Germany Produces Record-Breaking 5.1 Terawatt Hours of Solar Energy In One Month

oritonic1 writes "Germany is rapidly developing a tradition of shattering its own renewable energy goals and leaving the rest of the world in the dust. This past July was no exception, as the nation produced 5.1 TWh of solar power (PDF), beating not only its own solar production record, but also eclipsing the record 5TWh of wind power produced by German turbines in January. Renewables are doing so well, in fact, that one of Germany's biggest utilities is threatening to migrate to Turkey."

Comments

Gonna go back in time

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:Gonna go back in time

[Culture20]

Yeah, it could power 4214 trips!

Re: Gonna go back in time

[Anonymous Coward]

Good, I hope it bankrupts E.ON. Here in the UK where we privatised a public utility we are now paying the price, higher prices year on year. After all they have shareholders & executives to look after first. To top it all off we are now looking to follow of dumb cousins across the pond and start fracking. We the people don't want it (unless you have a vested interest) & were not consulted. Guess that is what you get when you sell the house, absolutely no control. Consensus is now looking to renationalise here. Then we can boot the likes of E.ON out. Good for Germany

Re: Gonna go back in time

[Anonymous Coward]

Go Germany!!! Just imagine...a country of the people, by the people, and for the people! We in the USA, on the other hand, in the interest of helping the rest of the world, are in the process of creating the greatest cautionary tale in history. After all of our short-term high-$-gain fossil fuel energy grabbing adventures have fizzled out here, many Americans will have to move from their contaminated homes to less-desirable locations. We might even screw the environment so badly here that the movie Elisium might happen. Churchill was right...we Americans do the right thing, but only after we've tried every other possibility. PS: we're already a cautionary tale...have you seen the American political inaction lately? Too bad our absolutely crazy religious-right, who are God-fearing, Jesus-loving, but Jesus-doctrine-hating, are afraid of the African-American man in the White House. If they practiced what they preached, we might have a functional government. Germany, keep up the good work. You serve as an excellent example for governance to the rest of the world, including we wayward, off-the-rails Americans.

Re: Gonna go back in time

[Optali]

In Germany they have a private E.ON and RWN ;) And I bet the prices aren't much cheaper than in the UK.
Sorry to bust your religious Sacred-Private-Enterprise experience. Remember that business is business and religion, religion.\

Re: Gonna go back in time

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Optali, I wish people in the US would keep business business and religion religion, but all too often it's mixed. I don't need to remember how it should be. But I do think of how I want it to be. That means a separation between religion & government, and ideally a separation between religion & business. :-)

Re: Gonna go back in time

[Optali]

I am not talking about the religion with the nakkid guy nailed to a pair of sticks.

I am talking about the Capitalist Religion with it's sacred dogmas that private is always better than public and that the market will fix anything and that prices and quality will raise just because something is private.

And there you have E.ON... a private company BTW, together with RWE (another private company) owners of close to 100% of the German energy market and part of the rest of Europe, including my country, Holland. There were some examples at small scale publicly owned gas companies in Germany able to deliver gas at a fraction of the price E.ON was charging.

And we have other examples here in Holland, were the health care for elderly people and the hospitals was put into private hands hoping that hte Holy Ghost of the Market would drive quality and price... without taking into consideration that there was no such market with the results of an extremely expensive system delivering low quality work and costing the tax payer extra money both privately, because we have to pay an inflated prices for services that a public company would have been able to acquire at bulk prices and also because the state has to put money into the system to avoid a total collapse.

Want another funny Dutch example on how to fuck up majorly? Well, this is one of our best: Our railroad network. We privatised the railroad infrastructure and kept the train company (NS) in a sort of Frankenstein semi-private company bing the state the owner of 70% of shares. Result: Chaos! And please note that we Dutch workers depend on out public transport not because we are all Socialist-Green-Eco-Fascists minions of the Evil Global Warming Conspiracy, but because our population density is even higher than in Japan and during peak hours driving your car means moving at an average of 20km/h.

We, unfortunately, live in a society, meaning that a bunch of us live together, if something is working fine, like here in Holland the (old) school system, the health system or our trains then don't touch it... As a matter of fact these trains were said to be so efficient that Hitler used them to transport people to the extermination camps. Don't worry, colabs were hung and shot after the war... this was fortunately not left to private hands.

My point is not that public is good and private evil, my point is that we must abstain from mixing faith with economics: We should prefer the option which costs us, the tax payer and consumer less: Be it taxes or fees doesn't matter, an Euro is an Euro and where it goes after it leaves my bank account is not of my concern.
 

Re: Gonna go back in time

[Anonymous Coward]

Optali, all good points...I fully agree. Western European countries seemed to be operating so well 20 years ago when I was living there. It's unfortunate to hear that some of the ill-conceived (for the public) but very profitable (for the shareholders) practices in the US are also happening in Europe.

In the US, the conservative Republican Party maintains a stance that the government can't do anything right so they try to run the government so they can legislate & pass the privatization of everything. Yet his holiness Alan Greenspan, after the great market crash of 2008, publicly acknowledged he didn't think private companies would make decisions not in their own best interest (which lead to the collapse). Despite that, no significant lessons were learned...the economic behaviors here haven't changed much since 2008.

Our economic middle-class & lower class are being squeezed harder & harder. So far, their protests have been very weak & in small numbers. I'm wondering at which point they'll awaken from their deep sleep & take up torches & pitchforks. Voting can help, but the Republicans aren't even hiding anymore their efforts to make it much more difficult for non-Republicans to vote.

Best of luck to you in Holland. We could use some luck in the US. I'm really hoping rational thought & sound judgement will prevail, & the big folly happening now will fall apart as a big correction happens. I admit I'm optimistic.

NO NO NO

[AmiMoJo]

This can't be right, solar doesn't work, Germany is too far north, the lights must go off every night, PV is a stupid technology, nuclear is the only way!!1 How can this be happening, it must be a liberal media lie put out by the scientifically illiterate eco-nazis... it... it just can't...

Re:NO NO NO

[Ruede]

i am paying 24,26 €cents per kwh

i prefer the prieces of nuclear power.

Re:NO NO NO

[yincrash]

What I'm more interested in is what is the percentage breakdown of various energy sources for the total energy consumption of the country.

Re:NO NO NO

[IonOtter]

"i prefer the prieces of nuclear power..."

Ask the people of Fukushima how they feel about those low-low prices.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear subsidies are in your taxes, where you don't see them. Solar subsidies are in the electricity price, where you see them. Nuclear energy is not cheap energy, and while it does work for base load, you only need to look at France in the winter and in the summer to see that relying on nuclear does not cover all loads, so you also need other power plants on standby, so nuclear does not have an advantage over wind and solar there.

Re:NO NO NO

[Kjella]

Well to quote the wikipedia page quoting a financial times article:

Due to the costs of this "Energiewende" Germany now has Europes highest energy costs. Costs have risen over the last 5 years even for industrial consumers who are exempted from the costs of the renewable energy subsidy that consumers pay. In 2013, energy was 4 times cheaper in the United States than in Europe, and 6 times cheaper than in Germany.

It comes at a price and the sweet spots to produce renewables have already been picked, to keep it up they must use less and less ideal areas and means. Nice to see them lead but it's not really an act the whole world can follow.

Re:NO NO NO

[Mycroft_VIII]

It can, only problem is last time I checked (a few years ago though) it took about 6 TW of energy to produce solar cells that could deliver that much energy. It also produced more and more highly toxic waste than the same in coal which in turn produces more radioactive contamination than nuclear, which in modern designs is even better and much safer.

Mycroft.

Re:NO NO NO

[Microlith]

You must be pretty tough to knock down those straw men!

5.1TWh is probably enough that, with all existing sources of energy, they could fully supply their exports or cut off all imports and have a small surplus. It would be, at most, slightly under 1/9th of what Germany produces on a down month. Note also that the output from solar has dropped, so all told they're at... just under 7 TWh in renewables.

But let's ignore that the vast majority of energy production continues to be fossil fuels, which pollute constantly.

*http://www.iea.org/stats/surveys/mes.pdf

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

"i prefer the prieces of nuclear power..."

Ask the people of Fukushima how they feel about those low-low prices.

Impossible, there are no people in Fukushima.

Re:NO NO NO

[Microlith]

s/solar has dropped/wind has dropped/

Re:NO NO NO

[Maxo-Texas]

33% petroleum
12% hard coal
12% lignite
22% Natural gas, petroleum gas
08% nuclear Energy
02% Water and wind power
10% other renewables
  -1% Foreign trade balance power
02% Other

Re:NO NO NO

[SolitaryMan]

Took like 30 seconds of googling. For production: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany#Statistics and for consumption: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Energy_consumption

Re:NO NO NO

[AmiMoJo]

Gotta love statistics. "Europe" includes a large number of countries with widely varying prices. If you compare Germany to similar north western European countries it isn't particularly expensive. Other countries happen to have some nice natural resources, or they subsidise the cost through general taxation (especially for nuclear power).

The US is a terrible polluter and has lots of fraked natural gas that have driven down prices, so isn't a very useful comparison.

Re: NO NO NO

[khallow]

Nuclear subsidies are in your taxes, where you don't see them. Solar subsidies are in the electricity price, where you see them.

In other words, both those subsidies are in the same place. Whether you "see" them or not depends on what "see" means and how you spin it.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right... keep alienating people instead of bringing them together.
 
I hope you get AIDS and die.

Re:NO NO NO

[poity]

Please try to run smelters on PV, build cars and planes on wind.
Renewables advocates always forget industry when poo-pooing nuclear.

Re:NO NO NO

[khallow]

What's not right? Germany pays a huge amount of money to make solar work. Those technical arguments still apply, but you can spend a bunch of money to ignore them.

Re:NO NO NO

[tbf]

Problem isn't renewable energy, problem is the horribly bad EEG law Rot/Grün was drafting: Industries got excluded from paying renewable energy compensation, still a fixed price must be paid for renewable energy. So everytime the energy price drops at the European Energy Exchange in Leipzig the consumer's energy price rises. Yet another example how socialism fails. See http://www.lvz-online.de/leipzig/wirtschaft/strompreise-an-der-leipziger-boerse-sinken--buerger-zahlen-mehr-fuer-energie/r-wirtschaft-a-173930.html (German) for a good explanation of that fatal mechanism.

Re:NO NO NO

[Iniamyen]

TW is not a measure of energy!!!!! ARGGGHHH

Re:NO NO NO

[Tim the Gecko]

It can, only problem is last time I checked (a few years ago though) it took about 6 TW of energy to produce solar cells that could deliver that much energy.

Don't you mean TWh? TW is the rate of energy production.

The good news is that the cells last for longer than a month. From your guesstimate figures it seems like they break even remarkably quickly, and then are energy positive for decades.

Re:NO NO NO

[khallow]

The US is a terrible polluter and has lots of fraked natural gas that have driven down prices, so isn't a very useful comparison.

Unless electricity costs matter to you more than those other concerns (the "terrible polluter" is about as polluting as the EU and fracking just doesn't seem that bad compared to normal oil drilling) at the minor levels they occur at.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

This is how it works:

"Due to the costs of this "Energiewende" Germany now has Europes highest energy costs. Costs have risen over the last 5 years even for industrial consumers who are exempted from the costs of the renewable energy subsidy that consumers pay. In 2013, energy was 4 times cheaper in the United States than in Europe, and 6 times cheaper than in Germany."

It is pretty awesome progress (from something like 7% of electricity generation to ~25% from 2000 to 2012), but there's still a long way to go and it's come at a very high cost. I'm all for switching to renewable sources. It should be part of the mix. But I think we should be realistic about what it will take. Most people seem to think it is an easy substitution. Other than hydroelectric, which is a very mature renewable technology, it's challenging stuff.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

6 TW is a quantity of power, not energy. Based on this simple mistake, I am going to go ahead and write off everything you said since I don't think you have any clue what you're talking about.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course nuclear for (air?)-planes is the way to go.

Re:NO NO NO

[crossmr]

30 seconds of googling to get 4 year old statistics. Wow.. what a great locator of information you are. They've obviously been improving renewable energy so those statistics are outdated and not remotely useful.

Re: NO NO NO

[Bengie]

And coal taxes us by health care for coal miners and other breathing issues caused by pollution.

Re:NO NO NO

[Guspaz]

Funny, my province's power is entirely supplied by a government-owned corporation, which hits about 98% renewable energy generation, has among the lowest energy prices in the world, and has still produced a consistent profit in the billions for decades. Doesn't seem to be failing to me.

Re:NO NO NO

[ackthpt]

This can't be right, solar doesn't work, Germany is too far north, the lights must go off every night, PV is a stupid technology, nuclear is the only way!!1 How can this be happening, it must be a liberal media lie put out by the scientifically illiterate eco-nazis... it... it just can't...

Worry not, the average American Household keeps Green and Renewable Energy at bay by leaving lights on all over the house, the refrigerator door open while doing something else, having the TV running while not in the room, having dozens of wall-warts sucking energy to power nothing at all, but burning up watts through cheap inefficient design, pre-heating ovens and stoves, etc.

I'm considered subversive for managing a monthly combined bill of about 30 dollars. I expect their coming to get me, reprogram me so I'll be a more wasteful power consumer, it's only ... just a sec, door. brb

[NO CARRIER]

Re:NO NO NO

[Zeromous]

YYMV and anyone saying something different is selling something.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the world doesn't have a vast hinterland full of gigantic hydroelectric dams.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad thing is, as you can see on pg. 18 of the PDF linked in the articte, that the utilities shut down their flexible gas plants instead if their inflexible coal plants or nuclear reactors to compensate for the lower demand. And then they bitch about being unable to compensate for the varying supply of renewable energy caused by the weather.

Btw., I can't say that July in Germany was exceptionally sunny this year. I think my bedroom was 28'C on the hottest days and that's without an AC.

Re:NO NO NO

[bdwebb]

Sensationalism much? They feel fine...only their warm-fuzzies were really effected and mostly due to trauma from either proximity to the plant's fire or due to the massive fucking tsunami that caused all of the actual problems . (http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/28/world/asia/japan-who-radiation)

The lifetime risk of contracting certain types of cancer rose slightly for a small group of people because they were exposed to radiation from the nuclear disaster, the WHO said Thursday.

The notable exception was young emergency workers at the plant, who inhaled high doses of radioactive iodine, probably raising their risk of developing thyroid cancer. But since the thyroid is relatively resistant to cancer, the overall risk for these people remains low, the report said.

Otherwise, any increase in human disease after the partial meltdown triggered by the March 2011 tsunami is "likely to remain below detectable levels," the WHO said in its report.

So basically the tsunami and resulting devastation from the tsunami's aftermath are what the people in Fukushima are really concerned about...not growing extra arms or dying of cancer any sooner than they already would have. The real question for people there is whether or not they are willing to pay double price for their power and be safe from the apparent nuclear menace that is destroying lives...I'm betting people like cheap power.

Re: NO NO NO

[bdwebb]

Except you still pay for the nuclear subsidies while ALSO paying for the solar subsidies.

Re:NO NO NO

[maxwell demon]

YYMV

Your Yardage May Vary?

Re: NO NO NO

[fustakrakich]

Pollution is harmless. In fact, it's good for you, helps you build resistance, just like drinking contaminated water helps you produce more antibodies and live healthy. Unnecessary sanitation makes you weak and vulnerable to all sorts of normally harmless chemicals, viruses, and bacteria..

Re:NO NO NO

[khallow]

which hits about 98% renewable energy generation

How much real estate is permanently devoted to hydro in order to reach that level of "renewable" energy?

