will shutdown and you’ll import it from places that don’t tax natural gas as highly, unless you have ultra-cheap electricity.

This isn’t a horrid idea if you don’t have access to piped gas (LNG = hard to ship, nitrogen salts = easy).

Having said that, I am all for replacing income taxes with carbon taxes.

Taxing people’s work, skill and effort should be avoided at all costs.

Using gas for residential heating is saner compared to using electricity (what the French are using, for example). Afaik it also makes it easier to use centralised heating systems, which are more efficient than "outsourcing" the heating to each building or even to each apartment.

That's not true, even if you produce electricity from gas, using a heat pump to heat your home rather than a gas-powered central heating is more efficient.

Generally correct, except they now have people running air conditioning in summer now that they have it.

Which will hopefully be running from solar then, when the sun's out. ;-)

The electrical network as it is right now won't be able to resist each and every apartment, or each and every building, using a heat-pump during the winter at -5 or -10 degrees celsius. The network in my city is on the brink of going down even during the summer, when AC is turned on (and not everyone has AC, but everyone will have to have heat-pumps in the heat-pump scenario, because you literally risk dying in your home when there are -10 degrees outside and if you don't have heating inside).

More generally speaking, I never quite could understood this obsession for heat-pumps. Again, the Soviets (yes, the Soviets) have managed to do it right when it comes to central heating during the winter, they even had lower costs compared to the West, not sure why and how we have to use more inefficient solutions.

To say nothing of the fact that under the central heating scenario you can more easily subsidise people that cannot afford to pay for heating, after all, if you're providing heating to an entire micro-district might as well heat the old lady pensioner's apartment who cannot afford to pay for the whole heating bills, but under the heat-pump scenario your electrical utility sees that you're behind with your payments and doesn't care that you're an old pensioner lady, it will just cut off your electricity (and hence your heating), while leaving the electricity on for the rest of said pensioner lady's neighbours.

Heat pumps have gotten much better over the last decade. They don’t work as well in sub 10 degree Fahrenheit weather, but in the 20-40 range are more efficient than furnaces from what I understand.

I measure sanity on a simple scale of "this produces carbon emissions that will accelerate climate change and its catastrophic consequences" to "it doesn't do that".

This. The situation here seems like the inverse of investment rounds for startups, where "the pie gets larger, and the value of your share gets larger, despite you share of the pie itself becoming smaller." Their share of renewables got larger, but the overall energy pie itself got smaller, and that's a problem.

You can also be more efficient with heat pump than with direct gas heating, including when producing electricity from gas, eg:

https://twitter.com/DrSimEvans/status/1560556804051968000

"Thought experiment:

1 UK replaces 24m gas boilers with electric heat pumps

2 UK builds new gas plants to supply the electricity

=> Overall UK gas demand falls by 120TWh (15%)"

It's worth noting in such discussions that nuclear is also capable of displacing gas in many of these use-cases. Surplus heat from nuclear reactors can be used for district heating, and dedicated reactors can be used to provide heat for industrial processes.

Will be interesting to see things like stove sales for this year, because I'm quite sure there's a massive shift going on right now. My parents wanted to replace their old oil heating with gas, but now moved to a heat pump instead. My girlfriend and I wanted to buy a new gas stove but are now looking in more efficient induction stoves instead.

The stove migration to electric will be longer term. I think tabletop « toaster ovens » and tabletop pressure cookers (like an instant pot) will be really hard to come by come winter.

Maybe a run on electric kettles if the culture is to use stovetop kettles.

And yet, Germany produces more CO2 than any other European nation, and much more CO2 per capita than India.

Germany has 15 million people more than France, the next most populous European country. It is hardly surprising they produce more carbon dioxide. India will surpass Germany unless the degrowthers get their way and condemn Indians to permanent poverty which doesn’t look likely.

There is no need for poverty there, but there's the case for massive deployment of renewables. China shows it can be done from scratch without getting poor.

That is not happening. Indian government also tends to look aside when other polluting industries - mostly textile - are involved.

Where are you getting that number from? Couldn't this just mean they stopped producing as much nuclear, for example? I'm sure they have increased their green energy, but we can't tell from this figure. In fact, the total output could have actually decreased but increased relative to others.

Especially if they traded domestic energy produciton for piping in more natural gas straight to homes for heating.

I feel like the focus should be on cheaper energy (Is 10x cheaper possible?) than focus on green energy. Cheap energy would open a lot of opportunities (carbon sequestration?) and solve a lot of economic tensions. But it looks like the energy markets are going towards bigger prices and probably more profit that way.

Solar and wind are the cheapest sources of energy, they just happen to also be green. But this is a recent development- fossil fuels were cheaper in the recent past.

The transition to them would be a lot cheaper if the opposition from the incumbent energy suppliers was not so stiff.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

you quoted Lazard. I always warn anyone quoting that study to be careful with the prices claimed there. There are two major issues - one that the current prices of wind and solar are primarily driven by zero fuel cost. Meanwhile, the rest of the grid continues to exist. Second - because the grid exists, energy for when the wind isn't blowing at night can come from somewhere and your lights stay on. Wind and solar introduce volatility into the mix, volatility on the generation side. That has a cost that is not currently borne by them but by us - the consumers.

Lazard and co conveniently ignore this aspect when claiming that wind and solar are as cheap as they make them out to be. To be clear, wind and solar are cheap but that may or may not hold true in the future.

There is currently no gigawatt scale power grid anywhere that runs on renewable energy for more than minutes at a time. Renewables are very far from being able to provide energy 24/7 and cheaply.

I don't get your criticism.

Why should there not be zero fuel cost?

Your second argument is supposed to be a variable? Since with a wider grid, the volatility falls ("there is always wind somewhere"). I also don't think the size of the whole grid should be priced into a single power source. Why not price that into other non-green sources too if the local grid doesn't support the whole country?

I think the point is that the cost of solar is actually the cost of solar + the cost of whatever other source required to supplement it.

The issue is that intermittent sources are really working to subtract the emissions of fossil fuel plants. Generating electricity completely, or even partially from intermittent sources is a totally different ball game.

