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Comment by Erikun | Hacker News Reader

"In March, the German government asked energy companies to weigh a seemingly impossible engineering task. Could a new liquefied natural gas import terminal, which normally takes at least five years to build, be erected in this port town by year’s end?"

For anyone wondering what the specific feat was.

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Germany didn’t build a complete LNG terminal. Instead, they built docks for floating LNG terminals which itself are going to be rented from other countries.

They solved the problem still. Germany doesn't care about having a LNG terminal per se, they care about being able to import enough LNG without relying on russian pipelines.

Not really. As I understand it, the floating LNG terminal is much more expensive to operate and has much less capacity than the fixed LNG terminals which Germany still needs. It's basically a pricy partial stopgap.

Pricey partial stopgap is still better than the alternative. In software engineering and digital product development, there's this idea of "give them what they want, not what they are asking for". A professional, knowing that what they are asking for is totally impossible by the necessary deadline, comes up with a pricey partial stopgap and everyone is still grateful for their expertise.

Nothing like stressful and unnecessary workarounds to problems of political chest beating and doubling down.

Unnecessary? How would you solve the current problem instead (without going back in time)?

My point is we shouldn't be here in the first place

I agree then.

They "solved" the problem by throwing money at it, making it harder for everyone else. Germany frantically overbid for all possible gas sources making the price skyrocket, then they threw 200B euro at domestic market to subsidize energy, sustaining >400€/MWh prices (today price was 430 in Germany).

Its easy to solve problems this way when you are the wealthiest country on the continent, all because you waged two huge wars of aggression and got rewarded with Marshall plan, while victims ended up under russian occupation.

But already, that's good engineering. If the constraints rule out the "standard" solution, change the constraints.

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