Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Great German Energy Experiment

technologyreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 209 posts

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#31

Post by kfk »

macavity23 wrote: post #24
kfk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just some quick answers. * It is difficult, no doubt. But it is also difficult to find a way to efficienlty store solar and wind power. It is difficult is not a good excuse not to do it. * It does not help innovation. Not true. It does. Taxes will lower the margins of the businesses with externalities and capital holders will look for more efficient technologies. Less cost and/or more profit are the only way you ince…

Politics. Don't know, don't care. Fair enough - but not caring about this will leave you unable to fix serious problems, and incurably unhappy with the state of the world. Every problem, every issue, every project of non-trivial size is critically dependent upon politics of some stripe or other. History is riddled with excellent ideas that failed because they didn't consider politics (and for that matter, terrible id…

You are right. But we still need to keep in mind that what's happening makes no sense. We need to know what the real, un-politic, solution is, otherwise we don't even know how and where to compromise. More public spending is not ground for compromises. We are gambling with our future packing debt on debt with silly ideas (like this one that throwing money at pig farmers to raise wind towers is going to save our energy-hungry asses). That's not going to happen and we will pay for this bad decision making in the future.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#32

Post by larrydag »

macavity23 wrote: post #2

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 caus…

Some large scale projects that come to mind include Panama Canal, USA Highway system, Alaskan pipeline although you could argue they did destroy some things.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#33

Post by koide »

simonh wrote: post #14
macavity23 wrote: post #2

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 caus…

I don't think it's reasonable to count incidental benefits from projects, such as the WWW from CERN. The same basic problem of sharing information between scientists would still have existed without CERN, and who's to say it or something even better, with fewer of HTTP/HTML's limitations wouldn't have been developed if TBL had been working on a different project? The space race argument is another old sore, it turns…

I don't think it's reasonable to discount all the subproducts from such an investment just because many would have been developed eventually anyway.

In this vein, it's just as easy to discount the people who did the inventions/discoveries because someone else would have eventually made the discovery/invention anyway.

Of course that the main project has to be sound, and cannot be justified only due to the subproducts, but "would have happened anyway" is not a solid argument to discount the subproducts, mainly because you cannot know if it would, nor when it would.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#34

Post by adventureful »

kfk wrote: post #16
kfk wrote: post #3

I don't like this. Instead of heavily subsidizing some technologies, they should tax externalities (i.e. pollution) and let the markets do the rest. It's annoying having to pay 15% more energy bills because somebody has decided that wind and solar are the hot thing of the moment. Bad, really bad. Same way of thinking that brought us to the debt crisi in Europe.

Just some quick answers. * It is difficult, no doubt. But it is also difficult to find a way to efficienlty store solar and wind power. It is difficult is not a good excuse not to do it. * It does not help innovation. Not true. It does. Taxes will lower the margins of the businesses with externalities and capital holders will look for more efficient technologies. Less cost and/or more profit are the only way you ince…

Said taxes can just as easily destroy the capital holders you claim will go looking for other investments. It's a fluid pool, you can't suck a billion out of the private economy without impacting all other private capital.

And that is all premised on getting the taxes right. If you miss in the guess work, you'll cause massive damage and dislocation of capital. The US has done that on numerous occasions (eg ethanol 1970s).

Energy is politics. There's really no other industry on the entire planet that is more defined by politics due to its importance and nature (from land for solar to drilling in Nigeria, to tar sands in Canada, to windmills killing birds and on and on).

If you don't know and don't care about politics when it comes to energy, then you're going to get nowhere.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#35

Post by cturner »

macavity23 wrote: post #2

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 caus…

Theere's a basic role of government that's widely agreed upon - that it keeps us from hurting one another and clarity on the use of roads and telecommunications channels and the like. And I realise that opinions diverge above that, but I'll put mine.

Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient, and seems like a bad place to look for inspiration in engineering. When governments set up things like NASA they become political institutions themselves. It's easy for them to grow into organisations that seek self-preservation and always more money to support the glamour of their leadership.

When government gets involved in a field, you get a cross-polination between field-experts and government people. Often the government people end up on the side of workers in the field rather than the public that they're meant to be serving.

Given all these problems, I don't think we should be attracted to the idea of governments taxing us to spend the money on difficult-to-quantify never-never projects. They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#36

Post by gaius »

loceng wrote: post #26
macavity23 wrote: post #2

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 caus…

The economics are easy. Money on war 'invests' your resources into other countries (no return, negative return likely), vs. money on innovation and infrastructure in your own country (positive return, long-term; potential for making other things more efficient, more cost-efficient become higher).

Sorry, but that's nonsense, you cannot underestimate the impact of military technologies like jet engines, radar, communications satellites, GPS, the internet, superglue... The whole of the modern world is based on military tech. Plus you gainfully employ lots of people (e.g. teaching trades to people who haven't done well in mainstream education) and as a free bonus you get the defence of the realm.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#37

Post by lmm »

DasIch wrote: post #27

I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative. It's better to work on the problem now, developing knowledge that helps our economy and makes us a worldwide leader than holding it off unless we are near collapse due to oil pri…

>I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative.

There's one obvious alternative: Build and run nuclear power plants. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries, and the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#38

Post by eru »

cturner wrote: post #35
macavity23 wrote: post #2

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 caus…

Theere's a basic role of government that's widely agreed upon - that it keeps us from hurting one another and clarity on the use of roads and telecommunications channels and the like. And I realise that opinions diverge above that, but I'll put mine. Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient, and seems like a bad place to look for inspiration in engineering. When governments set up things like…

> They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects.

Or, if you agree that a low-carbon future would be a good thing: Tax carbon usage, and, since you don't like the government spending money, just distribute the proceeds equally among the population. This works out to a net impact, modulo transactions costs, on the average carbon-emitting person of zero, but rewards and punishes the outliers.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#39

Post by eru »

arethuza wrote: post #22
macavity23 wrote: post #2

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 caus…

"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" Having been on large EU funded projects (all part of the ESPRIT II program), I honestly can't believe that they provided good value for money. Now there might have been a lot of indirect benefits, but I'm…

Also the US Space Shuttle had a cost 1000-fold cost overrun, if measured by cost to orbit per unit of mass.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#40

Post by toemetoch »

onli wrote: post #30
toemetoch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Inevitably, some hot July week will come when a high-pressure system stalls over Europe, stilling turbines just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners The summer in Germany isn't that hot. Middle europe, not california. Accordingly, we don#t have air conditioners (in general) These scenarios do happen. They're not always as straight-forward as the one suggested (low production/high demand). A few we…

I don't know about Belgium. Maybe air conditioners there are more common? In Germany, it is said that cold winters are more dangerous for the energy balance, as the cold also increases energy demand and the photovoltaik-cells aren't as useful as in a hot (and sunny) summer.

Please read again. Energy demand was lower because it was a holiday, nothing to do with air conditioners.
Post reply on HN