Comment by calpaterson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calpaterson | Hacker News Reader

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I don't agree that the "vast majority" of government motivations for green energy are "geostrategic". Some of it is but much is clearly driven by genuine concern about the environment by elected representatives.

If Germany were most motivated by energy independence they would not have closed so many nuclear power plants. There are in fact lots of decisions that politicians make that are inconsistent with aiming for strategic benefits but are consistent with an earnest (and sometimes quixotic) concern for the environment. If the UK was so bent on energy independence we would have made more progress on heat pumps. Yet gas boilers (lifespan: 15 years) are still being fitted today. In truth, governments thing about energy security a bit, they think about green stuff a bit and they aren't always very effective agents of change...

I also think you're not right to imply that energy production largely happens as a result of government direction. In fact, energy prices are high at the moment and the prospect of profit drives development of green energy a great deal (not that subsidies don't have an effect as well).

To be honest (and I hope I'm not straying into a personal attack here - that's not intended) I think your viewpoint sounds clever because it is cynical. Cynical views - especially the attribution of an ulterior motive - usually sound clever. But I think your post is at best partly right and perhaps even mostly wrong. Political realism is a drug to take only in small doses.

EU obviously has many reasons to shift to renewables, but a huge amount of urgency was provided by the Russia/Ukraine war. There was both effort to shift supply to other countries, and reduce overall demand.

"A regulation on co-ordinated demand reduction measures for gas: This targets a 15% voluntary reduction in EU gas demand between 1 August 2022 and 31 March 2023, compared with its five-year average. The European Commission has adopted the European Gas Demand Reduction Plan with best practices and guidance for member states to help them reduce gas demand."

https://www.iea.org/reports/how-to-avoid-gas-shortages-in-th...

"In March 2022, the European Commission and International Energy Agency presented joint plans to reduce reliance on Russian energy, reduce Russian gas imports by two thirds within a year, and completely by 2030.[15][16]

In April 2022, the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said "the era of Russian fossil fuels in Europe will come to an end".[17] On 18 May 2022, the European Union published plans to end its reliance on Russian oil, natural gas and coal by 2027."

"A fully open study from Zero Lab at Princeton University published in July 2022 and based on the GenX framework concluded that reliance on Russia gas could end by October 2022 under the three core scenarios they investigated – which ranged from high coal usage to accelerated renewables deployment.[63][64][needs update] All three cases would result in falling greenhouse gas emissions, relative to business as usual."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022–2023_Russia–European_Unio...

Nuclear energy has only contributed to 10% of electricity generation in Germany - not to the total energy supply. Furthermore, nuclear energy is far from being self-sufficient. Germany and France import (or imported) uranium from Russia. In quantities that Russia could not provide if it did not itself source uranium from other countries (which Germany, at least, decided not to import uranium from due to a self-imposed commitment). This adds to the dependency on Russia and other countries regarding the remainder of the nuclear fuel cycle.

Then there's coal, oil, and gas. Reducing these is the mammoth task in terms of energy self-sufficiency and independency. Nuclear was marginal at best. France will be a different (very problematic) story…

It was still over 12% in 2019 and over 14% in 2015 after shutting down plants since 2011.

https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...

Unfortunately, only the gross electricity generation. You should look on the original numbers destatis is referencing https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/

2022: 9.9%

The primary energy consumption of electricity from nuclear power was even lower.

That's electricity, not energy.

Most road transport, building heating and many industrial processes use energy that isn't electricity.

The post I was replying to said

> Nuclear energy has only contributed to 10% of electricity generation in Germany - not to the total energy supply.

That number isn't correct, which I pointed out. In both cases we were talking about electricity. I don't see the added value of your comment.

That number is correct.

Germany closed their nuclear plants when the fear of nuclear was at an all time high, due to Fukushima.

At the same time, the risk of war has been downplayed ever since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Gerhard Schröder was one of the strongest political voices behind the de-nuclearization of Germany. After his chancellorship he was on the board of Rosneft and was appointed to Gazprom's board but I believe didn't end up taking it.

Read into that what you will, but it sounds very geopolitical to me.

Gerhard Schröder did not care one bit about nuclear. He was in a coalition with the Greens who wanted to get rid of all nuclear power plants (whose fuel, by the way, mostly comes from Russia if I recall it correctly). He was Putin's best friend, though. When Merkel took over, she stopped or delayed the closing down of the NPPs only to speed it up again significantly after Fukushima.

> whose fuel, by the way, mostly comes from Russia if I recall it correctly

Currently, sure. But it's possible to load enough nuclear fuel from Australia on a rowboat to power Germany for 10 years (that would be about a suitcase).

An alternative explanation is the Greens didn't care about nuclear until Gerhard Schröder started to scare them with Fukushima.

That would have been quite a feat of divination. Schroeder was chancellor until 2005 while Fukushima happened in 2011 (during Merkel's government, which actually had pushed the nuclear exit further into the future at first and then rolled back that decision after Fukushima).

The important event was Chernobyl in 1986, from then on it was pretty much clear that Germany would leave nuclear power behind (and this was the Green party's main agenda, and what made them 'big' during the 90's).

[flagged]

And why so exactly?

Why do you think?

I do not think that at all, hence why I asked.

He is considered to be aligned with the Putin regime:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sanction-gerhard-schr-de...

And that is enough to whish him ill? Hint, Schröder was long gone from power when Putin invaded Ukraine.

