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Comment by justincormack | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. Businesses involved in something that falls rapidly in price tend to have these type of issues, and also tend to complain and get government support a lot. Managing a business with fast falling prices is different from one where they gradually rise.

In other news, Germany reached 23.9GW of peak solar power output a few days back, around 40% of consumption http://cleantechnica.com/2013/07/07/breaking-germany-sets-so...

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It's really irresponsible to throw figures like that without the disclaimer that solar PV production constitutes only 1.1% of the total energy consumed in Germany for the last year.

[1] http://www.erneuerbare-energien.de/fileadmin/Daten_EE/Dokume...

It's really irresponsible to throw around figures like total energy consumed without clarifying that this refers to the entirety of electrical power, heating and fuel used for mobility. ;)

FWIW, PV contributed 4.7% of the electricity in 2012, wind contributed 7.7%. (Same source.)

It's helpful to consider neighboring France as to why the total energy consumption is a more meaningful indicator. It has relatively cheap electricity due to the abundant nuclear power and as a result much larger percentage of the households use electricity for heating.[1]

In Germany, they prefer burning fossil fuels and therefore need less electricity during the winter. Should those burned fossil fuels be arbitrarily excluded when considering the total energy dependence of the country, considering they could be substituted with other energy sources?

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/14/europe-power-suppl...

You were wrong and you got called out. Now you're moving your goalposts, and your response still stinks since (unless your point was to note that France had to import electricity to meet heating needs from Germany, thereby externalizing the costs of their electric heating).

The original poster had a much more accurate statement since transportation and industry is so weighted towards refined petroleum products and cannot/can not practically be substituted with electricity.

I think the GP makes a valid point - if you're worried about climate change, it's no good being able to say that all your electricity is produced from clean sources if all of your heating / transport energy needs are being met by carbon-intensive sources.

Also, which goal posts do you think were being moved exactly?

It's a not a valid point, it's a silly point dressed up to sound reputable.

First he tried to minimize the accomplishment of having 40% of consumption coming from PVs by saying that it was from a very small percentage of the total energy consumption.

When it was pointed out that was over all types of consumption, he claimed that electricity could be a higher percentage of consumption if it were not from solar (presumably from nuclear plants).

That is where the goalposts were moved. He went from saying "Well, it's not really that much" to "Oh, it would be even higher if it weren't solar".

Let me point out a few things:

Germany is further north, and its population weighted climate is cooler. It has larger heating needs than France. Electricity is an godawful energy source for heating. Check out payback periods of solar hot water when substituting for NG hot water heaters vs electric water heaters. If Germany wanted to substitute low/no carbon heating they'd be better off with passive solar systems or geothermal - not solar PV or nuclear electricity. The very article he linked to was about France having to buy German electricity because they couldn't heat their own country w/ their huge nuclear fleet in a cold snap. The conclusion to be drawn there is that France's energy policy is flawed, not Germany's.

Also, heating methods aside, the metric is not honest. France has a smaller demand base than Germany (quick research: approximately 650TWh vs 525TWh in the mid 2000s) and Germany's economy is more industrial and energy intensive, which frequently doesn't permit electrical substitution.

Anyway, I don't have time to write more or edit this a bunch. But I hate to see poorly organized thought spreading anti-memes about clean energy.

The 23.9gw figure is actually what the article leads with.

I'm guessing you are one of many that don't read articles ry comment on?

Somehow I missed that sentence, read the rest of it. But it maybe sunk in as I remembered seeing some figures recently on that...

This is a case where, even if the businesses are failing, the mid to long term outcome will benefit Germany anyway.

the mid to long term outcome will benefit the whole world anyway

Here, fixed that for you. (Pilot projects on a large scale are useful to all of us. Someone has to finally do it.)

True, and I'm fine with paying for that (I'm German). It's better than just having world summits that end in disagreement.

Let's build amazing green technology, invest and then profit some from adaption and then see the real goal come true when everyone starts to make it. It might kill some companies in the end, but there's so much more at stake here.

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit. -- D. Elton Trueblood

How exactly do you think Germany (as a whole) could profit from this? With the EEG (Energie-Einspeise-Gesetz), the German government created an artificial solar bubble which is costing electricity customers several billions of Euros each year, only to fill the pockets of (mostly Chinese) panel producers, homeowners and companies who install that stuff, and last but not least the banks (most installations are financed by credit).

The amount of electricity actually produced is almost neglible (a meager 3.1% in 2011), whereas the consumer price has almost doubled since 2005, and is now one of the highest in the world.

Even if you assume that this giant experiment in planned economy would somehow lead to technological breakthroughs, making producing electricity via solar economically feasible in the long term, Germany would still have to recover the cost of 20+ years of subventions (which already amount to over 100 billion €, and that's only a fraction of the total sum which has been guaranteed by the EEG), while other countries with much better climatic conditions would be able to reap the majority of the profits.

How about by forcing the government to admit it was a jobs program and not a program to improve the environment. How about the government officials having to acknowledge the burden their system puts upon their local manufacturers?

So was it a jobs program or environmental? Politicians love to sell programs as one while really doing the other. Jobs programs tend to be vote buying schemes for the most part.

How about we call it an energy security program and be done with it.

That's literally the first sentence of the OP article.

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