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Germany's Energy Catastrophe

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Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#161

Post by ajuc »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #39
elsjaako wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious, because I haven't heard these arguments before. > Totally ignoring the climate impact of nuclear power What climate impact? I though it was CO2 neutral (except for construction, which has similar costs to wind an solar). A quick google doesn't give me anything. > it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time I thought nuclear was basically a steam boiler, same as coal or gas plants? Wh…

AFAIK nuclear output can be controlled only in a certain range, but if you go below a certain threshold it shuts off and you then have to restart it, which takes a lot of time. Coal has a similar issue, these plants also can't be turned on and off quickly. In fact, the term "base load" originally was driven more by the minimum amount of power that has to be consumed to keep a plant running. Only now with the move to…

Nuclear, coal, and gas powerplants only differ in how you produce heat. After that they work the same (heat water, make steam, drive turbines). There is usually a few stages of turbines to extract as much work as possible. Reaction time is 1 hour or more.

The waste heat can be used for district heating no matter how you produced the heat (in my city they use coal powerplant for this). It's not just gas. And it's not "perfect efficiency", it's about 80% for the best cogeneration powerplants compared to 60% without cogeneration. It's a little less in practice cause most powerplants aren't as modern and as efficient.

All of these is usually used on regular (not peaker) powerplants, because it's only useful if you use your powerplant for long periods of time.

There are also peaker powerplants. They work differently, and they are optimized for quick reaction time (so the energy they produce is more expansive and efficiency is lower). Reaction time is about 15 minutes. They don't only burn gas - they can also burn any liquid fuels (but gas is indeed the most common). Usually the efficiency of peaker powerplants is about 30-40%, can be almost as good as the regular ones but it's not worth it to install cogeneration if your plant runs for few hours a day.

I'm not sure which kind you were talking about. If they use cogeneration it means they must run for long time, and peaker powerplants running constantly is wasting money and fuel. Do you know what reaction time (from 0 to 100%) they have? 15 minutes or more like 1 hour? Or maybe less (then they are piston engines - and efficiency is even worse).

Anyway - there are also grid-scale batteries that can deal with power fluctuations on the order of milliseconds. That's why if you have lots of renewables and reasonably free energy market - grid scale batteries economically beat the crap out of peak powerplants (like gas plants).

In USA and Australia grid scale batteries already made building new peak powerplants unprofitable. It will soon happen in Europe too (unless lobbying stops this). Here [1] you can read more about how it works. It's basically the same advantage that High Frequency Trading has over regular traders on regular stock market. Just the difference isn't 1 second vs 10 milliseconds but 15 minutes vs 10 milliseconds. Before gas powerplant start up to produce the missing energy - the battery supplied it and shut down again. So now energy price lowered and gas powerplant has to either to produce that energy anyway and sell it for a fraction of price, or to shut down wasting fuel and not earning any money. And gas peak powerplants aren't designed for producing energy cheaply, they are designed for producing energy when there's shortage so energy is expansive.

So when you have grid scale batteries - they drive peak gas powerplants out of business :)

[1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl...

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#162

Post by DocTomoe »

majewsky wrote: post #153
ajuc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 German…

> Then pay them with state money if needed. We can't. The radical pro-small-state finance minister fights tooth and nail against any additional debt in order to obey the holy debt ceiling that a bunch of idiots wrote into the constitution about a decade ago because they didn't understand the difference between a national budget and a company budget.

There is this weird idea in some circles that national budgets are endless debt pits which you just can create any amount of money from for just about any reason. This obviously is incorrect as a blanket statement - it only has some time-constrained credibility for relatively rich countries with a somewhat good future ahead of it. If your economy is weak and your outlook is bad, no-one is going to lend your country money to put the national budget into the red even more - just ask Greece what happens next.

Germany has had a relatively strong economy and good growth in the past, which allowed us to spend a bit more lavishly. But with our economy about to break down in the next 20-30 years and our population shrinking massively (worse: with employee-age population shrinking even more), this is no longer the case.

Insofar, I think it is prudent to keep expenses under control. Of course, you can't play international moral police and cause massive inflation if you do so. Which is where Berlin fails right now.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#163

Post by DocTomoe »

ajuc wrote: post #82
DocTomoe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 German…

> Then pay them with state money if needed.

Yeah, let's heat the fire of economic disaster by shovelling some more freshly-printed cash into it. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, right: [1]

> we will choose supporting our industry every time cause it's the only thing that matters.

In the end, it is. Without industry, no wealth, and no wealth to spread around the EU, which is most likely going to make it falling apart as well.

> Russia was supporting wannabe and actual autocrats all over the world for decades. Including AfD in Germany.

True. And now we're about to make them able to stand on their own feet. Great job, another mosaic stone in wrestling control away from Russia!

> Apparently that's fine but if it was indirect support through industry in Germany losing money it would be too much.

Different countries have different ideas what is or isn't a prudent way to approach their own interests. Germany has no interest in a war thousands of kilometers away between one party which has proven to be a reliable business partner for decades, and one party that was not a reliable partner, but a constant drain of resources ever since it was created post-1992.

> If you care about autocrats you should stop paying Putin billions of euro.

