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Germany's Energy Catastrophe

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Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#131

Post by dividedbyzero »

epups wrote: post #108
dividedbyzero wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Olkiluoto is bound to be 13 years late at four times the budget, the other ones in France and the UK look like they're going the same way, and Germany demonstrably sucks at these large-scale projects (think BER airport), so any new reactors probably wouldn't be ready before the 2040s, but they would be ridiculously expensive. That kind of money buys a lot of storage research and solar capacity.

Ok, so since Germany is slow at building existing stuff, it will somehow be better at building non-existing, future tech stuff. Until then, gas and coal and we kill thousands.

> it will somehow be better at building non-existing, future tech stuff

Those power plants and the Berlin airport went the way they did because of the immense corruption around such extremely large, expensive, long-term construction projects. There's a whole sector in construction exploiting the inane legislation around these things. There's no way that's going to change anytime soon, and it's not a purely German issue either (as the European nuclear projects demonstrate).

At least so far, the push into renewables looks like it will require very few such monolithic large-scale projects at all, and even then, they should be a lot less complex and cheaper than the current generation of nuclear plants (and a lot faster to build). A lot of the concepts for storage are also well-suited to a distributed build-out, and that involves making people order a bunch of things from China, set them up and network them, which we're all doing all the time anyway and which tends to works pretty efficiently. The whole thing is by no means a guaranteed short-term success, but I'd say the chances of this working out nicely aren't bad at all.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#132

Post by dispat0r »

ben_w wrote: post #120
dispat0r wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany will just no longer have the fourth-largest economy in the world. There is no way to substitute gas short term, long term you can replace it with electric alternatives. But these electric alternatives do not run on a grid with just wind and solar. I live in Germany and I have no hope. Our heating bills for the next winter can already exceed $900 per month for a 4-person household, electric costs also at $200…

I expect Germany to import the smallest amount of natural gas that the government can be confident will prevent economic collapse. I also expect this quantity to be much lower than it would've been last year, as I also expect significant effort to be put into both improvements (e.g. home insulation) and alternatives (e.g. renewables).

Germany doesn't have the infrastructure to import from other sources. The LNG terminals don't work yet, and the capacity is too low and LNG is much more expansive than the Russian pipeline gas. And even if we have the LNG infrastructure, we have to buy a big chunk of the world market, which screws poorer countries. Our home insulation is already pretty good and renovating all old buildings is expansive, and we don't have enough craftsman to do that. Renewables brought us this mess the plan was to use natural gas, this is now over. We need to go back to coal and build new nuclear plants to phase out coal, but this will never happen under the current government, at least until the winter.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#133

Post by dispat0r »

VaxWithSex wrote: post #48
Zanfa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. Grid-scale storage (apart from hydro, but that's basically maxed out or unsuitable for most geographies) is still an unsolved problem for renewables, even the largest lithium-battery ones are basically a rounding error. You'd need multiple weeks worth of batt…

It's a solved problem for Germany. Electrolyze Hydrogen, store it in the existing gas infrastructure for the winter. Use the gas plants to burn it in the winter.

We don't Electrolyse Hydrogen in Germany there is not one large-scale installation. You can't pump 100% hydrogen in the natural gas infrastructure, and the gas plants need to support hydrogen burning. You also need a surplus of energy, which Germany obviously not has.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#134

Post by dividedbyzero »

llampx wrote: post #113
dividedbyzero wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now the fourth largest economy in the world with a huge and extremely capable engineering base is committed to finding a way. Given that storage and other supporting tech for renewables has so far received hardly any serious funding at all, I think it's quite realistic to expect a success story there. Just consider what the many billions invested into fracking tech did to the US accessible gas reserves, and that…

Germany has been funding renewables for decades now. Even then, they are not competitive with China, for solar panels for example.

There hasn't been much funding for storage though, at least compared to what went into e.g. solar panels, not to speak of nuclear (which is dual-use, hence unlimited money). There are tons of promising concepts that haven't seen any realistic trials yet. Competing with China will be difficult, but it's the same for the whole western tech sector.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#135

Post by dispat0r »

mvgcf wrote: post #10

This op-ed is getting things so utterly wrong, I don‘t even know where to start. The Energiewende (so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility) here in Germany is working just fine. It is a reasonable investment in our future. The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy. The lack of gas is problematic because it is a preliminary product used in chemical proc…

> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. On paper maybe, most people are actually using electricity generated from conventional power plants most of the time, and we are paying the highest energy prices in the world for that.

