Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time
intellinews.com
intellinews.com
It reminds me of the Voyager probes that left the solar system half a dozen times, each time taking a different definition of what marks the edge of the solar system.
Anyways, we are now getting to sensible metrics, which is good.
Moving away from fossil fuels is a big task, these are the first signs that things are happening.
And it is not just because of the negativity bias. Things that work as they should don't make the news. I mean, take Ukraine and Poland, both European countries of a similar scale, one is at war, the other is doing well, guess the one that makes the news.
I'd say the only consistent supplier of good news is science and technology (with maybe a 50/50 ratio of good to bad), and sports (for the winning team). Geopolitics is almost exclusively bad news, economics is mostly bad, the good news are often agreements that conclude a stream of bad news, such as wars and economic crisis, and then we stop talking about the thing, because it now works as it should. And then, there are crimes and disasters, which are obviously bad.
If you have a good source for something that says otherwise, I'd be genuinely interested to see it. Not that I would probably change my opinion on renewables, since I personally think cutting pollution of the air I breathe is worth paying a little extra for, but I like to be informed nonetheless.
Renewables aren’t dispatchable, so the two aren’t comparable.
Any increase in renewables in a grid, beyond a small and insignificant fraction, requires a significant increase in dispatchable electricity generation to match.
Coal can load follow to a limited extent because steam can be vented and base load is very predictable.
Gas turbines are very dispatchable, and combined cycle gas turbine can load follow well.
The argument against renewables being cheaper than the other options is that there isn’t any example anywhere to date where renewables have gone and electricity has become cheaper.
It’s a fact that anywhere renewables have penetrated the market to any extent worth mentioning, electricity has become much more expensive.
Countries that haven’t conducted the renewables experiment haven’t experienced anywhere near the same rise in electricity prices.
Wind and solar, especially in a place like Australia which is extremely geographically dispersed, requires massive infrastructure investment to get the electricity to the grid.
Complete with the destruction of vast swaths of land through national parks, parks environmental types would have previously nailed themselves to trees to defend.
For an entire year, that year being 2025.
Also, yes, absolute generation from fossil fuels is declining quickly. The total generation is changing way more slowly than that share.
We have right to roam in nature here, which is quite rare across the world (and even compared to the few other countries that have something similar, the Swedish variant is stronger). I wouldn't trade that for anything.
Ummm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
At least according to the list, Americans work ten weeks more a year than their German counterpart.
I would bet everything that life, at least right now, is comfy. But I don't see it as remotely sustainable.
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/industrial-production-m...
Of course, stable is probably bad here. But it's not declining.
Onshore wind and solar is about £40-50
Offshore wind about £60
Gas about £120
That’s generation cost, before subsidies and levees
But we still haven’t put in an emergency legislation to make it easier to build cheaper energy.
But those headlines are about the step where you find out who won these auctions because that's when that magic price number is known, wind power for £68.35 per MWh or whatever.
Going from the fun headline to actual contract signing in which there's a legal promise to actually try to make electricity and get paid, takes several months. After they've signed they begin the actual work, which still includes planning not just the mechanical aspects.
Just building a solar farm might take 12 months, and wind farms are often slower.
AR6 took place in 2024, you'd have read headlines back then about some excellent solar farms, getting paid about £50 per MWh. First, those are 2012 prices, for comparison reasons they choose a base year and then calculate inflation adjusted pricing in reality but I bet that £50 figure was what you saw in a headline, of course the solar farm didn't exist in 2012, so £50 per MWh was never the real price.
More importantly though, those solar farms weren't built in 2024. The plan when the bids went in, said 2026/27 for some and 2027/28 for the majority. A few of those AR6 solar farms (by no means the majority) were live in time for the July sunshine, in 2026. But you've already read headlines about AR7, and like I said maybe even AR8.
A big boost in practice is home install. A big business can take six years to do contract paperwork, get something signed off, build it and then commission it. A home owner is angry after six weeks without work done. Where are my fucking panels? You were going to install solar panels, make it happen! So lots of individuals and small businesses which own a building with a roof installed a few panels, they might add up to only 5kW each but if a million people do that it's 5GW of nameplate electricity generation, a sizeable fraction of UK usage for several hours per day.
The discussion about fossil fuels vs renewables is a bit different within countries which produce fossil fuels than within those that don't.
Just because it was the right decision doesn't mean there are not downsides.
Edit: there was never any chance of Germany invading Ukraine then/joining Russia on any invasion.
Politics often are about the unintended consequences. Often they are also unforeseen.
There are consequences for it that though.
However it is still correct. If Germany had joined Russia (and got away with it!), there is every reason to think the pipeline would still be flowing.
Of course if they had done that other countries would likely object and so we can go on and on with what could have been (for starters the propaganda would be all different). There are no easy answers and we can never know what would have happened.
The former Warsaw Pact countries are aware capitulating to Putin would mean they're next, so they're vocal against EU surrender. Further, if East Europe gets threatened, West Europe knows it'll have a mother of a refugee crisis - even if Ukraine falls they'll have one.
Anyway, that's all to say currently USA's geopolitical interest seems to be "Trump Tower Moscow", and Germany is not going to go along with that.
However we can still discuss what would have happened if they did.
This was spun as a Russian decision, but western countries were clearly trying to force Germany's hand.
The gas was never cheap, either; apart from the money spent now to restrain the military buildup and invasion it financed, even at the height of supplies it was much higher price than China is paying, a price sustained by Russia using military force and more to restrain other (Asian) countries from supplying to Europe.
(This was obvious to everyone, right? A single majority supplier nation state charging a cheap price out of the kindness of their heart? No, of course not; neither cheap nor kind. It was a monopoly, built on blood.)
it's a little rich to accuse them of playing games with gas after the stunt Canada pulled and most especially after a western partner subsequently blew up the pipeline and blamed it on Russia.
Clearly certain western allies decided that Germany couldnt be trusted to make its own decisions about where Germany gets its energy.
If you want to see their approach to maintenance while prices and needs are high, watch them put oil refineries back in operation days after drone hits.
During that time Nord Stream was blown up.
