Germany Is Dismantling a Wind Farm to Make Way for a Coal Mine
oilprice.com
oilprice.com
-The turbine is 20+ years old and was scheduled to be decommissioned at this time.
"A spokesperson for Energiekontor, which built and runs the rest of the windfarm, said a time limit to its operational permit meant it expected to have to dismantle the five remaining turbines by the end of 2023"
"Rebuilding the turbines to make way for the expanding mine was part of the original agreement that allowed the windfarm to be constructed in 2001, he added, and not a result of a recent change of German energy policy"
Eliminate the clean energy sources, put up a facade of green power which is then bulldozed to facilitate the dirty coal baseload power they now completely rely on.
This entire discussion about nuclear is just a propaganda trick by the fossil fuel industry, which knows that nuclear can't be build in time. So people will rely on fossil fuels longer because they wait for nuclear while renewables and storage are presented as unattractive.
Just like Elon did with his hyperloop adventure to sabotage high speed rail.
Why did they do that?
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-former-chancellor-gerhard-sch... (he declined after the massive backlash, but is still on the board)
https://www.thelocal.de/20221013/merkel-says-no-regrets-over...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Merz#Other_activit...
After Fukushima the shutdown of some of them was pulled up by a small amount of years, undoing that decision does make sense and should be done (and somewhat had been done in a roundabout way where the one side can pretend they didn't do it and the other side can complain they didn't do it but should it matter its basically as if the did it).
The problem is that they use the situation as an excuse to push other things which are neither necessary nor sane.
The grid is like a big Tetris board, and nuclear power plants are big multi-prong pieces: they can be good to cover a large surface, but sometimes, they block situations were a better configuration (which is at the end cleaner) is possible.
For example, the evolution of the grid may make a specific nuclear power plant not totally needed (because this region can now get cheap import, because the heavy industries in this area have changed, ...) while still expensive to maintain. In this case, shutting it down is a good idea. Another example, if you say "yeah, maybe we will built a nuclear power plant there, maybe, who knows", the risk of investing in a renewable power plant that would replace a dirty power plant may be not attractive to investors, and the dirty power plant will continue for years. But if you say you will exit the nuclear, then the renewable power plant is suddenly very attractive and the dirty power plant can, at the end of the process, be replaced. Another example, the grid needs a balance between production and demand, but demand is not flat during the day, there are peaks. Nuclear power plants, especially the not recent ones, may not efficiently produce non-flat production. In this case, the grid can evolve in a situation where too much "flat production" exists, and where a "flat production" power plant is the one that is not competitive anymore due to the maintenance costs. ...
Keeping the old nuke running for ten more years costs more and winds up being less reliable than a new wind farm.
The moral is 'don't let your leader gut zero carbon investment for a 'job' in the gas industry'. Not 'spend your limited zero carbon investment in a much worse way'.
All you have to do is not turn them off, man. Or recommission the ones that were turned off a year ago. This isn't a conspiracy.
So we need both.
We'd need to build 800 more average nuclear power plants to replace fossil fuels in EU. That's like millions of average solar parks. Impossible.
Nuclear makes _financially_ no sense, only undoing the decision for a earlier shutdown done after fukushima makes sense. But building nuclear power plants takes at least decade a so it's not even an option to consider for short term handling of shortages in the next years and nuclear power was only ever cheap because of it being highly subvention.
It also makes geo strategically no sense as it's a sigle point of failure and a rather catastrophic point of failure, too.
Germany had a budding promising solar and wind industry which was basically killed of by politicians from CDU and SPD. Worse it's more then obvious that the politicians behind it have tight connections to the coal and gas industry to a point you could call it corrupt.
Money spent building nukes is money not spent build out renewables that produce much more power for the money, and start producing immediately.
The amount spent on fossil fuels over the decade or two waiting for the nuke to come online would have bought that much renewable capacity, the which would have been displacing CO2 the whole time.
It's a real problem for nuclear plants: we still need them as "baseline continuous" generators, but no-one wants to risk investing for a site when there is a large chance that this specific site will not be needed in 10 years, will be too expensive to run and not competitive, and will go bust.