Re:NO NO NO

[Mozai]

Sure. While I'm asking the people of Fukashima, you go ask the four thousand US coal miners each year with blacklung, or if its easier, the six thousand that die each year in China from coal mine accidents. While you're doing that, don't forget to check out the uranium and thorium that gets upchucked into the atmosphere where it can't be contained in a discrete area. http://web.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

Re:NO NO NO

[kesuki]

well they made a nice 1980 lbs rover for mars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover, and its nuclear powered so we know how to build nuclear atvs but only for extra terrestrials...

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, whatever you don't use I'm more than happy to use for you. I run my computers 24/7. They aren't servers, I just don't like needing to boot them up for the occasional email or google search. I don't even have enough hands for all of them at the same time. My bill isn't that high (about $80 just for electric, and ~ $50 for natural gas year round due to billing method used) but I live in a really cheap power area of the country.

Re:NO NO NO

[turbidostato]

"I think my bedroom was 28'C on the hottest days and that's without an AC"

Do you mean it can get even higher when you turn on your AC?

Gasp!

I'm in Spain... yesterday it peaked 42ÂC -and I was lucky, that was without AC too!

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not sure how much people would be interested in something that weighs as much as a normal car, but has about a sixth of a horsepower, even if it only has to be fueled once a decade. Although if you drove only 20 minutes a day, with Curiosity's batteries you could get that up to 2 hp.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

I could not have said it any better myself

Re:NO NO NO

[englishstudent]

That's true. Only zombies live in Fukushima now.

Re: NO NO NO

[khallow]

Except you still pay for the nuclear subsidies while ALSO paying for the solar subsidies.

And vice versa. The solar subsidies aren't all paid by the kilowatt hour. This is a pointless level of spin.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Get used to it. The future of the human race will be about adapting to the fact that energy is no longer cheap. Forget all the grandiose 1960s promises about never-ending material progress and our glorious future in space. Think more about LED lighting and expensive transportation.

Re:NO NO NO

[aliquis]

I've read earlier being further north is actually better.

I don't remember why for sure but it may have been that the circuits work better at a lower temperature and as such you still win.

I read of some which made both electricity and heat with a claim that they normally didn't do that (likely depending on what electromagnetic wavelengths they focus on picking up.)

Re:NO NO NO

[KugelKurt]

Yet another example how socialism fails.

You have a weird definition of socialism.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for posting anon, but I didn't like the parent to your post and moderated appropriately. You are SPOT ON. Nuclear power has nothing on coal for environmental problems. Nuclear has the potential to be worse, but is heavily-enough regulated to be a smaller problem. I prefer solar- and hydro-electric generation, but will take nuclear over coal power generation any day

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing, in the first couple years of grad school, I stayed in the university housing and had mostly international roommates and neighbors. And they all left lights on all the time, regardless of European or other international student. They all were happy to live some place where electricity was a flat rate (included in rent), and suddenly took the stance, "Why save it if I don't have to pay for it?" I thought that attitude was an Americanism (coming from an American), until then.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine averages 25$/mo and I have 3 pc's running 24/7 and a fridge. Sometimes even 3 LED lights. Everything else is either unplugged or rarely used. Oven, who needs that when you have a microwave and a toaster.

My point is that a lot of energy use/cost reduction has to be at the expense of lifestyle. I don't use the stove every day, and I keep the fridge rather empty. My computers and everything plugged into the UPS use 200watts. (Yes 3 PC's are running off the same UPS.) Most of that figure comes from the desktop/windows machine and not the Apple Products.

I could save even more energy but, really based on my electricity bill, 20$ is the electricity, 5$ is the "connection" and the the rest in taxes. I use 300kWh per month. At some point you have to remember that heating/air conditioning is part of the building (rental) and not all buildings have central ac/heat.

In fact, previous places I lived at, which had inefficient baseboard (electric radiator) heating, and mostly-glass walls cost a lot more to heat in the winter, and the heat was completely off in the summer, so the peak/valley on the electric bill would vary between 60 and 100$/mo

If I wanted to save more money (a whole 10$/mo) I could use the macmini instead of the desktop. I recently replaced a C2D with a haswell part, we'll see if the energy use average is lowered significantly. I doubt it because Intel still seems uninterested in putting a 15Watt part in a desktop and not a underpowered laptop/tablet/phone.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in Fairbanks, AK. Energy prices here are about 20cents/KWH. Right now, payback for unsubsidized solar is ~20 years. This is a *long* time for break-even, but the economics can work if you're willing to wait. (Unless you use an efficient wood stove for heat, you can realize a better payback if you store solar heat underground rather than collect electricity, but electricity is much sexier.)

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds terrible

Re:NO NO NO

[aliquis]

Nice to see them lead but it's not really an act the whole world can follow.

Sure it can. At the cost of higher energy price.

There's lots of related stories.

I just read in a somewhat recent magazine (0-2 year old) how here in Sweden/Scandinavia I think they was often recycling 90-95% (or just 95%) of the building material when they broke down a building.
In the rest of the Europe they was trying to reach 50-95% (or 50-90.)
In the US? 20%.

There's also that story about that plastic stuff in the pacific.

Over here in Sweden almost all aluminium cans are recycled, you pay 1 SEK for them when you get your drink and you get 1 SEK back when you recycle them. When people go out and drink (and just throw or put down their beer somewhere) or maybe leave their soda cans some people browse the cities for cans and look through the trash cans to pick them up and return them.
We do the same for glass (1 SEK) and PET (1 or 2 SEK) bottles.
We have had the same system for beer, cider and wine bottles to. I don't know how it works atm because I don't buy them anyway.

I'm supplied with a compost bag holder and free paper bags to put my compost in and suppost to drop that content into a compost box outside. At the parking lot (same area) I can also leave all packaging which is made of plastic, metal, glass, cardboard and papers&magazines. If you live further out on the country side there's bigger ones like these: http://www.orebro.se/310.html

Around the city there's places like this:
http://www.orebro.se/305.html
They are made like this:
http://www.orebro.se/download/18.1ae77d4612f5d50ab538000632/Atleverket_karta+%C3%B6ver+ramp+och+containrar.pdf
http://www.orebro.se/download/18.1ae77d4612f5d50ab538000634/Mellringe_karta+%C3%B6ver+ramp+och+containrar.pdf
http://www.trollhattan.se/Documents/Tekniska/renhallning/avc_detaljplan_stor2.jpg
Here's a photo of one:
http://www.orebrohus21.se/att/Hovstas%20nya%20%C3%A5tervinningscentral.JPG
http://www.emmaboda.se/upload/Om%20kommunen/Kommunala%20bolag/MHAB/Kopia%20av%20IMG_3356.JPG

There you can leave more or less everything. Electronic (everything with built in battery, TVs, ..), dish washers, fridges, freezers, things you can burn (mostly wood and furniture), plastic, asbestos, metal, light bulbs and FLs, I assume there's also room for things like garden left overs for people with no compost of their own, batteries, paint, thinners, oil, ..

In general the rest garbage is burned for long-distance/district heating (and there's places which burn more nasty stuff to.)

As for land fills those exist to but with clay in the bottom and they put stuff above and so on but I guess that may be the case in many places. But as I understand things we've actually got a bigger demand for garbage to burn (though I assume we get some pollutans/filter material by doing so) than garbage so we import garbage ..

They are rebuilding the largest one (?) in VÃsterÃ¥s:
http://www.malarenergi.se/sv/om-malarenergi/vara-anlaggningar/kraftvarmeverket/Valkommen-till-fornyelsebloggen/
I don't know where to find the nice looking schematics picture but whatever.

Re:NO NO NO

[symbolset]

Until the spent fuel is disposed of it isn't you paying for that nuclear power. It is your children and grandchildren.

Re:NO NO NO

[uniquename72]

Yes, any statistics more than 3 years old should just be thrown away, as they are not remotely useful.~

(Or you could just Google it yourself instead of being a fucking dipshit.)

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

This complaint reminds me about how Ronald Reagan once claimed that the TVA flooded more land than the floods they were meant to prevent...except his numbers were comparing the whole river system served by the TVA, while the estimate for the flood was a large singular event, so he left out the possibility of that flood occurring among how many more square miles of land...and numerous times, in uncontrollable fashion, in devastating ways.

Of course, he also failed to mention how many of the other things he complained about were a result of the TVA being mandated to be fiscally solvent rather than serving the public needs into the future. Had he told the TVA to do so, they could have eliminated their use of coal entirely, and switched to a mix of hydroelectric and nuclear, with some gas, solar, and wind, but no, he told them they had to be run like a business, and no president sense has had the force of will to change the standard.

Because that would cause money for investment now, and the payoff would be long after his term expired. Can't have that.

Yet we're still building gigantic aircraft carriers.

Re:NO NO NO

[aliquis]

US is about as polluting as the EU?

Locally or / capita?

Feel free to back that claim up with something. I'm much more interested / capita than anything else.

You buy a new TV, car or whatever = You pollute.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

The EU has 500 million people. If you're saying they're about as polluting total, then per capita, it's horrible.

Re:NO NO NO

[MightyYar]

This can't be right, solar doesn't work

I'm a big fan of sarcasm, but are you honestly impressed by 5.1 TW-h over the course of an entire month? That's 6.9 GW average.

Now, I don't want to pooh-pooh progress here, because I think solar will eventually be very important - but you are talking about output equivalent to one large coal or nuclear power plant here. To be fair, there is only one nuke plant that big in the world, so let's say the output is equivalent to 2 standard French nuke plants. And for this privilege they pay 6x what consumers in the US do, and import 2/3 of their energy.

Re:NO NO NO

[WOOFYGOOFY]

If you don't put on price on energy usage then there's no incentive for appliances and lights to become more efficient. Sure you pay more, but Germany is proof of what can be achieved with solar and wind. BTW Germany's economy is the best in the EU; they were last seeing bailing out the rest of Europe.

Don't ask how much something costs without also asking what you get for your money. Germany gets closer to energy self-sufficiency , creates a proof not of concept but of implementation for the rest of the world to benefit from which can and will offset more climate change which saves Germany and everyone else the astronomical, nation destroying costs - which will ultimately fail after they bankrupt us- involved with trying merely counteract climate change.

So what is the financial cost? It's negative, because the very people paying higher electricity costs today will be spared having to fork over the all the rest of their money to battle climate change later.

Don't ask how much something is, that's a brain-dead question. Ask what are you're getting for your money, and set the horizon for analysis to be the rest of your life, at least, or even your children's lives if you're the sort of person who is capable of being about something other than just yourself.

Thanks Germany !

signed,

America.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

he didn't define socialism that way, he just gave yet another example of how socialism fails when ANY other choice would give a better result.

you have weird reading comprehension, even for a socialist.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Well to quote the wikipedia page quoting a financial times article:

Due to the costs of this "Energiewende" Germany now has Europes highest energy costs. Costs have risen over the last 5 years even for industrial consumers who are exempted from the costs of the renewable energy subsidy that consumers pay. In 2013, energy was 4 times cheaper in the United States than in Europe, and 6 times cheaper than in Germany.

It comes at a price and the sweet spots to produce renewables have already been picked, to keep it up they must use less and less ideal areas and means. Nice to see them lead but it's not really an act the whole world can follow.

That is because they don't include the 5.81+++ trillion yen that it will take to clean up disasters like fukushima, if they can EVEr clean it up. At this point, we don't even have the technology to clean up fukushima which is an ongoing meltdown disaster. 5.81 trillion yen doesn't include the medical costs for all the people that will get cancer because of it, the fishing industry that it is ruining, etc.

In the long term, solar will be the cheapest power ever and it actually is an act the whole world can follow.

If we put solar concentrators all over Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Africa, plus solar on every rooftop that could power the world.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

to keep it up they must use less and less ideal areas and means.

Or technology will get better, which is is. Exponentially. In a decade, big businesses will be demanding (or building) renewables to run their factories and data centres, because paying for natural gas would be throwing money down the toilet. We're not remotely close to the limits of these types of technologies.

Re:NO NO NO

[ultranova]

Do you mean it can get even higher when you turn on your AC?

Well, a properly designed AC can pump heat either way...

Re:NO NO NO

[MightyYar]

I'd say they are "remotely" useful, but you might have to do some work yourself. Using the number 5.1TW-h from the summary and 512.9 TW-h from the consumption link, you can see that solar now accounts for about 1% of consumption. To me, that is stunningly disappointing considering consumers pay 6x what the US does for electricity and import 2/3 of their power.

Re:NO NO NO

[edxwelch]

I find it amazing that nuclear shills can still cling to these tired old "coal is more radioactive than nulcear" fairy stories. That report was written by people who work for the nuclear industry. Of coarse they will find that nuclear is better, much like a Microsoft sponsered survey will find that Windows is better than Linux.
Like all nuclear spin stories, it assumes that no nuclear accidents happen. Count in chernobyl and Fukusima and you get a different story, especially considering Fukusima is still leaking: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2013/aug/20/fukushima-still-leaking-toxic-water-video

Re:NO NO NO

[MightyYar]

It is pretty awesome progress (from something like 7% of electricity generation to ~25% from 2000 to 2012),

It's a lot less impressive when you look at it in terms of consumption instead of generation. Germany imports most of its energy. The solar produced in July accounts for about 1% of their power consumption, and you can't just multiply that by 12 because July has to be the peak.

Re:NO NO NO

[MightyYar]

pre-heating ovens and stoves, etc.

The horror! The HORROR! Good God, once you've pumped an oven up to 350, what can it possibly cost to add 15 minutes to the cook time?

Re: NO NO NO

[TClevenger]

In other words, both those subsidies are in the same place. Whether you "see" them or not depends on what "see" means and how you spin it.

Southern California Edison has already told us to start doing stretching exercises in preparation for being bent over to pay for the upcoming $4+ billion to decommission San Onofre Nuclear Plant because it's being shuttered early. That's in addition to the nuclear subsidies I've been "seeing" in my previous bills.

Re:NO NO NO

[LynnwoodRooster]

If you compare Germany to similar north western European countries it isn't particularly expensive.

Nope, not particularly expensive, just generally expensive...

Re:NO NO NO

[Mashiki]

You seem to be forgetting that in Quebec, the majority of your renewable electricity comes from hydro-electric dams. While in Ontario, they use wind and solar and our rates have done nothing but soar through the roof. We're still on track for 2016, and being the most expensive place in North America for electricity.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, arguing that coal mining AND nuclear power have their dangers isn't an argument against renewables, now is it?

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

What I'm more interested in is what is the percentage breakdown of various energy sources for the total energy consumption of the country.

RTFA, genius.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

That is true. When ever I stay at the Hilton, I spread my feces on the walls. It makes it feel like your home.

Re:NO NO NO

[ShanghaiBill]

i am paying 24,26 €cents per kwh

Germany is one of the cloudiest places on the planet. Solar is a lot more cost effective in sunny places where it actually makes sense.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

The first part of the story is probably true.. but the second part is not well explained in the quote.

US is truly blessed in terms of energy - they went digging for Shale Oil and dug up oodles of Natural Gas. Natural gas is difficult to store so you need to continously ship it out or use it. So the prices are very low. Recently many power plants shifted from Coal to Natural Gas (The breakeven is around $4 of Natural gas a level it stayed below for most of last year). Then there is abundant coal in US which has also traditionally put an upper limit on prices.

So even if Europe and Asia completely got rid of wind/solar power, the energy costs would be multiples higher than US. (Unless India/China decided to burn off all their Coal for electricity or Middle East priced electricity using costs of extraction of Oil rather than market cost of Oil).

Source:I am a commodities trader.

Re:NO NO NO

[khallow]

This complaint reminds me about how Ronald Reagan once claimed that the TVA flooded more land than the floods they were meant to prevent...except his numbers were comparing the whole river system served by the TVA, while the estimate for the flood was a large singular event, so he left out the possibility of that flood occurring among how many more square miles of land...and numerous times, in uncontrollable fashion, in devastating ways.