The point is moot, since Putin has offered multiple times to open the remaining intact pipe:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/putin-urges-germany-...
And the broken pipes can be repaired, as was determined in the LLoyds lawsuit recently.
I'm not saying that reopening would be reliable, but it would be one diversification away from US and Qatar dependencies. The US just cut the EU off from Qatar gas.
Something is wrong with Germany. Go to Our World InData's Electricity Production per Capita page and have a look at Germany, Vietnam, and say Israel.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-ge...
Why aside? Germany had to burn gas and coal to compensate for the nuclear reactors they shut down, (and to import electricity from France which didn't shut down the reactors). Germany could've weathered the transition much better, and suffered without Russian gas much less had they not shut down their reactors.
Every First World country seems to be following the path from industrialisation, through deindustrialisation (which, when I was at school, was still called ‘structural change’), to a service-based society. It seems to be the price we pay for economic prosperity and cheap goods - and it is not the first time in Germany this happens.
Are you sure? Jobs are no longer in industrial companies, and that isn't where the growth is. However when I look at the numbers I see heavy industry output is still growing.
Robots are the answer to reindustrialize the developed world, but that necessarily keeps industry smaller than services.
Factory work isn't generally physically demanding, more tedious & repetitive than anything.
It's air conditioned, generally pays a lot more than minimum wage and has benefits.
You have a job description, the standard operations manual, and you operate the machine that does most of the work.
All complicated work is either outsourced to machines, enterprise systems, or architects/chief engineers that setup the whole system on day 1.
all day 2 operations are mundane blue collar work, just like warehouse work or fast-food work with no viable path for career growth
It's a political choice by our own politicians.
How? China is actively moving up the value chain, into EVs, batteries, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, etc. China is not abandoning industry.
> It's a political choice by our own politicians.
No, it's mostly how our economic system, how capitalism works. Production goes where production is cheap. You’ll never be able to produce goods in Germany at such low costs as in China or other third-world countries without eroding workers’ rights and thereby creating a new lower class.
But that would turn off the spigot of cheap goods.....
The main reason Germany was so hooked on gas wasn't because Hans Müller needed to run his Bosch washer-dryer and heat his home to a comfortable 24°C.
It was because natural gas is an great source of hydrogen, which in turn serves as feedstock for the production of all kinds of chemicals used in industry.
That was the engine of Germany's industry, not just energy. Energy has a whole spectrum of solutions - not the case with hydrogen.
Oh my, where ever else will we be able to find hydrogen, the (checks notes) tenth most common element on our planet ?
No, there's actually plenty of hydrogen, what people who say they "need" methane to make hydrogen actually mean is that they don't want to pay what this really costs.
Maybe Porsche can survive by going independent, downsizing drastically, and selling 911's to the nostalgic faithful.
Had great hopes for the ID.Polo but from what I've seen it's just another vehicle that gets really expensive for not that much of a car...
For the remainder, the wage costs - more specifically - the overhead costs are the true killer. If you want to pay someone 80k a year in Germany, the actual costs are closer to 100k a year in purely salary overhead costs, not to mention the other bureaucratic overhead in Germany
There are thousands of such companies in Germany, called Energy-Intensive Industries.
Think chemicals, mining, materials, paper pulp, glass, ceramics etc.
Stats available here: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Indus... (unfortunately only available in German)
The challenge is to nake renewables reliable accross several days .
This is the most expensive part for needed storage and transmission lines ....
The advantage of that type of storage is that it scales very well. Batteries are cool when space is an issue. But when it is not, digging out a hole and insulating it is surprisingly effective per unit of work stored there.
Sand/rock heat storage is for industrial and utility scale application, not your house.
> You can also use water for storage, but again you have the issue needing a tank (and water is a drowning hazard, plus the worry about leaks...)
Tank heat pump water heaters are available and can already do load shifting on a daily basis (using off peak cheaper and cleaner electricity). I have one and it works great, and I guarantee it isn't a drowning hazard.
There are versions of these systems that can store enough heat to heat a house, not just provide hot water at the tap.
I've seen them for a house as well. (when the utility offers a large discount for power used overnight - 40 years ago my local coop was trying to sell my parents on this, but since we had natural gas heat it wasn't worth it) To hold more than a days worth of heat you need a lot of rocks.
Heap pump water heaters work, but you need a large one to hold a days worth of hot water (40 years ago my family had 200 gallons of hot water storage - the utility gave my parents a discount on water heating because we only heated water at night, we ran out of hot water once that I remember). If you want to store more water than a days worth of use then you need more storage. This can become a drowning hazard if we are talking about a couple weeks worth.
Can you point at a residential scale rock heat storage system that is available? I saw one startup in the UK trying this several years ago, but can't find them now, and haven't seen anything since.
> Heap pump water heaters work, but you need a large one to hold a days worth of hot water
Mine (for a household of 4) is 45 gallons - small by US standards - but we keep it at a high temperature (along with a mixing valve) to get higher "virtual" hot water capacity during peak usage hours. It serves us fine for daily usage, but we also have efficient flow taps and showers throughout the house so that helps too.
> If you want to store more water than a days worth of use then you need more storage
I don't think it makes sense to store hot water for days if the goal is to minimize energy costs. The standby losses would be pretty significant, even with a very well insulated tank.
If the goal is resilience to a grid outage, it makes more sense to have a solar PV array + batteries that you can use to run the heat pump water heater, or have a backup gas-powered heater.
But low grade heat cannot efficiently drive a heat engine to produce other, more useful and transferable versions of energy, like electricity. For that you need "high grade" heat.
The reason is, heat engines do not operate on heat. They operate on heat flow. You must have a high temperature side and a low temperature side, and you extract energy by taking heat out of the high side and injecting it to the low side, through various processes. By thermodynamics, this process has hard efficiency limits of around 35%, with that efficiency heavily affected by the delta between the hot and cold side.
The "low" heat side is often a great source of low grade heat, for industrial or communal purposes, but cannot be used to run an efficient heat engine. It's already "used up" essentially.
