Comment by nforgerit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nforgerit | Hacker News Reader

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German here. To be fair, Germany has a bit of a history concerning energy. I'm not blindly supporting those actions (and am actually deeply concerned) but a bit of context might be valuable:

1) In early 2000s the then government (coalition of Social Democrats and Green party) decided to end nuclear and to fully transform the country to renewable energy; the Greens are heavily influenced by 1980s anti-nuclear movement. I still think that this decision was mindblowingly progressive and valuable at that time. As a "bridge technology" they wanted to use natural gas (hence the good friendship between ex-chancellor Schröder and Putin).

2) The Merkel-led gov't in 2010 (coalition of Conservatives and Liberals) decided to prolong nuclear (no real reason, imho more of a "we know better").

3) Fukushima happened in 2011. Germans were concerned in surveys and Merkel (imho stupidly) decided to make nuclear's deadline even earlier (end of 2022) causing huge fees the gov't had to pay to energy companies (afair 1-2 billion EUR). Running plants were shutdown between 2011 and 2022. Meanwhile Germany's dependence on cheap natural gas imports from Russia went up. Chemical Industry, electrification and warming were the main uses. I think they doubled or so at that time.

4) Putin invaded Ukraine. Sanctions on gas exports (imho rightly) happened and gas prices skyrocketed. Putin completely turned off the gas. The current gov't (Social Democrats, Liberals and Green party) had to decide on what to do. So they decided to build LNG ports and continue phasing out nuclear which at that time only contributed around 6% to electrical power because all the other plants were already shutdown.

5) They still needed to find a way to produce electric energy in case renewable energy is not available (due to cheap Russian gas there was zero incentive to create waus to save energy) so they're now burning coal and heavily need to buy CO2 certificates and bet on that it will get so expensive that energy companies will invest heavily into renewables.

The signal though is horrifying. I hate everything of this typical German kind of stupid compromises.

> I still think that this decision was mindblowingly progressive and valuable at that time.

But that's not rational. Disabling nuclear power more than negates the effects of investing in wind and solar. Actually wind and solar are worse than nuclear, since the former are highly volatile and can't act as a stable baseline energy source.

Not necessarily. They gave scientists and industry 25+ years to develop ways to save excess renewable energy (e.g. by hydrolysis) and electrify industrial processes. Nothing happened, instead the industry lobbied the gov'ts for more Russian gas.

Plus, we have the European Power Grid which lets you import and export electricity to neighboring countries and e.g. France is so deeply invested into nuclear, they would always have excess energy (sidenote: due to mismanagement and droughts France heavily needed to import electricity from Germany).

Germany afair set a world record in generating solar electricity around 2012 while it was losing its whole solar industry (150k+ jobs) to China, bc the Merkel gov't suddenly stopped subsidizing them.

> They gave scientists and industry 25+ years to develop ways to save excess renewable energy (e.g. by hydrolysis) and electrify industrial processes. Nothing happened, instead the industry lobbied the gov'ts for more Russian gas.

That's absurd. First, it was actually politicians like Manuela Scheswig who promoted Russian gas even though nuclear was better. Second, you can't simply blame "scientists and industry" for the effects of bad policy. If politicians turn off nuclear energy and simply hope that "scientists and industry" would readily figure out how to store vast amounts of energy, then that's naive. There is no justification for basing your policy on wishful thinking about non-existent science fiction technology.

The "non existent science fiction technology" you're talking about (wind turbines, solar, hydrolysis) is already there for many decades. It just needed a proper push to incentivize the industry to produce and deploy it at massive scale. When deployed at scale it constantly produces clean energy at unbeatable prices per kWh. Compare that to nuclear being heavily subsidized by tax money to achieve affordable customer prices. The only real downside is that renewables take a lot of space (2% of Germany's area only for onshore wind turbines).

NB: Schwesig promoted Russian gas to improve her local industry. She was the pawn sacrifice of the "leadership" in the whole shitshow.

