The Great German Energy Experiment

Great article - upvoted. That it's inconceivable that the US or UK government could think about spending such an amount (~5% of GDP!) on a long-term science and engineering project speaks volumes about why the Germans are where they are, and why we're where we are, economically speaking.

From an engineering point of view I think it's foolish to turn off the nuke plants, but public opinion is what it is, and this causes the regulatory requirements to prevent nuclear from being economically viable.

The article does a good job of covering the risks, but personally I'd bet on the Germans here - even if the 'Energiewende' doesn't pay off per se, the rewards from the science and engineering knowhow will be huge. The only comparable project I can think of is the Apollo Program, though a quick google suggests that was never more than 1% of GDP, and the returns from the science on that were massive and lasted for decades. Likewise, CERN, which was about as blue-sky as things get, gave us the World Wide Web: completely tangential to its stated purpose, but what kind of rate of return did that give us?

So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run?

(On a side note, I really want to have a stickybeak around a 30MW AC/DC converter!)

Stephan Reimelt, CEO of GE Energy Germany: "Germany is forcing itself toward innovation. What this generates is a large industrial laboratory at a size which has never been done before. We will have to try a lot of different technologies to get there."

It has been done before, at far greater scale. WW1 and WW2. Some of the best innovations or inventions are derived out of a person or a nation having their back to the wall. Hence the famous saying: "necessity, who is the mother of invention" (dating back a mere 2400 years or so, and it's probably older as a known premise).

I would anticipate very impressive industrial breakthroughs in renewable energy coming from the German experiment.

> they should tax externalities (i.e. pollution)

Because that is a really difficult problem to solve. It's easier to tax CO2 emissions, but how do you tax nuclear waste? And by how much?

Taxing external effects like pollution does nothing to ensure the taxes drive benefit toward the technology (renewables) the taxes were created to spur.

If you go looking for technology breakthrough by tax, you'll find nothing unless a particular technology breakthrough is able to be produced in said time and place. Which is why the approach doesn't inherently work, nothing guarantees a meaningful tech breakthrough is waiting in the wings, it might take 50 years for all you know.

On the negative effect side, by attaching the new pollution taxes, you're removing private capital that could have been put toward innovation.

Then to top it off, deciding how to measure and tax pollution and what should be or should not be defined as pollution, is rife with incredible disagreement (and that is not going to change). The games politicians start playing when you open that can of worms....

It's not in any way inherently a better way to go.

Europe also brought us the air travel tax, which does target externalities and seems close to sparking a trade war because it covers all flights in the EU, not all EU-based airlines. It's difficult to do.