The efficiency of any heat engine is bounded by the Carnot cycle. In simplified form, it depends on the temperature differential between the cold and the hot parts. So if your hot part is at 300C (572 Kelvin), and the cold part is at 30C (300 Kelvin) then the absolutely best possible efficiency is around (572-300)/572*100% = 47%.
You see that it quickly becomes inefficient as the differential goes down. E.g. if you use 90C to store the heat, then the maximum efficiency is just 17%.
So in that regard heat is very useful in producing energy. But converting directly from heat to energy? Not so much as far as I know.
The amount of energy needed to test things is just intuitively huge. Boiling one liter of water takes the equivalent amount of energy as lifting 34 metric tons up a meter. Or to translate it to human scale: the same as walking a vertical climb of 1000m with a weight of 34kg.
A single 1/4 beef hamburger emits 7-12 kg of carbon[1]. Compared to ~1.5kg of carbon driving your car 3 miles[2].
Not telling you to go full vegetarian, but I'm personally far less interested in a beef product unless you're going to guarantee its an extremely expert prepared steak. Most beef is mediocre.
1 - https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
2 - https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
It would be bad enough with all the burping and farting but at least we would not destroy the rain forest so we could produce more soy for fodder
People drive cars, and people eat burgers. Is that the context you were looking for?
We've identified two ways to reduce carbon production. 1) reduce production per human. 2) reduce humans.
Only the first one is being argued for here. Conflating it with the second is just a confusion.
The invisible hand of the free market will take care of the rest. If red beef consumes too many resources then it will be too expensive to consume. Simple as that.
Unfortunately fossil fuels make a lot of money and people are hungry for more, so we can't do anything about it really. We can only shift blame and distract to pretend we care.
Beef is too expensive for many Europeans because GDP per capita/standards of living are declining in many European countries. People in East Asia, the Middle East, Oceania and South America still eat plenty of beef too.
Subbed pork, poultry, and eggs for the most part, some fish but that's not particularly cheap either.
Ah, I see, your graph says CO2-equivalent, not CO2. It's the methane.
And it seems here its about 1/4 carbon per kg of food as beef:
>IE a chicken filet is about the carbon impact of 8oz of milk.
They said cheese not milk. Note that it takes more than 1 unit of milk to produce 1 unit of cheese. From this source I found, they estimate ~10 input units of milk per output unit of cheese [1].
Assuming both of these are true, and assuming that the cheese making process produces no carbon, then a chicken filet would have the same carbon impact as .8oz of cheese or roughly a single slice of cheese.
The cheese making process does produce carbon (e.g. heating the milk) but it also produces whey as a valuable byproduct.
Nature needs animals as well. In fact it is essential.
Agricultural reform or innovation is certainly an avenue to explore; but this strange obsession with "stop eating red meat" is a bit too much.
Most of the people pushing it are doing so because they believe it's immoral to eat meat, so they'll latch onto whatever excuse they can to try to stop people.
That most red meat is very co2 expensive compared to getting the proteins from other sources is a relevant argument for many of us, and not a particularly 'strange obsession' for those of us caring about reducing our co2 footprint.
Grazing animals are part of a cycle. Any methane from digestion is broken down in the atmosphere and bound again to plant life and recycled. This is vastly different from drilling rock and letting out new carbon into the atmosphere at a drastic rate.
That goes to my second point; if you keep cows (or other animals) and feed them grain, and use artificial fertilizer and add other fossil-fuel dependent machinery on top of that - yes then that becomes a problem.
But it is mainly a problem if e.g. the population of cows drastically increases. In Europe and North America, it has decreased since at least the 50s; increasing in other parts of the world.
So regardless of the downvotes - "we have to stop eating red meat due to co2" is way too simplistic.
Even ignoring methane gas releases the production of red meat causes higher emissions of co2 than comparable plant-based proteins. These emissions originate from feed crop production, synthetic and organic fertilizer application, manure storage, land-use changes like deforestation for pastures, on-farm energy use, and meat processing and transport. As you see most of these are 'running costs', and reducing global meat consumption would reduce emissions.
The whole of life, plants and animals - depend on the "cutsy" parts.
Basic atmospheric science.
Anyway, feel free to make an actual argument. Both of the claims above of is contrary to established science, so you must say something more than 'you are wrong'.
Methane traps 81 to 84 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, but drops to 28 to 30 times more heat over a 100-year period.
Cows create methane (or rather the microbes in their bellies) from co2 and hydrogen, they do not 'capture' it from somewhere. More cows -> more methane, which heats the world more than the co2 used to create that methane would have heated the world.
- healthier
- tasty
- cheaper
- a small contribution to keeping the planet livable for their children
- as a sign of respect for $DEITY/the planet/...
Many people will see some sense in at least one of the above arguments at one point in life.
I would never argue for banning red meat as it will certainly backfire and end up counterproductive.
1. It's not the true Carbon or CO2 figure. It's weighted for other greenhouse gases. That's kind of an issue because methane naturally breaks down (into CO2 and water) over time. The methane issue comes up all the time in such estimates (eg leaks in natural gas pipelines) where methane is a worse greenhouse gas but temporary (7-12 years) and CO2 is essentially forever (until sequestration or photosynthesis);
2. Production method really matters here. American beef, for example, is primarily grain fed. That grain requires fertilizer (more natural gas) and distribution. Australian beef, for example, is largely fed on natural grasses and vegetation, typically until the last 60-120 days where it's transitioned to grain for marbling. American cattle is also heavily fed on corn, which really shouldn't exist in the quantities it does;
3. Ecosystems are complex. One of the big causes of the dust bowl, for example, was the destruction of the great bison herds. Replacing the natural grasses with crops like wheat was just the last straw. The point of the bison is that they're heavy, like up to 2000+ lb heavy, and they leave deep hoof prints on the plains. Water collects there when it rains and feeds cgrasses and the aquifers.
This has been backed up elsewhere too. China has had long projects to stop the desertification of the Gobi and spent a ton on planting trees with varied successes. You know what did work? Horses. They released horses and the same thing happened. Horse hoof prints allowed water to collect and grasses to grow and spread. Grasses, as it turned out, were key to stopping desertification, not trees.