> On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint. Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#136

Post by mrtksn »

pas wrote: post #128
mrtksn wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear energy is very cool tech and I think it strikes a chord with techie people and that's why I think nuclear gets a free pass on the economical and operational issues. Nuclear is so amazing, right? Relatively small, high tech self-contained facilities that rhyme with some of the best science fictions out there. However, the moment you dive in it you see just how long it gets to build these things, how expensive…

you know that every form of energy generation today involves some kind of trade off (extraction from the earth, hydro and PV panels and wind turbines require a lot of space, and so on). nuclear advocates advocate for nuclear when it makes sense.

I don't know, in my experience nuclear advocates argue how stupid everyone is for not making everything nuclear. In the conversation, some advocate will say how misguided country A was to abandon nuclear just to please hippies and others will point out that the decision was also economical. The nuclear advocate will say that the waste issue is not an issue and the renewable advocate will point out that renewables got drastically cheeper. Then the nuclear advocate will say, good luck when the wind doesn't blow.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#137

Post by locallost »

BenoitP wrote: post #118
locallost wrote: post #6

Germany proceeded with their "nuclear exit" in 2011. Had they gone the other way and all in on nuclear, they would be in the same situation as they are today as planning and building nuclear plants takes a lot longer than 10 years. Actually they would be way worse because instead of having 50% of electricity coming from renewables, they would still have 45% of it coming from coal, instead of 25% in 2020 (did not chec…

If Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would not be wasting currently 5GW of gas for electricity (and burning much less lignite coal as well): https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE > one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia It is a common false perception that it is a problem, very often pushed by fake news outlets. You might be a victim. Russia produces about 15% of the world's uranium [1…

Which makes them one of the largest exporters of uranium in the world, including to the EU, which is what I've said. A victim of what exactly? Knowing the facts?

Imagine the importance of Russian uranium if there was a nuclear renaissance and the world suddenly built terawatts of nuclear plants, which is what this article is proposing and presumably you too. And also, Russians are one of the last countries that actually builds them including abroad, so a nuclear surge would mean countries lining up to have Russian nuclear plants built.

The article is devoid of not only data, but common sense.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#138

Post by mvgcf »

disgu wrote: post #102
mvgcf wrote: post #10

This op-ed is getting things so utterly wrong, I don‘t even know where to start. The Energiewende (so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility) here in Germany is working just fine. It is a reasonable investment in our future. The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy. The lack of gas is problematic because it is a preliminary product used in chemical proc…

> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. No you don't. Just because you pay for Ökostrom or whatever doesn't mean that the electricity you actually use was produced by renewables. It's one grid. You use the electricity produced by coal plants just like everyone else.

I am glad you got my point: My share of energy consumption is completly covered by renewables.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#139

Post by mvgcf »

ucha wrote: post #92
mvgcf wrote: post #10

This op-ed is getting things so utterly wrong, I don‘t even know where to start. The Energiewende (so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility) here in Germany is working just fine. It is a reasonable investment in our future. The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy. The lack of gas is problematic because it is a preliminary product used in chemical proc…

> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. How can you receive energy purely from renewable energy sources when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? Germany doesn't have any significant capacity for electricity storage. It's such a bold statement but it seems physically impossible.

One example: my energy provider builds biogas plants. Guess what, they turn agricultural waste into electricity. Even at night.

Your argumentation is similar to suggesting Tesla should stop developing electrical cars because there is no charger infrastructure. So 2010.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#140

Post by mvgcf »

tallanvor wrote: post #124
mvgcf wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It is 100% green energy. No certificates or whatsoever.

Then they're lying to you. Unless you're on a completely separate power grid, your energy is, in reality, provided by the power source closest to you. It might be solar or wind sometimes, but the rest of the time it's probably a non-renewable source. German companies claiming to get their energy through renewable sources are primarily buying credits from Norway and a few other sources in Europe. You can stick your he…

This is not true. There are multiple energy providers selling only renewables. There even is one village that managed to do so on its own for itself.

Your argumentation is wrong. What you say is: There is no use in limiting pollution, because there will still be some pollution left anyways. I bet you never clean your place, because it will get dirty soon after.

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