How big of a deal is it for the pipelines to be filled in seawater?
But I think by now the project is dead, its just a scrap metal..
I personally can't think of any other logical explication than German politicians having been "bought by Russians" to explain that decision.
I definitely saw this kind of stuff coming like 10+ years ago as they went full steam ahead with energiewende.
> Gerhard Fritz Kurt "Gerd" Schröder is a German lobbyist and former politician, who served as the chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005|
> Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom
They're not even trying to be subtle about it, it's just plain sad
German here. Russian gas was absurdly cheap, I paid 5ct/kWh in 2015 and that included taxes. Large industry which was exempted from at least some of these paid even less. There simply was no economically viable alternative, even renewables today are more expensive than Russian gas was back then.
Yes, there may also have been corruption involved as well (just look at former Chancellor Schröder who started the entire NS1/2 mess, Merkel just ran along with it), but the primary motivation always has been price.
Hell even the primary motivation for NS1/2 was price, as there are no transit fees associated with it, unlike Drushba/Soyuz. The second motivation obviously was to reduce the leverage of Ukraine.
Side note: Assuming a household with 12.000 kWh/a thermal energy consumption, that was 600€ a year/50€ a month back then. At current gas prices, it's ten times that... which is the cause for widespread discontent and outright existential fear in society at the moment. When you only have 200-300€ left after rent and necessities, 50€ for heating is manageable - but 500€ certainly is not, and the new gas prices representing the current future market prices that will hit in next year aren't even priced in.
> I definitely saw this kind of stuff coming like 10+ years ago as they went full steam ahead with energiewende.
Lol what? Energiewende? You mean Mr. Altmaier and his conservative friends sabotaging the wind and solar industry wherever they could, leading to well over 100k lost jobs [1]? Fuck that shit.
[1] https://www.iwr.de/news/erneuerbare-energien-beschaeftigen-u...
nucl... ah no that's bad
The madness factor of nuclear power - safety, waste, availability factor (France!) - aside, nuclear power is economically even worse than brown coal [1, page 8], once you include externalized costs such as teardown, maintenance of the permanent waste dump sites or the insurance that an NPP would need without the taxpayer guarantee.
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/887090/1867659c1d4edc...
It should have been done, but the reasons it wasn’t aren’t just outright corruption or anti-nuclear sentiment.
This was the lie that German politicians propagated after having been compromised. The obvious reality is Nuclear is economically and environmentally viable.
Yes, you can use nuclear power for electric heating, but well... France shows at the moment why this is a particularly foolish idea, their complete inability to keep their historic NPPs running and the new ones actually built (Flamanville...) is causing a lot of strain on the entire European electricity and even gas market, because German gas peakers now have to compensate for the lack of French NPPs.
To fix them they would have to be filled with seawater anyway as you would need equal pressure on inside and outside the pipe to do any fixes.
But more importantly I doubt there is any political will to actually fix these. Russian gas in EU is as good as dead in the short term future. And by the time there would be the will to use these pipes again EU should have moved off gas for the most part anyway.