Put this in practice: Solar costs $5 per watt hour, and comprises 25% of the grid. Fossil fuels cost $10 per watt hour and comprise 100% of the grid. Solar is cheaper than fossil fuels in a zero fuel cost model. But you can't just change the remaining 75% of the grid to solar and save a bunch of money. Solar produces energy in a sine wave (in the short term, there's also weather fluctuations in the longer term). You'd end up with a huge energy surplus at noon, and energy shortages from dusk to dawn.

In this sense the actual price of renewables is heavily dependent on the price of fossil fuels. Because wind and solar are really "gas supplemented by wind and solar". You can't have the latter without the former. Hence why Germany is in such a bind right now.

Ultimately you would have "solar and wind supplemented by batteries/power to gas/hydrogen and fusion", but that's still years off, which we do not have.

So the more workable idea would be to have a percentage of nuclear for the critical always on load, and to provide some industrial overcapacity at time.

Base load accounts for 70-80% of most grid demand. Plus, the demand peaks usually happen when renewables aren't producing electricity.

So you say we should price in all those fossil and renewable sources which help France and they rotting nuclear fleet these days?

The whole "criticism" (more like: meddling) of Lazard grew from the fans of nuclear. It doesn't make any sense but to make nuclear look better. However it backfires spectacularly these days.

Did you look at historical data on who gave who electricity in former years?

Climate change is changing the playing field fast and unexpectedly, but let’s not forget that e.g. solar panels don’t work better in huge heat either - it affects everything. And even so, nuclear plants will go back to producing a shitton of energy once the weather cools a bit.

> Did you look at historical data on who gave who electricity in former years?

I did and Germany has been exporting more than they buy for decades.

Considering that just like France it is part of a single market and France HAS to run their fleet all the time and so is selling "cheap" on the EEX it's quite surprising that Germany doesn't buy more cheap nuclear energy from France throughout the year. But it doesn't ant that's not only because of the failures of the French fleet in summer and winter but also because it's not really cheap. It's only "cheap" for the French consumers because there is a fixed price and they pay for the real price with their taxes.

> And even so, nuclear plants will go back to producing a shitton of energy once the weather cools a bit.

Let's hope so for the not self sufficient country of France so the rest of Europe with their diversified power sources won't have to safe their ass again.

PS. it is not "just" the heat which has wrecked their nuclear fleet. Look it up. It's a massive fuckup and they need to be done by winter when all those electric heaters in French homes will come on line.

France has also been exporting about twice as much energy as they import: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1279015/france-electrici....

The difference is that most of France's exports are carbon-free energy.

This is a useless graphic.

They HAVE to export because they can't regulate and they have to sell so the dishonest hidden price scheme they drive with their tax payer doesn't get too bad. In the end they still need dirty power from countries like Germany. Something which is not carbon-free but also doesn't appear in all those fancy graphics the radioactive Astro-Turf hands out to their followers.

The net decarbonization is still better. It's not that they can't regulate reactor output (they can) it's that running at 100% capacity all the time is more optimal. Even including the fossil fuel imports Frances's carbon intensity of energy is lower.

Regulating nuclear makes it even worse economically.

Today's state of their fleet shows: they missed the train on renewables. Would they have them, they wouldn't have to buy so much dirty power from abroad. Also: others wouldn't have to produce so much dirt because those dirty reactors can be shut down fast.

I mean seriously...they have so much nuclear because they needed the technology for military use. They never did it for the environment or something. It's also not like this is some green energy source. Their failure to diversify costs the rest of Europe money today and will cost it for months. There is absolutely nothing to cherish there. It's not an example for anyone since money is better invested in renewables today already. So what's the point?

Who cares if they had nuclear because of military goals. The disparity in CO2 emissions is crystal clear:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290216/carbon-intensity...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity...

Germany releases over 5 times as much CO2 for the same amount of electricity as France. Would France have had cheaper electricity if they used coal, gas like Germany? Sure. But they'd be emitting way more carbon dioxide. The amounts of renewables Germany has deployed is nowhere near enough to offset the amount of fossil fuels they use. Germany doesn't have a renewable grid. They have a fossil fuel grid supplemented by renewables.

> Who cares if they had nuclear because of military goals

I do care if someone desperately tries to sell nuclear as green/sustainable or even wants my taxpayer money to fuel this kind of crap (EU).

> Germany releases over 5 times as much CO2 for the same amount of electricity as France. Would France have had cheaper electricity if they used coal, gas like Germany? Sure.

This is a straw man. I never said they should have build more coal or gas.

I even said that they should have gone with renewables.

> The amounts of renewables Germany has deployed is nowhere near enough to offset the amount of fossil fuels they use.

This is a lie.

They have replaced nuclear years ago https://i.imgur.com/i0n83xM.png

Renewables make almost half of the whole energy generation in Germany https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...

Germany has actually a LAW to phase out coal completely.

The German taxpayer made renewables a product people can buy all over the world and generate power for small amounts of money. This ridiculous Astro-Turf campaign against Germany only shows where the wind truly comes from: climate change deniers and haters of renewable energy. And yes, yes you can assure me that YOU are different that it's just for the environment etc. etc. However the fact remains: nuclear is out. Money is better invested in renewables.

Face it and don't try to meddle with numbers only because you don't like them (Lazard).

France emits 60 grams of CO2 for every KWh of electricity generated. Germany emits over 300 grams of C02 for the same electricity. The one that's fuddling numbers is the one that's trying to paint the latter as more successful than the former at cubing climate change, despite the vastly larger greenhouse gas emissions.

The "rotting nuclear fleer" means France still generates more of it's electricity from carbon free energy sources than all of its neighbors, and it's a lot less exposed to natural gas shortages. How exactly is it backfiring?

It is right now completely exposed since they heavily depend on deliveries of dirty energy from Germany, UK, etc. and it will get even worse in the winter if they don't fix the show up.

That's like saying supermarkets "introduce volatility" because they aren't open 24/7 like some convenience stores. Of course prices will increase when the number of vendor decreases (e.g not sunny and not windy), like it always does in liquid markets. What you are saying is that electricity shouldn't be treated as a commodity sold on an open market and instead should be regulated and subsidized by states. But that's what got us into this mess. If things like CO2 pollution had been accurately factored into prices, more people would have biked to work, installed solar panels, and invested in better home insulation.

I live in a small apartment with district heating and my electricity bill is consequently low. I don't want to subsidize nuclear power just so that those who live in large electricity-heated villas should get lower electricity bills.