Not defending Schröder in any way, just pointing at some discurs issues.

I don’t get Fukushima driving a worry about nuclear but not about tsunami or earthquake which killed orders of magnitude more and caused Fukushima in the first place.

Nuclear powerplants exploding have a tendency to make pretty large swaths of land uninhabitable for decades or centuries, in a densely populated country like Germany that's a bit of a problem.

Where has this ever happened with reactor types used by Germany?

So according to your logic, it must have happened first to worry about the possibility of a GAU?

By the very definition somebody already worried about the GAU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design-basis_event https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslegungsst%C3%B6rfall

Not exactly sure what a GAU is.

If an event has never happened, and the risks have been adequately mitigated, no, I don’t see the need to worry.

GAU = "Grösster Anzunehmender Unfall" roughly translates to "maximum conceivable accident", almost exclusively used for nuclear accidents (or sarcastically for lesser problems, like accidentally deleting a database without a backup at hand).

The fact that this is a very common German word should tell you something about the complicated relationship of the Germans to nuclear energy ;)

That’s simply an oversimplified view of risk, mitigation adequacy, and the dynamic and often unpredictable nature of real-world events.

The 'nuclear exit' was officially started in the early 2000s under Schroeder (in coalition with the Greens), then the Merkel government actually extended the nuclear power plant lifetime again, then Fukushima happened and the lifetime extension was rolled back on pressure from the public.

While Schroeder might have had his own interests in mind and eventually became Putin's useful idiot, the shutdown of nuclear power was a popular opinion in Germany at least as far back as Chernobyl and then reinforced by Fukushima.

Maybe this is hard to imagine for people living in the US, but as someone who grew up in a region where we were not allowed to do certain things, eat certain stuff and many people know mothers that gave birth to deformed children after the radioactive rains following Chernobyl — the dangers of the technology are much more present on the minds here than in regions that have not been affected.

No countries are "bent on energy dependence", because it isnt feasible.

The day-to-day idle chatter of your local representative is really irrelevant over the time horizons of a green transition. This is cultural ideological wash. If there were no security or economic basis for green transition, it would fail upon contact with any non-trivial security or economic issue.

Consider that the UK fired up coal plants when energy prices rose too much. Did it really ask the public to be colder for awhile? Of course not. Ours do not suffer, but theirs (be it india, china, africa...) well they ought not use coal that causes climate change!

The idea that green transition could happen for "values" reasons is ahistorical nonsense -- the values of all countries are the prosperity and the survival of their nation, and anything which threatens this will be handled ruthlessly.

It's rather dangerous to hold any stock in the idle ramblings of politicians speaking under no material duress -- they will say anything and promise anything, as will any of us, when it's cheap to do so. This is hot air. A kind of hot air the rest of the world now understands the west produces with abandon, it is now clear to everyone outside our countries what sort of propaganda we prefer. And it is this sort (moralising about values in the summer, ruthless hypocrisy in the winter).

So my comment here is to point out, to those who can take a longer view of these issues than that printed in newspapers, that there are macro forces at work preserving the green transition -- which is quite reassuring.

In the world we're entering, security competition is returning and this will be a significant drive of war-time-like funding behind energy transition. This is great news.

You're no doubt right that much of the current political class is unaware and unfit to transition their thinking fast enough to handle this; but they will. Most politicians of the last 200 years thought this way quite naturally.

The youngest nuclear power plants in Germany were opened in 1989 after at least six years of built time, with planning going back much further. The last East German opened just weeks before the wall came down and took 13 years to build and closed within the same month. On top of that, you simply can't run a nuclear power plant forever. Germany's nuclear power plants ran an average of 32 years, and I doubt that US power plants will run those 80 years they intend for some https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=21

To keep a 30 year old nuclear power plant safe you will sure see time of maintenance increasing, thus reducing its output. A 30 year old solar panel? Take it off your roof, recycle the old one, put a new one on and we can be sure it will be more efficient. Just this simplicity when replacing panels makes it a no-brainer. Granted, the blades of wind turbines are still not being recycled, but they slowly get there.

I don’t see why it has to be due to environmental concern. At the end of the day, the world is complex and if political pressures force countries to adopt green policies, who cares.

That said, I think energy independence is a really major concern but one that few countries actually do something about. I personally believe Merkel shut down the nuclear reactors due to popular appeal more than anything to her own party’s benefit.

Energy independence is extremely important. During the height of winter 2022, Russia was pressuring Europe to abandon Ukraine and with Russia being Europe’s major supplier of natural gas, the upcoming cold winter meant that Russia had a lot of leverage, being able to force Europe to decide between freezing or weakening support for Ukraine. In the end, the US decided to ship an exceptional amount of natural gas to Europe (over 74% of natural gas produced in the US went to Europe during that time!) as a major foreign policy move in pursuit of its main goal of keeping Ukraine independent by ensuring continuing Europe support. Unfortunately, it had a direct cost on me and everyone because my natural gas bill during those months was literally the highest it has ever been.

Russia did more than that. Already in the summer 2021 Gazprom reduced and later stopped the supply of gas to the spot market. Then Gazprom rented storage space but didnt fill it. All this to make Europe more vulnerable to the blackmail after the invasion, which luckily was delayed enough to fall flat for that winter.

Apparently later Gazprom Germania planned some actual sabotage that was prevented.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-raided-gazprom-in-germany...

https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/putin-gas-russland-deutschland-...

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