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The Great German Energy Experiment

technologyreview.com

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Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#41

Post by cheez »

eru wrote: post #38
cturner wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of the reason why there is no natural incentive to develop new sources of energy is that the government works hand in hand with energy companies to prevent it for example, via drilling rights, subsidized prices making it uneconomical to research better sources because the companies can guarantee their profits.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#42

Post by eru »

gaius wrote: post #36
loceng wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are comparing the benefits of war to the wrong base. The civilians wouldn't have just burned all the riches (like war literally does to some extent), but would have used it to develop new products, too.

Nowadays the military actually uses consumer electronics.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#43

Post by larrydag »

jsilence wrote: post #11
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.

To everybody who thinks energy right now is too expensive. A couple of friends and I built a bike generator station for five bikes. We are using DC-Motors as dynamos and lead batterys for buffering the output. Five bikers in total can generate between 220W to 250W for an extended time. Let assume they bike at 200W for five hours. They then will have generated one kilowatthour of electricity, which costs 25ct. I'm pre…

Bike generators are powered by people. People biking require time. What is the labor or opportunity cost of having all of these people sustaining 250W per hour or essentially a .25kW-hour? Just a thought but that doesn't sound cheap.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#44

Post by cturner »

lispm wrote: post #15
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.

It is actually totally different. In the past the governments and the companies gave a shit about public opinion. Government money was used to research and build the nuclear industry. The electricity companies were huge monopolies. Currently we have four huge electricity producers which nicely divide the market into four regions. Competition? Zero. Government support? Max. That brought us huge coal power plants whic…

    > You can see who is the opposition: the four
    > huge electicity producers.
And responsible-budget people. Germany is running in defecit beyond it's European treaty obligations. A factor contributing to the bottom line is expensive energy and expensive energy projects.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#45

Post by jorleif »

One of the things that always surprises me when talking about lulls from wind and solar power, is that the assumption always is that we _have_ to provide continuous power. Would it not be possible to have industrial facilities that run in bursts when the energy is available (or more likely cheap), and then turn off again? Sure, this is not as easy as the old way to do things, but seriously, this is not impossible, nature essentially works in this way. Prime candidates would include extremely energy intensive industrial processes with short runtimes.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#46

Post by ars »

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

It's not that complicated. Making a solar panel costs more energy than it produces for decades. So all Germany is doing is making China foot the CO2 bill.

China makes the solar panel with all the associated CO2 costs, Germany installs it and claims no CO2.

Globally they are doing nothing useful, except maybe pushing the costs down.

I especially find shutting down the nuclear plants stupid. The one and only technology that actually would work, and they are spurning it.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#47

Post by skore »

lmm wrote: post #37
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 bet…

> We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries

That's incredibly short sighted. And not just the measure of 'centuries' (even if that were true, it's still arguably just postpone the problem). Energy demand is going up, sharply, as more countries join our standard of living. We will, definitely, need technologies that are as clean as possible to meet the demand, eventually. No amount of pollution that is avoidable is acceptable at the scale we are going to witness. Which brings us to

> the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables

I've stopped buying this argument and I'm sick of seeing it again and again - it's complete and utter Bullshit. The only way we have come up in terms of "dealing" with the highly toxic waste that nuclear energy produces (letting alone the often brushed over but equally horrifying ecological cost of mining the fuel) is to store it away "somewhere". The kicker is: We have not figured out that "somewhere". In Germany, there is exactly one site that is being developed for this. We literally ship the containers there and they sit in a holding facility above the salt mine because we have not even figured out how to get the fuel from the shipment containers into the storage containers. Oh, and the storage containers haven't been fully developed either. This is a catastrophe just waiting to happen.

Years and years of politics playing nice with (and pushing money into) the nuclear industry have produced no results that a reasonable person could support. What the government had done was basically doubling down on what is often - in this thread as well - requested: To let the market figure it out. Oh they have figured it out alright. Just not the part about it also being reasonable. Or even sane.

And this is only for the waste that was produced so far. The technology and storage capacity for centuries of waste simply doesn't exist. At all.

Story time: They actually did have the "solving" of this in mostly private hands for a long time - a semi-government agency (under strong, yet curiously absent oversight) conducted "experiments" on how to store the waste in a different salt mine [1]. They "experimented" with things like whether they roll or "throw down" barrels into caves. When they "noticed" that they had a problem with huge amounts of radioactive water rising up everywhere, they "solved" it by pumping it down into a deeper cavity. That whole agency was abolished and replaced and put under proper (and horrified) oversight when the extent of the disaster came to light in a huge scandal.

They have been "working on" trying to clean up this mess since nineteen frigging ninety five. They haven't even figured out how to drill into the closed off cavities to get the improperly stored fuel out of there, for crying out loud! All while cancer rates are going off around the site.

So yeah, great environmental impact. Go sell your snake oil somewhere else.

Very few things piss me off as much as nuclear defenders selling their technology as reasonable. Zero Carbon Emissions, Woo! Give me a break.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II - the German version is a lot more in-depth: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse - the English version seems to brush over much of the issues.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#48

Post by ars »

onli wrote: post #20

The article has a heavily biased view. Some points it gets wrong: >"If you close eight nuclear plants, which were carbon-free, overnight, you will increase carbon emissions," Nuclear plants are not carbon free. Getting the uranium, transporting the nuclear waste, transporting the people who run the plant costs a lot of carbon emissions. You need to look at the whole picture. >Inevitably, some hot July week will come…

> Nuclear plants are not carbon free. Getting the uranium, transporting the nuclear waste, transporting the people who run the plant costs a lot of carbon emissions.

But shutting them down when you already paid all the costs is clearly stupid.

And he didn't say carbon free. He said "increase carbon emissions" (he probably meant carbon dioxide emissions), and it clearly will increase them.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#49

Post by DasIch »

lmm wrote: post #37
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 bet…

Nuclear technology is extremely risky and prohibitively expensive even if we ignore the cost of accidents and waste disposal covered largely by governments because not a single company controlled by sane people would ever build a nuclear power plant otherwise.

That being said it is not at all clear whether there is enough uranium for a couple or even one century, especially given the massive increase in demand that we will see in the next couple of years.

Even if we assume it is cheap and will last for centuries it is still not a long term solution, which is what Germany is aiming for.

Re: The Great German Energy Experiment

#50

Post by sesqu »

larrydag wrote: post #43
jsilence wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To everybody who thinks energy right now is too expensive. A couple of friends and I built a bike generator station for five bikes. We are using DC-Motors as dynamos and lead batterys for buffering the output. Five bikers in total can generate between 220W to 250W for an extended time. Let assume they bike at 200W for five hours. They then will have generated one kilowatthour of electricity, which costs 25ct. I'm pre…

Bike generators are powered by people. People biking require time. What is the labor or opportunity cost of having all of these people sustaining 250W per hour or essentially a .25kW-hour? Just a thought but that doesn't sound cheap.

That's exactly what jsilence is saying. Energy from the grid is so incredibly cheap that you're using it without a second thought on things you would never consider doing without a grid. It could go up hundredfold before becoming expensive.

Also, kWh/hour is just a kilowatt.

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