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The Coming Energy Turnaround In Germany
An anonymous reader writes "Germany has decided to close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 and embark on an energy turnaround that focuses on large increases in sustainable energy production. What will it take in terms of investments, and will it mean cost hikes for German consumers? Will it really mean more jobs in the 'green energy' sector? Quoting: 'Total investment over the next decade for such an energy turnaround is estimated to be roughly €200 billion (or almost $290 billion). ... At the moment, more than 20 new coal-fired power plants are being planned or already under construction; together, they would achieve a total output of 10 gigawatts and could, in terms of power supply, replace nuclear power plants that are still operational. But coal-fired power plants do not fit into the concept of the sustainable energy turnaround that the government has put forward.'"
Most of the green energy sources are not viable by themselves. They're too unstable. Wind gusts cause surges for wind power. Solar doesn't produce anything at night. The only one that sounds like it might be viable is wave energy, and that only on shorelines that are never flat.
So to fill in, you need nuclear, coal, or gas plants.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You're just not thinking long-term.
I think the German government has the same problem, like that time where they decided they should shut down all their nuclear power plants.
Unless/until we can develop some form of industrial scale fusion, any of the base load options (nuclear, gas, coal, oil) are going to be necessary and will come with a serious environmental price tag attached. Solar and wind need to be developed and widely used but absent some miracles in battery technology and/or transmission losses (high temp superconductors) they will have limits.
If Germany wants to use fossil fuels instead of nuclear that is their prerogative but they are simply trading one problem for another one, possibly worse than the original. I don't really understand what they think they will accomplish other than to mollify people who are (reasonably or unreasonably) terrified of nuclear fission.
I agree. This story is such an excellent example of why environmentalism can be so dangerous and *must* be subjected to intense criticism, not adopted automatically "because that's what we should all do, right?".
It plays on people's fears, causes them to act irrationally and in the end can achieve environmentally negative results - as in the case of Germany introducing 20 new coal power-plants - the same that we've been so fighting so many years to get rid off, since they pollute the air and deplete non-renewable resources. (Yeah, my country neighbors with Germany, so I actually care about the resulting pollution.)
Yay! Progress... :(
Like all decisions driven by irrational fears, this is a bad move.
Germany already has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe (22 Cents/kWh versus 12 Cents/kWh in France, for example) and switching to super-expensive solar power and unstable wind turbines will prove to be eye-wateringly expensive, especially since there's very little energy storage capacity (eg. storage basins) and the existing energy transport infrastructure (ie. pylons across the country) is proving to be rather inadequate and has to be upgraded, naturally at huge economic and political cost (read: lots of NIMBY demonstrations).
Germans are very unrealistic about a lot of things (I'm German, BTW), and I think a lot of people are going to come down with a loud thump in this country when they're finally presented with the inevitable sky-high bills for all this energy utopia.
Hard figures: I'm reckoning on electricity prices of around 30 Cents/kWh in 5 years or so.
My 30 cents to the discussion.
Cheers,
Gerald
"Long term" in politics means "after my next term." To a politician, 2022 seems like a million bajillion years. They are in fact thinking "long term." Specifically they're thinking long term in the way they always think: it will be someone else's problem by then.
This will mean more and more hydrocarbons will have to be used to sustain the German economy. This is a hysterical political response from form uniformed and misguided environmental do gooders. I made an earlier post in another article about thorium reactors. These have no where the dangerous consequences of uranium/plutonium reactors. Thorium reactors have already been built in the US. But the reason why they never went commercial is because you cannot produce nuclear weapons from them in a practical sense.They better hope that fusion becomes viable soon. But I doubt it. People need to be more educated themselves and stop listening to lying politicians and self serving demagogues of fanciful ideologies.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
Except that it's not a level playing field. Fossil fuels get heavily subsidized. According to this, (which I have not independently verified or checked sources on) solar would be cheaper if that was turned around.
At the very least "less optimal economy" seems like disingenuous or stupid way to judge the cost/benefit to me. The costs of global warming, asthma, coal-related deaths, and smog would massively tilt the scale in favor of green. We've let the economists and corporations convince us that fossil fuels' external costs will never ever ever have to be paid off though, just as we let economists and irresponsible politicians convince us that deficits don't matter.
They are in fact thinking
Why do you say politicians are thinking, given all the evidence to the contrary?
That's why it's happening now, but it couldn't have happened without decades of attacks on nuclear power by some environmentalists.
So, Japan got hit by an earthquake and the reactor failed, shit happens, without risk there is no gain...
There's acceptable risks and unacceptable risks. Locating a nuclear plant on a seashore, next to a fault line, is not an acceptable risk, it's downright dumb. We've done the exact same thing here in the USA with a nuclear plant in California that was on the shore and right next to a fault line.
If you're going to do totally stupid stuff like this, you shouldn't be using nuclear power at all. Leave it to someone smarter, like the French, who apparently don't do these idiotic things and have been running tons of nuclear plants safely for decades.
The world has settled on very very very expensive, highly highly highly radioactive uranium to power nuclear reactors, so that we get neeto byproducts like being able to build nuclear bombs and blow other people to kingdom come! This has left us with a nuclear power grid that is fragile (one worker in Arizona switches off a single piece of equipment and 4 states go dark), dangerous, expensive and unable to scale into the 21st century. World war 2 started --in part-- as a fight over oil, and was ended with --in part-- nuclear weapons. Since that time, nuclear power has been used to power the world. Very expensive uranium. Thorium is wildly cheaper to build a plant for, burns much more completely, can be made intrinsically safe (if there is any kind of failure, reactions automatically stop with no external intervention, produces a million times less waste, and the waste that is produced has very short half lives --one reaction product has a half life of 12 minutes, the other about 90 minutes). We have tried one of the more dangerous types of nuclear power for about 50 years. No one wants to try a safer way.