Germany begins dismantling wind farm for coal | Hacker News Reader

Germany begins dismantling wind farm for coal

euobserver.com

23 points_hypx17 comments

I've always been curious why Germany/France/European Union did not try to land lease acreage for solar farms and build the corresponding transmission lines.

To those concerned about sovereignty, costs and jobs, obviously that's not a concern because the alternative Germany pursued was Nord stream which is less sovereign and probably costs more (albeit the Russian oligarchs probably made the initial down payment) and the talent is Swedish.

Or lease space for factories in Spain/Portugal. Similarly, concerns about sovereignty, costs and jobs are moot because the alternative is to build the plants in Asia and ship the cars over.

Germany is much cloudier than California and it is also at a significantly higher latitude, where the solar insolation is a lot smaller.

Solar panels above about 50°N almost never break even from a carbon budget POV over the lifetime of the panel once you account for mining, smelting, panel production, transportation and end of life processing.

You can fudge it if you have a location that far north with both a high altitude and low annual cloud cover but there aren't very many of them. AFAIK the only place with good annual solar potential at that latitude is in the Amur Oblast of Russia.

That said, all of this applies to solar buildouts in the northern and central latitudes of Europe. Building panels in Spain/Italy/Serbia/etc and transmitting power is a wonderful idea that hasn't seen as much uptake as anybody with green ideas would like.

"That said, all of this applies to solar buildouts in the northern and central latitudes of Europe. Building panels in Spain/Italy/Serbia/etc and transmitting power is a wonderful idea that hasn't seen as much uptake as anybody with green ideas would like."

>> Yes - seems like I omitted the part about the leasing of land being in Spain/Portugal accidentally when doing a final edit of my comment!

Doing some sort of 100 year land lease of land in Spain/Italy/Portugal/Serbia for German/French solar farms seems like such a no brainer - at least relative to Nord Stream.

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Feuobserver.com%2Fgreen...

Germany does literally all the wrong moves when it comes to future of energy

Which is weird when they make all the right moves when it comes to future of energy. They are only ones to implement the switch to green energy, whilst all the oil, gas, coal, nuclear lobbyists are against it. Thanksfully those lobbyists are only loud in the press or forums, the industry knows that the old way is out.

Their CO2 emissions per capita are the largest in Europe after Poland. What makes you say they do all the right moves?

Coal is being phased out, nuclear already out. Solar and wind is rising.

The right moves are to get rid of the polluters, and switch to sustainable energy

>nuclear already out

And how is this a "right move" exactly?

as long as you cannot get rid of the poison long-term, and cannot prevent multi-century poisoning in case of accidents, this is the right move. Just wait until you get your Diablo earthquake, and the whole Silicon Valley can shutdown. Exceptionalism game over.

Even in case of multi century poisoning, the affected area is small. The more radioactive the isotope, the faster it decays, so the poisoning isn’t really multi century. Chernobyl, the worst accident to date, is negligible in terms of poisoned area, and environmental impact. Orders of magnitude less than poisoning from fossil fuels. Your point simply doesn’t stand scientifically. It’s an ideological position, fueled by fear and disinformation. If we had other options, maybe, but we are against the climate change wall, and Germany is the perfect example of what’s wrong with your reasoning. So, tell me, when do you think Germany energy policies are going to shine, with actual CO2 numbers? In 20 years? 50 years? I believe it’s never going to shine, because it doesn’t work if you do the math. Wind turbines and solar energy aren’t going to fulfill all energy needs alone, for many reasons. We’d need orders of magnitude more, not to mention energy storage. Germany has built lots of them, it’s been at least 20 years, and they are still very very far from being clean. As I said they are the worst after Poland. How can you even argue?

Which is especially weird given that they have such a strong Green party.

the german green party is not very green. They actively opposed nuclear energy and got it shut down before there were other low carbon energy sources available to replace it. Which led directly to more coal and more gas being used. More ecological destruction and more CO2, it really contrary to any kind of good sense.

That's pretty the much the same as the green party in the UK

1. No one wants a nuclear reactor in their back yard

2. Making a safe nuclear reactor takes skilled engineers

3. The only country with those skills in europe are in france (The UK folk have all mostly retired now)

4. Oil companies have been known to fund the likes of Greenpeace and CND to promote fear about nuclear power/weapons

5. Nuclear has a longer ROI than Fossil fuels, but rapidly overtakes the profits when it reaches ROI Investors want to make a quick buck.

6. Investment into safer nuclear reactors has been choked for many of the above reasons

7. Even without reprocessing, nuclear is an order of magnitude less damaging to the environment than Oil/Gas

> 4. Oil companies have been known to fund the likes of Greenpeace and CND to promote fear about nuclear power/weapons

It would be curious to see if there is a real conspiracy here, namely that green parties are really the creation of fossil fuel companies. Mainly to redirect and block credible environmental movements and replace them with ridiculous fearmongering groups with the goal of making fossil fuels the only option.

Ah but that's quite unfair isn't it. Green+socdem had greener plans which were stopped by the following Conservative+liberal government in the late 00s. Then fukushima happened and in a knee jerk reaction conservatives rushed out of nuclear, paying off the remaining providers, all while shortly before then fucking over solar development in Germany.

Now green is finally in gov again and can only look on the ruins left for them after 16 years of Conservative led power policy.

It's not the greens that fucked it up. They had a plan in the 90s which was supposed to transition to a renewable grid. Conservatives ruined it and had been in power for the past 16 years. The current rushed nuclear exit is solely their fault.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com