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The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

#101

Post by sabertoothed »

someguydave wrote: post #74
adrianN wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear was always less than 15% of Germany's primary power consumption. Renewables something like 5%. We need to get to 100% carbon neutral. Whether we have to replace 80 or 100% with wind and solar shouldn't make that much of a difference.

Nuclear fission is the only non-carbon technology that could realistically get to 100% supply. Ending its generation in Germany was a mistake.

I think you need to qualify that first statement with a timeframe. Otherwise, it is clearly untrue. 100% supply is realistically possible with only renewable energy -- within a few years by investing in storage, local wind power in South Germany where the main demand is etc.

Re: The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

#102

Post by DocTomoe »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #91
DocTomoe wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether that is true or not: How do you expect it to become viable when coal is subsidized? Cutting subsidies to coal and/or increasing subsidies to solar just raises the cost of energy for end users, which does not affect the average HN user, but will affect the average citizen. Germans already paying a ridiculous amount of money per kilowatt hour (in fact, we are the first world country with the highest electrici…

> Cutting subsidies to coal and/or increasing subsidies to solar just raises the cost of energy for end users Source? And does that include the future costs of the environmental impact for the end users that will still be alive by then? > Germans already paying a ridiculous amount of money per kilowatt hour What exactly is ridiculous about a price that reflects the actual costs? > (in fact, we are the first world cou…

> Source?

"Source" is not a magic incantation that invalidates a statement. When subsidies change, price goes up, we have seen that repeatedly happening in the German electricity market, most prominently with the EEG.

> environmental impact for the end users that will still be alive by then?

You try to derail my point by underhandedly claiming I want more coal, which is false. I am pro-nuclear until we get fusion (also technically a nuclear technology) working. "But the costs are hidden, deconstruction will have to be paid by the taxpayer". Maybe - but when we were nuclear and before we installed bird-shredding and insect-killing wind farms, before we made everyone pay for large amounts of money to gift to rich homeowners to put solar on their roofs, electricity was considerably cheaper.

> What exactly is ridiculous about a price that reflects the actual costs?

The actual cost of power generation apparently can be a lot lower, because the hypercapitalist US pays about a third of our price.

Also, if you need to prop up an energy source with money, obviously it is not cost-effective.

> If you are paying 40 US cents per kWh for electricity in .de, then that's because you chose to, not because that's the market price.

I pay about 46 Eurocents per kilowatt hour, or around 52 US-Cents, with EnBW (900 kw/h per year[1], fixed costs factored in). Arguably, I could lower that to about 42 Eurocents per kilowatt hour if I change to Yello, who are famous for buying large amounts of nuclear electricity. Which, btw, is about to end here. With my low consumption, savings of about 36 Euros are just not worth it.

[1] So here I am - a single who moved to a small flat, all the lights are LEDs (which are considerably more expensive than the old ones), cooking rarely, enterntainment coming from a low-wattage laptop, actually turning off everything before leaving the flat ... I have done my part. I won't be painted as some kind of environmental monster or a right-winger because I do not support risking the social cohesion of our society to provide for some people's green renewable fantasies.

> So ... we should implement right-wing politics so that right-wing politics doesn't win?

So, what exactly is right-wing in not making the price of electricity rise to appease some crypto-right-wing Greens?

Re: The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

#103

Post by maze-le »

mc32 wrote: post #61
maze-le wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is such a program. There is a region in eastern Germany, that was known as the 'death triangle' during the DDR -- the region between Bitterfeld, Halle and Borna ( https://www.google.com/maps/@51.364936,12.2644447,63124m/dat... ). The region was dominated by coal mining and chemical industry -- greyish-black snows and acid rains were not uncommon. If you look at the map today, there are lots of lakes where…

That has echoes of the “Siberian Maldives” [1]. An ash lake that has turquoise waters, due to toxic pollutants, where lots of people go to take selfies ignoring the warning signs posted to not go in the lake... but people still do. [1] https://time.com/5623538/toxic-waste-dump-selfies/

I was barely alive at that time, so I only know these stories from my family members. But I've seen photographs of the time, that confirm it happened, albeit I doubt that it happened on a regular basis.

Re: The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

#104

Post by someguydave »

adrianN wrote: post #93
someguydave wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do they propose to deal with massive swings in generation and demand? Hydroelectric pumping? Batteries?