We made the mistake 10 years ago by not planning ahead (even France, who was going to the nuclear route, messed up by not renewing and maintaining their know-how). But now, it's just true that building an expensive power plant that will not be used is just not a good idea.
If renewable investment was tripled and you could still wrest more money from the coal lobby then building nukes with that would make sense. Until then it just means burning more coal (which is precisely why it's being shilled so hard).
Even then spending money on a sodium ion or iron air battery factory will probably pay off sooner.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/rwe-darf-grundstuecke-von-la...
Exactly. This is a market signal that coal is far from over. As a global resource, coal is ubiquitous. We have existing tech and infrastructure to burn it. (Unlike the more valuable natural gas and petrol, which are in the hands of a few producers and prone to erratic leadership and price fluctuations.)
Many regions across the world have access to coal deposits of various quality, why would they not use them? Because coal is "bad for the environment"? Mkay.
Coal is a convenient and nearby energy source. It's quite obvious that affluent Europe is turning to coal as quickly as possible, abandoning or diluting its green-energy rhetoric. We'll burn coal and someone else will deal with pollution, climate change, etc.
Because burning coal is literally killing us slowly. Try breathing in a city that burns coal and tell me how you feel after a few weeks.
So now the greens and their voters will be breathing in coal soot all winter because that's "way better" than the zero emissions nuclear energy. /s
If this isn't bitter sweet irony, I don't know what is.
Getting those ramshackle old nukes into good-enough shape to turn back on, and then running them, was correctly recognized as much more expensive, and otherwise riskier besides, than building out renewables. That was proceeding on schedule.
The gas shortage upset schedules.
Had they chosen not to build out renewables as they did, they would be in even worse trouble now.
The choice was spending $200bn on renewables to get 238TWh/yr now vs 0 now and maybe 150 later.
Not cutting wind investment by 50% would have had a vastly bigger effect than starting some EPRs which would be unfinished or offline right now.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
But also we should not ignore the local economic incentives that will arise due to an energy crunch. When gas and liquid fossil fuels become more expensive, local stores of coal become relatively more valuable as an energy source.
In the last 10 years, the US went so hard on oil and gas exploitation that coal is basically dead just from market forces. And the irony is that by burning more natural gas the US is now doing better on climate than most of Europe.
Making policy based on a momentary crisis would be much dumber than anybody in Europe is. As the momentary crisis abates, emergency measures will be dropped.
People who have coal will not burn it if it costs more than building out renewables, except where corruption locks in continued dependence on coal.
You do realize that you're commenting on an article showing that people are literally, today, as we speak, doing exactly the opposite. i.e. tearing down decade-long investments in renewables to get at coal.
People mining coal get paid for the coal. People buying power buy it where they can. It must be clear to the coal miners that this might be their last chance to get a profit from their coal.
Again, this was the deal from the start: we will build a wind central there, even if it blocks the coal, because wind is more profitable, and when we have to recycle, maybe we will move, why not. That's really a non-event.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/world/europe/germany-coal... ("Germany’s New Hunger for Coal Dooms a Tiny Village")
You can see a wind farm in the background (maybe it's the same one?)
edit: I believe it's the same one. Wikipedia has a map what's going on: the expansion is labelled "Garzweiller II - 2045". The village "Lützerath" is within in boundaries, and there's a "Keyenberg" just north of it. So the Times' photograph's angles would seem reasonable. (The OP doesn't name the wind farm, but the linked Guardian article identifies it as a "Keyenberg").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garzweiler_surface_mine#/media... (map)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagebau_Garzweiler#/media/Date... (aerial view)
> The population from several municipalities in the area west of Cologne had to be relocated due to the Grazweiler mine expansion. In addition to the location of the wind farm, RWE is taking an area in and around the small town of Lützerath. It will be completely evicted and demolished.
https://balkangreenenergynews.com/wind-farm-in-germany-is-be...
This is some next-level desperation for lignite.
When I put up my solar panels, they will be propped up like accordion folds to pick up morning and afternoon light, because they are getting so cheap.