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Germany's Energy Catastrophe
81–90 of 171 posts
Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have foreign policy blindness problem, no independent media problem and most of all - "everything except making cars and exporting them doesn't matter" problem. Otherwise I can't explain how you were so dumb for 3 decades. It's not like Germany is so poor it can't afford to pay 50% more for gas. Or that it couldn't build an LNG terminal just in case. Poland which is much less wealthy - managed to do it. How come…
> Germany is so poor it can't afford to pay 50% more for gas Germany isn't. Many Germans are. If missing gas leads to industry breaking down, more Germans will be. Germans being made poor, especially for no good reasons other than the decisions of politicians abroad, tends to lead to unintended, but severe consequences. Already, wannabe autocrats are winding up their propaganda. Guess which countries they will have a…
> Germany isn't. Many Germans are.
Then pay them with state money if needed.
> If missing gas leads to industry breaking down, more Germans will be.
And if we have to choose between EU falling apart and millions of people abroad dying or some Germans temporarily getting a little less wealthy - we will choose supporting our industry every time cause it's the only thing that matters.
That's the main problem with Germany.
> Already, wannabe autocrats are winding up their propaganda.
Russia was supporting wannabe and actual autocrats all over the world for decades. Including AfD in Germany.
It's not even just secret financial support or propaganda - just last year Russian army helped Lukashenko "pacify" protesters after he faked elections. This year it did the same in Kazakchstan. That's direct military support. Sending Russian army to kill people protesting against their autocratic governments.
Apparently that's fine but if it was indirect support through industry in Germany losing money it would be too much.
If you care about autocrats you should stop paying Putin billions of euro.
But what Germany really cares about is sweet sweet export money. Everything else is an excuse.
Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe
#83The funniest thing is - Germany was repeatedly warned by Eastern European states that this (literally this) will happen if they continue to build Nord Stream 1 and then Nord Stream 2 and try to "fix" Russia by trade. Russian government already poisoned Ukrainian presidential candidate in 2004. Killed opposition and journalists both in Russia and in EU. Invaded 2 countries (Chechnia and Georgia - I don't even count Li…
Not to rain on your parade - a few points are definitely justified - but Poland has just switched to fill their "natural gas gap" with imports from Germany when it was cut off by Russia recently. Did you ever ask yourself where that "German" natural gas is actually coming from?
Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe
#84I'm tired of these probably nuclear industry backed articles that are wrong and miss the point. 1. Nuclear energy is no solution. See here for an example how things turn out in real life (in German): https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Deutsche-Solaranlagen-haengen... 2. Germany doesn't really lack electricity. You cannot replace gas in industrial processes that need heat just like that with electricity. If you could, you…
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Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe
#85The funniest thing is - Germany was repeatedly warned by Eastern European states that this (literally this) will happen if they continue to build Nord Stream 1 and then Nord Stream 2 and try to "fix" Russia by trade. Russian government already poisoned Ukrainian presidential candidate in 2004. Killed opposition and journalists both in Russia and in EU. Invaded 2 countries (Chechnia and Georgia - I don't even count Li…
I find Merkel's legacy quite bad. Germans never wanted to take a side on international stage, but pressured EU country in the backstage to accept policies favouring them. How many times we restrained car emissions laws because it would kill the almighty German car industry?
In the end, this shopkeeper attitude burst into their face very hard and I don't feel sorry for them.
Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to make things clear: Nuclear energy is just cheap because it gets massively funded by the state. Nuclear power plants are the most expensive way of generating energy and the least sustainable way. We don't even have a good way to dispose nuclear waste. We were checking for a "Endlager" which means a place to hoard all the nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Guess what? No one wanted it. Bavaria tr…
We don't even have a good way to dispose nuclear waste. Sure we do, just aerosolize it and vent it into the atmosphere! At which point... Nuclear energy is [...] massively [subsidized] by the state. ...You'd have a fair comparison to other modes of energy production. It's not nuclear that's massively subsidized, everything else is.
> Sure we do, just aerosolize it
Sounds interesting, would you mind to expand / link some site that goes into details?
> It's not nuclear that's massively subsidized, everything else is.
Germany massively cut funding for solar power being supplied into to the grid (Einspeisevergütung) back in 2012 [1] and it still isn't funded the way it was before.
But it is and was still worth it for most people, if they just consumed most of the electricity themselves. [2]
[1] https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2012/37990550_... [2] https://www.kfw.de/inlandsfoerderung/Privatpersonen/Bestands...
Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe
#87I'm tired of these probably nuclear industry backed articles that are wrong and miss the point. 1. Nuclear energy is no solution. See here for an example how things turn out in real life (in German): https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Deutsche-Solaranlagen-haengen... 2. Germany doesn't really lack electricity. You cannot replace gas in industrial processes that need heat just like that with electricity. If you could, you…
1. Your article on nuclear energy just says that France has reactors that need maintenance. It also says they produce less electricity because they need cold water which is not currently available because of heat waves and droughts. Both are temporary problems that can be planned around or avoided by over-provisioning capacity. As the original article notes, you cannot over-provision capacity with renewable energies because they tend to produce 100x less power on windless or cloudy days.
2. It's more efficient to burn gas and collect the heat for industrial processes that go through an intermediary step of converting heat into electricity. I don't think it has anything to do with gas being irreplaceable as a source of heat. Gas can be necessary as a chemical precursor in some reactions - which can't be replaced by electricity - but that has nothing to do with heat.
Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe
#88The funniest thing is - Germany was repeatedly warned by Eastern European states that this (literally this) will happen if they continue to build Nord Stream 1 and then Nord Stream 2 and try to "fix" Russia by trade. Russian government already poisoned Ukrainian presidential candidate in 2004. Killed opposition and journalists both in Russia and in EU. Invaded 2 countries (Chechnia and Georgia - I don't even count Li…
Not to rain on your parade - a few points are definitely justified - but Poland has just switched to fill their "natural gas gap" with imports from Germany when it was cut off by Russia recently. Did you ever ask yourself where that "German" natural gas is actually coming from?
I'm aware that Poland is in bad situation too. I live here and I don't support my government (especially their idiotic effective ban on wind power).
But that's just the last 7 years out of 33 years that we're independent, and even the current government mostly did the right thing when it comes to Russia.
Poland was in much worse situation than Germany. In 1989 we got independent and all of our infrastructure was tightly coupled with USSR. We were also dirt poor and had infrastructure in shambles. Since then we decoupled a little, built interconnects with other countries, an LNG terminal which provides about half our our gas, this year we also finish Baltic pipe to Norway and when it's ready we'll be fully independent of Russian gas.
Germany went the other way and increased their dependency on Russian gas in last 3 decades.
Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to make things clear: Nuclear energy is just cheap because it gets massively funded by the state. Nuclear power plants are the most expensive way of generating energy and the least sustainable way. We don't even have a good way to dispose nuclear waste. We were checking for a "Endlager" which means a place to hoard all the nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Guess what? No one wanted it. Bavaria tr…
> Nuclear energy is just cheap because it gets massively funded by the state. No it doesn't. Not anymore than gas, coal and renewables at least. The issue of disposal is also simply incorrect. There are plenty of places to store it, France does it, everyone does it. Do you know where the waste from coal goes? Into the atmosphere, where it kills thousands directly and potentially billions indirectly with global warmin…
> The issue of disposal is also simply incorrect. There are plenty of places to store it.
The question is not, whether there are places or not. It doesn't matter if none of the 16 regions in Germany wants to be responsible to store the waste.
If no one wants to deal with it, the effect is the same.
Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe
#90The funniest thing is - Germany was repeatedly warned by Eastern European states that this (literally this) will happen if they continue to build Nord Stream 1 and then Nord Stream 2 and try to "fix" Russia by trade. Russian government already poisoned Ukrainian presidential candidate in 2004. Killed opposition and journalists both in Russia and in EU. Invaded 2 countries (Chechnia and Georgia - I don't even count Li…
> It's mind-boggling how a big European state like Germany with big ambitions and supposedly independent media could be so ignorant for 3 decades with nobody in the country taking the warnings seriously. That's a warped perception. There has been a huge controversy (also in the media), it was the government and primarily chancellor Merkel who pushed for a adopting a soft line with Russia. Critique was small since the…
> Sounds harsh, but that's the reality of politics everywhere and not particularly surprising.
The funniest thing is - Germany trades more with Poland ( $92.3 billion) than with Russia ($31.5 billion). In fact Germany even trades more with Czech Republic than with Russia. If you add up all EE states it's orders of magnitude more. Yet somehow Russia is more important to them.
If it was just realpolitik I would be outraged but not astonished. But it's not a rational foreign policy. German foreign policy is not only morally wrong - it's also irrational.