Electricity can't be purely priced on a spot market. Any sort of large-scale industrial use requires reliable power at predictable prices. Solar and wind power is not reliable for base loads without huge amounts of storage, which exists basically nowhere today.

Open your eyes and look outside your apartment. What you call a subsidy I call an investment in maintaining our industrial base. Or would you prefer to see the rest of our manufacturing industry move to China, where they can obtain cheap and reliable power from coal and nuclear plants?

They have it right on the first page: look for the little diamond that represents the marginal cost to produce power at a fully depreciated gas plant, $24/MWh. [This price is certainly no longer true thanks to Russia].

But it's unfair: what is the marginal cost of solar or wind at a fully depreciated solar or wind plant?

Also: they have the cost of PV+storage on the last page.

How much money do I need to pay to make my house hot using solar panels? And natural gas?

Perhaps you meant to contextualize your claim a bit.

>How much money do I need to pay to make my house hot using solar panels?

It might possible depending on how much land you have, but is certainly impractical. I mean you could theoretically do it with a large enough area and your own storage system, but it would sure cost a lot.

>And natural gas?

It's completely impossible without the natural gas grid (and electric grid). Unless.. do you have a natural gas well on your property?

Solar and wind are very expensive when it's dark or not windy.

If we made natural gas 10x cheaper, using it for carbon sequestration wouldn't work at all...

Cheap energy has been the focus- almost the sole focus, above everything else. That leads to eased tensions and tons of opportunities, and most importantly, absolute shitloads of carbon in the atmosphere.

Are you under the impressions that we haven't been working towards cheaper energy over the last several decades?

"As the numbers from the past 20 years show, renewables do not require more volumes of gas (MWh) for the system to be balanced (they may require more gas-fired capacity (MW), but that’s not the same thing - gas turbines are manufactured in Europe)."

This is a fact noted, but it includes an additional aspect. If there is a need for more gas-fired capacity, that burn less volumes of gas, then that operation still need to be paid. The way that works in Sweden is called reserve energy, which mean the plant get paid twice. First they get paid through subsidies in order to keep the plant operational and staffed, and then they get paid a second time when the plant is burning gas and the spot price is at the highest point. This is quite expensive.

Sadly I rarely see people actually account for this cost, and the article does not.

Gas turbine are the cheapest electricity generator to build, only expensive to operate due to fuel cost.

That's why people don't mention overbuilding gas2power capacity.

Data from:

https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...

For now at least, those plants are not operated or maintained by robots. You need employees and people to be there even if they are not generating any power, and they need to be "warm" if they are to get online quick.

The case examples in that link assume constant running. One could simply take the Fixed O&M times the effect and assume that (in combination with investment costs) to be the subsidies required to keep the plant in stand-by, through a constant operated plant is not the same as one that is standing by for most the time. None of the examples you linked has that kind of operation.

The disaster is already preprogrammed. Lots of germans bought electric heaters to heat flats through the winter, as the heat provided by the house central heating will be reduced. Which will result in large increases of base load on the network, which already will be under strain.

Which means rolling black outs as soon as it gets cold. Perma-black outs if the people do not see reasons and unplug their heaters. No solution has been proposed for this. The clever ones went for wood for heating.

Still preferable to shiver one winter through, then have it warm in putins prison.

It is not clear at all that people will behave that way. The buying of electric heaters for now just reflects huge uncertainty about any sources of heat.

People also bought toilet paper against covid.

What percentage of German homes use resistive heating? If they switch to heat pumps with a COP of at least 4, every heat pump will free up enough electricity to run 3 more heat pumps. The problem is importing enough heat pumps and having the government subsidize the purchase and installation for those who can't afford it. Perhaps NATO countries would sell their stocks of heat pumps to Germany if manufacturers don't have enough of them.

The whole EU is setting up for a more interesting winter than… 1989? Not sure since I’ve been barely alive then but certainly it hasn’t been this dire since quite a while

Was a hot summer too.

The summer is worse, especially drought - lack of water to cool power plants.

It's not bad at all. You can look at it in isolation and wish for more, but the truth is, controverse oppinions about high nuclear usage, like France, aside, the vast majority of other countries have significantly less green energy percentage. Small exceptions aside, Germany is only beat by those countries/areas whose green energy is close to 100% water, which of course is easy to use, and has been used first historically. It isn't new and most countries use as much as their geography allows. Netherlands, UK, Italy, Spain, basically all of eastern Europe, the US, India, China, Australia, ..., they all produce less green energy. If Germany's energy policy was bad, what's the excuse of all those other countries?

This article says, "Germany did a bunch of reasonable looking things."

But after Russia invaded Georgia (2008) then Ukraine (2014), Germany worked to increase dependence on Russia for both electricity and heating. They failed to take even the most basic steps to diversify. Such as building LNG terminals to give them the option of importing gas from countries like the USA.

And it wasn't like there wasn't some history demonstrating the Russia wasn't always a reliable supplier. For example in 2009 they shut off gas for 10 days. As it happens they had a good reason (dispute with Ukraine over Ukraine stealing gas - which Ukraine had been). But fundamentally all of Europe, Germany included, should have been on notice that a single man could take out their gas supply. A man whose capriciousness was demonstrated in 2008 by his invasion of Georgia.

Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify? And why, given the current consequences of that past failure, are people trying to defend Germany's past bad decisions?

> Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify?

So they could benefit financially by being the natural gas hub for Europe. As you said, the reasons not to work with Russia were plainly obvious.

What's even more egregious is that Germany has ran multiple years with a massive budget surplus (2018 + 2019 alone amass to 100bi€). Imagine if that could be used to be invested in ways to have a diversified grid...

Because in the past that also would have likely forced a rethinking/reexamination of Germany's defense setup and that would have been impossible to sell domestically.

I can’t make the argument a previous head of state should be mandated from working where the free market takes them.

I also can’t argue that the decisions of Germany’s leadership make a ton of sense. Or rather I can, the economic argument and Germany not likely to deal with a Russia near home it isn’t able to easily deal with (outside of MAD.) That calculus makes sense to me I get and even still agree with the principle.

But you also have to look out for your national security and it really seems like Germany wasn’t looking out for anyone but it’s self here. Germany faces no serious conventional threat from Russia nor does it currently have competing spheres of influence. However as part of NATO and the EU does.