Especially when you consider floods don't last very long while most flood control is permanent, this is a valid argument.

Of course, he also failed to mention how many of the other things he complained about were a result of the TVA being mandated to be fiscally solvent rather than serving the public needs into the future. Had he told the TVA to do so, they could have eliminated their use of coal entirely, and switched to a mix of hydroelectric and nuclear, with some gas, solar, and wind, but no, he told them they had to be run like a business, and no president sense has had the force of will to change the standard.

We could also have sold off TVA assets. That would have satisfied the "run TVA like a business" and serve the public need or as an investment, such as they are, better than having TVA in any of its prior forms.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

> Germany imports most of its energy.

Where do you get this from? The wikipedia article? That's useless, since it does not list electricity exports. So far, Germany still exports more electricity than it imports. So comparing it to consumption the percentage might be even higher (though how can you say whether it is Germany or Spain that consumed the solar power? It's not like the electrons are magically marked... Thus percentage of production is the only measure that makes much sense).

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice diversion from the point. Nobody said coal is more radioactive than nuclear. He said coal causes more deaths / health problems. Which is true EVEN when you consider Chernobyl and Fukushima. (How many deaths have been attributed to Fukushima?).

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay $0.067kwh (Seattle, USA). I prefer Hydropower.

Re:NO NO NO

[slashmydots]

When the cost adjustment shifts to maintenance instead of equipment loan payoffs, you'll like the price of solar.

Re: NO NO NO

[khallow]

Hmmm, I think the state of California should be footing some of that bill since it is their updated regulation which is part of that cost. I really dislike how "chasing the nuisance" can lead to unrealistic costs for industries that generate unintentional or illusory externalities through the actions of the parties which experience (or merely think they experience) the externality.

But that's not going to happen.

Re:NO NO NO

[Sollord]

The record was set in July you know the Summer when the northern hemisphere tilt is pointed towards the sun. The problem is the other 6 months of the year.

Re:NO NO NO

[afidel]

Try 12%, 1% per month and since wind is similar that means those two renewables account for ~1/4th of all electric use in Germany.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah the metallic tang of the air is totally worth it.

Re:NO NO NO

[Guspaz]

Ontario's power comes primarily from nuclear (clean, but not renewable), though, and I suspect Ontario's pricing woes have more to do with poor policy decisions than technological aspects.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not a valid argument, in fact that they're permanent versus temporary, is why it's a terrible argument with no relevance to the actual situation.

See...the problem with the temporary flooding is not the water being where it is, the problem is what the water does to everything else around at the time. That's the bad stuff we're trying to avoid, so the sacrifice of some land, to spare the risk of flooding? Worthwhile trade-off.

Especially since that area is often quite useful to the public at large, for various reasons, including transportation and recreation, so it's not even a total loss.

Reagan made a misrepresentation under which he premised his argument against the TVA. You can argue against hydroelectric projects for a lot of reasons, but when you choose an argument which is so blatantly fallacious as Reagan's, you discredit yourself.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the push of renewable energy sources in Germany is generating a lot of trouble in subtle ways. The obvious problem with these sources is that there are no good storage methods for the uncontrollable oversupply these sources give you at bad times. Utilities are required to purchase this oversupply from the providers by law which forces them to dump electricity somewhere, to the point where they will pay other (mostly foreign) utilities to take it. Under bad conditions, the situation changes and power needs to be imported. Yous can easily see this in the statistics for power import and export for Germany for the last couple of years: both are rising. Now, with the lack of adoption within the power grid itself (people resisting construction of new power lines etc.) we are inthe right track for losing much of the stability of the power grid that we have enjoyed for decades.

TL, DR: Germany may seem like a model for change, but the situation looks better than it is.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Who will get good education and nutrition to find out how to EASY dispose from menace using robots and other types of technology, just because we given them better education and nutrition and some capital for building technology, for the money we saved.

Re: NO NO NO

[TClevenger]

Hmmm, I think the state of California should be footing some of that bill since it is their updated regulation which is part of that cost. I really dislike how "chasing the nuisance" can lead to unrealistic costs for industries that generate unintentional or illusory externalities through the actions of the parties which experience (or merely think they experience) the externality.

The State of California caused the station to discharge radioactive waste into the environment and the steam tubes to corrode out prematurely? The shareholders, not the ratepayers or taxpayers, should be shouldering that cost.

Re:NO NO NO

[fearofcarpet]

i am paying 24,26 €cents per kwh

i prefer the prieces of nuclear power.

Solar has reached grid parity in Eurozone countries. The only way nuclear could undercut it now is if the entire continent stopped installing solar and diverted all their resources into nuke plants.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

PROTIP: Don't use the abbreviation "SS" in a story about Germany unless you mean that SS.

Re:NO NO NO

[lxs]

You're right. Just after I replaced all my bulbs with LEDs I felt an incredible urge to ring my house with barbed wire and build guard towers.

Re: NO NO NO

[Sique]

It is not pointless if someone argues with the price per kWh. The price per kWh includes solar subsidies, but not nuclear subsidies.

Re:NO NO NO

[Sique]

What does expensive energie has to do with a concentration camp?

We have to get used with rising costs for a lot of thing. Accomodations in big and prospering cities. Medical bills. Insurance for houses in hurricane prone coastal areas. No one would compare them with concentration camps.

Re:NO NO NO

[he-sk]

In case you haven't noticed: This is an article about SOLAR power, not COAL. Nobody in their right mind is proposing to keep using coal to get off nuclear. You don't have to chose between the two. Germany plans to get rid of both. And consistently bringing up the radiation danger of coal plants (which are based on a single study from the 70s and does not take current technology into account) in discussions about renewable energy is a straw man.

Re:NO NO NO

[he-sk]

I am paying 27,48 € per kwh.

I don't mind by the high prices per se but by the exceptions that big energy consumers get from taxes. The whole point of rising prices is to incentivise lower consumption.

BTW, I am with Lichtblick.

Re: NO NO NO

[bogjobber]

True, but that seems like a fairly straightforward problem to solve from an engineering perspective.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

So on one hand some article say Germany barelly uses it's fossil powered plants when the sun shines, and on the other hand people say they get 1% of their consumption from solar panels on July. Hmm....

Re:NO NO NO

[Dahamma]

Uh, except solar power doesn't replace fossil fuels, it just reduces their use in daylight. Not saying that is not a great thing to reduce fossil fuel use wherever possible, but if all of the gas, coal, and nuclear plants in Germany shut down because they aren't making money, there are going to be some very dark winter nights in the Vaterland.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

And how much real estate is dedicated to mines (coal, uranium and thorium) and power plants to get that level of non-renewable energy?

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, anything that isn't lassier-faire capitalism is evil, unproductive socio-commie scheme.

Re:NO NO NO

[prionic6]

Germany imports most of its energy.

Technically you're right, because we import lots of oil, gas, natural gas from countries like russia. But I wanted to add that we actually export more electric power than we import. Of course, part of that is produced with the imported resources.

Re:NO NO NO

[mpe]

Um, arguing that coal mining AND nuclear power have their dangers isn't an argument against renewables, now is it?

So called "renewables" also produce plenty of pollution and come with associated dangers. Ironically wind and solar can turn out to have a bigger "carbon footprint" than fossil fuel plants. Once all applicable factors are considered.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

The costs of the "Energiewende" afaik are to a large part costs of installing new power lines. Currently, high capacity power lines spread around the conventional power plants and many of those are (obviously) located in the more crowded areas of Germany. Wind parks however are often in the very north of the country or even offshore in the North Sea, where there is not much power line infrastructure.

Re:NO NO NO

[Stephan Schulz]

i prefer the prieces of nuclear power.

You have never seen the price of nuclear power. From massive subsidies to develop nuclear technology (both civilian and military) to subsidised insurance to low-balling decommissioning costs, nuclear energy has been so heavily subsidised, it's not even funny. And that's not even talking about nuclear waste storage, which still is an open problem wherever there are working nuclear installations.

Re:NO NO NO

[dave420]

That is the perfect example of an ad hominem attack. Point out why their research is flawed, instead of who paid for the research. It's not unheard of for commissioned research to bite the commissioners in the ass when the actual findings do not gel with their expectations.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Most properly designed ACs are optimized for transferring heat one way.

Re:NO NO NO

[Pieroxy]

In case you haven't noticed: This is an article about SOLAR power, not COAL. Nobody in their right mind is proposing to keep using coal to get off nuclear. You don't have to chose between the two. Germany plans to get rid of both.

And Germany plans to shut down on all those nights that when there are no wind? Give me a break. Solar and Wind power are GREAT but they cannot replace another source of steady power, because they are both intermittent by nature. And Germany clearly stated they plan on getting rid of all nuclear. As a matter of fact, they have recommissioned quite a few fossil-fuel-based plants already.

Re:NO NO NO

[Sique]

It's probably because Germany imports oil and gas, which account for about 40% of the energy consumption.

Re:NO NO NO

[Pieroxy]

So Germany is burning fossil fuels for 79% of its electricity production... Interesting how solar/wind/renewable is making electricity so much more expensive there while only producing 12% of their total production. Looks like a big problem ahead of them.

Do you have a source for those numbers?

Re:NO NO NO

[bickerdyke]

Well, I help to save energy by switching of my bedroom lights every night when I go to sleep...

Re:NO NO NO

[AmiMoJo]

Don't forget that Germany is now a world leader, and will benefit by being able to export their technology. It's a long term investment.

Re:NO NO NO

[gadget junkie]

This can't be right, solar doesn't work, Germany is too far north, the lights must go off every night, PV is a stupid technology, nuclear is the only way!!1 How can this be happening, it must be a liberal media lie put out by the scientifically illiterate eco-nazis... it... it just can't...

And effectively, you are right. renewables, and solar in particular, have a problem of load balancing. they either produce, or they don't, but you cannot flick a switch and produce more energy because the grid wants it. AFAIK no well thought out study has been produced on the costs imposed on other operators and on the system because of this.
For example, imagine that while you are happily producing (and consuming: the grid has no meaningful storage capacity) those Terawatts, a naughty cloud interferes: somebody else must be able to substitute solar energy production with something else, which by the way cannot be nuclear, because the ramp time must be near instantaneous, nor coal: so you end up building, at somebody else's expense, a huge park of gas turbines, which are the only viable alternative, in term of ramp time and production capacity.

The BIG snag is that instead of having solar producer either buying the turbine themselves, or contracting for on demand energy to cover a fixed supply, you offload the costs to the "Evil" traditional utilities. The consumer thinks that solar can be viable, at least after huge capital tax breaks, and everyone wins.

Re:NO NO NO

[bickerdyke]

Before that happens, energy at nighttime will be in high enough demand to have those plants make money again. We probably should trust those "magic correcting forces" of a market at least that far.

Contrary to the claims some extreme liberals it will not fix everything, but as long there is demand, money can be made.

Re:NO NO NO

[bickerdyke]

So what is the financial cost? It's negative, because the very people paying higher electricity costs today will be

...

having well paid jobs in a companies selling renewable energy technology to other countries when their oil is running out.

Re:NO NO NO

[bickerdyke]

Germany gets as much sun as Alaska.

And considering that was enough to generate those 5.1TWh, I#m wondering why this isn't catching on where there is more sun.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans? Unlikely, the country that brought us industrial scale spying on its own citizens + world & dog, whilst trying to convince the rest of the world they are the only true free nation? Pathetic. When are you going to wake up & grow up sheeples of the USA?

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Amerikans don't know the meaning of the word, ignorance is the word you are looking for.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Germany id doing same thing at local scale that USA is doing globally.
Lesson taken, thank you America

signed

Germany.

Re:NO NO NO

[3247]

Actually...

Fukushima is a fairly large province in which the nuclear power plants are located. The larger part of the province - including the city of Fukushima - has not been evacuated.

Re:NO NO NO

[3247]

That is the perfect example of an ad hominem attack. Point out why their research is flawed,

He did:

Like all nuclear spin stories, it assumes that no nuclear accidents happen. Count in chernobyl and Fukusima and you get a different story, ...

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on holiday at the moment, haven't seen many Americans, if I do you know what I'm going to do? Punch them right in the fucking face. Wake up you whiney stupid pricks.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

he didn't define socialism that way, he just gave yet another example of how socialism fails when ANY other choice would give a better result.

you have weird reading comprehension, even for a socialist.

He took a big rubber stamp and slapped the label "socialism" on something he doesn't like, which is a common right-wing knee-jerk reaction. By doing that he also added said phenomenon to his personal definition of "socialism". To right wing drones the "socialist" label can be applied to pretty much everything from complex political and economic issues to refusing to teach creationism in science class at the local primary school.

Re:NO NO NO

[the real darkskye]

Well those LED bulbs ARE expensive, you'd do well to guard them.

Re:NO NO NO

[Antonovich]

YYMV refers to "Your Yodeling May Vary". It is used in reference to deals at high altitudes (especially those in the Alps) where the changes in air thickness and the respective region of the deal may cause some variation in the type and duration of your yodeling.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you put "nazi" and "Germany" in the same sentence and got rated funny.

Re:NO NO NO

[crossmr]

There is nothing that says condescending douchebag more than starting your reply with "took like 30 seconds of googling". But hey pointing out that said colossal douchebag provided out of date irrelevant information in a fast changing industry and did so in a douchbaggy manner is somehow the one who deserves to be chastised.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Where would they come from? No one died.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta love statistics. "Europe" includes a large number of countries with widely varying prices. If you compare Germany to similar north western European countries it isn't particularly expensive. Other countries happen to have some nice natural resources, or they subsidise the cost through general taxation (especially for nuclear power).

The US is a terrible polluter and has lots of fraked natural gas that have driven down prices, so isn't a very useful comparison.

And isn't it just wonderful how the right wing always leaves out the environmental impacts of oil and coal pollution every time they claim that renewables are more expensive. I always find it interesting how the effects of pollution and climate change don't count as a cost factor for these people. Not that it is surprising, they seem to consider the former a sign of prosperity that they carry like a badge of honour and do not acknowledge the existence of the latter.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

No one doubts that hydro power is cheap, but that is not really what was talked about.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am paying 24,26 €cents per kwh

i prefer the prieces of nuclear power."

Yes, you just have to pay for 180.000 years.

Re:NO NO NO

[nospam007]

"So basically the tsunami and resulting devastation from the tsunami's aftermath are what the people in Fukushima are really concerned about...not growing extra arms or dying of cancer any sooner than they already would have."

That's the other people, they clean up, rebuild their house and go on with their life.

The people in Fukushima will have to wait for a couple of hundred years, live in tents and get 10.000$ for their lost property if they are lucky.

Re:NO NO NO

[nospam007]

"This is an article about SOLAR power, not COAL. Nobody in their right mind is proposing to keep using coal to get off nuclear. You don't have to chose between the two. Germany plans to get rid of both. "

They are in the process of moving people out of another village that's going to be completely destroyed, church and cemetery included, to get at the coal underneath.

For the people living in those villages it can't get fast enough.

Re:NO NO NO

[jez9999]

This can't be right, solar doesn't work

I am interested as to how Germany is powered during the calm nights.

Re: NO NO NO

[nospam007]

" and while it does work for base load, you only need to look at France in the winter and in the summer to ..."

Yes, in winter there's flooding forcing the plants to shut down, in summer there's not enough cooling water and they shut down too, they are not allowed to heat the water over a certain level, every fucking year and it gets worse with Climate Change.

Then there's automatic emergency shutdowns and inspection shutdowns and repair shutdowns, refitting shutdowns and a fire in the engine room shutdowns and hundreds of other crap on the list they publish each year.

