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Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

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Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#41

Post by [deleted] »

patall wrote: post #28
throw0101d wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine how much better carbon emissions would be in Germany if they hadn't dismantled nuclear! Germany has 15.4 GW of hard coal generation, and 14.7 GW of lignite, for a total of 30.1 GW: * https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... In 2010, before the shutdowns started, it had 21.5 GW of nuclear. So if all the other rollouts (renewables, etc ) had stayed the same, but the shutdown of nuclear…

And Europe would be in even bigger black-out trouble right now as half of those 20 GW of nuclear power would not be running due to missing cooling water, just like is the case in the other European countries. The german green part certainly isn't perfect, but they had a plan. A plan that included far more renewable energies than currently build. The ones that orchestrated the ultimate end of nuclear energy while shut…

[deleted]

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#42

Post by bluGill »

raphinou wrote: post #17
NishanStepak wrote: post #4

Part of this is about a new way to store energy. In the Netherlands, they have started storing heat energy with sand, in Germany, they are using bricks. This has some advantages. It allows the direct use of heat for industrial processes and heating industrial and commercial facilities. They can either convert energy into electricity or use the heat directly. This technology can be used with a wide variety of energy s…

I think I have read that heat is hard to convert to useful energy. Can someone confirm? But the, if that's true, why use heat as energy storage?

That depends on what you need energy for. Converting heat energy stored during the day to heat my house at night is easy. Converting heat energy stored into light is much harder (as the other reply stated, it needs high heat and thus is a fire hazard)

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#43

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

raphinou wrote: post #17
NishanStepak wrote: post #4

Part of this is about a new way to store energy. In the Netherlands, they have started storing heat energy with sand, in Germany, they are using bricks. This has some advantages. It allows the direct use of heat for industrial processes and heating industrial and commercial facilities. They can either convert energy into electricity or use the heat directly. This technology can be used with a wide variety of energy s…

I think I have read that heat is hard to convert to useful energy. Can someone confirm? But the, if that's true, why use heat as energy storage?

Heat is really useful if the energy form you want is heat. If you want electricity or motion it's not the best.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#44

Post by [deleted] »

lnz_me wrote: post #14
suddenlybananas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have done all this without dismantling nuclear power and emitting more carbon than they otherwise would have.

i love the "but nuclear" crowd as they seem to gloss over that a nuke is a steam engine and needs water. water we don't have anymore. if you follow the news in europe you'll see every summer that country X (normally france) has to drastically reduce or switch off their nukes because no water.

[deleted]

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#45

Post by freehorse »

novaRom wrote: post #18
marcosdumay wrote: post #11

What is not on the title: For an entire year, that year being 2025. Also, yes, absolute generation from fossil fuels is declining quickly. The total generation is changing way more slowly than that share.

But so is German industry - every day in the news either insolvency or workforce reduction and moving production to Eastern Europe - main reason often stated "expensive Energy". I wonder what are the stats for industrial production in 2025 or total energy consumption in Germany?

Discussion about nuclear reactors aside, energy in germany became expensive when they cut off russian gas and they had no good alternative. There was no other source of cheap fossil fuels for electricity production. If anything, renewables are promoted as a solution to that energy problem.

The discussion about fossil fuels vs renewables is a bit different within countries which produce fossil fuels than within those that don't.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#46

Post by bluGill »

ragebol wrote: post #6
citrin_ru wrote: post #3

It's a good news and a milestone to celebrate but if we count all energy and not only electricity and not only developed world then the progress is not as fast unfortunately [1]. Not a long time ago I've seen a post arguing based on the data [1] that renewables are irrelevant and should not be taken seriously and fossils will the main source for the lifetime. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-subst…

When looking at hat kind of graphs, it's good to keep in mind that burning hydrocarbons is relatively inefficient: only ~20-30% of the energy in the fuel turns into useful work, while electricity is much, much more efficient. So, we need much less of it. Still a long ways to go regardless, but much less bleak. And also, exponentially growing deployments of wind and solar are harder to spot on this 2-year old graph wh…