So it looks to be pretty clear that the Germans do not consider that they and, say, Lithuania share the same goals.

germans and russians have been fighting for 1000 years. Take the calendar and mark the times when they were not fighting. Constructive engagement is sane; endless war from all sides is not sane

How would you propose to prevent endless war between Germans and Russians in the future? I mean without carving up Eastern Europe between themselves, that is. So far engagement with Russia hasn't been constructive. Believing that this will change seems like hope triumphing over experience. In the long run, a steady policy of containment with occasional minor outbreaks of violence might be the best we can realistically achieve.

I have heard that the French are excellent cooks - perhaps they know about this "carving up" you speak of?

Russia's expansion is definitely a national security thread to Germany. The thing is that Germany didn't believed that Russia would expand. It was a gross miscalculation on Germany's side. Believing promises and neglecting capabilities.

If Russia takes Ukraine their population grows to 180 Million. With the Baltics and Belarus they will be near near 200 million. Expecting Poland (at 40 Mln) to hold the Russians of is ridiculous.

I think this may be a mischaracterization. Germany believed that, knows really, that it is richer economically and has a tech gap thanks to NATO over them.

Germanys stance was that Russia will piss and moan as it’s elite slowly lose their autocratic regime to a Republican one (similar to South Korea and Taiwan.)

I’m not convinced this has changed and it is my opinion that German policy is a pretty obvious open secret that Ukraine and Russia is there problem.

You can see this in their reaction to the invasion where they stalled with hold off rhetoric because they couldn’t believe we’re taking this seriously.

So it wasn’t ignorance that Russia would bully the two smaller “Russians” it was a calculated risk and an accepted cost of doing business.

We can add Chechnya (1999) to that list.

https://www.historyonthenet.com/putins-first-invasion-the-19...

It's different.

How is that?

https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/chechnya-war

Chechnya was inside of Russia's national boundaries. And therefore was not a violation of international law.

The question is whether it was ever reasonable to see Putin as a reliable partner. The first thing he did in office was launch a brutal invasion, stifle the press, and ignore war crimes committed by the Russian army.

Is that someone a peaceful democracy can trust?

I am in complete agreement with you on Putin's character. I am also in complete agreement on what he did to the press, and the war crimes he committed.

However what he did in Chechnya was fight a civil war in a particularly brutal way. This is different than invading another country. Admittedly the distinction doesn't matter to the people who were living there. But it DOES matter to other countries.

The US position, in particular, was that we wanted Russia to remain territorially stable. Our top priority was to see Russian nukes secured. Our nightmare was a breakup of Russia resulting in loose nukes going to bad actors. Which gave us a big incentive to not complain about the horrible ways in which Russia was maintaining said stability.

When Putin moved from suppressing civil war to international conquest, the situation changed. But the USA was also in the embarrassing position of having no moral high ground to stand on. For example estimates of excess mortality in Syria are in the same range as estimates of excess mortality in Iraq. And across much the world, our invasion of Iraq is seen as less legitimate than Russia's invasion of Georgia, and support of the existing government of Syria...

We're talking about whether Putin's character was something a country like Germany could bank its energy policy on starting in the 2010s. That's not a question of international law, of US policy in 1999, or US actions in Iraq.

Chechnya was evidence of what he's willing to do for political gain. Georgia was evidence of territorial ambition. Assassinations in UK and Europe showed us he saw those countries as no different than any other. Yet western leaders spent years trying to convince themselves and their people that Russia could be trusted as a partner.

I agree that there was little to nothing anyone could do about Chechnya, but that doesn't mean we couldn't learn from it.

You make a good point. And we can add a long list of other things to this list, such as his 2007 speech in Berlin, or 2008 law that the Holodomor was not genocide.

That German leaders refused to act on the evidence is definitely to the shame of Germany.

> Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify?

As I understand it, the general thrust of Germany's Russia policy (until several months ago) was a kind of energy-politik [1]: bind Russia into the world economy via the need to maintain stable energy links, and it will be less likely to be a capricious bully to its neighbors. Which doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I guess the relevant figures somehow figured that Russia was acting like a petulant child only because people were treating it as a petulant child?

[1] Sorry, I don't know the German word for "energy" to write the proper German compound word.

Die Energie, pronounced basically like "en-er-gee", where the g is like gulp, not like jump (or... energy), and ee is long e ([i])

> I guess the relevant figures somehow figured that Russia was acting like a petulant child only because people were treating it as a petulant child?

You are trying to post-rationalize this with some 4d chess realpolitik. Just follow the money. [0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-ex-chancellor-sc...

Many of the decisions were made my Merkel who, despite lots of flaws, is with absolute certainty immune from the allure of money. She's never shown any interest in it, had any income other than her government salary, and spend 16 years while in power living in a modest apartment within walking distance from the office.

Ukraine has been a pain in Germany's neck, Nord Streams are the most visible result of that but then there are also anecdotes of Merkel ignoring Yushchenko, German delegations not attending Ukrainian independence parades and so on. Even now Merkel is openly saying "no regrets" in the face of the bona fide genocide, that's how little empathy German leadership has for Ukraine.

I think the calculus was that Ukraine is never going to be in NATO and so its future is at best irrelevant for Germany, and at worst they'd prefer it absorbed by Russia who Germans enjoy dealing with. But in the meantime Eastern European countries gained power, and they are really not okay with Russian imperial project (Hungary aside). So now Germany, being an ally with Eastern Europe on paper, has to do something, so they are reluctantly doing the bare minimum.

For the same reason the world didn't take climate change seriously already in the 90s. It didn't align with short-term economic interests. As mentioned in the article, the prevailing political climate had made energy imports less political and more a matter of economics. Increasing energy imports from Russia made sense in that climate.

The Russian invasion of Georgia wasn't a big deal in West Europe. It was like the US invasion of Iraq. An empire invaded a faraway country because its leaders had some personal issues. That's what empires do. Political leaders condemned it, but there were limited practical consequences, because everything happened far away. And because the EU was not trying to be an empire shaping the world in its image.

East European countries took things more seriously, because they are closer to Russia and more vulnerable to its whims.

