Renewable Energy Made Up 62.7% of Germany's Electricity in 2024
ecowatch.com
ecowatch.com
Downplaying the risks of nuclear power plants, which are real, is easy to do, as long as it is far from your home. Most people can't grasp the reality of a nuclear disaster or its aftermath, because they haven't seen it. I have.
Yes, engineering has progressed, yes, there are ever improving safe-guards. As you're probably aware, in Japan, we had a major disaster 14 years ago. Such disasters are very rare, but they will keep happening in future, and no electrical company that build nuclear reactors can guarantee that the probability is 0%. It is a matter of time (maybe in 50 years, maybe in 500 years), and when it happens, who is going to take responsibility for all the lives and damage? Toden couldn't, and certainly not the armchair (nor actual) nuclear engineers who like to lecture people about how they are uneducated.
Please take a look at Wolf Creek, KS, nearby where I lived for many years.
> which are real
> Yes, engineering has progressed, yes, there are ever improving safe-guards
> As you're probably aware, in Japan, we had a major disaster 14 years ago
A 1960s reactor design is still not a valid comparison. In all empathy, I feel sorry this happened in your area; I wish that on nobody, and I understand how hard it is to have to pick up the pieces.
However, it is not just to the rest of the world to put red tape in front of modern designs because of what happened to a 1960s design. Modern designs need to be evaluated on their own merits.
We haven't banned modern cars because of the death traps of the 1960s; instead we iterated upon the designs even though many people experienced personal loss due to unsafe car designs. In fact, more people will die in a car accident this year 2025 than the totality of nuclear deaths from the time we began using nuclear power for power generation, with zero deaths from radiation or sickness at Fukushima.
Your analogy that somehow equates car accidents to nuclear disasters is not even wrong, and the fact that in your mind these can somehow be put into the same analogy is a testament that you don't understand.
1. With a car, you make a decision to use it or not given the risk factors. In contrast, the actual risks of a nuclear reactor built by a corporation in a remote area are not born by the company but rather by the town folks who have been living there and their descendants (an entire population) who have no choice in operating a nuclear power plant in their neighborhood.
And as we also see here, for few who dare to raise their voice, they are shut down by the corporation and local politicians with promises of a bright future or blamed with ignorance by some of their peers. Those same people who are not going to take responsibility when the nuclear disaster happens.
2. A car accident can kill a few people and financial damages are small and can be covered by an ordinary insurance company. A nuclear disaster can kill and make sick an entire population, destroy their livelihoods and poison the environment for generations, and caused damages are so great, well beyond the capabilities of any insurance or electrical company. In practice, the burden of the material damages fell upon the citizens of the entire nation.
As I already said, ever-improving nuclear reactors can result in a nuclear disaster, however "modern" they are. You can guarantee otherwise only in the imaginary world of spherical cows. As long as nuclear power plans are run, Fukushima disaster is not going to be last nuclear disaster the humanity has seen. And again, the question is not "will another nuclear disaster happen". This is Murphy's law. The question is "when it happens, what will its effect be?"
If a corporation wants to operate a nuclear reactor, they should build it hundreds of kilometers away from any human settlement, with proper containment and cleaning mechanism in place that can be deployed right after the failure.
I looked at Wolf Creek Generating Station on Wikipedia, what of it? I don't see a nuclear disaster happened there. I hope the day won't ever come, but I would be interested in hearing your opinion on the matter after Wolf Creek melts down like in Fukushima ---at which point you will actually understand.
Chernobyl irradiated a huge part of the whole continent of Europe and poisoned parts of the food chain. This is not the same risk dimension as unsafe cars.
And the radiation of Fukushima probably entered the food chain at different points as well. Contrary to popular belief, radiation doesn't homogenously disperse in the ocean. Measuring the negative effects isn't trivial. Sure, water is a very good radiation absorber, so you won't get problems from direct radiation.
I would totally buy the Enron egg for personal use but that is beside the point. And I still would have no means to recycle it, so I would make it a problem of future generations as well.
Of course coal isn't a solution, I am happy that nobody starts with ideas like liquifying it into oil. But I think nobody is disputing that.
Germans turn to balcony solar panels to save money
The problem with this --- it's not only bad for the environment, it's also bad for the economy.
Reliance on more expensive carbon based energy makes US industry less competitive.
Yet even in oil soaked Texas, renewables account for most new capacity being added to their electrical grid. Why? It's cheaper. Simple economics.
This is the current reality that you might want to check in on.
