Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
1–10 of 77 posts
Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
#2Do they have a reliable and renewable replacement for baseload generation?
Nuclear would be ideal but that has been ruled out for political reasons.
Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
#3This seems nearly unachievable--and will punishingly expensive--if they don't reverse their nuclear phase-out.
Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
#4Do they have a reliable and renewable replacement for baseload generation? Nuclear would be ideal but that has been ruled out for political reasons.
At worst they can import electricity from France which has plenty of nuclear power.
Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
#5Do they have a reliable and renewable replacement for baseload generation? Nuclear would be ideal but that has been ruled out for political reasons.
Gas from Russia maybe? Big pipelines being built in the Baltic Sea.
Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
#6Do they have a reliable and renewable replacement for baseload generation? Nuclear would be ideal but that has been ruled out for political reasons.
No, they don't.
I am already expecting big blackouts in Germany.
Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
#7Looks like they'll still be on coal when most of the world will be moving off it.
Just because there's a timetable for it still makes it backward (including the self-decided avoidance of Nuclear) to hang on so long.
Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
#8It seemed really expensive in the beginning, but now even more so, given they'll do it 5 years faster. I wonder if the investment pays off as it's implemented. Or does it pay off at all? It's really cheaper to move from coal to other ways of producing electricity? I'm asking about the current state of things because I'm sure in the future it'll be cheaper and cheaper
Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
#9This seems nearly unachievable--and will punishingly expensive--if they don't reverse their nuclear phase-out.
I know this isn't a very popular opinion, but I've always thought that was a hugely stupid idea in the first place. Instead of shutting down nuclear power plants, we should have doubled down on them and spent more money on research to make them safer (as I understand it, there's still many unexplored concepts to make nuclear power much safer and reduce nuclear waste) and more efficient.
The sad truth is, that decision was largely driven by uninformed and emotional reactions to a single event on the other side of the world. Many people think a nuclear reactor can blow up like an atomic bomb, probably from movies and games as well as just assuming everything "nuclear" is inherently explosive and dangerous.
Re: Germany looks to step up coal exit timetable
#10It seemed really expensive in the beginning, but now even more so, given they'll do it 5 years faster. I wonder if the investment pays off as it's implemented. Or does it pay off at all? It's really cheaper to move from coal to other ways of producing electricity? I'm asking about the current state of things because I'm sure in the future it'll be cheaper and cheaper
it's not expensive considering the alternative is we all die in a giant fireball.
edit: Also currently on HN frontpage is "Climate threats now dominate long-term risks, survey of global leaders finds" so maybe adverting that is worth the cost.