Even the 2014 invasion of Ukraine wasn't a major issue. Until then, Ukraine was seen as one of the corrupt post-Soviet states that didn't know whether they wanted to align with Russia or Europe. As long as Putin's ambitions were limited, they were not a West European concern. Leaders again condemned Putin's actions and some sanctions were issued, but that's it. Putin's Russia was still seen as a fact of life West Europe had to learn to coexist with.

Things changed after 2014. Ukraine aligned with the West. When Putin invaded the next time, it was a full-scale invasion of an unambigously European country. That did concern West Europe, because it was dangerously close.

The whole situation looks like a mutual misunderstanding of the motives on the other side. Putin seems to have counted for a limited European reaction, because he didn't understand that non-empires tend to make pragmatic rather than ideologically motivated decisions. He assumed that West European complacency was an ideological rather than a pragmatic position. Similarly, West European leaders didn't see that the threat of the invasion was real, because they assumed empires would also make pragmatic rather than ideological decisions.

> Why on Earth did Germany not work to diversify?

Diversify towards what? The biggest consumers of gas is heating homes and the chemical industry. Most houses have gas or oil heating. Do you convert from gas back to oil? Or to coal? Because most urban housing in Germany cannot be easily transferred to heat pumps, you know. The cost for conversion is prohibitive. In most cases you would have to cancel rental contracts to free the flat for conversion. How do you convince house owners and tenants to go with such a mad stunt that will mutliply their heating costs? All for a hunch of "someone might do something crazy in the east".

How do you convert a chemical industry that cannot subsitute gas for any other product? Push them abroad?

Please have reasonable and informed answers to these questions before asking question like

> And why, given the current consequences of that past failure, are people trying to defend Germany's past bad decisions?

Germany has lignite to use for electricity and oil for heating, as you said. That should be enough to reduce demand and thus prices.

Long-term there are gas reserves in Netherlands , in the mediterranean etc. The EU has options.

I have to also ask why? Germany obviously has options but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily? We have a war in europe

> Germany obviously has choices but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily? We have a war in europe

I think the problem here is that the Germans would rather have war in Eastern Europe (people of which they probably don't consider important) than more expensive heating.

Germany has taken 900,000 refugees. Why not send them to a similarly sized U.S. state and watch the reactions?

U.S. citizens already complain about gas prices (which are still much lower than in Europe). How about raising them the European prices and see if they still virtue signal?

As usual, the U.S. supports a war and Europe pays for it.

How would you propose to end the war? Who do you think should pay for it, and how should they pay?

> As usual, the U.S. supports a war and Europe pays for it.

This is somewhere between extremely biased and dead wrong.

According to https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s..., the USA is spending more to support Ukraine than Europe both in absolute dollars, and as a share of GDP. (Various eastern European countries are pulling their weight. The western ones, aren't.)

Of course that is tracking money sent to Ukraine. Refugees are a cost mostly borne by Europe. According to https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/39775/hosting-ukrainian..., the cost of refugees for a year is on par with what the USA is sending to Ukraine. This would take Europe's share above the USA.

But if you're going to include that, you should note that Germany alone spends about $20 billion year less on its own defense than it committed to spending by being part of NATO. (Germany spends about 1.5% of GDP and promised to spend 2%. It is hardly alone.) Given decades of Europe freeloading off of American generosity, paying for the refugee crisis doesn't even begin to balance the scales.

There is something funny about 1 day old account with pre-canned anti-US talking points.

I am in Eastern Europe and US has been a great ally doing everything they can to keep us safe from Russian aggression, while Germany would watch us get raped and murdered and enslaved and do nothing.

As for refugees, Poland, Romania and Slovakia have taken several millions of them despite being poor compared to rich Germany.

The oil for heating has been phased out in favour of gas because of emissions. So for most homes this would mean to convert back to bulky oil tanks. It's probably cheaper than heat pumps and you can keep the plumbing. The plumbing and use of radiators is a big problem for heat pumps because of the higher temperatures that are needed to heat radiators on the 4th floor etc.

Other houses never had oil. They switched from coal straight to gas in the 60s and 70s. But here the furnace is usually on the same floor as the radiators. But conversion is still expensive.

> Germany obviously has options but why is it taboo to ask them to change their policies abruptly and temporarily?

It's not taboo to ask to change policies. Actually a lot of policies are changing. Even support for nuclear is on the rise.

But one of these changes in policies might have to be abandoning some goals of emission reduction. One of the reasons why gas was on the move up is because it burns much cleaner than oil or coal. So converting all that oil heating to gas was incentivised by the government. Also gas is much better in filling in the gaps for renewables than nuclear or coal which can't be switchted off again so easily.

The plan was to move from coal to renewables. The path there was via gas. A very reasonable bridge technology.

Putin's war came too early for that conversion but luckily not too late to stop switching coal to gas.

BTW, Germany never had enough nuclear plants to provide more than about a quarter of today's electric demand anyway. Most was coal. Even if Germany never decided to phase out nuclear, the problems would pretty much have the same magnitude.

OK so the changes are totally doable and would nullify Putin's weaponization of natgas. We are at war , yet Germans seem to be totally inflexible to postponing "some goals of emission reduction" for a few years. That's unreasonable

> move from coal to renewables. The path there was via gas.

It's disingenuous to call that "a path" because natgas will never go away since renewables are wildly intermittent and natgas will always be needed to sustain the load. And it is imported from some of the worst dictatorships in the region.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...

Your lecture would have been more reasonable if I had not already given a specific example of diversification. Namely the construction of a LNG terminal.

Here are numbers for you. The Sabine Pass LNG project in Louisiana, USA, was constructed for about $5 billion. Its capacity is almost exactly the same as the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was constructed for approximately €15.7 billion. Thus for 1/3 of the cost of the pipeline, Germany could have provided themselves a backup plan for Russian gas, while requiring zero changes from industry and consumers.

This one time investment would have been a fraction of what Germany spends each year subsidizing renewable energy, and a drop compared to the cost of shutting down nuclear. Therefore the cost of making sure that there was a second supplier of gas available would have been quite reasonable to do some years ago.

Given that it hasn't been done, it is impossible to do on short notice. But Germany could have done it, should have done it, and was repeatedly advised by allies to do exactly that. And failed to.

> Your lecture would have been more reasonable if I had not already given a specific example of diversification. Namely the construction of a LNG terminal.