Re:NO NO NO

[Savage-Rabbit]

The US is a terrible polluter and has lots of fraked natural gas that have driven down prices, so isn't a very useful comparison.

Unless electricity costs matter to you more than those other concerns (the "terrible polluter" is about as polluting as the EU and fracking just doesn't seem that bad compared to normal oil drilling) at the minor levels they occur at.

We're talking about electricity production here and the most problematic pollutant in electricity production with fossil fuels is CO2. The US produces c.a. 17 tons of the stuff per capita. The only EU country that tops that is Luxembourg with 20 tons, the runner up is the Faroe Islands with 14.3 followed by Estonia with 11.9. So on average the EU countries produce between 50-60% as much CO2 per capita as the US (cit.). Thus in terms of CO2 pollution the USA does indeed rank as a great polluter although the good news is that the current trend is downward, but the US still has a whole lot of progress to make before it reaches EU per capita levels.

Re: NO NO NO

[nospam007]

"Except you still pay for the nuclear subsidies while ALSO paying for the solar subsidies."

No. I just installed panels on my house and now I'm _getting_ the subsidies, why do you think the record gets broken every year?

Re:NO NO NO

[jez9999]

So build integral fast reactors that can use nuclear "waste" as fuel. Win-win.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

The EU has 500 million people. If you're saying they're about as polluting total, then per capita, it's horrible.

Average per capita pollution levels from electricity production in the EU (mostly CO2) are about half of those in the USA.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm on holiday at the moment, haven't seen many Americans,..."

They don't have 5-6 weeks vacation like normal people, they have 1 or 2 that they need for sick days, because they can't stay at home for a couple of months when sick, like we do.

Re:NO NO NO

[nospam007]

"Don't forget that Germany is now a world leader, and will benefit by being able to export their technology. It's a long term investment."

Actually no. The panels are all Chinese nowadays, 2-3 times cheaper, they even started a trade war with China over it.

Re:NO NO NO

[fritsd]

It was a bit difficult to read, but the paradox sounds like those "Endverbraucher in Haushalten" who don't have solar panels, are basically forced to subsidize the difference between Börsenstrompreis and Ökostrompreis, and (brilliant use of mass psychology), this subsidy then goes to their own neighbours if they have a solar panel on the roof. So, if you don't invest € 980 in ( electricity + renewable infrastructure investment ) per year, your neighbours will be sure to profit instead of you.


It's fucking brilliant. Who came up with this idea? Joschka Fischer's Green Party? What a clever use of (some) people's "keeping up with the Joneses" wish, the need for renewable power infrastructure, the need to reduce carbon footprint, the political need to invest before you can reap the profits (big problem, see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6647 (Jeff Vail - The Renewables Gap)).

IANAEconomist, but unless I have read the article wrong, I don't see what the problem is. Brilliant government strategy.

Re:NO NO NO

[the_other_chewey]

Careful. While this is the correct answer to the question,
your table is for total energy consumption, not for electricity.

This explains the huge amount of oil in there. Nobody in his right
mind uses oil for electricity generation.

JFTR, here's the breakdown for electricity in 2012:

• lignite - 25,7 %
• nuclear - 15,8 %
• anthracite - 8,5 %
• natural gas - 12,0 %
• patrol products - 1,3 %
• hydro - 3,5 %
• wind - 8,1 %
• biomass - 6,2 %
• PV - 4,2 %
• trash - 0,8 %
• others - 4,1 %

source [PDF] - includes an interesting row for "percent renewables",
rising from 3% to 23% since 1990.

So yeah, still a long way to go (lignite? really?), but working hard on actually going it.

Re:NO NO NO

[dunkelfalke]

We had a very unusually hot and sunny July, that is probably the reason. Unfortunately, the price for it was an unusually cold and cloudy March and April.

Re:NO NO NO

[the_other_chewey]

Damn: petrol products, not police farts.
Read it twice before submitting and it still got through. Gnah.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right. Solar works FAR from advertised.

Check price of electricity in Germany. Is it cheap, compared to non-solar production ?

Judging by the marketing crap, it should be practically free - after all sunshine is free, isn't it ?

And then check about how all this electricity was actually used. has it been sold on the market ? Who bought it ?

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

"i prefer the prieces of nuclear power..."

Ask the people of Fukushima how they feel about those low-low prices.

They are irellevant for this discussion.

Would you ask every victim of a car accident shold cars be banished ?

Re:NO NO NO

[the_other_chewey]

Except that year != month. You should at least read the whole summary.

Re:NO NO NO

[fritsd]

A certain East-Japanese power company wants to talk with you. Are you interested in buying 300 tons of diluted corrosive fuel for very very cheap?

<small-print>Shipping to jez9999's door, handling and insurance to be paid by the buyer.</small-print>

Re:NO NO NO

[Eunuchswear]

Actually no. The panels are all Chinese nowadays, 2-3 times cheaper, they even started a trade war with China over it.

Well, no. France tried to get the EU to start a trade war, the Germans refused.

Haha. Who are the surrender monkeys now?

Re:NO NO NO

[Wildclaw]

In 2013, energy was 4 times cheaper in the United States than in Europe, and 6 times cheaper than in Germany.

Using current EUR/USD conversion rates and cents/KWh

Industry Retail Nov 2012 (including taxes):
* Germany: 15
* US Avg: 6.53

Residential Retail Nov 2012 (including taxes):
* Germany: 35
* US Avg: 11.74

If you wander why the German residential electricity is so high, it is because they pay a massive 20.50 EUR/MWh or 27 cents/KWh in taxes.

Seriously, nowhere have I been able to find the how electricity would be 6 times more expensive in Germany than in the US, even with taxes applied the difference is only 2.5-3 times. Without taxes, it is less than 2 times.

Ref:
http://www.energy.eu/
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a
http://www.eurelectric.org/media/60787/taxes_and_levies_on_electricity_2011_-_final-2012-560-0006-01-e.pdf

Re:NO NO NO

[Askmum]

I am paying € 0,22 per kWh, have a contract that is supposed to deliver me green power only and am not really concerned by the price of electricity because I generate 75% myself (solar) which means that my energy bill is negative (there are some statedeductions that make that happen).
If the price of enery would go up, I have enough roof to supply myself with 100% of the electricity I need.

Re:NO NO NO

[DeathToBill]

Keep in mind that Fukushima Daichi so far has caused exactly zero human deaths and exactly zero human health impact, with exactly zero forecast human health impact. I'm not saying it'll be cheap to clean up, I'm not saying the environmental damage is unimportant and I'm not saying the disruption to people's lives is unimportant. But keep some perspective.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the German Greens are proposing exactly that. In their minds, coal and lignite are better than evil atoms. Sure, if you ask them directly, they will respond that they are "also against coal", but publically they are crying out for the shutdown of all nuclear plants, not of all coal plants. And no, Germany is not going to get rid of coal. It is building new plants (Niederaussem was built last year, more are planned). How could it be otherwise? The power has to come from somewhere in winter, too.

Then again, "nobody in their right mind" is still an accurate statement. Those eco-loonies don't even have a brain.

Re:NO NO NO

[olau]

The Financial Times editor is unfortunately either misinformed or is deliberately trying to frame this into a particular agenda (or more likely just trying to make up a story to make headlines).

Those costs only appear if you include taxes. E.g. in Denmark there's a really hefty tax on energy in general, partly to induce people to save energy, partly as just a means of taxing - instead of taxing income which according to prevailing economic theory reduces the incentive to work. It's not the renewables that are the cause of the high price.

You're the third guy on the Internet I've had to explain this to. That Financial Time writer really needs a kick in his/her butt.

Re:NO NO NO

[JaredOfEuropa]

Solar works pretty well in temperate climates. Here in NL, you get paid for solar power going into the grid as much as you pay for getting it out (in my case: €0.19 / kWh or so). Doing the math on solar panels I found out that, even with no subsidies and a suboptimal setup (SW facing roof), solar panels will pay for themselves in 8-10 years. Work out the longer term economics (maintenance etc) and you'll arrive at a decent ROI, far better than anything you'll get on bonds or a savings account. Your money is safer on the roof than in the bank.

I'm holding out though. A big part of the expense in solar is installation and labour, and there are some interesting developments going on that will make that part of the bill a lot lower.

Re:NO NO NO

[DeathToBill]

Solar might. Progress in wind is perhaps just starting to slow down. Cost of energy modelling trades the unit costs of building a wind turbine (grid connection, land lease, control gear, cooling, lubrication), the scalable costs of building a wind turbine (generation gear, gearbox, blades, hub, support structure, nacelle frame, foundation) and the operational costs (maintenance) against the expected return on electricity generated. For many years this has shown the optimal size to be larger than the turbines being built (showing that the technology is improving faster than the manufacturing market can keep up). But currently it says around 7MW is the optimal size, and that's around the size of new designs currently being built. There are several at that size and several much bigger (at least two 10MW machines I know of). This suggests that the technology is maturing and future progress will be slower.

For offshore wind, the picture is worse. The cost of energy decrease has stopped altogether and in fact it is getting more expensive.

Re:NO NO NO

[timbo234]

It's true that electritcty is only a minority of Germany's total consumption. But one of the goals of the "Energiewende" laws passed by the current government is to increase the share of renewable energy in the *total* energy consumption from 10% in 2011 to 60% in 2050 (the renewables-share in electricity generation should be increased to 80% by 2050).

Whether they can do it or not remains to be seen but it's great that at least one major industrialised nation is making a realistic attempt to use renewable energy for the majority of it's consumption.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

The Germans emit roughly 9.6 tons of CO2 per person and year, the neighboring French only 6.1. What makes you claim that Germany is "offsetting" climate change, whatever that means?

In 2001, Germany imported 79 billion cubic meters of natural gas, in 2010 it imported 100 billion cubic meters. What makes you claim that Germany is getting closer to energy self-sufficiency?

From 1991 to 1999, German yearly per capita emissions of CO2 descreased from 12 to 10.1 tons. From 1999 to 2008, they decreased further to 9.6 tons. The crazy subsidies for unreliable energies started in 2000. What makes you claim that the decreased emissions are due to unreliables and not due to the destruction of industry, mostly in the former GDR?

We don't need to talk about the cost/benefit ratio of unreliables. The benefit is zero if they don't work.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

And if I'm correct, all that renewable power is hydroelectric. So you have the good fortune to live in an area with lots of moving water. Lucky you!

Re:NO NO NO

[dwsobw]

No it is called "Windgas" or "Power-to-gas" where you just produce hydrogen or even methan with renewable energy (mildly efficient: 50-67% power -> gas -> power) and inject it into the gas network. There already working prototypes (granted I think they are all sub MW stations). But they improved from 25kW to 500kW within 3 years (2009 - 2012). Nice sideeffect is that in theory renewable energy could in the long run power our gas-cars and gas-heating and highly efficient gas-power stations.

Re:NO NO NO

[dwsobw]

"Windgas" or "Power-to-gas" where you just produce hydrogen or even methan with renewable energy (mildly efficient: 50-67% power -> gas -> power) and inject it into the gas network. There already working prototypes (granted I think they are all sub MW stations). But they improved from 25kW to 500kW within 3 years (2009 - 2012). Nice sideeffect is that in theory renewable energy could in the long run power our gas-cars and gas-heating and highly efficient gas-power stations.

Re:NO NO NO

[khallow]

And thus my point. I don't consider a factor of two, especially of CO2 and especially in conjunction with somewhat greater economic activity, to be a significant difference. I know other people do, so I probably should have argued the point in a somewhat less rhetorically aggressive manner.

As to fracking, it has two features which make it different than normal oil well drilling. First, it is a lot faster - a smaller number of wells for a much shorter duration are necessary to drain an oil field. There are some well holes in the US which are kept open (if not active) for half a century or longer (oil gets pumped when the price of oil meets an appropriate level).

And the extensive production of cheap natural gas has actually led to a temporary decline in US carbon emissions (and modest decline in sulfur/nitrogen oxides emissions). It has replaced some amount of coal burning.

Re:NO NO NO

[Zeromous]

+5 funny on typo. Ice cold /.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing
Welp, lessee. France has no natural resources for electricity to speak of.
Their avg price for generation according to that chart:
19.39

Germany?
34.14

Re:NO NO NO

[freudigst]

He has a weird definition of failure

Re: NO NO NO

[khallow]

The State of California caused the station to discharge radioactive waste into the environment and the steam tubes to corrode out prematurely?

Well, actually yes. Regulation often has unintended consequences like this. If the thresholds were higher, for example, then the so-called "radioactive waste" probably wouldn't be. After all, for sufficiently sensitive measurements, even discarded banana peels would be radioactive waste due to the presence of trace amounts of potassium 40.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

More like 45%, see the other response. Renewables account for almost a quarter of the electricity consumption. The other number is total energy consumption, not just electricity, so that includes cars, heating, process heat, etc.

Re: NO NO NO

[khallow]

The price per kWh includes solar subsidies

I tell you what. Show me evidence for your claim. I'll just note that the subsidies, I'm aware of in the US and Europe are massive subsidies which include direct payments and tax write offs on solar power. Neither of those would result in high costs for people consuming solar power.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

More recently at Fukushima: Japan nuclear agency upgrades Fukushima alert level

Re:NO NO NO

[khallow]

That's the bad stuff we're trying to avoid, so the sacrifice of some land, to spare the risk of flooding?

But the sacrifice of a lot of land so that some low value land doesn't get inundated occasionally?

I haven't even touched on the perversity of flood control in the US, where flooding has been made worse by flood control. You don't get the low grade flooding any more, but huge floods do more damage than they used to, because flood water has less places to go than it used to.

Nor have I touched on the perversity of subsidized flood insurance which encourages people to build expensive stuff in flood zones.

Reagan made a misrepresentation under which he premised his argument against the TVA. You can argue against hydroelectric projects for a lot of reasons, but when you choose an argument which is so blatantly fallacious as Reagan's, you discredit yourself.

Now, Reagan may have discredited himself in such a way, but I think it's a logical fallacy to claim my argument is the same as his, merely because we're both discussing land usage and some AC was "reminded" of Reagan's words by mine.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you really short of real estate over there?

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha, joke's on you! I'm sterile from exposure to radioactive material!

Re:NO NO NO

[khallow]

Well, another poster noted that CO2 emissions are double what they are in Europe as a mean. I don't consider that significant pollution because I don't consider CO2 to be a significant pollutant or a factor of two to be particularly signficant either, to be honest. That deals with the usual ton per capita pollution comparisons between US and Europe.

As to other pollutants, the US is somewhat heavier in per capita pollution which is balanced by both moderately greater economic activity and significantly lower population densities. But Europe has ridiculously low thresholds for its pollutants. Even being an order of magnitude higher (as is the case for the US with respect to some airborne pollutants and the countries with ample hydroelectric power) is just not that significant when the threshold is so low. I speculate at the end why I think that's the case.

You buy a new TV, car or whatever = You pollute.

I see this as a protectionist gimmick and not a valid observation. The obvious rebuttal is that the pollution you are referring to comes from the manufacturer of the device not the purchaser and user of the device and most of that pollution is local. Europe has been remarkably adept at protecting its native industries from competition by using metrics like this to inhibit competition from regions (such as the developing world) which happen to have lower standards of living and higher pollution.

I view Europe's environmental standards more as a relatively successful protectionist racket than something that serves a vital environmental or public health need.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a story about Germany, so naturally we're talking about the German subsidies to solar power. They're paid as a price guarantee to the owners of solar energy plants. That's mostly ordinary home owners who install a few kWp of solar cells on the roofs. For ten years from installation, they get a price per kWh produced that is fixed at time of installation. This has created demand for solar cells even when they were not directly competitive, which enabled companies to invest, invent and scale up, and it rapidly increased the installed capacity. The subsidies are paid out of a surcharge on every kWh sold in Germany, the so called "Erneuerbare Energien Umlage", which is currently at 5.4ct per kWh. That's why everybody sees the cost of the solar subsidies: It's right there on the electricity bills. Nuclear subsidies are paid through taxes, so they do not show up on the electricity bill. That's why people think that they pay less for nuclear power than for solar electricity.