Personally, I'd much rather have an autocrat in Moscow than one in Berlin.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#164

Post by pas »

mrtksn wrote: post #136
pas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

in very general terms there are a few truisms about energy: economic growth and technological progress both seem to be very much correlated with energy consumption; modern democracies (eg the "Western world") are in gridlock and have increasingly become very myopic, short-termist, incrementalist with regards to energy policies (and others too, but that's not strictly relevant here)

so any advocate for any kind of energy policy preference is fed up, frustrated, and so on.

green advocates? yeah, completely right with regards to global warming, ecological disasters, fucking up the planet, etc.

based on one's morality we can say that advocates of global fairness are right in their view that currently the "West" has the burden to exert a heroic effort to fix the warming they caused, and help the poor countries to skip the "fossil phase". and anyone pointing out that this effort is basically non-existent is also right. (and so poor countries will be likely more affected by climate change and economic and energy shocks than rich ones. mostly because being rich helps with almost everything, and also because poor countries tend to be located in areas that used to enjoy year-round warm climate with occasional extremely warm days which will now become a lot more frequent)

on top of all this poor countries usually doesn't have the luxury of picking the best long-term solution. (but as we saw even rich countries have been optimizing for short-term nowadays.)

. .

okay, that said, economics of nuclear energy, it all depends on economies of scale. it's basically irrelevant what happens with 1-10 power plants.

if in a given country there won't be a healthy nuclear energy industry, then keeping one plant alive is .. irrelevant. (even if economically retrofitting a 40-50 year old plant is cheap, because the big ticket items are already paid for ~40 years ago.)

renewables got cheaper because they are mass produced. were nuclear plants mass produced they would be drastically cheaper too. (that's the promise of small modular reactors.) but even simply ordering 100+ big plants would push down costs from the ~3rd one. (if they were properly standardized and near identical. it parts were pre-fabricated, and so on.)

basically construction (so housing and transportation ... and healthcare and education) everywhere is getting more and more costly because technological progress is unevenly making other things more cheap. (and also our standards are going up, so we use the old inefficient technology and more skilled labor to build better things, it'll be simply more expensive.)

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#165

Post by DocTomoe »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #105
epups wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I support that. But one thing doesn't preclude the other. Invest in nuclear now to get rid of coal, and at the same time invest in research that may or may not pay off.

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.

Between a green pasture and Biblis going online at that location, it took 6 years.

Either we got a lot worse at building complicated stuff, or the real reason for building delays is NIMBYs protesting and lawmongering.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#166

Post by seszett »

illiac786 wrote: post #158
seszett wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not understanding that nuclear doesn’t play well with renewables (it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time). That's actually not been true for the last 40 years or so. In France, nuclear power plants have been doing load following without problem. They are apparently able to adjust their production by 80% over 30 minutes. One such episode is explained here: https://lenergeek.com/2019/03/07/mix-ele…

I read the article and I do not see the 80% mentioned. I really would have loved to read this, but they mentioned only 10GW of variation, that's roughly 20% I believe.

Another article talks specifically about the power modulation ability: https://lenergeek.com/2017/09/13/modulation-parc-nucleaire-e...

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#167

Post by illiac786 »

seszett wrote: post #166
illiac786 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the article and I do not see the 80% mentioned. I really would have loved to read this, but they mentioned only 10GW of variation, that's roughly 20% I believe.

Another article talks specifically about the power modulation ability: https://lenergeek.com/2017/09/13/modulation-parc-nucleaire-e...

Yes, but they are quoting the EDF paper again — almost verbatim.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#168

Post by ggeorgovassilis »

ajuc wrote: post #65
planb wrote: post #25

We don’t have an energy problem. We have a gas problem. I’m open for (re-)discussing nuclear energy here in Germany, but we could run 100% on nuclear or coal and a full gas stop by Russia would still have catastrophic consequences. We need gas for industrial/chemical processes and heating our homes. In fact, if the Energiewende had progressed a bit further, then more houses would have installed a heat pump by now.

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…

> no independent media

This cannot be overstated. The entirety of German media (excluding niche outlets) across the political spectrum align on every important topic.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#169

Post by CRConrad »

mvgcf wrote: post #138
disgu wrote: post #102

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. 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.

> My share of energy consumption is completly covered by renewables.

Only if you

a) Pretend that the electricity you get doesn't come from the same grid as everyone else's, where the input to that grid is a mixture of renewable and non-renewable energy, and

b) Don't look too hard at how many others make that same boast: Being "green" is "in", so lots of people's consumption "is completly covered by renewables"... Perhaps a larger proportion of electricity consumers than he proportion of electricity actually generated by renewables?

I mean, if you can happily -- and unthinkingly -- echo the empty promise on your electricity bill, so can everyone else.

Your claim is point-less.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#170

Post by CRConrad »

mvgcf wrote: post #79
ThePhysicist wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those renewable energy contracts were mostly a scam in my opinion, most of these providers just bought renewable electricity from the stock market when it was cheap and sold it to consumers at a premium, creating zero new renewable capacity in the process. Greenwashing at its finest. And last year when prices for renewables went through the roof due to several unanticipated factors most of them went belly-up and had…

While you do make a fair point on greenwashing being a problem in general, your opinion does not apply to my non greenwashed contract. 100% green energy and a coop investing heavily in more capacity. This is true for gas (heating) and electricity, btw.

> does not apply to my non greenwashed contract. 100% green energy and a coop investing heavily in more capacity.

So you're connected directly to a co-op's green power plant; neither your house nor that power plant are on the national grid where your "100% green energy" gets mixed up with all the other -- non-green -- electricity being produced nationwide?

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