Nuclear energy works since more than half a century, large scale energy storage is still not available. So yes, it is de facto a science fiction technology at this point. It does not exist, much less does it have unbeatable prices. Again, one cannot simply demand that it is available and blame "scientists and industry" when it isn't available. Regarding subsidies: Germany has in fact massively subsidized renewable energy, but all this got negated by needlessly disabling nuclear power. Germany produces way more CO2 than France.

> Plus, we have the European Power Grid

Ah, I see, solar and wind being volatile are not a problem because you have other countries to generate power for you, even if it is nuclear (that apparently is bad) or coal. What?

For solar and wind you need dispatchable generation to fill in the voids. Nuclear doesn’t fit that bill.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation

The use case for nuclear power isn't to assist renewable energy sources, but to replace coal power.

Yes, and their argument was that this is a bad match up.

Renewable energy is only available at certain times, whereas nuclear is as stable as you can get. You can't pause energy generation for nuclear power plants, which is why coal/gas is more effective in this context, as you can start and stop these at will.

(no real reason, imho more of a "we know better"). - yeah they did. They realised thay relying on a putin would lead to more issues and energy storage had no solution incoming.

I see. That's probably why while Merkel was in power, the overall dependence on Russian gas imports raised significantly and her administrations essentially stopped renewables. Meanwhile she decided to end nuclear earlier.

There was no "realizing things" in her administrations. There was just erratic opportunistic actions.

I think you can explain all this nicely with: "SD leader Gerhardt Schröder immediately joined as a Russian oil lobbyist after leaving politics".

Greens were useful idiots to Gerhardt's plan to power Germany's economy using cheap natural gas from then-nascent Putin regime in Russia.

It's arguable he wasn't wrong in fact, if you look at the fact that Germany drove a lot of the EU economy for the past 2 decades, he's probably feeling quite justified in selling his country's energy sector out to Russia.

> I still think that this decision was mindblowingly progressive and valuable at that time.

That's a very positively way to say "mind-blowingly stupid".

Stupid, no.

The nuclear equation was viewed very differently in those times. Recall that back then, Chernobyl was still a very fresh memory.

Meanwhile, the other half of the decision (to move to renewables) was quite prescient for its time.

But it was terrible! France produces much less CO2 than Germany and doesn't have a major energy crisis, because they switched to nuclear power.

France is also a smaller economy with a smaller population with fewer industry.

they also have a significant issue with dumping hot water into streams killing off the flora and fauna, which means in the heat of summer they have to scale back their nuclear stations significantly.

Even when nuclear power plants weren't leaking dangerous levels of radiation over cities they were still producing hazardous waste we had no real means to deal with besides hiding it under the rug and hoping to hell it stays contained.

Getting rid of nuclear power would have been fine if renewables had advanced enough to replace them, and for a while it was looking like that was entirely possible. I've always thought investing in some new nuclear power plants would be a good idea so we could get off coal sooner but getting rid of nuclear power plants should still be our ultimate goal.

> I still think that this decision was mindblowingly progressive and valuable at that time

In light on what is the real-world consequences of that decision; I would qualify it more as mindblowingly mistaken.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

It played a big roll in making photovoltaics economical and boosting wind. Today more energy is produced worldwide with renewables than coal or nuclear.

Which is bad. Investment in nuclear would have been far better. Countries could have followed the French model, which works much better than the German one.

Are we living in the same universe? From what I understood, EDF the quasi-government agency managing nuclear in France is heavily indebted (~50 billion EUR), they have maintenance problems that made them shutdown about half of their reactors, they have problems with freshwater supply because France is in a drought (as other parts of Europe, sth which will get worse with climate change) and they have a cost and build-time explosion with some new power plants.

Are you living in the universe that had EDF with 0 debt until the greens prevented investments in nuclear (constructions & maintenance) to push for alternatives power sources (gas & wind/solar; mainly) which pushed a once world leader to a 50B hole; increased France CO2 emission; pushed energy cost up; and lead the talents and knowledge that French had developed to get lost making it difficult & expensive to go back to their former glory.

If so, we are living in the same one.

I would suggest that a lot of past German attempts to be "mindblowingly progressive" have turned out to be disasters. Maybe they should learn from it.

-> Putin completely turned off the gas.

Why would Russia turn off their main source of money?

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