> Here are numbers for you. The Sabine Pass LNG project in Louisiana, USA, was constructed for about $5 billion. Its capacity is almost exactly the same as the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was constructed for approximately €15.7 billion. Thus for 1/3 of the cost of the pipeline, Germany could have provided themselves a backup plan for Russian gas, while requiring zero changes from industry and consumers.

LNG isn't even in the ballpark of what would be needed to replace Russian gas in volume. About 40 LNG terminals are currently operational in the EU. Even if you could use their full capacity, it wouldn't be enough to replace Russian gas. And it wouldn't affect prices positively aswell. LNG is only good for preventing actual shortages, not replacing the source. Even if Germany had built 5 LNG terminals in the last decade, it would be a drop in the bucket.

There is an old saying that when you are in a hole, you should stop digging. You aren't following that advice though.

I claim that an LNG terminal on the scale of the Sabine Pass LNG project could replace Nord Stream 1. You claim that 5 such terminals would be a drop in the bucket. Let's look at numbers and see who is right.

Nord Stream 1's official capacity is 55 billion cubic meters a year of LNG. (They actually run a bit more than that.) Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/kremlin-nord-stream-...

Sabine Pass is the largest LNG terminal in the world. Its capacity is 55.4 million metric tonnes per year. Source https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263935/largest-operatio...

Those numbers are close, but the units are different. But 1 million metric tons LNG = 1.38 billion cubic meters LNG. Source: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c6-89....

Therefore a single LNG terminal on the same scale as the Sabine Pass LNG project would provide 139% of the official capacity of Nord Stream 1.

Do you have any more "corrections" to offer? Or do you wish to keep digging the hole you are in?

> Nord Stream 1's official capacity is 55 billion cubic meters a year of LNG

Hmm... Are you saying liquified natural gas is pumped through North Stream?

Oops, that was clearly a mistake. Thanks for catching it.

Natural Gas is pumped through Nord Stream. But it is not sent in liquid form. If it was, then keeping the pipeline sufficiently cold and pressurized would be an insane challenge.

This is partly true. There were LNG terminals planned and are now being planned again AFAIK and also see sibling. There were/are some woes though as can for example be seen here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-30/german-ln...

Funny the timing is though.

Interesting comparison. Germany's GDP is ~$3T, so a $5B insurance policy is well worth it, even had it not made any revenue, which it seems obv it would have.

Side note..

SabinePass[1] 30 million tonnes = 30 billion kgs per annum NordStream1[2], 55 billion cubic metres a year

Are those about equiv? LNG is 430 kg/m3, 55Bm3*430kg/m3=23,650Bkg, so 1000x more via NordStream, assuming same density. But looks like pipelines may be lightly compressed vs ships more typically higher compressed LNG? Anyone know?

[1]https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/cheniere-completes-n... [2]https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/kremlin-nord-stream-... [3]http://www.kosancrisplant.com/media/5648/1-lng_basics_82809_...

I presented my calculation in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32558820.

Statistica reports a much higher capacity than your Reuters article reference. Using the same a million tonnes of LNG is 1.38 billion cubic meters that I referenced there, that would still be 52.44 billion cubic meters.

My best guess for the (rather large) discrepancy is that Statistica is reporting on how much LNG is able to pass through the terminal, while Reuters is quoting how much they are able to liquify there for export.

To answer your other question, a pipeline carries natural gas as a gas, while we ship it in in liquid form in pressurized containers. Therefore ships carry natural gas in a much denser form than pipelines do.

Cui bono?

Kissinger noted in Diplomacy (1994) that Germany's key role in European history has been main defender of Central Europe against Russia. And ofc, Russia was a major foe in the last wars. To me, there's no way Germany missed the point of Russian moves the past decade.

So assume for a moment that they knew this day was coming.

If they have energy independence, they might also be called to task to play their traditional role and their natural role now as the powerhouse of the EU and NATO, to lead the fight against Russia.

But if they're hobbled by energy dependence, they can shrug and say "sorry, it's simply not a feasible option for us. We're sitting this one out." Which seems to be what they have done.

Add they get cover from their domestic green problems as well. Alles ist gut.

That's an interesting explaination, but I'm not sure why they'd need such a complicated scheme when they could just point at the state of the German armed forces as justification. (Which was basically their response to the invasion of Ukraine)

The power of AND

This is nonsense, Germany is militarily very weak and only makes up 20% of the EU economy. You make it seem like they own Europe and are some scheming superpower in disguise. There's not much they could do in terms of military aid the US couldn't do 20 times over in half the time. France is like twice the size as an arms producer, what are they doing? What about Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Belgium? None of these countries needed an excuse to do nothing.

Germans might not have enough gas to heat their homes which would cause the government to fall and you see this as some sort of genius chess move.

"You make it seem like they own Europe and are some scheming superpower in disguise." Not the craziest idea I've ever heard.

The point about a weak military is valid, but same logic applies. Germany has shown the ability to quickly arm when it wants to.

We’ll find out this winter.

I like the approach how the introduction attracts the conservative readers and then completely turns around at some point. I just hope they read on after the introduction.

The bigger issue is that the green capacity should have been increasing almost exponentially. The cleanup is not keeping up, especially for industrial sources.

You can sugar coat this any way you want but the fact of the matter is, they cut energy production in lieu of renewables without actually having enough renewables up and running to offset the difference. And now they are in the predicament of not having enough energy because the gas taps have been turned down. The path to hell is paved with good (but not well formulated) intentions. Just wait until you see the environmental devastation of a continent that turns to cutting down all the trees and burning anything they can find to stay warm.

They couldn't have made less distinguishable colors in charts, could they?

How messed up was it that Trump warned about the exact current situation years ago, and was promptly ignored? Didn't Obama, too?

Yes, we absolutely fucked up here, there is no doubt. The dependency wasn’t a topic at all, neither in politics nor “on the street”. A cushy situation for decades lead to naïvety, I guess.

It wasn't exactly a controversial take either. What was Biden thinking by green-lighting NS2?

Biden has done a lot of bad things just to do the opposite of what ever trump was doing.

Not just ignored.

Trump at the UN warns that Germany is endangering itself by increasing dependence on Russia. [German envoys laugh.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJv9QYrlwgepe). Among the comedians is Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, now enjoying a quiet retirement back home in Saarland.