So the point is that certain ecosystems need large herd herbivores to survive. So if you got rid of cattle entirely, what other second order effects would there be?
More practically, people just arne't going to give up meat. Sorry. Unless it become sprice prohibitve (as beef arguably is rapidly becoming now).
The carbon cycle is basic scientific fact yet confidently ignored by people who hate things like logging and meat.
The problem is we have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not too much of various assorted carbon-based compounds on the planet.
If humans stopped eating meat, the only way to reduce the amount of carbon that animals “emit” would be to kill all of them and bury their carcasses underground where they can’t decompose (as that would turn them into CO2).
Burning oil introduces new carbon into the cycle, animals existing does not.
It's a topic that's way more complex than you seem to think. Climate scientists did not miss the simple fact that all carbon in a cow originates from the atmosphere. That's understood. But there's all the other stuff.
For the record I'm not vegan or even vegetarian. Attacking vegans for their beliefs is poor formimo
Scientists didn't miss this; there's just a lot of grifters trying to use people's desire to fight climate change to get them to support unrelated issues.
Doing an appeal to authority is poor form.
The amount of atmospheric methane also very obviously isn't fixed. Increases in production result in a higher concentration of methane, since it takes ~a decade to break it down. As long as you keep increased output of methane, the baseline concentration will also stay increased.
Your point about "kill[ing] all of them and bury[ing] their carcasses underground where they can’t decompose" also shows that you really don't understand that 1) different animals produce different greenhouse gases that may have weaker or stronger effects, and 2) that we're actively causing far more cattle to exist than would without us continuously breeding them.
The only way I can see your points making sense is if you're literally approaching the topic from an absolutist binary perspective (as in, "either we keep going exactly as before, or we have to literally kill all animals, no middle ground possible").
It is basic scientific fact and denying it is the same level of ignorance as denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
You don't even seem to understand that the amount of cattle changes when humans breed more cattle.
I live close to a large meat processing facility, and it appears to be quite an energy intensive operation from the outside. Never been inside though, so I can't say for sure. But transporting live cattle, feed, water, slaughter, freeze, freeze+transport all might be pretty carbon heavy.
Wild bison live 15-20 years.
Cattle raised for beef ~18 months.
That's beyond the natural carbon cycle an existing ruminant population.
Also horses, in my reading of the data, actually have less of a methane impact. They have a different digestive system entirely.
On the methane point, methane, yes, is a greenhouse gas that breaks down over years (~12 years). But has far worse impact on climate while its in the atmosphere.
We have dogs and cats as pets and we eat cows and pigs (in Western countries). As if cows and pigs didn't also have personalities, memories, parental bonds, the ability to feel pain. It's a mass wilful ignorance.
What's the difference between us and animals? I would argue that it's our ability to take ethical decisions and not inflict suffering even if it goes against our base instincts.
Unless you decide to go on a full mineral diet.
Plants don't cry out for days when their children are taken away from them. Plants don't remember your face, come up to you and want attention. Plants don't scream when they are killed (no matter what some edgy research shows).
Or to put it more simply, would you feel bad pulling a plant out the ground? I would imagine probably not. Would you feel bad pulling the lever and watching as a pig is lowered into a gas chamber? Or while slitting a cow's throat? I would imagine probably yes (hence why slaughterhouse employees have so many mental health issues and there is such high turnover).
That's just a random line you have drawn.
> Plants don't cry out for days when their children are taken away from them.
Plants do feel pain and react to their surrounding. They are more primitive creatures though.
> would you feel bad pulling a plant out the ground?
Yes, I wouldn't do it and I am from a country where pulling an olive tree is illegal (with a jail sentence).
That said, plants do have defense mechanisms, of course. But that's not the same thing as pain or emotions.
In any case, generally strawberry pickers aren't traumatised in the same way as slaughterhouse workers.
Even if one were to view animal and plant lives as equivalent, around 40% of all crops are grown to feed animals.
Needless to say, it's a lossy conversion. Calorie-wise it's far less efficient for an animal to eat the food and for us to eat the animal, than for us to just eat the plant directly.
So if you really want to reduce un-necessary plant deaths/suffering, then ultimately eating less meat is the way to do it.
we don't know that for sure. just to be safe don't eat plants or plant based products too. Eat dirt, that's 100% safe and also feed your children dirt too. The evolution would do the rest and rid your genes from the gene pool
Thank you Sajith Dilshan
not accusing, but in case any commenter is going down a slippery slope: what produces the most harm? people! why dont we just kill ourselves instead of cutting out beef? vegetarian options have never been more accessible, and increasingly so
its certainly regional and cultural in the US. there are many towns and cities i visit where its quite difficult to find menu items without meat. i expect it will change over time
I always find it incredible some people equating animals with people. How do you not see the difference in human range of emotions, ability to do science, technology, arts, etc. Do you perhaps live in the city and don't really have any real contact to animal?
That's not to discount human lives, we all have worth aside from our abilities to create. But I don't think there's a sensible non-arbitrary hard line you can draw to separate humans from all other animals.
And if you agree we shouldn't eat humans who aren't fully functional, then the line is obviously not being drawn at capacity, it's being drawn at the fact we are members of the same species. In my view that's not an ethical argument, given animals share almost all of the same things (apart from capacity as mentioned), that make someone a human.
I used to think the same as you, btw actually. But in end it came down to 'because I'm human': when you start to break it down and engage with it that's not a very strong argument. Especially when we are killing animals ultimately for pleasure, not survival.
We are breeding them, bringing them into existence to meet the demand for meat, keeping them in small cages, and then killing them.
It's not about anthropomorphizing. But if you love animals, it's hard to justify conditions where they can't even turn around, give birth in their own feces, and are then gassed. I'm sure, even without anthropomorphizing, you know that animals have emotions, memories, bonds, etc. They feel these horrible conditions intensely.
Ultimately consuming meat is causing those animals to be raised, kept in poor conditions, and killed. Those conditions are deliberately hidden from the public as the meat industry knows that demand would suffer massively if they weren't.
Anyway, thanks for engaging on the subject and for the discussion. That's much more than most people do and I appreciate it.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-...
>Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon
Forest fires are a natural part of the life cycle of many forested regions - particularly in Canada and the Western US.
Suppressing all fires as soon as possible means that dead, dry plant matter continues to build up for decades longer than it naturally would, creating a "tinderbox" effect where eventually you have vastly more intense and destructive forest fires than would typically have occurred if you'd just left nature alone in the first place. And because these fires have so much more concentrated fuel they also burn hotter and can make the recovery of the forest in the area take far longer to come back.
The correct answer is to regularly perform controlled burns in areas near human settlement and to mostly leave things alone in areas away from it. Much of Canada's land area is literally uninhabited and dozens if not hundreds of miles from the nearest road, much less actual settlement.
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Additionally: Strongly discourage new construction in the Wildland-Urban Interface (aka: low density settlement in a wooded setting, your typical picture-esque rural mountain home - that wood is meant to burn one day, taking your cute house with it). Beyond that, strict building codes for whatever does get built there + ordinances for maintaining the space around the home to reduce risk.
Although to a significant extent, property insurers are basically already taking on this role in recent years. I have family out in the hills in CO, their insurance rates are multiple times that of their property taxes and they are now quite strict on evaluating properties in terms of risk-mitigation. And failure to adhere to all of what they want to see means you're getting dropped by the insurer and you will have a very hard time getting a different company to pick you up.
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Anyway, as another poster noted: The forest grows back and recaptures all that carbon in a few decades, making those fires basically carbon-neutral.
Probably impractical at scale though..
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However, this isn't addressing the other problem: Fire is an actual part of the ecosystem in those areas. Various plant/tree species are adapted around it. Some require fire for their seeds to germinate, others need the cleared ground that results (and their seeds can survive the fire), others rely on it to keep other species out with adaptations that make them much less likely to burn in a moderate intensity/natural fire (and so they survive while an invading species doesn't).
Fire also opens up areas and causes natural forest succession - which creates an environment for more than just the biggest trees to exist for a few decades. Etc, etc, etc.
You simply can't have the natural environment out there exist as it is evolved to function without fire in the long-term.
Sure, get rid of factory farms and CAFO's, but I see nothing wrong with raising animals on family farms where they eat a nutritious diet in line with what they evolved to eat.
Grass for cows, pasture and bugs for poultry, silvopasture for pigs. Anyone who wants to go vegan for ethical or environmental reasons is fine, but I hate this idea that all of us have to fall in line with your crazy ideas.
I'm just sharing my personal choices based on what I've learned.
What could be more American than that? :)
The reality is that the only way to feed people's insatiable demand for meat is to use factory farms. You can't factory farm without causing suffering to animals, and you can't factory farm without use of antibiotics, etc.
Also you say, 'evolved to eat'. Do you think people were eating meat every day throughout human history? This started after WWII with mass agriculture and factory farming. That's why so many cultures have beans and rice as their primary dish: it's a perfectly balanced protein.
If 'evolved to eat' is your primary concern then actually you should be eating meat like once or twice a month, max. Evolution doesn't happen in less than a century.
Yes people were eating meat most of the human history, because farming was invented much much later. If you have ever been in a temperate forest which covered most of the area of current Europe, northern America and northern Asia you would notice there isn't really much to eat besides wild game.
Me either. It just means beef will become about 10x more expensive in places that don't have so much grassland or pastureland. Which is almost all of the places. You cool with that?
We'll expand the herd, and do mob grazing to maintain our species rich grasslands and our SSSI fields, while also providing the best beef to those that appreciate it, family first of course.
Grass fed and pasture fed, are not good enough. The cattle need a wide variety of food, which starts with more than grass or a monoculture pasture.
https://www.merkur.de/reise/reduzieren-sollte-besser-reisen-...
If we could change culture and the global diet, there are many exciting low carbon foods being promoted, especially in aquaculture. Shellfish and seaweed do not rely on artificial fertilizer, fresh water, or people burning down the rain forest.
If you compare e.g. with a country like Sweden or France they have been free from fossil fuels for electricity since the build outs in the 70s-80s.
Also Germany is an importer of significant electricity (e.g nuclear power from France).
But due to a stagnant economy and no increase in electricity demand - yes, I guess this milestone is now passed...
"Renewable alternatives cover half of 40% of fossil fuel demand" would be more accurate. Still a win, but it's not "overtaking fossil fuels" by any definition.
Also on other unrelated news German economy is rocketing to the bottom, their industry is dying with thousands of layoffs, closing factories, and complains on energy prices and they can't even maintain their rail and road networks for the first time since forever. The signs of decline are not even signs anymore they are bright neon signs. But at least we are taxing cows farting. While china is steamrolling ahead and we are regulated to death by bureaucrats.
People always blame German politics, but German management is as responsible if not more responsible for the decline. They simply made bad management decisions for decades and they didn't see the future coming.
"The world's largest automotive supplier has decided against producing its own battery cells despite calls from EU politicians to do exactly that. Bosch said the investment would probably never pay off."
https://www.dw.com/en/bosch-says-battery-cells-are-too-expen...
The importance of BEV for China goes well beyond long-term concerns for climate change. For China the most important are the immediate geopolitical aspects of BEV. Every Chinese BEV in China is driving using domestic electricity and is not dependent on imported oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacca_dilemma
"The Malacca dilemma is a strategic vulnerability for the People's Republic of China due to its heavy reliance on the strait of Malacca, a critical maritime choke point connecting the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea."
"The United States is viewed within Chinese strategic analysis as a potential threat to maritime energy flows through the Strait of Malacca. In the event of a conflict, particularly over Taiwan, the United States could interdict oil shipments to China by disrupting maritime routes. China has expressed concern that U.S. naval forces operating near the Strait of Malacca could obstruct critical petroleum shipments, effectively cutting off vital imports. U.S. maritime strategy has included options for restricting China's access to key sea lanes through the use of attack submarines and surface ships."
Except for downplaying the problems or saying they have to suffer?
Mine is re-shore all industry so that products are made according to environmental, health & safety standards. Deploy a mix of renewable and also nuclear power.