Re:NO NO NO

[Fusselwurm]

Yes, lignite. Insane as it seems, there are still villages being razed in Germany for lignite strip mining.

As it is, Vattenfall is the most destructive Swedish force in Germany since Gustav Adolf.

Re:NO NO NO

[GuB-42]

Solar works in Germany because it is supported by coal, gas and a bit of hydro.
In fact Germany have a high peak power capacity mainly due to their fossil fuel power plants. As a result they can easily absorb the fluctuations of their solar and wind plants, they can also buy nuclear electricity from France when it is cheap.

Re:NO NO NO

[necro81]

i am paying 24,26 €cents per kwh

And as a result, I bet you use a lot, lot less electricity than the average American. Having something be expensive makes conservation easy and simple.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

>Nobody in their right mind is proposing to keep using coal to get off nuclear

Actually, Germany is. They shut down 8 nuclear plants immediately after Fukushima and are now constructing 26 new coal plants.
It is also worth noting that energy costs Germany are 6 times more expensive than in the United States, and at least 33% more expensive than in the rest of Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you know Germany is building new coal plants, up to 25 which will increase its emissions. Emissions went up in Germany for the second straight year.

Re: NO NO NO

[Sique]

The evidence is in the German EEG (Energie-Einspeise-Gesetz, Energy Feed-in Law), where exactly this is written down.

Re: NO NO NO

[Sique]

Or to be more exact: An energy utility has to buy the energy from local renewable feeders for a guaranteed price (that's, what the EEG is about). This of course causes the energy utility to adapt its own prices to reflect the guaranteed price for the feeders.

Re:NO NO NO

[necro81]

but you are talking about output equivalent to one large coal or nuclear power plant here. To be fair, there is only one nuke plant that big in the world, so let's say the output is equivalent to 2 standard French nuke plants

To be more precise in the comparisons, here's some data from the US Energy Information Agency:

In 2011, the "average" nuclear power plant in the United States generated about 12.2 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh). There were 65 nuclear power plants with 104 operating nuclear reactors that generated a total of 790 billion kilowatt-hours."

Which works out to an average power output of 867 MW/reactor, or 1.39 GW/plant. The conventional shorthand (such as when weighing renewables against nuclear) is that one nuke = 1 GW.

Re:NO NO NO

[pci]

Would you be from la belle province?

Re:NO NO NO

[tbannist]

Indeed, the last time I saw that claim, they counted manufacturing emissions for constructing both facilities (including estimated manufacturing emissions for the solar panels, and replacement panels). Unfortunately, the author "forgot" to count the CO2 emissions from the process of mining, shipping and burning the coal for the coal plant. But it's just a minor oversight, right? One plant was required to account for all materials and wear and tear over it's lifetime, and the other was allowed to produce free energy perpetually with no fuel and no repairs. It was certainly a "fair and balanced" comparison.

Re:NO NO NO

[oh_my_080980980]

It was the earth quake jackass not the tsunami that caused the problem. And I guess your are ignoring the recent reports of leaks from the plant. But hey put your money where your mouth is and move there.

Re: NO NO NO

[oh_my_080980980]

Except energy companies are pre-billing you for building a nuclear power plant to recoup the cost up front before building the plant!

Re:NO NO NO

[ciderbrew]

Anything to back that up? I accept that things like Prius batteries or any batteries are awful and the shipping of parts around the globe isn't efficient at all.
So what factors are breaking the system?

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

No, actually. It WAS the tsunami that caused the plant failures. The meltdowns were caused by a loss of power to the coolant pumps, which was itself caused by the emergency generators being ruined by the tsunami. If it had had JUST been the quake then there would have been no disaster.

Re:NO NO NO

[tbannist]

Ontario's electricity prices are soaring because the price controls on electricity were loosened about a decade ago, effectively you're still seeing the effects of the privatization of the energy infrastructure by the Mike Harris government combined with the elimination of coal power plants. Yes, it takes a long time for big changes to make their way through the system. Before the privatization Ontario had some of the lowest electricity rates in North America because the shortfall was simply being converted into debt held by a crown corporation. Since that can't happen anymore, electricty prices have riser to a little higher than average, plus I think you're still paying a surcharge to eliminate the accumulated debt from decades of price controlled shortfalls. The primary reason the electricity prices in Ontario are higher than average is because the cheapest way to generate electricty (after hydro) has been phased out in Ontario. If it were phased out all across North America, Ontario would likely be below the average price.

Re:NO NO NO

[Stuarticus]

So called "renewables" also produce plenty of pollution and come with associated dangers. Ironically wind and solar can turn out to have a bigger "carbon footprint" than fossil fuel plants. Once all applicable factors are considered.

Thanks for this interesting tidbit and all the accompanying referenc... Oh wait, you didn't just make that up as it confirms your preconceptions did you?

Re:NO NO NO

[MightyYar]

I used a typical French plant in my example because Germany borders France and imports most of its power. France has pretty big nukes. Japan has the largest single plant.

Re:NO NO NO

[MightyYar]

I'm happy (as an outsider) that they are working toward that goal, but if I were German I'd be concerned about pushing technology that isn't yet cost effective. Countries that wait in the wings for solar to get cheaper will end up with a huge competitive advantage, IMHO.

Re:NO NO NO

[MightyYar]

I do understand that, but I didn't want to guess at what production would be in cooler months.

Anyway, apparently they do not import 2/3 of their electricity - they import 2/3 of their ENERGY, so I was mistaken there.

Re:NO NO NO

[Mozai]

> Nobody in their right mind is proposing to keep using coal to get off nuclear.

Then Germany isn't in their right mind, because that's exactly what they're doing.

I didn't say coal plants produce more nuclear waste than nuclear plants; I said the radioactive waste isn't contained in a discrete area. You're also ignoring my main point, which it the cost of lives in fuelling the plants.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

"Uh, except solar power doesn't replace fossil fuels, it just reduces their use in daylight"

Also known as REPLACING THEM during the day. You get that energy is a zero sum game, right? Every renewable KWH generated is one that is NOT generated by non-renewable sources. Every gallon of fossil-petroleum replaced by biofuel is one that's not pumped from the ground.

If solar power eliminated 33% of power usage by eliminating all power generation during the day then you could shut down plants during the day and start firing them up as the sun sets. Would that not result in 33% fewer hyrdrocarbons being burned to create electricity???

How is that not progress?

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

They CAN and DO replace other power sources. The "Grid" is a distributed network of generating stations. When solar output is high, you slow down, idle or shut down fossil fuel sources. When solar output is low, you ramp those up. How can you not figure that out? Just because you are only turning off a power plant 33% of the time instead of 100% of time is irrelevant. The relevant factor is the AGGREGATE usage.

You can bury head in the sand if you want to, but I'm laughing all the way to the bank. My solar panels just went operational today. I've stopped paying for electricity. See ya later suckers.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

A single car wreck is unlikely to contaminate an area of the world for thousands of years. Fail.

Re:NO NO NO

[LifesABeach]

How daming; how about a reference? Like the day that the father land had no wind and no sun light? At the same time?

Only Texas can make this claim. And we all know why?

Re:NO NO NO

[MightyYar]

I unintentionally conflated energy and electricity.

Re:NO NO NO

[LifesABeach]

So um, how many folks involved in the renewables industry wear radiation badges, and deal with black lung stuff?

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

" Having something be expensive makes conservation easy and simple."

No, it just makes the math simple and accelerates the time to recoup your efficiency investments.

Electricity is 10-13 cents per KWH here in Florida and I still made the investments needed to cut my energy usage in half: insulation, energy star appliances, efficient AC units, LED bulbs. Most of my investments pay off within 5 years, which is a damn good interest rate (try to double your money in 5 years with a savings account or CD).

Solar PV panels will take closer to 8 - 10 years, depending on the weather mostly, but even a 10 year is equivalent to 7% ROI. So I save money and I'm part of the green solution.

The question is, why aren't all of you doing it? Why are you intentionally spending more money than you need to?

Re: NO NO NO

[LifesABeach]

I'm reminded of Edison stating, "I plan to make it so that only the rich will be able to afford candles."

I see a day when Fossil, and Nuclear power are a foot note in a history book.

Re:NO NO NO

[couchslug]

The dispersed casualties of coal and other fossil fuels are EASY TO PROCESS using existing medical systems.

They sicken and die quietly without making the news.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because you are in Alaska! The payback here in Florida is 8-10 years with subsidies and 10-13 without. And that's with 10 cents/KWH pricing and no adjustment for any increase in energy prices over the payback period (which is unrealistic--prices will go up). If electricity was 20 cents/KWH you wouldn't be able to throw a rock without hitting a PV panel.

I expect that the continuing escalation in electric prices coupled with continuing declines in solar PV prices will result in a massive uptick in adoption here in Florida.

Re:NO NO NO

[GoogleShill]

And Germany plans to shut down on all those nights that when there are no wind? Give me a break.

Man, if only we had people smart enough to figure out how to store extra energy for the times when the sun isn't shining, or the wind isn't blowing.
</sarcasm>

It's not rocket science to figure out how to power a town using just the power available from a non 100% duty-cycle power source. Generate extra while you can and store it in capacitors.

Hell, the UK has a bunch of storage reservoirs waiting just to dump through turbines to handle the extra load from tea kettles fired up during breaks in the World Cup.

Re:NO NO NO

[rjstanford]

Less than gets strip-mined for coal. For some reason we always compare renewables to fairy-dust rather than to the actual current alternatives.

Re:NO NO NO

[MightyYar]

Yes, that works out. I don't know what the other months of the year provide so I didn't want to multiply by 12. Is 25% renewable energy worth 6x the energy cost? I'm not German, but I be running my AC a lot less if it cost $1800/month to cool my home.

Re:NO NO NO

[MightyYar]

Yes, I was misled by the Wikipedia article. My apologies.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Trouble is, the lower income brackets, those which are hit hardest by higher electricity prices, usually rent, so they can't put up solar cells. The landlord on the other hand will put solar cells on the roof and get the subsidies that are paid out of the tenants' pockets.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your fucking meds.

Re:NO NO NO

[Guspaz]

Yes. My comments were specifically addressed to the grandparent's "another example how socialism fails" comment; it's working quite well for us, and that's not specifically because of the low cost of hydro.

Re:NO NO NO

[bdwebb]

The Earthquake caused the Tsunami and both caused devastation to the people of Fukushima. I'm not ignoring the recent reports of leaks from the plant...I'm identifying that those leaks combined with all of the radiation generated during the partial meltdown event and still inconsequential to the people in Fukushima because of the following:

There were no deaths caused by radiation exposure, while approximately 18,500 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami. Future cancer deaths from accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima are predicted by some agencies to be extremely low to none.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

Before anyone jumps down my throat, the following sentence in the Wikipedia article is this:

However, other researchers are less optimistic, with predictions that 25 times as many people in Fukushima area will develop thyroid cancer after the disaster compared to before: Professor Shinzo Kimura of Dokkyo Medical University in Japan, had been collecting radiation contamination data and studied the radiation exposure risks from Chernobyl. He was the first scientist on the ground in Fukushima after the disaster, keen to establish data independent of TEPCO and the government.

Again, however, there are existing studies and evidence to the contrary of this and there is little to no empirical evidence that has been identified in support of the claims that 25 times 18,500 people (462,500) will develop thyroid cancer. The sheer scale of the estimations for thyroid cancer seems to illustrate to me that these 'researchers' are using this event to garner attention with predictions of the sky falling. Ultimately the WHO report and other various reports identify the thyroid cancer risk and using hard data they have found that the risk is almost negligible that more people would develop thyroid cancer than normal. Also, they identify that the most at-risk group, the emergency workers, still have a very low potential to develop thyroid cancer (and there are definitely not 462,500 of them).

Ultimately, your statement that I "move there and put my money where my mouth is" seems a bit silly. Obviously I'm not going to pack up my belongings and sell my house to prove a point. However, if there were a nuclear disaster on this scale near enough that I had been or could potentially be exposed to it with the same potential after-effects, I also would not pack up my belongings and sell my house.

Re:NO NO NO

[bdwebb]

The people in Fukushima will have to wait for a couple of hundred years, live in tents and get 10.000$ for their lost property if they are lucky.

The people in Fukushima are the ones that have to rebuild after the earthquake and resulting tsunami but that's my point - those are the things that damaged the city and the partial meltdown was a byproduct of the earthquake and tsunami that had relatively little to no impact comparatively.

Re:NO NO NO

[bdwebb]

I understand...this is a level 3 event compared to the level 7 event that was the actual partial meltdown resulting from the tsunami. While this may represent a serious potential risk, this is only for the emergency cleanup workers and plant workers tasked with fixing the leak and cleanup of the contamination. It's not like this has poisoned the water supply, old west style.

To give this some perspective, they detected leaks of 100mSv/h recently but during the partial meltdown in 2011 the highest level measured was approx 1000mSv/h.

According to the Guardian, the Fukushima workers have to be wary of radiation spiking—a sudden and unforeseen rise in radiation.[28] This threat forced to evacuate the workers for a short period of time on the morning of Tuesday 15 March 2011 when radiation detected at Fukushima rose to approximately 1000 mSv/h,[29] the highest level of radiation detected at any point of time during the accident at the plant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50

I'm not saying that anyone should go splash in the contaminated puddles like a schoolchild - I'm just saying that it is isolated, it effects a relatively minimal number of people, and it is about 10 times less than the original exposure rate.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Until people learn to stop being hysterically phobic over nuclear waste cooties, posts like yours will persist.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of 2500 TWh they use a year, this is about 0.2% and is probably massively more expensive than other forms of energy. It truly will never work without so much money money thrown at it that you'd see famine, looting, and pillaging.

Re:NO NO NO

[aliquis]

I don't understand most of what you're saying. So I can't really comment on it.

US economy and purchasing power is higher. And that's one reason to assume they pollute more. If the poor would get rich more consumtion would happen and with that likely more pollution.

I don't get the low threshold, like in easy to pass or like amount?

I don't get the magnitude higher and what that have to do with say hydroelectric power. Or you mean one pass say CO2 levels easier becayse of having hydroelecric power? I have no idea what it was all supposed to be about.

I don't get the protectionist talk either. It had nothing with protectionism to do. If I buy lots of useless junk from China I feel guilty because I'm buying lots of useless junk (say a set of paint knives, in the store you may get 10 or 15 of them at a price not much more than for a few of them but did you needed 15 of them? Same with all the crap which may come with advertisment or magazine subscriptions and such, uesless junk produced for nothing because I didn't even wanted it. Dealextreme sell lots which I think of as crap to.)

Consumer is doing the demand and picking the product. You've got choices. Take responsibility for buying more shit and the shit you're buying. Thinking something else is just retarded imho.

It wasn't at all about "oh don't buy this and that from China because they are filthy" (if so I would had said that. I don't give a shit about where it's from. Though I do understand a more environmental friendly product is more environmental friendly regardless of where it's from.)

So the idea was that we have higher environmental standards and fill them ourself and then say that oh no we can't buy from you because you don't live up to them?

Whatever. I see US as a filthy stinking ignorant garbage patch so.. let's go both ways.

Re:NO NO NO

[SolitaryMan]

First of all, the first link provides the statistic for 2012. Last time I checked this was not 4 years ago

Second, I did not set myself a goal to provide you with the most accurate and up to date statistics. I don't care about it. The point was that if you do, the numbers are out there and freely available, if one cares to look for them. Obviously, you don't, and just came here to whine.