That is very much a it depends. The best combined cycle power plants get around 60% efficient. The gas engine in your car is in the ideal case around 45% efficient - but the way you drive in the real world is only about 20-30% efficient.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#47

Post by RandomLensman »

freehorse wrote: post #45
novaRom wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But so is German industry - every day in the news either insolvency or workforce reduction and moving production to Eastern Europe - main reason often stated "expensive Energy". I wonder what are the stats for industrial production in 2025 or total energy consumption in Germany?

Discussion about nuclear reactors aside, energy in germany became expensive when they cut off russian gas and they had no good alternative. There was no other source of cheap fossil fuels for electricity production. If anything, renewables are promoted as a solution to that energy problem. The discussion about fossil fuels vs renewables is a bit different within countries which produce fossil fuels than within those…

Germany cut off Russian gas? Gazprom suspended supply indefinitely via NS1 before it was destroyed.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#48

Post by throw0101d »

RandomLensman wrote: post #40
throw0101d wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Greens were not in Office when the nuclear exit was decided 2011. Schröder was talking about it in 2000: * https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/15/johnhooper * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schröder#Domestic_poli... Oh, and he was appointed to Gazprom (and other Russian energy companies) after leaving politics: * https://www.dw.com/en/former-chancellor-schröder-sworn-in-at... (He did encourage ren…

Politically that would have been done how? I think in restropect removing nuclear powerplants that make awful targets in a conflict doesn't strike me as a bad choice either.

> Politically that would have been done how? I think in restropect removing nuclear powerplants that make awful targets in a conflict doesn't strike me as a bad choice either.

The only people causing conflict is Russia, and Germany had to be dragged kicking and screaming in shutting down Russian supply pipelines, so don't go talking about "security" when the actions from Berlin showed there was zero consideration for it:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream

When the architect of the retirement ends up on the board of Gazprom:

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/15/johnhooper

* https://www.dw.com/en/former-chancellor-schröder-sworn-in-at...

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#49

Post by mrguyorama »

raphinou wrote: post #17
NishanStepak wrote: post #4

Part of this is about a new way to store energy. In the Netherlands, they have started storing heat energy with sand, in Germany, they are using bricks. This has some advantages. It allows the direct use of heat for industrial processes and heating industrial and commercial facilities. They can either convert energy into electricity or use the heat directly. This technology can be used with a wide variety of energy s…

I think I have read that heat is hard to convert to useful energy. Can someone confirm? But the, if that's true, why use heat as energy storage?

"Low grade heat", less than the boiling point of water (often), can be stored in a sand system and recovered efficiently and distributed later.

But low grade heat cannot efficiently drive a heat engine to produce other, more useful and transferable versions of energy, like electricity. For that you need "high grade" heat.

The reason is, heat engines do not operate on heat. They operate on heat flow. You must have a high temperature side and a low temperature side, and you extract energy by taking heat out of the high side and injecting it to the low side, through various processes. By thermodynamics, this process has hard efficiency limits of around 35%, with that efficiency heavily affected by the delta between the hot and cold side.

The "low" heat side is often a great source of low grade heat, for industrial or communal purposes, but cannot be used to run an efficient heat engine. It's already "used up" essentially.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#50

Post by freehorse »

RandomLensman wrote: post #47
freehorse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discussion about nuclear reactors aside, energy in germany became expensive when they cut off russian gas and they had no good alternative. There was no other source of cheap fossil fuels for electricity production. If anything, renewables are promoted as a solution to that energy problem. The discussion about fossil fuels vs renewables is a bit different within countries which produce fossil fuels than within those…

Germany cut off Russian gas? Gazprom suspended supply indefinitely via NS1 before it was destroyed.

When we are talking about countries, what matters is the political decisions, not the technical details imo.
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