"The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations."
People need jobs and a functioning economy to live.
This thread started with the GGGP talking about the decline of Germany's economy contrasted by the meteoric rise of China.
GGP states it's capitalism's fault.
GP says even if Germany disappeared from the face of the earth the current emission levels wouldn't even notice.
My parent asked why GP was downplaying or ignoring and asked for a solution.
I provided one.
Quoting Marx is not a solution. One of the current largest polluting countries was founded in part according to Marxist ideas. Russia under the Soviets gave us Chernobyl and Lake Karachay they also continued to hunt whales far in excess of their international agreements well into the 1980s.
"As others exited the whaling industry, the Soviets, alongside the Japanese, helped reduce the world’s whales from imperiled to nearly extinct, doing the hard work of an annihilation that flew in the face of economic rationality. The Soviets were able to do this in part because of a planned economy that resisted market forces."
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/history-of-sovie...
So no, your economic ideology has nothing to do with your ecological ideology.
What is your solution?
You’re 178 years too late. "Reshoring" was a pipe dream then, it is even more of a pipe dream now.
> What is your solution?
What makes you think there is a solution?
Except for really really really wanting there to be one?
North Sea oil and gas are long past its prime, Norwegian supply is already nearly as expensive as LNG shipped from half the world away. The ideal gas station is Siberia, but that is what it is currently.
So, dunno, what's left, the Arctic? Frack the polar bears?
I don't want to become china obviously, I love the environment especially in my village. But the 'green' craze is not it. It's just a scam to extract even more money that will go to friends and family of the various parasites we have as leaders. We were and still are the best in nuclear energy, we have infinite amounts of fossil fuels, and Europe contributes almost nothing to global warming, even if we removed the entire continent then the amount of air/sea pollution would drop by no more than 2%. And crippling our feat because the sheep fell for one more 'global warming' scam is not something I'm OK with.
For 40 years now we have increasingly richer wolves screaming global warming will kill us all in a year (while they fly on private jets to buy a coffee and have 9 seaside villas each) and increasingly more stupid sheep that enable them (and are poorer and more sad every single year). The temperatures are normal, that's how it has always been. And if they are not, me destroying the economy and civilization of my country is not going to stop that. You can try and gather cow farts though. I'm sure that will 'save' the environment.
German rail has been an under-invested in mess since reunification, it's a long slide not a recent one. They are finally investing the kind of amounts in it they need to, to actually revive it to what it should be. It's going to be a long road to actually get there, of course.
Paywall but a decent read on that note: https://www.ft.com/content/db75e347-b13b-4753-8130-6301bb55c...
https://www.dw.com/en/high-electricity-prices-a-threat-to-ge...
In other words it's been approximately 2.5 years since prices recovered. If Germany industry can be irrecoverably damaged by 3 years of high power bills, maybe there were deeper issues.
Not a long time ago I've seen a post arguing based on the data [1] that renewables are irrelevant and should not be taken seriously and fossils will the main source for the lifetime.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
Still a long ways to go regardless, but much less bleak. And also, exponentially growing deployments of wind and solar are harder to spot on this 2-year old graph which goes only up to 2024.
> Primary energy is based on the substitution method and measured in terawatt-hours.
Isn't a lot of energy used for heating, not work?
I've seen plans to run an engine in your furnace, thus creating both electric (at 20-30%, and capturing the rest as heat to the house. I've never seen this in the real world and experts who have looked as those systems said they won't enter a building that has one using that design. (it is possible to make a design they would trust, but they haven't seen any)
The challenge in heating is industrial heat, which is much hotter. Can't do that with heat pumps (yet?)
Even without those, the continued decrease in solar costs means that there's a decent chance that plain old resistive heating will become viable at some point in the 2040s.
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-source-bar...
For instance, if you just go by the number of joules in an electric car's battery versus the number of joules in a gasoline car's tank with the same range, you'll see that a 'normal' electric car gets around 15 kWh/100km whereas even a rather efficient gas car needs something more like 50kWh/100km. That's because gas combusion loses gigantic amounts of energy to heat and sound.
If you want to talk about 'total energy consumption' and compare solar/wind against fossil fuels, you should count the amount of energy in the sunlight that hits the surface of the solar panel, or the amount of wind energy hitting the turbine blade, rather than the amount of energy they deliver to the grid.
This undoubtedly explains why the current US administration is openly hostile to it.
The good news is that batteries are deployed at almost the same scale as solar now on grids world wide. They can respond in more or less real-time to huge fluctuations in supply and demand and smooth out peaks and dips in those.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/live/fifteen_min... Anyone is free to compare France and Germany here.
Ember Energy: Batteries and demand flexibility are ready to scale across the EU - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/batteries-and-deman... - June 24th, 2026 ("The EU battery fleet is projected to grow fourfold, from 37 GW in 2025 to 178 GW by 2030. As this growth unfolds, batteries reduce the need for regular gas backup. By 2030, EU batteries could deliver in a single hour over 80% of the power that all EU gas power plants combined can generate in the same period, up from about 20% in 2025.")
Largest battery storage in Germany set for partial commissioning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104584 - July 2026 (0 comments)
Germany's solar installations drop while new battery storage hits record - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019046 - May 2026 (8 comments)
What's happening in Hungary's power grid? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154001 - August 2026 (0 comments)
Hungary to shut down sole nuclear plant as Danube falls to record low - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145531 - August 2026 [dupe]
EU considers emergncy meeting as nuclear shutdown leaves HU facing energy crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131244 - August 2026 (1 comment)
How Hungary became the best at solar [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49125682 - July 2026 (1 comment)
Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49120120 - July 2026 (231 comments)
France powers down several nuclear reactors due to extreme heat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899232 - July 2026 (19 comments)
Europe's extreme heat is shutting down power plants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48697170 - June 2026 (2 comments)
Commercial nuclear generation is incompatible with a rapidly warming planet due to cooling demands.