Preytending that renewables are winning based purely on economics is disingenuous. If it were true, things like this would be unnecessary:
https://apnews.com/united-states-presidential-election-9dfb1...
So even when the right has control of a large oil soaked state like Texas for decades, it's still all the left's fault?
Distort reality much?
The end of fossil fuels is inevitable. The supply is limited. "Drill baby drill" will only reach the end faster and cause more environmental damage for your kids to deal with.
This is the line Texan anti-renewable lobbyists are coming out with [1].
[1] https://www.theenergyalliance.com/research/the-end-of-texas-...
Texas is still building gas generators [1][2].
Renewables are cheaper, but on the margin. Their production remains low, and despite massive growth, won't going to rival whole-grid growth for at least a decade. (Growth + replacement takes us into the 2040s.) That means we need other power sources for decades to come. America went with gas, which makes sense–we have lots of it. China with coal for the same reason. (Europe, also gas, which doesn’t make sense, but they don’t want to do coal or nuclear and don't seem to be deeply thinking about this.)
In the long run we’ll probably be all solar with marginal wind, hydro and experimental sources. That will not happen in our lifetimes. Texas and Germany are prime examples of why simplifying our grid’s future to a single source is not only economically infeasible but also politically self defeating.
[1] https://www.power-eng.com/gas/calpine-affirms-plan-to-build-...
[2] https://www.powermag.com/new-gas-fired-power-plants-proposed...
In Germany this has been a major problem for many companies that invested to be greener and the costs were huge. It doesn't matter that 1kwh costs 10 cents less when you need to invest 100 millions to change your infrastructure.
- https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/konjunktur/insolvenzen-...
- https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/hohe-zinsen-und-energ...
- https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/hohe-energiekosten-li...
Not sure if VW, Bosch, Thyssenkrupp count, but they have been in the news for a year now...
- https://www.dw.com/en/is-german-industry-migrating-to-the-us...
- https://www.ft.com/content/bca7837a-6ac4-4ed1-ab73-18fbdfa5f...
- https://fortune.com/europe/2024/02/19/german-companies-pouri...
That's true, they didn't shut down the factories yet, they are just firing thousands of people and opening up / investing in the US :)
Honestly I find the goal of 100% renewables awesome. But take it easy, with Merkel we reached a very high percentage in a steady way - why not to proceed like that instead of getting crazy....
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/klima-energie/erneuerb...
Neither of them can be reached with coal/gas/other fossil fuels. In addition, having 100% renewables means that you have an entire society ready for it - from infra to consumers.
So, no, that's for me in no way an implementation detail like "I am just swapping A with B" otherwise I am pretty damn sure we could stop everything we're doing and mount solar panels everywhere to reach 100% renewables.
In principle I understand what you were trying to say, but I don't agree on the premise that they are just an implementation detail.
The better term would be 'sustainable'. What you want is to have 'sustainable' near zero emission, near zero Co2, safe energy production.
Renewables also misleading because by definition hunting wales for oil is 'renewable' but nobody would consider that 'sustainable'.
So to write legislation with a narrow viewpoint of 'renewable' as the goal, rather then the goal being reducing on emission and CO2, you are shooting yourself in the foot from the jump.
However, there is a very strong correlation between reaching those targets and the broad/accepted definition of renewables. Again, I understand you're trying to be more precise and all that, but in the broader language the connection is "renewables = reduction of CO2 in a sustainable way with solar panels, wind, etc etc".
EDIT: ok, I forgot, there would be the nuclear energy as well to reduce CO2, which is not really renewable (although most of it can be recycled it seems). You were right. I would still prefer 100% renewable (and have no burning fuels at all) but I would be happy to have a mix of renewable and nuclear to reduce emissions and still keep companies up and running (=cheap electricity).
https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2016/10/26948/
>Unfortunately, due to a failure to marshal significant public support for the nuclear side of the energy plan and the untimely occurrence of Watergate, the nuclear plans went largely unfulfilled after 1974.
What's not said in this article is that the NRC was created soon after this and it basically squashed all future developments.
The same thing is happening in Germany, they shut down their nuclear reactors and now they have the highest energy prices in Europe and are reliant on Russia.
France is leading the way with nuclear, everyone should copy them.
Them phasing out more nuclear than Germany over the last few years is quite a message.
But adopting one reactor as a standard design across all of Europe and building 100s would have lead an incredibly cheap decarbonisation for Europe.