Re:NO NO NO

[WOOFYGOOFY]

. A big part of the expense in solar is installation and labour, and there are some interesting developments going on that will make that part of the bill a lot lower.

Do share.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Straw man. This is not what typical supporters of nuclear energy say. They point out that (given the time frame we have to deal with for reducing GHG emissions) it is so unlikely that a renewables-only strategy can get us where we need to be that nuclear power needs to be part of the mix. I rather doubt that there is *anyone* in the mainstream of those who support nuclear power — perhaps even in the fringes — who says that we must go with nuclear power alone and that renewable technologies should be excluded from the mix. As far as I know, the message is always that renewables are welcome and can help us partway along the road to avoiding excessive warming, but that nuclear is also an essential part of that mix. I am willing to be corrected if the information I am unaware of turns out to be factual — but I remain quite confident that because of the illogic of the position, any "nuclear only, no renewables" types will definitely be outside the mainstream of the pro-nuclear movement.

On the other hand, there is an extremely loud, vocal, and fundamentally illogical constituency in the pro-renewables movement who insist that we can and *must* do everything with renewables and are equally insistent that all nuclear power generation must be eliminated. They cherry-pick their evidence, glossing over what contradicts and defeats their prejudices. Perhaps their most notorious and shameless spokesperson is Ms Helen Caldicott, the out-of-her-depth pediatrician and chief handwaver of the antinuclear hysteria movement.

The objections to nuclear power (in general) have been soundly and conclusively trounced by the weight of the factual evidence. Third- and fourth-generation nuclear are designed so that they cannot melt down like earlier generations: this is ensured by the laws of physics. The problem of spent fuel with half-lives in the hundreds of millennia? Antinuclear types insist that there is no solution and they will inevitably poison the environment for all eternity. Forget the fact that the disposal protocols are already extremely safe: there is a solution to *recycle* spent fuel as catalysts for breeder reactors, which would allow us to increase the efficiency of nuclear reactions from around that of PV cells to the high 90% range and power humanity for tens of millennia if not more. And with the danger of contamination of the environment designed out of the systems.

Antinuclear types who insist on the chimera of renewables only simply refuse to recognise these facts and continue to defy logic and respect for the balance of the data and resort to repeating already discredited arguments, semi-factoids, and straw-man arguments like the above post.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

The additional cost due to renewable energy subsidies is about 20% of the current electricity price in Germany. The total price is about 0.25 EUR per kWh (including subsidies and taxes). The EEG-Umlage, which is used to pay the subsidies, is 5.4ct/kWh. There is also a lowering effect, but it's not entirely clear how much that is per kWh.

Re:NO NO NO

[puppetman]

Well, as for the price of nuclear power, there is a 30-year, multi-billion dollar cleanup in the works. Even if a private corporation is paying for it, they'll be recouping their money somehow. There is no such thing a free lunch, or a free nuclear decontamination.

From another /. article today,

"A puddle of the contaminated water was emitting 100 millisieverts an hour of radiation, equivalent to five year's maximum exposure for a site worker. In addition up to 300 tonnes a day of contaminated water is leaking from reactors buildings into the sea."

You might be able to argue that, in a safer place, the Fukushima reactor would have been fine, but Japan is one huge earthquake waiting to happen. Maybe solar, wind, and wave power make sense in a place like that.

As for what people "like", using that as a basis for what's right or good is ridiculous. People want want everything for nothing - someone else should pay. They want cheap power, but don't want a power plant in their back yard. On average, we're not a terribly rational species.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

That renewable generation can only be hydro power. Wind and solar are not capable of that kind of dependability and to expand them to the level where they would be able to do so would entail a huge fossil fuel footprint for construction and maintenance, both for the generative capacity and new transmission infrastructure, that would largely undo the advantages.

So you are most likely in Quebec. Perhaps in Manitoba. There are few places in the world with the natural resources to exploit hydropower to anything near the extent it is in those two provinces. Just like there are very few places in the world that can exploit geothermal to the extent Iceland can, sitting on top of the Mid-Atlantic ridge as it is. But wind and solar, unlike these last two, are not able to supply dependable base load generation except by building vastly beyond capacity and using highly efficient storage — even more efficient than pumped hydro.

Re:NO NO NO

[bdwebb]

Of course the efforts of the cleanup will be recouped from the people and that this is indeed a cost of doing business after a nuclear disaster has taken place. My only point to make about this is that every investigative agency that has subsequently reviewed conditions at Fukushima prior to the event has determined that there were gross missteps made with handling of safety by the agencies who were supposed to be responsible for assessing conditions of the reactor. I can't find the article I read right now but some reports indicate that had the responsible agencies enforced standards properly, even the earthquake and the tsunami more than likely would not have caused more than minor leakage, if that.

My point is that responsible handling of nuclear power plants makes it a very safe source of energy. Yes there are byproducts that last an extremely long time and that are extremely dangerous, yes there are hazards if handled improperly or in the case of natural disaster that destroys the safeguards in place, but historically there have been very few nuclear power disasters. Even in Chernobyl which is recognized as the worst nuclear power disaster in history, modern studies indicate that the health impact from that event is relatively low compared to the scale of the disaster:

Among the residents of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, there had been up to the year 2005 more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident, and more cases can be expected during the next decades. Notwithstanding the influence of enhanced screening regimes, many of those cancers were most likely caused by radiation exposures shortly after the accident. Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure two decades after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although those most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

My point here is that people have this negative opinion of nuclear power because they don't understand it and it is simply FUD. I retorted to the original poster's assertion that we should "ask the people in Fukushima how they feel about those low-low prices" and as I said previously it is a silly argument because what the people of Fukushima are concerned about is the damage from the giant earthquake and resulting enormous tsunami and that the impact of the Fukushima disaster on the populace is almost negligible.

Ultimately, you're right in that wind, wave, and solar power make sense there and they do have quite a bit of these technologies in place or in experimental stages but power-to-cost, nuclear is the cheapest option to fulfill the demands of the society at this point. In the future, it would be great if we could get away from nuclear power and subsist entirely on renewable energy sources but we are not there at this point. You're also right in that people are irrational and want everyone else to pay but it also has to be considered that those who say "So what solar costs more per kWh? That's the price you pay for clean energy!" have no concept of poverty and the impact that such an elevation in the cost of energy would cause.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Fish caught near crippled Japanese N-plant with 2,500 times the legal limit of radioactivity for human consumption

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was low value land, it wouldn't be built on, but it is built upon, because it's desirable, for a lot of reasons. Which means it is a lot worse when it does flood. And no, it's not flood control itself leading to the flooding problems you allege, but rather flood control being capitalized by leaving the reservoirs full so it can be maximized in value. More of that running things as a business.

But no, you didn't distance yourself from Reagan's words, you embraced them as a valid argument. You chose to endorse him and his words. Had you chosen to reject them, you might have an argument that you were making a different argument, but you didn't so. You just nodded along with him.

Therefore, you lost your chance to distinguish yourself.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, what Germany are doing with renewables is remarkable. Arguing that it was only a level 3 not a level 7 is a bit like chopping your thumb and two fingers off with an axe and saying, "Well, shoot, I'll just keeping chopping with this blunt old thing. I could lose a whole hand and STILL keep chopping."

Re:NO NO NO

[fritsd]

I hadn't thought of that. That's a good point. But to forbid or reduce the landlord's profit would disincentivise(sp?) him/her to improve the house, and the end-user electricity prices aren't going down anymore. And the lower income brackets, who rent, have no money to spare for this investment anyway.

The only solution would be not a "stick" for the landlord but an extra "carrot" for the tenants. Maybe a form they can fill in "hey my landlord has solar panels and I want to profit too" and get some money back at the end of the year. Where could this money be extracted... not the tenants .. not the landlord .. tax office rebate, I think (it's their fault/problem that the current system is unfair towards the renters).

This would give a small additional incentive for the renters to prod their landlord to install solar panels.

It's not a large sum of money unless the renters live in a draughty monastery, so the tax office doesn't need a large extra control/enforcement staff to verify that the renters really have a landlord with solar panels.

Re:NO NO NO

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

I am sure you could produce power by dragging puppies on a wool carpet, but I mean it still just isn't practical in spite of how cute it would be...just like solar energy.

Germany requires about 50 TW/hr a month (wiki says 607 TW/hr a year) so this is only about 10% of their power requirements in spite of the BILLIONS of euros that went into the project. They only hope reach, at most, 25% -325%. Not that that isn't significant, but still implies that solar reaches some level of feasibility well below what is required to solve the world's energy crisis.

When you can power a whole nation with solar energy, your sarcasm will be appreciated. For now its just another green alarmists comment absconding from common sense in favor of a reality that could never exists.

Re:NO NO NO

[Guspaz]

My point was more that the reliability/price/profitability was not substantially impacted by it being done by the government, in response to the "socialism fails" comment. As in, the cheap Hydro prices are happening in spite of it being provided in a socialist manner.

Re:NO NO NO

[excelsior_gr]

Lignite is used in many european countries for electricity. If that's what you can dig out of your ground, that's what you burn.

Re:NO NO NO

[yusing]

It comes at a price...

Yes, global warming trends show the price of the alternative: seashores being drowned and lengthy, very hot summers and an eventual massive die-off of humanity for lack of foodstuffs. I'm SO glad I won't live to see and suffer it.

Bravo to Germans for sholdering the burden. Here in the US we'd actually have to do without all the stuff we cram into our "Public Storage" spaces. And that 4th iPad.

Re:NO NO NO

[AmiMoJo]

You really need some new arguments.

Your argument is ridiculous. Solar can't cover 100% of the requirement, therefore it's useless. By that logic all sources fail and we must go back to the stone age.

Re:NO NO NO

[Mycroft_VIII]

No. I mean the amount of energy it takes for a solar cell to be made is more than it will produce in it's lifetime.
    It's pretty obvious what I meant. If not sorry.

Mycroft

Re:NO NO NO

[Mycroft_VIII]

So a typo invalidates the whole statements meaning, especial one so obvious in intent? Based on your lack of reasoning skills I'm just going to write you off period.

Mycroft

Re:NO NO NO

[Mycroft_VIII]

Sorry about that. Was late and I missed a stupid typo.

Mycroft

Re:NO NO NO

[khallow]

But no, you didn't distance yourself from Reagan's words, you embraced them as a valid argument.

Yes. That's what rational people do. They consider an argument on its merits not a misguided prejudice based on who came up with the argument.

Therefore, you lost your chance to distinguish yourself.

And why should I care? You brought up Reagan and I merely pointed out my perspective on his statements. Looks to me like you have a 25 year old ax to grind with a dead man. I personally have better things to waste my time on.

Re:NO NO NO

[khallow]

It had nothing with protectionism to do.

For example, consider the ISO 14000 series of standards. If you want to do business with the governments of the EU or businesses that follow ISO 14000 standards, you have to follow those standards to some degree. It makes it easy to create trade barriers since local European businesses are immersed in a standards-compliant business ecosystem while Chinese businesses aren't even close.

Re:NO NO NO

[crossmr]

In 2009, it consumed energy from the following sources

2013-2009= how much?

and if you don't care about it, why come here and post about it in such a douchebaggy manner?

Re:NO NO NO

[SolitaryMan]

In 2009, it consumed energy from the following sources

2013-2009= how much?

Please read my previous comment again.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

1 nuclear plant = 1 GW
31 days = 24 * 31 h = 744 h
1 nuclear plant * 31 days = 0.744 TW

So not bad, not bad at all. And this is coming from a nuke. My only observation against solar is that summer is the best time of the year for solar. 1 nuclear plant pumps 1/10 of 5 TW every month of the year and that constant energy is good for the grid.

I'm thrill to see the Germans make it work though. If anybody can do its them.

Re: NO NO NO

[khallow]

Ok, you showed me. I wager there are hidden subsidies, but 5.4 cts per kWh would be at least a sizable portion.

Re:NO NO NO

[crossmr]

I read it, please stop pretending that you didn't post 2 links.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure about the nuclear subsidies. If its the loan guarantees those are pretty equivalent to the ones Solyndra and friends had. They were intended to test the new legal framework for plant commissioning, which was design the theory goes to ensure that the utility doesn't invest huge capitals until the plant approval is finalized. If the government changes it mind after the final approval happens then its the government that looses the money.

Re:NO NO NO

[SolitaryMan]

So, then what part of "First link provides the statistic for 2012" you had trouble understanding?

Re: NO NO NO

[CrimsonAvenger]

Solar subsidies are in the electricity price

And in your taxes, where you don't see them.

Do keep in mind that Federal Tax Credits for Solar are a subsidy.

So are State Tax Credits for Solar.

And we have both where I live. So I can buy solar and get my neighbors to pay 80% of the price.

Which is a pretty nice subsidy. Until everyone does it, of course, then it becomes a fiscal disaster....

Re:NO NO NO

[yenic]

Yeah I'd still ask the people of Fukushima how they feel about those bottom dollar prices. According to your angle, no problems were caused by the fact they were using nuclear power. It's all the tsunami's fault.

Lesson learned folks: it's not the use of nuclear power that's at fault, it's those darn tsunamis getting in the way of my meltdown everytime!

Just to preempt your next gem of wisdom for everyone: Chernobyl was caused by Communism.

Re:NO NO NO

[crossmr]

What part of the "the second link is 4 years out of date and doesn't justify your douchebaggy attitude" did you have trouble understanding?

Re: NO NO NO

[TClevenger]

Regulation often has unintended consequences like this. If the thresholds were higher, for example, then the so-called "radioactive waste" probably wouldn't be.

Cool, we should just raise the thresholds high enough that they can dump the waste directly into the ocean. That way, the entire planet can be declared "radioactive waste-free." Problem solved, and the shareholders don't have to worry about those pesky "costs."

Re:NO NO NO

[Dahamma]

Are you joking? Energy production is by no means necessarily a zero sum game. It requires large amounts of energy to build and maintain all of the energy production facilities. Those solar facilities will sit idle at night, partially idle in the day when highly overcast and up to 16+ hours in the winter in Northern Germany - are they even paying off their investment? How would you know?

Likewise, the coal/gas/nuclear facilities will sit idle during the day, even though they were originally budgeted to run much closer to capacity, which is why the companies running them are saying they are considering shutting them down for good or moving production to another country. And good luck stopping and restarting all of these plants efficiently every night - baseload-type power plants run most efficiently at full capacity and can take a lot of time and expense to stop and restart - especially nuclear, which takes several days to start up after being shut down. You have no idea how power generation and distribution really works, clearly...

It's the same thing people are questioning with electric cars - is the high energy and resource cost of production more than offset by the gains? It's not a clear answer at this point.

I'm not against solar power at all (or electric cars) - just people who jump on bandwagons fed by government subsidies without actually doing any real research. I really hope some day both of these things will succeed without massive subsidies, because that's the only way they will scale. For example, Germany imports 2/3 of its power, and solar only accounts for 3% of the total consumption after Germany has spent $100 BILLION EUROS on solar power subsidies. That's not "sustainable" sustainable energy...

Re:NO NO NO

[Dahamma]

Before that happens, energy at nighttime will be in high enough demand to have those plants make money again. We probably should trust those "magic correcting forces" of a market at least that far.

Actually, no - not the current plants. They are designed to be profitable at full capacity, not idling half the day - and are not even capable of stopping and restarting every night. You would have to convince someone to redesign and build new sources of non-solar energy production capable of running part of the time and quickly and cheaply stopping and started every day. While giving their competitors over 10B euros a year in subsidies, and outright telling everyone they hope to replace them ASAP. Good luck with that...

Re:NO NO NO

[bickerdyke]

That#s what gas turbine plants are designed for.

