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Comment by perrygeo | Hacker News Reader

> prioritization of energy security over clean energy in Europe’s biggest economy

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.

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Well, I think more specifically, it shows how foolhardy it was to cut back on oil and gas development while coal was still actively used.

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.

>why would they not use them? Because coal is "bad for the environment"? Mkay.

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.

Yet Germany is still implementing pro-coal policies. Not saying it's right, just that it is.

They have a huge manufacturing industry to feed and no energy, what else could they do to stay in business?

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.

It is not. It is just a war emergency.

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 isn't and wasn't renewables or nuclear until much higher penetration.

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.

And the radioactivity problem (amongst the acid rain problem, the CO2 problem, the smog problem and the miner's health problems)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

Burning coal will kill slowly, and freezing to death in German winter will kill quickly.

What is quite obvious is that there is a crisis brought on by a war. Period.

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.

Just to be totally clear on this, you're claiming that "People who have coal will not burn it if costs more than building out renewables"

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.

Nope. The article explains that the wind central was, since its construction, planned to have a given life span. It is incorrect to say that they are replacing wind by coal. What they are doing is closing wind that reached its end of life, and profiting from the empty space to expend coal. In fact, this article shows even the opposite of what you say: for years, the wind central was used despite blocking exploiting the coal: the fact that they are expending the coal only when the wind central has to be closed anyway shows that the wind central was more profitable than the coal.

"The wind farm was planned to have a given life span and now that it's over, no one is willing to reinvest in it. So it's become a coal mine because coal is more profitable. So that proves why wind is more profitable." I'm literally confused.

Maybe look up "capex" and "opex".

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.

Why do you say "no one is willing to reinvest in it"? They are investing right now in other sites, so, basically, what is happening is equivalent to "this wind central just profited that it needed a recycle to move in another site".

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.

So we should just ignore the climate crisis?

No, we should not!

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.

Preferably.

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