Build enough batteries and hydro to last for a few hours to a few days and use power-to-gas for longer periods of low generation (e.g. winter and no wind). There is already infrastructure in place for strategic gas reserves. We just need to build additional gas plants to meet demand when wind and solar are at production minimums.

But batteries and hydro are extremely expensive at grid-scale. How economically uncompetitive are you willing to make Germany in exchange for not using nuclear?

Re: The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

#105

Post by homonculus1 »

novalis78 wrote: post #40
titzer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's people and exponential growth. Doesn't matter what -ism you put on the end of your shovels.

That’s quite the Malthusian viewpoint. Alternatively: “Malthus theory, which holds that since the world’s resources are more or less fixed, population growth must be restricted or all of us will descend into bottomless misery. Malthusianism is scientifically bankrupt — all predictions made upon it have been wrong, because human beings are not mere consumers of resources. Rather, we create resources by the development…

*At the cost of catastrophic ecological destruction.

This specific strawman comes up so often that it ought to have its own name. Just because one guy underestimated the carrying capacity of the Earth a long time ago, and failed to predict farming practices that would eventually wreak havoc on the environment, doesn't make the population variable off-limits for discussion. Is it any more realistic to expect billions of people to voluntarily revert to an ascetic lifestyle?

Re: The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

#106

Post by adrianN »

someguydave wrote: post #104
adrianN wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build enough batteries and hydro to last for a few hours to a few days and use power-to-gas for longer periods of low generation (e.g. winter and no wind). There is already infrastructure in place for strategic gas reserves. We just need to build additional gas plants to meet demand when wind and solar are at production minimums.

But batteries and hydro are extremely expensive at grid-scale. How economically uncompetitive are you willing to make Germany in exchange for not using nuclear?

Nuclear is also extremely expensive. Personally I see opportunities in being an early adopter of technologies that have to become quite popular over the next few years if we want to prevent catastrophic climate change, but I'm not enough of an economist to have a strong opinion.

I would also be okay with building some nuclear, put nuclear and renewables don't go very well together, and I believe it's much harder to build enough nuclear plants quickly enough to replace all fossil energy consumption than it is to build enough wind turbines.

Re: The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

#107

Post by philipkglass »

avian wrote: post #98
adrianN wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany could close some of its coal plants immediately if it ran the mostly idle gas plants at capacity.

Don’t know specific situation in Germany, but gas turbine plants in my country are “mostly idle” because they are there to keep the grid stable (they spin up fast to cover peak demand). They can’t be run at capacity.

Irsching Power Station in Germany has a mixture of 770 MW peaking capacity (not suitable for routine use) and 1429 MW of idled high efficiency combined cycle gas turbine capacity. The latter type of unit is suitable for directly replacing coal fired plants. CCGT units have enabled the United States to rapidly replace coal fired power with gas fired power over the past decade. Replacing coal with gas isn't enough to reach climate goals, of course, but it certainly is better than continued coal use. Also, even CCGT installations not intended for peaking can respond faster to changing net demand than coal plants can, which makes them a better complementary source for renewables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irsching_Power_Station

There are another 1200+ megawatts of mostly-idle CCGT capacity at the Knapsack and Herdecke sites:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-20/merkel-s-...

Re: The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

#108

Post by kalium-xyz »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #42
ganesh7 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context the ecocide caused by the construction of windturbines is especially alarming

Do you mean the death of birds due to wind turbines? As best as I can tell, that is dwarfed by the birds killed by domesticated animals.

you say "domesticated animals" but is that not cats exclusively?

Re: The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

#109

Post by kalium-xyz »

reacweb wrote: post #88
fzort wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have a clear concept of a viable solution? Nuclear. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear to produce the same amount of energy (source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/08... )

I think nuclear is the best current solution, but it is too late to build nuclear plant now because it requires 40 years to be cost effective. I hope that solar will become better than nuclear in less than 10 years.

Solar less space efficient even at maximum capacity.

Re: The coal mine that ate Hambacher forest

#110

Post by kalium-xyz »

anoncake wrote: post #62
namibj wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also you can easily put solar over e.g. car parks, in which case you don't even need a proper roof if you funnel water from the panels towards the gutters without splashing the users walking to the cars. The cost should be within 30% of the panel price itself for a decent-size parking lot, less if you can get economies of scale through standardized modules that are placed next to each other to form rows for the cars.…

> You already can't use the land for plants/nature You can put plants on rooftops, we just don't.

You ever see those projects where they generate biofuel from algae growing ontop / against building using special build tanks? Its really cool.
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