Comment by Mewit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mewit | Hacker News Reader

Looks better than I thought! But of course they'll burn through that storage fast if it's a cold winter. The import graphs give me hope that they might be able to mostly plug the gap with LNG and maybe Algeria. Of course for LNG they're competing with Asia, so even if they are able to avoid physically running out of gas, it's probably going to get very expensive.

I think what this has really demonstrated is the danger of always taking the easy solution on energy generation. Germany seems like the best example. They decided they wanted to phase out coal. Fair enough, it's by far the dirtiest hydrocarbon. Then they also decide they don't want to use nuclear power. And they don't want to frac for gas. And they don't want to invest much in LNG terminals because ultimately they don't want to burn gas either. But renewables aren't anywhere near big enough to close the circle right now, so basically by saying no to everything else, they by default grew their dependence on Russian gas.

There are no perfect sources of energy (at least not yet), so countries have to make tough choices. Hopefully that is clearer to decision makers in Germany and elsewhere now; making the easy, uncontroversial choice every time can lead you into a big jam.

The part about germany is obviously not true. If you look at the electricity generation via gas, the share has not grown meaningfully since 2005.

The state has not started large campaigns in other areas compared to electricity to phase out other fuels.

The Wikipedia article seems pretty good on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany . You're right, gas has remained pretty steady at about 10 to 15% of electricity generation since the early 2000s. But electricity isn't the only type of energy the country needs, and in the case of gas a much more important use is for space heating. In my opinion, Germany would be in a much better position today if they had increased renewables as they have, but also maintained their nuclear generation, and instead reduced natural gas use for electricity. Then they would have freed up a huge amount of gas to heat buildings, up to 50 TWh-hr per year according to that article, and have lower emissions than they do at present. I think with hindsight, phasing out nuclear power was a big mistake.

In general, nuclear power and renewables mix quite poorly. This is especially relevant for replacing gas, since gas is great at providing variable power (when needed) which neither nuclear power nor (most) renewables are good at. You can also see this move to more variable gas generation by looking at the increased gas power plant install base (https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart....) without the corresponding increase in generation.

I wouldn't overrate the amount of gas that is freed by nuclear power (also do keep in mind that there is also quite a lot of heat-electricity cogeneration with gas in Germany, which further complicates matters).

If Germany only didn't shut of any nuclear power plants prematurely, then emissions could be reduced significantly since coal would probably be directly replaced. But I doubt the expansion of renewables in Germany would have happened as it did without a parallel nuclear exit in the 2000s. Would it have changed much if the exit in the 2010s didn't happen in terms of renewables? I don't know. But I also think a non-exit would have been politically untenable after Fukushima, with pretty much every party simultaneously being suddenly gung-ho in shutting down nuclear.

I think the phase-out of nuclear, could everything else have stayed the same, was a missed chance. But at the same time western countries which held much more strongly onto nuclear, especially France, are very likely seeing a huge electricity generation issue in the next decades due to very low rates of building nuclear (with huge difficulties) or renewables (not much interest) and a large amount of nuclear power plants going of the grid (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernkraftwerke_in_Fr..., the list in the englisch wikipedia unfortunately doesn't include planned closure dates). These dates could (and will) be extended, but as we're seeing right now they're already getting unreliable and nearing the end-of-life.

You can heat houses with other methods than gas, like ground or air heat pumps that use electricity. It might be somewhat complicated though.

Since it's not a drop in replacement, driving this change through might take decades and require changing building legislation etc. I'm unfamiliar what is the situation in the different European countries regarding this, but I know there are EU countries where practically nobody heats with gas.

Building a single house or building around a heating solution is a long term commitment. It might not be easy to change afterwards. This then implicitly makes assumptions about the availability and price of said heating solution.

Politics and national security concerns are inevitable around a large scale energy questions. These things don't "just happen" in a "free market". For example large scale electricity producers or gas suppliers are "too big to fail" and are actively managed by governments.

The German situation was even worse then you describe. They decided to move out of coal and nuclear, but at the same time made windpower significantly more difficult and reduced investment into solar. If you look at the installed windturbines (https://www.wind-energie.de/english/statistics/statistics-ge...) you can see an initial boom around 2000 and a large reduction after 2004 similarly things picked up again in 2014 only to be reduced very low again 4 years later.

Coincidentally the first reduction came with a change of power from the SPD/Greens coalition to the CDU/FDP and the second slump when the energy and business ministry went from the SPD in the coalition to Peter Altmaier of the CDU.

In a recent debate on energy in parliament the current chancellor from the SPD (labor equivalent) responded to criticism from the CDU (conservatives), that the current government is fixing the huge mess left over by the previous governments (lead by the CDU). I'm not a big fan of Olaf Scholz (the current chancellor) in general, but rarely was there a truer statement.

Germany never moved away from coal, in fact we just had a new coal plant online without a valid construction permit and illegaly removed protetswrs to kind of illegaly cut down a forest to get the coal for that plant.

Nuclear plant run times have been extended as well, by those mean green anti-nuclear environmentalists that are in the new government by the way.

This really begs the question on whether there was some outside influence on german energy decisions. It's not a given that Russia hasn't been using non-standard negotiation methods for making Germany more dependent on Russian gas by drumming up fear on everything else.

After his term as German chancellor was up (1998-2005), Gerhard Schröder became chairman of several gas companies that were (majority) owned by the Russian state (Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, Gazprom). There was nothing covert about the Kremlin courting Germany with its cheap gas - it was plain to see.

Cheap energy is great for Germany's energy intensive heavy industries, and strategically important. Russia and Germany getting cozy and growing together economically couldn't have made the US or the UK very comfortable and I believe this was at least a part of the US motivation to pull Ukraine from Russia's orbit. I mean it makes a lot more sense to me than the US actually giving a shit about Ukrainians and their freedom. It's very well played on the part of the US.

After all the point of NATO was to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down"

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-agenda-idUSKBN0FB06B20...

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. This is a reasonable take, especially following the way the US reacts to any prospects of getting the Nord Stream 2 started. “US pulling X from Y’s orbit” has been happening around the world since at least the 70s, nothing surprising here.

> “US pulling X from Y’s orbit” has been happening around the world since at least the 70s

It's been going on for far longer than that and pretty much since the late 1940's.

There actually seems to be an investigation into leadership of the energy department of the relevant department. Nothing is proven but some things raised suspicions.

No need to assume, it's publicly documented history: The 1969-1974 German goverment of Willy Brandt pursued a new foreign policy towards the Soviet Union, "Neue Ostpolitik". Part of that strategy was to build a system of mutual economic dependency, so that neither the german nor the soviet side would have any interest in going to war against each other.

And while Brandt was eventually replaced by the more conservative (but still social democrat) Helmut Schmidt, the general strategy of mutual economic dependency was upheld, and contributed to the eventual reunion of both Germanies.

In general, back then this strategy worked so well, that even the chancelors from the conservative CDU didn't feel compelled to change it.

Even Merkel, while far more cool and restrained towards russia than her predecessor, did not really change much in that regard. Kinda expected from a conservative though...

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