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Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

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Re: Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

#81

Post by UltraSane »

FinnKuhn wrote: post #42
IceHegel wrote: post #16

I have always wondered about the origins of the anti nuclear opinion of Germans. It has Cold War origins to be sure, but what kind? I suspect American intelligence has been supporting the anti nuclear movement for some time, for non-proliferation reasons - and not just in Germany. I certainly would be, if I ran the State Department.

Nowadays it is mostly two things. The 1st reason is nuclear waste. Germany is more densely populated than the US so you can't store it far away from humans. The solution tried before was to just store it deep underground. Turns out that might even be worse than storing it on the surface as it turned out and it has been a total disaster (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine ). There have been more cancer cas…

Electricity is so expensive in Germany that entire industries are leaving.

Nuclear fusion is very iffy while we know nuclear fission works very well.

Re: Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

#82

Post by FinnKuhn »

JackSlateur wrote: post #77
FinnKuhn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas/Hydrogen are Germany's answer to you last point. You can store energy created by renewables this way easily and use it when needed. Right now we can't produce enough hydrogen though, so gas can be used in the meantime, but in the future the entire infrastructure, such as power plants, pipelines or port terminals can be switched to hydrogen: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/HydrogenCor... You could…

Hydrogen is a bad idea because it is dangerous (highly explosive) and also leaky, due to the size of the atom To transport hydrogen, you need complex infrastructure (real cold trunk or whatever) and you still leak, so the overall efficiency is bad

https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/HydrogenCor...

Germany is planing a hydrogen pipeline network.

Re: Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

#83

Post by maxdo »

JackSlateur wrote: post #80
inglor_cz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They started the largest war in Europe since 1945 and I fervently hope that Putin will pay for that in a way similar to Hitler. That entire war is a massive, futile attempt to revive their glorious imperial days by annexing lands that they consider their alienated property. Fuck them and their bombs and their disgusting oscillations between paranoia and megalomania. Contemporary Russia has fewer people than Pakistan…

What largest war in Europe since 1945 ? Ha, you speak about the war between Russia and the US and friends You are correct. Perhaps deal with all these people in the same way ? It starts with Biden and ends with countless others, all of which are equally guilty, all of which are fuelling a war needlessly.

Biden? the war started in 2014, with inclusion of not so secretive anymore of regular russian military. continued in 2015, etc. How is that Biden at all?

The only person who fuel this war is Putin. I used to be a russian citizen, I speak russian, i know the society, etc. This war is extremely unpopular in russia, but the only reason why it is still ongoing is one man.

Re: Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

#85

Post by Saline9515 »

pydry wrote: post #52
Saline9515 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cumulative radioactivity emitted by German coal as a result of the ban on nuclear is likely higher than the amount of radioactivity spread by the Fukushima disaster. We can also add lung issues and other pollution of the environment caused by soot.

Just 6.5% of German electricity was generated through coal last year. By contrast Poland was ~90% for years and only just slipped below 50%. If I had to guess why Poland never got any criticism for that while Germany was routinely pilloried by certain flavors of propaganda I would hypothesize that it was because Poland weren't humiliating the nuclear industry by swapping them with solar panels and wind turbines at 1/…

Solar panels and wind turbines are useful, but don't provide the base power a network needs to be stable, and on-demand capacity to give some flexibility. Ironically, fossil fuel electricity plants have to be built as part of renewables projects to make them viable.

This is why after having spent a trillion of euros in renewables, Germany still has the highest cost of electricity and still relies on French nuclear to stabilize their network. Same goes with Spain, that had a major blackout caused by a renewable shortfall.

Re: Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

#86

Post by trencedamp »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #30
sajithdilshan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I had a discussion with a German that is a strong supporter of the green party and his argument against nuclear power was the nuclear waste and no proper was of disposing it and also building new nuclear power plants are expensive and take a long time. Then I did a deep research and created a PDF and pointed out that there has been many advances of re-using spent-nuclear fuel and minimize the environmental impac…

So we just have to build the first expensive 20 to get the experience and then we reap the rewards after 40 years when we need the knowledge again? If nuclear would be cheap in the western world I'd be all for it but we just can't do large projects in our ccurrent system. Solar + wind + battery is much less of an headache.