Europe's summer heat has broken the Bell curve - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49158483 - August 2026
Bloomberg: Europe’s Key Rivers Are Drying Up as Extreme Heat Impact Widens - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-02/europe-s-... | https://archive.today/tVpQJ - August 2nd, 2026
> Europe’s biggest rivers, including the Rhine and Danube, are drying up after a series of heat waves, disrupting the transport of goods and boosting freight costs. Soaring temperatures are curbing power generation at riverside reactors, pushing up energy prices and straining Eastern European economies. The river disruptions are becoming a test of how quickly the region can adapt infrastructure to a climate where extreme low water is likely to be increasingly common.
Bloomberg: Europe’s Endless Heat Waves Imperil Once Reliable Power Sources - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-01/europe-s-... | https://archive.today/EvSSS - August 1st, 2026
> A series of heat waves has weakened some of Europe’s most historically reliable sources of electricity, forcing the continent to lean more heavily on imported fossil fuels and variable renewable energy. France’s river-cooled nuclear plants have suffered a record amount of heat-related outages this summer, and hydroelectric plants in the Alps and Nordic region have been hobbled by hot, dry weather. The heat-related strains coincide with a surge in natural gas and coal prices, and the disruptions are poised to push power prices even higher, leaving Europeans facing steeper electricity bills.
Well it's good that Germans chose coal over nuclear!
There's no technical reason why the reactors in question could not have kept running:
> "Due to the weather conditions and to comply with regulations on [cooling water] discharges, and thus to protect the environment," reactors at the Golfech, Bugey and Chooz plants, located on the banks of the Garonne, Rhône and Meuse rivers respectively, have been shut down, the EDF energy group told Agence France-Presse.
> The measure is an environmental protection requirement to avoid discharging too much hot water into rivers already warming from the heatwave. Power plants critical to the country's electricity production use river water to cool their reactors, which heats the water that is then released back into the river.
> The Economy Ministry on Saturday issued an exemption to the temperature limits for the heating of the Rhône around the Bugey plant "to ensure the security of the power grid," valid until July 20.
Similarly, all industrial processes of heat rejection, including data centers, could use closed cycle cooling, but they don't, because it's more expensive to install and operate.
That affects ~0.5% of the yearly production in France, it's not a "primary weakness", it's the opposite, it's so low of a problem that the state simply doesn't care enough to fix it.
And since the poster didn't knew that, I'm not sure the cost analysis holds up.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2026.2...
> […] He has researched and published significantly in Life-Cycle Analyses, Life-Cycle Costing, energy, risk, Lean and other areas. […]
* https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/jan.emblemsvag
> Everyone jokes about the 20/20 hindsight of cost management. In Life-Cycle Costing, Jan Emblemsvag proposes to do something about it. Here's a new approach to life cycle costing that brings activity-based costing, risk, and uncertainty into the forefront. You'll focus on future costs and learn how you can perform any type of cost management activity better than before by introducing uncertainty into models and exploiting them to the max.
* https://www.wiley.com/en-us/shop/general-introductory-accoun...
Renewables also occasionally don't work as well, whether during the night or when the wind isn't blowing (before you retort with oh, but what about batteries, well, those would equally apply to reactors, in which case your original point is irrelevant).
I wonder if they had maintained their nuclear infrastructure, if that would have held back renewable build-out, because of economics.
Closing down nuclear plants while you keep burning coal is not a good decision, no matter how you look at it: deaths due to pollution (in Germany and downwind countries), deaths due to mining, economic costs, etc. We will also see in the future what affect all the extra CO2 that is being emitted. Even now, I just read that Germany ranks 8th globally for the amount of coal they burn. The people who made the decisions to close nuclear plants while they still burn coal are responsible for all that.
To buy coal?
Germany has 15.4 GW of hard coal generation, and 14.7 GW of lignite, for a total of 30.1 GW:
* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
In 2010, before the shutdowns started, it had 21.5 GW of nuclear.
So if all the other rollouts (renewables, etc) had stayed the same, but the shutdown of nuclear and coal was swapped, Germany could have reduced its emission generation capacity by an extra 66%. (Focusing mainly on coal, since that is (AIUI) the worst of the carbon emitters.)
Secondly, energy != electricity. Coal is mostly used for central heating (a plant heats water, water is then transported to a whole neighborhood). Electricity is sometimes also produced, but usually not the primary reason for the plant to exist in the first place. Nuclear plants are usually used for generating electricity (in Germany). Germanys carbon problem is the heating infrastructure being dependant on fossil fuels (mostly gas), but it has no lack of electricity sources.
Thanks for stating your openmindedness re/ nuclear discussion, BTW, IME statements like this can really lift the whole level of discourse.
Yes, but when it comes to coal more down is more better. And if nuclear was still around I would hazard to guess that's what would have happened.
The graph I'm looking at is labelled "Installed net electricity generation capacity in Germany". Lower down there's a pie graph with shares, and coal makes up ~20% in gross electrical production.
It raised some interesting questions about priorities.
The Greens actually prolonged their life time during Covid, after RWE, EON and EnBW argued that it does not make sense economically to let them run longer.
No insurer wanted to insure nuclear, and no energy company wanted to keep losing money on nuclear.
Since nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation, it makes sense to switch it off first.
Schröder was talking about it in 2000:
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/15/johnhooper
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schröder#Domestic_poli...
Oh, and he was appointed to Gazprom (and other Russian energy companies) after leaving politics:
* https://www.dw.com/en/former-chancellor-schröder-sworn-in-at...
(He did encourage renewables as well.)
> No insurer wanted to insure nuclear, and no energy company wanted to keep losing money on nuclear.
The German government(s) helped kickstart the global solar price drop by their subsidy programs in the early 2000s that allowed for economies of scale, so I'm surprised that—if they're really worried about climate change—they would not subsidize the alleged expenses of running the low-carbon generation of nuclear.
> Since nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation, it makes sense to switch it off first.
It's so expensive that prices in France, which generates >60% of power with nuclear, are at the same levels (or lower) as Germany, while producing less carbon per kWh than Germany (a quarter from some articles I've found).