Instead you literally had French and German energy minister conspiring to kill nuclear project and French political class fully willing to hand over all the 'we are so green and awesome' marketing to German. Despite France ACTUALLY being green.
Germany literally for 20 years market itself as being 'incredibly green' while burning coal at crazy rates, and they will continue for another decade.
And the CO2 isn't even the worst part, the coal dust being blown constantly blown all across central Europe is the worst part.
Maybe “leading the way” was not the right phrase WRT building, but they are an example of how nuclear energy can provide for an entire country with a relatively low number of plants. If we were actually allowed to build things like this in America we could do the same thing for very cheap and new reactor designs could be basically foolproof WRT safety.
What squashed future development was the cost of trying to make nuclear energy cost effective using reactor designs that were inherently unsafe.
Newer, inherently safe designs are now in the pipeline.
https://newatlas.com/energy/bill-gats-breaks-ground-first-us...
The light water designs proposed by industry in the past were inherently not safe. Making these designs reasonably safe was expensive.
Fukushima is the proof of what happens if this is not done.
Generally the way designs get approved in all engineering is by iteration. If you stop letting people build, it becomes basically impossible to improve designs.
The number of companies now promoting new, innovative, inherently safe nuclear reactor designs shows this is not true.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Wyoming-TerraPower-groundbreaking
https://c3newsmag.com/five-of-the-worlds-leading-small-modul...
https://www.inven.ai/company-lists/top-16-nuclear-energy-com...
Its crazy that before the NRC 100s of reactors were built, close to 0. And this isn't an accident.
> France is leading the way with nuclear, everyone should copy them.
Questionable. Sadly, the generation that build the nuclear fleet is gone, retired. The next generation of French statesmen fully bought in to the anti-nuclear believe and they viewed the nuclear fleet as a burden.
But they were so blessed that they were able to treat the nuclear fleet like 'the giving tree'. Doing all sorts of completely idiotic policies. The list is to long to get into here, but a few nice examples are.:
- Forcing the operator to sell baseload at incredibly cheap rates to fossil fuel companies and then when they realised that they actually needed it, the operator had to buy it back at market prices.
- Forcing them to invest in solar, and intermittent solar in the network actually makes the baseloads economics worse. So basically forcing them to make investments that don't make any economics sense what so ever.
- Voting the completely replace nuclear reactors but not actually having any even remotely serious plan to achieve it. Then to argue that plants don't need to be maintained as they are gone shut off anyway. Only to then realise that they had no fucking plan what so ever and that their delusional believe that solar/wind would being showing up out of know-where didn't come true. Only for this to lead to a huge maintenance backlog, taking many plants offline during a large energy crisis in Europe.
And French plants are notorious for low operational efficiency, ironically Germany was incredibly good at operating nuclear plants. The US in places is also really good.
So yes, France did something brilliant in the 70-80s but the next generation is basically just cursing on those accomplishments. Its beyond sad.
Why something like the Superphénix (or use a more standard design) couldn't have been branded 'European Standard Reactor' and a few iteration financed by EU budgets for nations in desperate need like Poland. No but at least they have a whole bunch of highways.
Trump already mentioned something like that a few days ago.
The guy is about making money. That's it.
Not that I'm defending the administration, but it'd be worth quoting that directly here, if such quote exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drill,_baby,_drill#:~:text=%22....
From my Swiss perspective, I am incredibly pissed that our political class in the 90s and early 2000s simply adopted the attitude that 'we can of course always import cheap energy from Germany or France' we don't need to do anything by ourself.
Building a single large new nuclear reactor between 90-2010 would have made us a major profitable exporter of energy instead of an importer. And with our large hydro storage we can even store extra baseload produced at night and sell it during peak.
What counts is greenhouse emissions per kilowatt-hour.
And Germany's grid is quite dirty in that regard. For example, the largely-nuclear-powered French grid emitted almost 10x less CO2eq per kilo watt hour in december.
December 2023: 382gCO2eq/kWh
December 2024: 372gCO2eq/kWh
Not really that impressive tbh.
So could also be just a less windy year - fact is coal is getting less. Without multi year data this is not too meaningful of a statistic.
And during all this and specially recently people had pretty high energy prices.
And during all this time huge amount of coal dust is still spread over central Europe.
You can most certainly change things faster then that.
First of all, not turning of almost 20% of electricity supply off simply because of some delusional misconception about nuclear energy.
My own quite conservative calculation show that they could have finished this whole transformation by now for far less money if they had simply replicated what France did decades earlier.