This article is literally about geothermal and all people can talk about is nuclear, solar. Why aren't we building geothermal energy plants everywhere?

Re: Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

#87

Post by atwrk »

Saline9515 wrote: post #20
atwrk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The no brain solution is to electrify everything and switch legacy infrastructure to renewables, just like China does. Gas usage is down in the EU anyway.

China still uses a massive amount of coal, and has a lot of southern idle land. Germany has been doing what you say for the last 15 years, it didn't seem to work out so well.

What makes you think Germany didn't do well with renewables? This almost looks like a hockey stick graph: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/climate-energy/rene...

Re: Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

#88

Post by pydry »

maxdo wrote: post #83
JackSlateur wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What largest war in Europe since 1945 ? Ha, you speak about the war between Russia and the US and friends You are correct. Perhaps deal with all these people in the same way ? It starts with Biden and ends with countless others, all of which are equally guilty, all of which are fuelling a war needlessly.

Biden? the war started in 2014, with inclusion of not so secretive anymore of regular russian military. continued in 2015, etc. How is that Biden at all? The only person who fuel this war is Putin. I used to be a russian citizen, I speak russian, i know the society, etc. This war is extremely unpopular in russia, but the only reason why it is still ongoing is one man.

It started with a group of terrorist snipers in the Hotel Ukraina who fired randomly into a crowd of civilians. None of them were ever prosecuted. The attempt to pin it on the Berkut failed miserably.

One of them was identified by a Ukrainian war hero as Andriy Parubiy, far right nut and future speaker of the rada. Several of them identified themselves as Georgian mercenaries who were hired by Andriy Parubiy.

The goal of the terror attack was clearly to overthrow a democratically elected president that was overwhelmingly popular in Crimea and the donbass and install a puppet who could be relied upon to do the bidding of the west.

This was successful, and is what kicked off the civil war.

Victoria Nuland's phone call where she "picked" the puppet on behalf of the US state department was leaked. You can listen to it.

Re: Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

#89

Post by mDyJzDPmBdG »

trencedamp wrote: post #86
notTooFarGone wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we just have to build the first expensive 20 to get the experience and then we reap the rewards after 40 years when we need the knowledge again? If nuclear would be cheap in the western world I'd be all for it but we just can't do large projects in our ccurrent system. Solar + wind + battery is much less of an headache.

This article is literally about geothermal and all people can talk about is nuclear, solar. Why aren't we building geothermal energy plants everywhere?

What? For the same reason we don't build hydro plants everywhere, they depend on local conditions and all best spots are already used. Iceland can access geothermal power in entire country so they did.

Re: Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy

#90

Post by pydry »

Saline9515 wrote: post #85
pydry wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just 6.5% of German electricity was generated through coal last year. By contrast Poland was ~90% for years and only just slipped below 50%. If I had to guess why Poland never got any criticism for that while Germany was routinely pilloried by certain flavors of propaganda I would hypothesize that it was because Poland weren't humiliating the nuclear industry by swapping them with solar panels and wind turbines at 1/…

Solar panels and wind turbines are useful, but don't provide the base power a network needs to be stable, and on-demand capacity to give some flexibility. Ironically, fossil fuel electricity plants have to be built as part of renewables projects to make them viable. This is why after having spent a trillion of euros in renewables, Germany still has the highest cost of electricity and still relies on French nuclear to…

Neither does nuclear power. This is why when half of the French nuclear power plants were down for unscheduled maintenance in 2022 they had to import German solar and wind energy and burn a ton of gas.

Gas, batteries, grid interconnects and pumped storage are the only things which can stabilise the grid to properly match supply with demand. There is far more money available for all of them if you don't have to spend 5x as much per kWh on nuclear power.

While the global warming denialist brigade did try to pin Spain's blackouts on too many solar panels it was actually caused by voltage control on the grid.

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