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Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to argue with you, just trying to understand as someone from a neighboring country — could you elaborate a bit more about what happened with the Conservative Party undermining the green energy effort? And how close would Germany realistically have been to being completely self-sufficient by now if that didn’t happen?

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Many things:

* Blocked Biogas by imposing a limit on installed capacity

* blocked solar by imposing a limit on yearly added installed capacity (1GW)

* introduced the so called EEG-Umlage that made storage technologies unprofitable when used to store renewable energy

* introduced a shitshow of bureaucracy to prevent new solar and wind projects from coming online

* introduced another shitshow of bureaucracy to prevent new solar and wind projects from coming online on top of the existing shitshow

* undermine EU law by just not implementing it, for example regarding neighbours giving energy to each other

* introduced redicoulus "Abstandsregeln"/distance regulations, so for example open pit mines that use demolitions have an allowed min distance of 300m and windfarms 1000m

* When China poured billions into the companies forming China's solar industry, while German's companies had no help with their investments and funding

the list goes on and on and on and on...

Realistically: not close at all. But significantly less close: in the last few years, German renewable buildup per capita effectively collapsed. Expressed in the most German units imaginable, buildup dropped from "world champion" to "failed to qualify for the tournament". Part of it is certainly caused by running out of low-hanging fruits, but yay can't be the only explanation.

Blocking wind power and grid efforts everywhere, stopping planned storage efforts, man we even shut down pump storages etc over the last decades that would be so necessary to have any chance to support and realize base load with renewables. Right now we are shedding cheap bio gas and wind power production again (and that given we build up much too little as we could have) while the power stock exchanges have fun gambling.

On top this constant nuclear narrative, which is not even much significant for current power production, this is all beyond any funny.

Google translate those for few alternstive povs:

https://www.klimareporter.de/strom/deutschland-fackelt-gas-a...

https://www.makawind.de/index.php?show=news

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Pumpspeicherkraftw...

Oh yeah, I forgot. All of that, too.

And this is the look of the politician in question https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/35/Peter_Al...

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