(The YouTube comments are hilarious.)

"It's not as bad as a lot of people are saying"

Enough for Trump to call them on it 3 years ago?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJv9QYrlwg

Wait, is this the same Trump who said he was getting the USA out of NATO, or is this a different Trump?

Why are you bringing up something unrelated as a gotcha for something nobody is commenting about?

This is related to Germany energy policy. Trump brought up the danger of depending on Putin’s Russia to the Germans, and they laughed at him.

They aren’t laughing much now.

What you should be asking is: How was Germany so dumb that Trump saw it, but they didn’t?

Because it's a good, realistic comparison. Pointing out Germany was too dependent on Russia for natural gas - good point. Saying the US would drop out of NATO - not a good strategy for stability. If you wanted to point out a Trump comment that everyone saw as a mistake at the time (but that doesn't add to the conversation), give the examples where he made dangerous suggestions to treat covid. Talking about nato seems fairly relevant.

Tons of people saw Germany was putting itself in a bad position. Every US administration since the initial direction was set said that.

President Trump talked about dropping out of NATO specifically because Germany (along with several other European countries) had broken their treaty obligations and had failed to spend the required 2% of GDP on defense. They were essentially getting free protection from the USA, France, and the UK without doing anything in return. And the threat worked! Germany did significantly boost defense spending (although still not quite to the 2% target).

The 2% was and is not a treaty obligation.

All NATO countries agreed in 2006 to 2%. It's an indicator of a country’s will to actually contribute to NATO

All NATO members agreed to a 2% minimum within the context of the existing treaty.

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm

If Germany or any other country is unwilling to meet that treaty obligation then they should simply withdraw from the alliance rather than freeloading on more responsible countries.

I don't think Trump is an authoritative source on anything.

> What you should be asking is: How was Germany so dumb that Trump saw it, but they didn’t?

I would be asking that, if we were talking about someone who's reliably correct. But since we're talking about someone who's held every position and it's opposite on any given subject, I think it's quite obvious what's going on. It's called survivorship bias.

>I would be asking that, if we were talking about someone who's reliably correct. But since we're talking about someone who's held every position and it's opposite on any given subject, I think it's quite obvious what's going on. It's called survivorship bias.

Put it this way. Trump was right and the Germans were wrong on the biggest German crisis of the past 75 years, one that now poses an existential threat to the German (and thus European) economy and social polity.

Even were Trump wrong and Germany right on everything else, how much would that matter given the scale and, more importantly, 100% self-inflicted nature of this crisis for Germany?

Put it this way. The German leadership is corrupt, their populace are naive green zealots, and Trump is a random number generator. Why is it that of these three facts youre fixated on the last one? There's lot of random number generators out there.

Ah yes, the "Trump says everything and anything" argument, second only to the "Even a broken clock is right twice a day" perennial. You will be surely able to list the many times in which Trump advocated for

* less German/European NATO spending

* greater German/European dependence on Russian gas

Let me repeat:

>Trump was right and the Germans were wrong on the biggest German crisis of the past 75 years

He was saying the USA should leave NATO. In our day and age you should be arrested as traitor for saying that. The man is an idiot.

>He was saying the USA should leave NATO.

Ah yes, the other line that people pull when questioned on this topic.

First, Trump did not say that the US should leave NATO. He publicly insisted/cajoled/prodded with that signature Trump charm and style that Germany and other NATO members who don't meet the 2% of GDP spending requirement—and showed zero inclination of actually meeting the 2026 deadline (itself pushed back repeatedly after first being set in 2006)—needed to do so.

>In our day and age you should be arrested as traitor for saying that.

Beyond the strange notion that an American should be "arrested as a traitor" for his words, a "traitor" to whom?

Who benefits more from NATO membership, the US or Germany? Who benefits more, the US or Belgium? The US or Norway? The US or Italy?

Would a Russian conquest of all of Ukraine endanger US security? Not really. It is Poland that would have Russian troops on hundreds more miles of its borders. It is Poland and the Baltic states that now face the risk being cut off from the rest of NATO at the Suwalki Gap.

The funny thing is that Poland and the Baltics do meet the 2% spending requirement, and have so for years. It is the likes of the far wealthier Germany, Belgium, Norway, Italy that do not. When you say that a US president should have been "arrested as a traitor" for questioning the value ("obsolete", I believe he said) of a military alliance in which the US funded 69% of total military spending while the wealthiest other members (with the notable exception of the UK) do not, have not, and (until February 2022) would not ever meet the bare minimum expectations set for them, I ask again: A traitor to whom?

>The man is an idiot.

An idiot who was, as I yet again point out, 100% right on the biggest crisis to face Germany in 75 years.

Trump and NATO secretary-general and former Norwegian PM Jens Stoltenberg argue on camera (video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpwkdmwui3k>, article <https://pbs.org/newshour/politics/at-nato-trump-says-germany...>) about dependence on Russia four years ago. Who turned out to be right? Who turned out to completely, totally, 100% wrong?

Trump at the UN warns that Germany is endangering itself by increasing dependence on Russia. German envoys laugh <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfJv9QYrlwgepe>, including foreign minister Heiko Maas. Who was right, Trump or Maas?

Either answer my question, or shut up about the "idiot"/"traitor"/"Orange Man Bad".

They're not unrelated, there's both the exact opposite bet on the same issue: should the west take Russia at face value?

Saying "Germany needs to look after it's energy independence" is synonym with "the west cant trust Russia", and saying "I'm taking the USA out of NATO" is synonym with "the west can trust Russia".

So he just claimed two opposite views and his fan it's pick and choose.

> "I'm taking the USA out of NATO" is synonym with "the west can trust Russia".

Trump was all over the place so it's hard to know what his exact positions were but he definitely bitched about European countries for not maintaining the NATO spending goal of 2 percent of economic output [0] which seemed to be his main gripe with NATO from what I remember.

One quote from the article: "Mr. Trump appeared especially annoyed, officials in the meeting said, with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and her country’s military spending of 1 percent of its gross domestic product."

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/us/politics/nato-presiden...

No, "I'm taking the USA out of NATO" was synonymous with "I'm tired of you free riding on our military - start contributing to your own defense".