See perhaps:
> […] Alternatively, Germany could have kept the existing nuclear power in 2002 and possibly invest in new nuclear capacity. The analysis of these two alternatives shows that Germany could have reached its climate gas emission target by achieving a 73% cut in emissions on top of the achievements in 2022 and simultaneously cut the spending in half compared to Energiewende. Thus, Germany should have adopted an energy policy based on keeping and expanding nuclear power.
* https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...
The only people causing conflict is Russia, and Germany had to be dragged kicking and screaming in shutting down Russian supply pipelines, so don't go talking about "security" when the actions from Berlin showed there was zero consideration for it:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream
When the architect of the retirement ends up on the board of Gazprom:
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/15/johnhooper
* https://www.dw.com/en/former-chancellor-schröder-sworn-in-at...
Gazprom suspended supply via NS1 indefinitely before it was destroyed.
So it’d actually be the safer option.
May 31st,2026 https://abcnews.com/International/iaea-issues-ukraine-nuclea...
Maybe you should take a closer look how those prices come to be.
Every single nuclear watt is being subsidised and has been for decades.
Last time they wanted to play the free market game, they had to bring the company back into the forgiving hands of the French taxpayer.
I have rather Germany invest into future tech then waste it on rotting reactors which are obviously unfit for the current state of global warming already.
Nuclear was clogging up the grid with it's expensive energy. It is gone now and the grid is diversifying while it follows the path of complete decarbonisation.
There is absolutely no reason to look back for Germany and only those whose ideology is "looking back" seriously do that currently.
So is everything else.
You won't find any grid which isn't subsidized, remember Germany already spent ~2x the French grid and that didn't spend by itself.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/government-agrees-phase...
Germany does not have set electricity prices like France does with the EDF.
And by the way, France also only has set electricity prices above market for renewables as well, same as Germany.
This is just plain false. In the 1990s and early 2000s, EDF was generating a whole lot of profit, which it wanted to reinvest. The governments of the time (both left and right) said: "Nope! We’ll take that, thank you." As a result EDF stopped making new nuclear plants and, most importantly, new nuclear engineers and technicians. When the government suddenly decided to have EDF build a new plant 15 years later, the 1980s generation was all but gone, the industrial know-how had vanished, and thi construction costs very logically skyrocketed. Oh, and in the meantime EDF had been (and still is) forced to sell electricity to its competitors under production cost.
Very few things in the power grid has insurance against major accidents. It is even doubtful for example if a forest fires caused by transmission lines will be repaid in full by the insurance of the power company, and to the degree that will pay all costs to property and land owners
The german green part certainly isn't perfect, but they had a plan. A plan that included far more renewable energies than currently build. The ones that orchestrated the ultimate end of nuclear energy while shutting down build up of renewables are the conservatives. Blaming someone for a half executed plan is childish. Especially when it is from a party that supposedly had economic competence yet killed tens of thousands of jobs.
Energie-Wende: Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran [Energy transition: growth and prosperity without petroleum and uranium]
https://web.archive.org/web/20160914043645/http://www2.hu-be...
If it's really about protecting fossil fuel wealth, is there a long-term plan or are they just juicing quarterly earnings as long as they can? Is there a serious belief that wind/solar is a fad?
This isn't the kind of thought that begets rational discussion, but if you can avoid cynicism and sarcasm, I am curious to hear what the smart people of HN think.
Part of the problem is you think there is unity in any large movement. There is not, only tiny movements with no political power have unity. There are multiple factions is always the right answer and you have to understand each. As a short cut, many (often the majority) are willing to live with those in their midst but don't actually care.
Fossil fuel companies have long supported conservative positions. This is their payback, they get support back.
Many do see renewables as the "left", and so they don't care to think, they just oppose anything the left does. (you often see the reverse)
The political movement that's currently leading the Republican party shouldn't be understood as "conservative". At least, certainly not in terms of the conservative values of respect for the rule of law, traditional mores and institutions, or personal integrity. The populist energy that passes for "conservative" is reactionary and much more concerned with scoring points on social media than governing sensibly.
To be fair, the populist left is also ascendant with its own set of bad ideas.
It's almost all tribalism: the left is for it, so they're against it. They have a partially valid point that a lot of so-called environmentalists are anti-progress degrowthers, but the response should be to demonstrate that clean energy (including nuclear) is very good for growth. When conservatives do what they're supposed to and let market forces work, you see things like Texas producing more renewable energy than California.
In any case I think the reason comes down to money/power structures and short-term thinking. We have two corporate controlled parties with one that is wholly owned and the other which allows a tiny sliver of dissent. Fossil fuels will never completely go away but anything that questions the entire infrastructure (worldwide, including the need for bases in producing countries), is seen as a threat to the status quo. In this way I don't see it as any different than teams protecting their turf in a large company which stifles innovation.
People will be inclined to latch on to anyone making an alternative suggestion: it’s a hoax, it will all be fine, the real problem is those people making you make sacrifices. It’s a relief to think that way, because the alternative is harrowing. It’s an easy sell for populists who are willing to say anything to get votes.
See also Covid: it’s easier to think of it as some kind of hoax than parse the true horror of the situation. Someone comes along and says it’s far less bad than the news is reporting, that these solutions aren’t necessary. You don’t need to feel guilty that you want to break isolation, find masking uncomfortable and find the jab unpleasant, because it’s all made up.
In a country like the US somebody owns the coal. They didn't make that coal, but we decided they can own it anyway, and so even though they didn't make the coal and it's never going to be replaced, just destroyed for all time, they get to capture the economic value from that.
Nobody, even in the US, owns the wind, and a wind farm doesn't capture some finite wind and gradually use it up, there's more wind where that came from, essentially forever.
Solar is even worse, because it works at a tiny scale. Owning your own wind turbine almost never makes sense but owning some solar panels makes sense for most owner-occupiers, especially if you live outside a city.
I don't think Trump would care whether the guy handing him an "America's Best Ever President" trophy and a $5Bn check is a Californian Sunlight Baron or a Wyoming Coal Baron, but the problem is that there can't be a Californian Sunlight Baron. You can't own California's sunlight, that's not a thing.
It would never have occurred to me that the appeal of carbon based fuel over renewables is that carbon base fuels are not renewable. There is less of a moat. Huh!