Re:NO NO NO

[Blaskowicz]

And I wonder if they're going to make coal gas to burn that in the plants. Or they can always cosy up with the Russians to get more natural gas. Ah, good job Gerhard Schröder!

Re: NO NO NO

[khallow]

I suppose it wouldn't at all be possible to come up with some threshold between every scary bit of radiation is bad and naked reactors cooling in the Pacific.

Re:NO NO NO

[palion]

zombies do not live, you insensitive clod.

Re:NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody in their right mind is proposing to keep using coal to get off nuclear.

Actually it is very simple.

All clean energy and global warming news is fake propaganda from evil liberal news monopolies, un-american, hurts American economy and jobs, and sides with the terrorists. All American dirty energy, but most especially American Big Oil, is part of the honest America true American homeland interest and resources. American coal is dirty power, therefore it is good American power. Solar power is clean power, therefore it is un-american and supports the terrorists. Don't you see how much sun there is in desert terrorist nations?

Faking irrational conspiracy nuts is odd, I think I'll need to go de-wash my brain now.

Re: NO NO NO

[Anonymous Coward]

Clue: the people of the state of California == the state of California

The taxpayers of the state of California get to foot the bill. This is the way capitalism works. Get used to it.

Re:NO NO NO

[hotfireball]

i am paying 24,26 €cents per kwh

I pay the same 24,26 €cents, mein lieber Freund, and prefer continue to do so, instead of continue paying Japanese yen, after Fukushima happened. Yes, my house gone.

Re:NO NO NO

[stoatwblr]

I think they're more concerned about the 20,000 people who died in the tsunami and the hundreds of thousands whose homes were trashed by it than the ZERO people who died in the meltdown and cleanup efforts.

The latest radiation leak is so small you could go swimming in the ponds without ill effects. There's a whole load of hysteria for what's on par with dropping a radium-dial watch in a swimming pool.

And that's a 40 year old design which was beyond end-of-life. Yes there's a lot of cleanup to deal with but noone's in danger and you get more radiation exposure living in Helsinki for a year from the local granites than most people will ever get around the reactors even with the radiation leaks (Most of what's leaking is Alpha-emitting so it's only dangerous if ingested or on your skin. The gamma levels are about 1/10-1/100 of what's reported and even then most of isn't particularly energetic (A lot of the gamma radiation is only at soft-xray photon levels).

Re:NO NO NO

[stoatwblr]

I agree this is a case of chicken little. Perhaps people might like to bear in mind that other than direct victims of the nuclear blasts (and their descendants), the rates of cancer in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 2-3% over background levels and so far there hasn't been any detectable increase in cancer rates in western european areas which were under the Chernobyl cloud.

Re:NO NO NO

[Dahamma]

Designed, but not built or proven cost effective for huge load.

What people seem to fail to understand here is that a power source like solar provides a lot of energy in the day but ZERO at night. While that's still a great thing we need to take advantage of, it doesn't make non-solar plants just become peaking generation plants - they need to be used for base load power generation (actually, almost *all* generation) at "night", which in Germany in the winter is about 4pm-8am, i.e.. 16 hours. So it still has to be cheap and efficient, ie. NOT what any current gas turbine design can provide.

Re:NO NO NO

[Iggy Dalrymple]

Most people know socialism when they see it.

Re:NO NO NO

[symbolset]

Knock yourself out. Let's assume you're American.

(PDF) In the United States, the national inventory of commercial spent nuclear fuel amounts to nearly 70,000 metric tons, which is stored at 75 sites in 33 states

For simple math that's 219 grams per person.

Now before you grab a shovel and bury that half-pound nuisance in your back yard, that's the uranium weight. Since there is binder and filler and stuff in that as well as the results of fission heat production (cesium, tritium and whatnot) and fissile uranium weight is typically only 3% of fuel rods, your actual weight of high-level nuclear waste to dispose of is 33x that, or 7.227 Kilos, or 16 pounds. Per person: man, woman, child. If you have usual the 2+3 nuclear family that's 80 pounds of crap that's never going to be safe in your lifetime to be put in a safe place for 100,000 years. Some of it is plutonium - one of the most toxic materials on Earth - which must also be protected from nation-states that desire it for weapons production, so budget for armed guards, hazard pay and regular audits of your 80LB bundle of joy - forever. That's just your share today. That top line figure grows by 3,000 metric tons per year.

Frankly here's the lie about fast reactors: Even in the utopian world where they work, can be built, deliver on their promises and create 100% of the world's electical power too cheap to meter - they don't need even 10% of our current spent fuel output, let alone the stores we've been saving up for 50 years. They could not consume the spent fuel ever.

Re:NO NO NO

[bickerdyke]

Designed, but not built or proven cost effective for huge load.

Oh yes, that comfortable narrow-minded argument.

In the news: Progress with power technology A
Slashdot: Bah Humbug! A is for base load, can never cover peak load
Answer: Use technology B for peak load.
Next Troll. That's BS. Will never be able to cover base load!

Combination of different methods is completly ignored. See:

What people seem to fail to understand here is that a power source like solar provides a lot of energy in the day but ZERO at night. .

But a) power consumption drops at night and b) there is still wind power. And we don't have to scrap all the existing plants in the next few months and I'm fine with running a few conventional plants for what is then left as baseload.

In this bigger picture I see two different possible scenarios: Due to the day-night-rhythm, solar power production will automatically better match the performance pattern, leveling out the amount of additional power needed as "hot spare" for peaks or

We'll see a huge raise in power storage capabilities. Less in efficiency, but in absolut amount: electric cars. AND they can be charged, whenever there is a production peak. Of course this will come with a sharp increase of demand for electric power in general, but we're adding new renewable energy to the grid anyway! The only differnce is that in that scenario, solar won't be able to replace a single conventional plant and therefore will be decried as a failure. The number of combustion engines replaced will be overlooked and ignored as they haven't been part of the electric grid equiation before.

Re:NO NO NO

[Dahamma]

Seriously, man, take a deep breath and relax. How is my comment a troll? This is a discussion, and calling anyone who disagrees with anything you say a troll is pretty childish. If anything, you were the one who made a one line response to the OP with no evidence it was helpful or true...

I'm fine with running a few conventional plants for what is then left as baseload.

Repeating myself *again*... unless you think wind power is going to somehow provide 90% of the power load at night some day, it's not *a few conventional plants", it's as many needed to run MOST of the power load for 16 hours in the winter. Not sure if you live on the equator or something, but power usage sure does NOT drop between the hours of 4:30pm-8pm when there is no sunlight, and you need FULL load then, too (not to mention if you replaced all cars with electric that charging load would be mostly added at night). You can't shut down most of the plants when you need them ALL at certain times of the day! Unless we somehow come up with ridiculous batteries to store TWh of electricity, it's still mostly an instantaneous thing - you always need enough generation capability to supply the whole required load.

I'm not saying clean energy is a bad thing, don't try to put words in my mouth. There's a pretty good chance my next car will be electric, and I'm considering solar panels on my house (in mostly sunny CA, where it actually may make financial sense some day). But I'm not deluding myself that I will save money doing this right now.

There is still way too much hype and politics in the clean energy industry and too much handwaving over the issues that remain, and clearly too many people (like you) who have a shit fit whenever anyone points that out. That shortsighted attitude (ignoring the negatives) doesn't get the problem fixed in the long run. Having reasonable, logical, non political/opinionated discussions does.

Re:NO NO NO

[Rakarra]

And don't forget flooding every square mile of land with light at night (gotta have those porch and deck lights on at all hours) just.. because. You know, somehow that's secure.

But...but...

[IonOtter]

But Germany gets so much more sun than the US! We can't compete with that?!

(I wish I were kidding...)

Re:But...but...

[simonbp]

With enough government subsidies, I'm sure you could build a profitable solar plant underground...

Re:But...but...

[SnarfQuest]

Please don't give out politicians ideas.They come up with enough stupid ideas on their own without your help.

Re:But...but...

[Anonymous Coward]

So one person on Fox made a shoot-from-the-hip comment that was mistaken. It wasn't in her prepared materials and nobody fact-checked it before she said it since nobody knew she was going to say it. She wrote a retraction which was published the next day.

Why is this so damned important that people keep bringing it up? What does this prove?

If I provide you with examples of hilariously stupid comments from non-Fox TV reporters, will you post those here on Slashdot or is Fox unique somehow?

I've said some dumb things in my time, but I don't stand in front of a TV camera so I have lived them down. Does Shibari Joshi get to ever live down her dumb statement or do you want her to wear it around her neck forever?

Re:But...but...

[Anonymous Coward]

retraction:

But I incorrectly stated that the chief difference between the U.S. and Germany's success with solar installations had to do with climate differences on a "Fox and Friends" appearance on Feb. 7. In fact, the difference come down more to subsidies and political priorities and has nothing to with sunshine.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/02/08/germany-isnt-all-that-sunny-and-case-for-diversified-energy-world/

Re:But...but...

[Prof.Phreak]

Holy shit, they actually say that in the video! Germany has more sun than the US... wow!

Re:But...but...

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was a once in a lifetime event, then you would be spot on. But it's not. It's a long-term, systematic, deliberate denying of scientific facts and empirical data whenever they don't agree with the editorial narrative of Fox News. This is not some random person who goofed, this is symptomatic of an institution deliberately lying to its viewers.

So yes, she has to wear it around her neck forever. That's why she gets paid so much.

Re:But...but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Few Spanish solar plants were (heavily) subsidized as they produced electricity during night time. Socialist (=eco, green) party was at power in Spain at that time.

And it's only getting better

[Anonymous Coward]

with cheaper solar panels and more efficient too. I think there will be a point in the future where no house is build without solar panels.

I don't like the greens too much but on days like this I'm happy that they do have as much political influence as they do.

Re:And it's only getting better

[GarethIwanFairclough]

and how long will the panels produce their rated output for?

Re:And it's only getting better

[tehlinux]

And how long does it take to pay for them?

Re:And it's only getting better

[c0lo]

It'll be a while, it currently take more energy to make a solar panel than it can generate in it's lifespan and costs more than coal or nuclear without the subsidies.

No longer true since 2012

Re:And it's only getting better

[c0lo]

And how long does it take to pay for them?

In Melbourne AU (shitty weather, better than Germany though): 5-6 year. And this only by the cuts in the power bills.

Re:And it's only getting better

[khallow]

it currently take more energy to make a solar panel than it can generate in it's lifespan

That hasn't been true for a while.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Anonymous Coward]

A 200 W solar panel costs about $400 today. If that cost were entirely from the energy required to produce it, that would mean it requires 4000 kWh to produce ($400 / $0.1/khW). 200 W * 10 hours a day = 2 kWh per day. In a year, it'll produce perhaps 600 kWh (assuming 300 days of sun). Most panels are guaranteed for 20 years, so that's roughly 12000 kWh over the lifetime of the panel. 12000 kWh > 4000 kWh, no?

Re:And it's only getting better

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that could be the case some years ago.
Now this is not true any more.
Citatioons:

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy05osti/37322.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#Solar_cells_and_energy_payback

Re:And it's only getting better

[ewibble]

I think that this has changed:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/2/4174204/solar-panels-finally-generate-more-energy-than-they-consume

They says it will make that energy within a year. with 50% certainty.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Zeromous]

Brilliant bullshit detection sir, too bad you are AC! :D

Re:And it's only getting better

[zippthorne]

Guaranteed full power, or guaranteed to be better than 50% of the starting power?

Re:And it's only getting better

[Nutria]

200 W * 10 hours a day = 2 kWh per day. In a year, it'll produce perhaps 600 kWh (assuming 300 days of sun). Most panels are guaranteed for 20 years, so that's roughly 12000 kWh over the lifetime of the panel. 12000 kWh > 4000 kWh, no?

AC's formulae are correct, but his numeric values suck. Solar cell wattage output starts declining after a few years, and German cities only receive approx much less than the 3,000 sun-hours/year his calculations assume. 1650 sun-hours is a much more accurate estimate.

That immediately drops the theoretical max output way down to 6,600 kWh.

If PV efficiency drops from 100% when installed to 80% in 20 years, then for easy of calculations let's call it 90% efficiency. That drops the cell's total output to 5,940 kWh.

More than needed to manufacture, but is it enough to be economical?

Re:And it's only getting better

[mark-t]

It's probably something like guaranteed 98% or better power, actually. If it lost half its power in just 20 years then that means it would have to be losing about 3% of its currently available power every single year, which would be very noticeable.

Re:And it's only getting better

[ebno-10db]

The GP is even more wrong than your citation suggests. What they're saying there is that the current worldwide power output of photovoltaics is equal to the worldwide power input for making new ones at the current rate. However, a panel lasts for years, and what the GP said was "it currently take more energy to make a solar panel than it can generate in it's lifespan". That's EROEI, which is currently 6.8 for photovoltaics. In other words, over its life a panel will produce 6.8x as much energy as it took to produce it. Even if all the energy used to produce it did come from fossil fuels, you'd still be way ahead.

The myth that the GP states is one of the great zombies of the Internet. Maybe it was true 20 years ago or something, but anybody who wants to say "them greenie wusses know nothing, solar is like so stupid" trots out the myth. For real cognitive dissonance, tell him that very few locomotives burn coal anymore.

Re:And it's only getting better

[ebno-10db]

You're all trying to calculate EROEI. It's already been done. It's 6.8 for photovoltaics.

Re:And it's only getting better

[zippthorne]

I'm not so sure.. My recollection is that degradation of practical cells is about 2% per year, but the only article I was able to find in a quick googling was a half percent per year, which is encouraging, but still more than would be necessary to keep it above 98% after 20 years. I'm sure the numbers vary with chemistry and manufacturing process, though.

Re:And it's only getting better

[afidel]

Warranties I've seen typically state 90% at 10 years and 80% at 25 years.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Nefarious Wheel]

Also in Melbourne, AU. 3.5kw array on the roof. I don't really care about the time to ROI; we had a bit of money for a while and spent a chunk of it reducing our power bill expenses now and into the future. Non-solar energy prices will only go up; ours will, but more slowly. We time the big appliances to run mostly during the day. Are we happy about it? Yes, yes we are.

We get a few cents per kWH back from the power utility. Not a lot, but it's amazing how much power we've generated since we bought it.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll be a while, it currently take more energy to make a solar panel than it can generate in it's lifespan and costs more than coal or nuclear without the subsidies.

Try to subtract the subsidies from coal and nuclear, too.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that article talks about the cost of the solar power industry, not an individual solar panel. Solar panels have pretty much always produced net energy over their lifetime, but when you have a vast expansion of the industry, you pay a lot of the up front costs at once, and that is what the study is about.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that China is the biggest producer of solar panels right now, and due to its usual shoddy QA its panels are failing much faster than they were supposed to. So any solar EROI computed from chinese solar panel prices and claimed chinese solar panel lifetime/average production will be wildly optimistic.

And even if it that was not the case, it will still only measure average production not production-when-consumers-need-it. Sporadic surproduction is causing negative energy prices in Europe, which means a large part of the production predicted by EROI won't be consumed since it will occur at the wrong times (and worse it will indue costs as the grid will try to mitigate surproduction).

Re:And it's only getting better

[c0lo]

Also in Melbourne, AU. 3.5kw array on the roof. I don't really care about the time to ROI; we had a bit of money for a while and spent a chunk of it reducing our power bill expenses now and into the future. Non-solar energy prices will only go up; ours will, but more slowly

A 4.5 kW installation fully covers my needs, including woodworking power tools I'm starting now and then for that hobby of mine.

We time the big appliances to run mostly during the day.