I'm very much not a Trump fan, but no, I do not agree with your interpretation of the threat to take the US out of NATO.

> free riding on our military

Small minded.

The purpose of NATO is to serve as a force multiplier. It's not that Europe benefits at the cost of the USA. Both benefit.

The purpose of NATO is to serve as mutual defense. If it's mutual defense with a bunch of nearly unarmed countries, how "mutual" is it?

(Yes, you could consider having other countries coming to your defense to be multiplying your force. But if they don't have much of a force of their own, how much "multiplying" are they doing?)

> What you should be asking is: How was Germany so dumb that Trump saw it, but they didn’t?

They weren't dumb. They were probably ok with helping Putin invade few more countries in Easter Europe - after all, the Germans themselves are quite far and safe, and possibly also care about money more than human lives.

Broken clock, twice a day?

ohh... these smug corrupted smirking faces. Now Ukrainians are paying for your gas, you cunts. The Three Seas Initiative was the way to go at that time, energy policy wise.

Enough for Obama to call them on it 4 years before that;

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-eu-summit/obama-tells...

And many US Government officials and their proxies have been sounding the alarms for years;

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/interview/senior-oba...

And Biden temporarily waived sanctions on the pipeline as a bargaining chip to help prevent the invasion of Ukraine, they were snapped back once Russia invaded;

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/if-russia-invades-uk...

Nobody in American politics thought it was a good idea, because it clearly wasn't, but the allure of dirt-cheap energy was too much to pass up.

The video is literally Trump in 2018 calling out Germany on their dependence on Russian gas whilst they smirk at him. His words:

> “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.”

Even the Washington Post wrote about it at the time: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/09/25/trump-accuse...

> His words: > ... "independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers."

Well, maybe not "his" words. But they are definitely words that came out of his mouth.

Tells you how brainless the media was and were just after headline clickbait despite Trump echoing the same warnings that Obama said in 2014.

Now everyone can see how silly Germany is looking after not listening to what both Obama and Trump already saw on their dependency on Russian gas.

I guess Trump had the last laugh on that one.

What policies was he referring to there? From what I recall, a big part of the German focus at the time was the shift to renewables, with the goal of reducing dependence on Russian gas imports.

Were those the policies that he wanted them to end? Or was it something else?

It was missing LNG imports to Germany.

Among the comedians on camera is Heiko Maas, the German foreign minister, now enjoying a quiet retirement back home in Saarland.

I somehow doubt that he will have to worry about paying energy bills (or, heck, just getting enough gas/electricity at all regardless of cost) this winter.

Not was. Is.

Interesting. Not a single mention of the impact of foreign policy precipitating this potential energy crisis. Foreign policy cannot be untangled from domestic policy.

There is now this idea that the only reasonable thing to do was to completely cut off Russia from international trade, prior to the unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because that made you dependent on Russia and that's just ontologically bad. That's not a reasonable position to have. I mean people trade with China in spite of Tibet, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong and Tiananmen Square, Saudi Arabia in spite of providing material support to al-Qaeda (and being the country probably most responsible for 9/11), an unjustifable genocide in Yemen and Khashoggi or even the United States despite many sins that can reasonbly be listed.

Trade in particular and engagement in general is the only reasonable path towards Russia or really any other power we may not like.

The problem was that Germany and the US through NATO expected Putin to swallow something the US never would ie a hostile major power in your backyard. I mean the US almost started World War 3 when the USSR tried this in Cuba (after the US had already done it to Turkey).

But instead people like the frame this debate as you should never have traded with Russia and/or to support the narrative that nuclear power is good.

Pretty messed up : https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/societal-choices/...

250 to 300 billion euros, which is more than the cost of rebuilding from scratch all the French nuclear power plants, is what Germany has invested from 1996 to 2014 to increase by 22% the fraction of renewable electricity into the gross production of the country (that went from 4% to 27%).

For this price tag our neighbors did not decrease their energy imports, did not accelerate the decrease of their CO2 emissions per capita, that remain 80% higher to those of a French, increased the stress on the European grid.

btw. his pricing is completly off and you can't build all french nuclear plants from scratch with 250 to 300 billion euros.

France could.

That's a great analysis, but unfortunately ends at around when Ukraine was first invaded. It doesn't show what has happened in the last several years.

For 250B EUR, Germany paid for the learning curve movement that now enables the rest of the world to deploy solar and batteries. If it was not for German investment to drive that 90% drop in price, bills like the IRA would not even be possible to contemplate.

The "that would pay for the entire French fleet" thing is nonsense. Just google the cost of the most recent plants built anywhere in EU and multiply it by how many you'd need to meet France's 61GW capacity. (example: Hinkley Point C, 75B EUR for 3.26GWe, 61GW/3.26GW = 18, 18*75 = 1,350B EUR, Olkiluoto Unit 3, 11B EUR for 1.6GWe, 61GW/1.6=~38, 38*11=418B EUR).

Yes, Germany paid a huge price for their solar. We should be thankful they did.

Or, you know, one could just take the cost of the French fleet and inflation-adjust it? Technology wasn’t that different when they were built. And building scores of reactors has tremendous efficiencies of scale.

It is no longer legal to build the kinds of Gen 2 plants France built their fleet out of, so I don't see how inflation-adjusting that cost would be more accurate than looking at the current market cost.

As an example, today plants are required to not suffer meltdowns if primary power is lost to cooling systems. Many similar sets of rules (see EU Nuclear Safety Directives from 2009 and 2014, for example), add up to much more plant complexity, which increases capex.

Now the thing is, loss of coolant is rather bad for both coal, gas and oil power plants as well. They may break, pollute water, explode... And the cessation of generation is about as problematic.

They have not been redesigned for alternate coolants, unlike new nuclear power plants.

The problem is that Germany is taking everyone down with them

The countries that follow the EU wholesale energy price rules are royally screwed, because the price of power is set by the exorbitant price of gas even if they only use 5% gas in their energy mix. In addition to carbon mandatory limits this leads to soaring electricity prices which do not correspond to real supply and demand, but religious adherence to inflexible regulations that have not been changed despite the war. This is madness at multi-state level

It is not also gas, also less hydropower available than usual in Norway, Switzerland etc. due to unfortunate climate/weather past year. There is genuine energy shortage not only an issue of setting the right price.

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