Why?!? I'm charged on a differential tarrif: peak/shoulder/off-peak - cheaper to run the heavy duty washing at night time or weekend (the ironing and hobby are weekend only). Letting aside some savings in my bill, it makes sense to let the industry consume what the PVes are producing at daytime, when it needs it.

Re:And it's only getting better

[bickerdyke]

AC's formulae are correct, but his numeric values suck. Solar cell wattage output starts declining after a few years, and German cities only receive approx much less than the 3,000 sun-hours/year his calculations assume. 1650 sun-hours is a much more accurate estimate.

That number is pretty much useless as PV cells don't need direct, unclouded sunlight to work. So when considering the time available for production of solar energy, it is probably safe to assume 365 days with daylight at daytime and average them as always cloudy.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously to not undo moderations.

A EROEI of 6.8 for PV is not very good actually. It is in between that of shale oil (5.0) and new oil discoveries (8.0), which are both very polluting. EROEI does not take pollution cleanup costs into account. Although it looks good, it may not be enough to be economical. Wind power is sitting at 18.0, a much better proposition.

Re:And it's only getting better

[necro81]

German cities only receive approx much less than the 3,000 sun-hours/year his calculations assume. 1650 sun-hours is a much more accurate estimate.

This is one reason (among several) why I haven't taken the plunge and installed solar at my home - the capacity factor. Living in the NE United States, I get a bit more sunshine than Germany. Solar at my home would certainly pay off. But that the same set of solar panels, installed in the desert southwest, would be able to generate perhaps twice as much electricity over their lifespan. I would much rather make that investment, because it has a higher energy-return-on-investment.

Unfortunately, there isn't a particularly good or widespread model for that kind of investment (fronting the capital for a residential solar installation far from your own home). Anyone know of such a method?

Re:And it's only getting better

[Nutria]

But the electricity would have to be transmitted literally across the country. That doesn't seem too efficient.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Alioth]

They do to work effectively though.

I bought an 80W panel to try out the technology (big enough to be useful for some projects, but not so big it was stupidly expensive). It's a modern panel made of monocrystaline cells which are the most efficient of the commonly available cells.

Basically what I found:

* The panel makes rated panel on a clear, hazeless day when the sun strikes the panel exactly at right angles.
* On a day with thin cirrus clouds, such that clear shadows are still being cast, it will make 50% of rated power.
* On a day with thin clouds but a faint shadow still being cast, it will produce at best 35% to 40%
* On an overcast but bright day, 25%
* Heavy overcast, only around 5%

Also the power very rapidly drops off if the sun isn't absolutely perpendicular to the panel. To get the best out of the panel sun tracking is absolutely essential which unfortunately means it's now no longer an installation simpler than a small wind generator.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, we've reached the break even point! /golfclap And how expensive are these?

Re:And it's only getting better

[necro81]

I don't mean for it to be transmitted across the country - it would be used locally, ideally at the point of generation. But the power used there is less total power that needs to be generated in the region by conventional means. The boundary lines - the scope of how I see things - extends at least on a national scale, if not globally. It doesn't matter to me if the electrons coming out from my solar panels trickle into my own home - an offset is an offset.

I wouldn't, of course, be giving this power away. I may be eco(logically)-conscious, but I am eco(nomically)-conscious, too. I am not a charity utility. I would be charging whoever actually does use that solar power something like a market rate, just like my utility charges me. But for the same fixed costs (i.e., the amortized capital cost of the panels and installation, plus small ongoing maintenance costs), I would get a lot more value if I had panels installed in a sunnier area than my home.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Nutria]

ISTM for that to happen you'd need a national electric utility, where cheaper generation costs in some areas (where there's hydro) would balance out areas where generation is more expensive.

Re:And it's only getting better

[Mycroft_VIII]

Actually they cost more than that. But many governments subsidize their production and/or purchase by the end user.
    If they really have gotten significantly cheaper (actual costs, not post subsidy) than they produce over their lifetime in the last few years I've missed it (not really looked into it in abt 5 years).

Mycroft

Re:And it's only getting better

[Mycroft_VIII]

It was sooner than twenty years ago, probably close to 8-10 IIRC. I looked into it because my dad asked me to as he was thinking about putting solar on his roof. At the time they were still not (as a practical matter based on the real world, not a panels theoretical output under ideal conditions) not there. Theoretically in ideal conditions they were close, something like 95% if you used sun tracking near the equator with defect free cells that never degraded faster than expected and never had any cloud cover.
We found he could spend about 6500 to save about 7800 over 10 years if he got all the tax breaks and bought the cheapest reputable brand he could and did all the installation himself. Or he could put in a 4 hours overtime a week for 3 months and make more.
The horrible toxic wastes that making the cells generate were just salt on the wound for him.

Mycroft

Re:And it's only getting better

[Mycroft_VIII]

The toxic byproducts of solar are pretty bad as well, further lessening their value and "green" cred.

Mycroft

Re:And it's only getting better

[Mycroft_VIII]

Both of those have much higher regulatory costs than their subsidies, though my understanding is that coal is a better proposition that way.
  Which is sad because nuclear with modern designs is far better than solar or coal. Coal actually puts more radiation in the environment and solar produces a lot more toxic waste compared to many designs that effectively recycle their nuclear waste down to a tiny fraction of older designs.

Mycroft

Re:And it's only getting better

[zwarte piet]

So how does it change if mirrors are used to double or triple the intensity of the light hitting the solarpanels.

but but but but

[Anonymous Coward]

exxon... says... unsustainable...

Re:but but but but

[phantomfive]

Not to burst your conspiracy theory, but oil companies aren't opposed to solar. Solar cars, yes, but they don't lose everything from reduced coal burning. Some oil companies actively invest in alternative energy.

Re:but but but but

[Anonymous Coward]

the oil/auto industry stands on the slaughtered husk of electric public transportation - a product of 'investing'.

Re: but but but but

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so. BP mothballs solar technology that competes. I know this firsthand-lost my job at BP research right after we achieved solar efficiencies that were competitive with oil. They only invest so they can own/sit on the technology and prevent commercialization

Re: but but but but

[GarethIwanFairclough]

aka anything that could possibly threaten the supremacy of oil. They sit on anything that could unseat them from their throne while they unleash the tech that simply isn't up to competing as 'competition'.

Re: but but but but

[zippthorne]

When do the patents expire on your project?

Re: but but but but

[mark-t]

It's a safe bet that, if true, it wasn't patented, actually... since patents would require public disclosure.

Re: but but but but

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, so that means we have to wait only 14 years (less, since you are talking about past tense) for the patents to expire. While now would be better than later, knowing that the problems have been solved and are only being held back by patents means the future should be nice... right?

Re: but but but but

[sir-gold]

They could have patented them under a completely independant shell company. Just because you did the research doesn't mean you have to be the one to patent it, especially if you are just trying to stop other research.

Re: but but but but

[phantomfive]

What's more likely, that BP has secret technology that it hid in patents through a shell company, or that an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot is lying?

Re: but but but but

[phantomfive]

right after we achieved solar efficiencies that were competitive with oil.

Competitive with oil? What were you going to do, put solar panels on car roofs? Hint: that's not going to work even with 100% efficiency.

Re: but but but but

[mark-t]

They might be filed by a different company, but patents themselves still would have to be publicly disclosed. Filing them under a different company name might make them harder to explicitly search for, but not any less publicly available, and so there'd almost automatically be more people that would know about it.

Re: but but but but

[sir-gold]

How would you tell the difference between BP-owned submarine patents, or just some pie-in-the-sky solar corporation that ran out of capital and died before releasing any products (that still managed to file patents before dying).

From the outside, both cases would look identical. A brand-new company files article of incorporation, registers some patents, and then nothing is ever heard from them again.

Re: but but but but

[sir-gold]

What's more profitable to BP? William Randolph Hearst could have switched to cheaper hemp-based paper for his newspapers in the 1920s, but because of his massive investments in timber and paper-making, it was more profitable to him to attack hemp-based paper instead. He chose to do it by using his media empire to demonize hemp and marijuana instead of through patent-warfare, but it's no different.

Powerful people always attack new technology that threatens their investments, even if that new technology might benefit for society as a whole.

BP has 2 choices, it can adopt the future technology of solar and be just one player among thousands, or it can cling to it's massive oil land investments by fighting against the future of solar (though patents) and remain one of the top players for at least long enough for the current board of directors to get a nice fat retirement check.

Re: but but but but

[phantomfive]

Solar doesn't compete against oil.

Eclipsing?

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter how much you wanted to do that pun, 2% greater does not count as "eclipsing".

Uneconomics 101

[Anonymous Coward]

But at what cost?

Re:Uneconomics 101

[Rockoon]

But at what cost?

Apparently Germans pay 2+ times the price that Americans pay.

So essentially this news story is stating that Germans are setting new records at getting fucked by their inefficient electricity generation strategy.

Re:Uneconomics 101

[reve_etrange]

I'm not so sure about your plan to let ~150 W / sq. m the sun is beaming down here all day be completely wasted forever, either.

Re: Uneconomics 101

[Anonymous Coward]

Germany's electricity prices are about the same as California's. Germans use much less electricity than Americans.

Re: Uneconomics 101

[Anonymous Coward]

California has the most expensive areas in the country and doesn't really represent the rest of the US. It's one of the reasons I moved east.

Re: Uneconomics 101

[Rockoon]

Germany's electricity prices are about the same as California's.

Residents in Germany are paying ~$0.35/kWh while residents in Californian are paying ~$0.16/kWh, and California isnt a good example of efficiency either.

In Europe, only the people of Denmark pay more than Germans and most of Europe pays ~40% less than Germans.

But lets not let facts get in the way of a good P.R. piece about solar power, right?

Re:Uneconomics 101

[Pav]

It's certainly a huge expense... but on the positive side they're joining the Chinese, the Australians etc... to claw back a couple of percent of global carbon and finance the development of solar technology - the price of panels etc. has halved and halved again. There are also advantages to relying less on foreign energy or so I hear. The Germans can free-ride on the US waste on the military, and the US can free-ride on the German waste on solar/wind etc... development. Sounds fair to me.

Re:Uneconomics 101

[Rockoon]

I'm not so sure about your plan to let ~150 W / sq. m the sun is beaming down here all day be completely wasted forever, either.

If Germany was having some sort of electricity shortage crisis where they just couldn't build any more power plants of any kind, you might have a point.
In reality there are more efficient ways to generate electricity, there are places to do it, and there is fuel to do so. No real shortage at all. They are forcing by mandate that their residents pay more than necessary for electricity. Inefficiency. Look up the definition.

Re: Uneconomics 101

[DigiShaman]

I'm paying roughly $0.105/kWh here in Texas where the energy produced is only from 8% renewable (per the EFL). When I was on a 100% renewable wind contract, think I was paying $0.123/kWh hour. Of course, the actual power generation isn't really distributed to my home. But it is being used in place of fossil fuels somewhere else on the grid.

Ever since Texas had deregulated markets where the resident could chose from REPs, prices got cheaper. The trick is to keep jumping from REP to REP after each contract expires. Otherwise, you will fall back to market value prices (inflated) and the current REP won't offer you the same deal that it does for new customers. So again, to save money expect to jump from REP to REP each year. It's a painless process really. They just make shitloads of money off people too lazy or complacent in paying the bill without really paying attention. FYI, I jumped from Tara Energy to TXU. I've heard bad things about TXU, but the deal was too good to pass up. After this contract is up, I'll be jumping ship again. I recommend Tera Energy by the way. I would have stayed with them had they offered me a better deal on contract renewal, but they were too late in continued negotiations as I already signed up with TXU, but I digress.

http://www.powertochoose.org/

 

Re: Uneconomics 101

[DigiShaman]

Word of advise. If you can, time your contract renewals to not occur in the summer time. That's when prices are the highest. Or else you will be locked in high rates for the rest of the year. You'll have to do the math, but it might pay off going with a three month contract, ride out the summer, and renew in the fall for a new 12 month contract when prices have come down again.

Re:Uneconomics 101

[bzipitidoo]

Look up a few definitions yourself. Like, "externality". Solar power absolutely is worth paying more for, if it saves more in environmental damage than its costs, relative to coal. I think it does. What is Global Warming eventually going to cost us all? Easily trillions, if we have to relocate coastal infrastructure to higher ground.

Even without that, what is the cost to our health from pollution from coal burning? Priceless. I visited London in 1985. One shocker I got was a day after I arrived, when I blew my nose. The white tissue turned black. I hear that London is much cleaner today.

Solar may cost more up front, but is cheaper over the long haul. Solar will continue to improve.

Re: Uneconomics 101

[Bourdain]

I pay about $0.27/kWh in NYC for what's that's worth...

Re:Uneconomics 101

[Rockoon]

What is Global Warming eventually going to cost us all? Easily trillions, if we have to relocate coastal infrastructure to higher ground.

We dont even know the sign of this value, yet you say its easily trillions. It might easily be trillions in benefit, rather than cost, and thats also presuming the projections are at all accurate which is well below 100% confidence.

But of course you seem to think that you know the optimal temperature of the earth and that its less than the current temperature, so why wouldnt you also be 100% confident about the projections....

Stop pedaling your religion to people with more knowledge than you about the state of knowledge of the climate scientists. Seriously. You just look like a parrot selling a story when you make such egregious errors about knowledge that even the IPCC admits isnt known.

Re: Uneconomics 101

[Anonymous Coward]

When comparing electricity prices between Germany and California, it shouldn't be forgotten that in Germany only few homes have air condition, so the electricity consumption here is much lower.

The German government is rightfully being criticized for poorly managing the so called "Energiewende" (turnabout in energy[production]):

* The subsidies for installing solar generation are not lowered with the same rate as the prices for solar panels - building a solar farm is a fool proof way to earn easy money, since the distribution companies are forced to buy it with a fixed price

* The subsidies are payed with a special tax on each KWh - companies consuming more than 1GWh/year are exempted with argument of them having to face international competition (they don't have to proof, they do). This make the tax for the private consumer significantly higher

* The regulation of the German electricity market does not encourage the investment in power stations, which can compensate the unsteady production of the renewables (e.g. natural gas). This problem substantially increases the probability of wide area brownouts - especially with the nuclear power stations being are put a out of service in the next years

The investment in solar & wind is going in the right direction. I think it will definitely pay out for Germany in the long run. But there's much room for improvement too make the costs more bearable for the public.

Re: Uneconomics 101

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm paying ~$0.30/kWh including 19% VAT for 100% renewable energy right in the middle of Germany.

Re:Uneconomics 101

[bickerdyke]

70% of that is taxes and subsidies for almost every kind of energy (including coal)

Energy production and usage won't effect 70% of the price, so if you want to have a better comparision, you'd need to compare the price without taxes.

Re: Uneconomics 101

[RivenAleem]

Is that for all electricity, or just that produced by renewable means? I'd also hazard a guess that the Germans are more environmentally conscious and willing to pay that bit extra if it benefits the environment.

I never got why people expected renewable to equal cheap. Renewable is supposed to mean not damaging the environment, or using up a finite resource. I guess people figured that since you don't have to buy wind, sun or tide as a 'fuel' that it should be free.

Re:Uneconomics 101

[bickerdyke]

More "efficient" ways to create energy compared to not paying anything for fuel?

I'm not going to repeat the fairy tale from free solar power, but the cost structure is completly different from fossil power to be compared that way. And fuel prices WILL rise. That's basically avoiding to have to pay (comparatively high) upfront costs for solar/wind when it is to late and fuel prices are rising. Because, if your electricity bill has to cover rising fuel prices AND establishing regenerative power sources, it will skyrocket.

Re: Uneconomics 101

[Anonymous Coward]

Electricity cost in Los Angeles is about $0.20/kWh, not including taxes. Electricity in Germany is about €0.21/kWh, not including taxes. So yes, there is a difference, but depending on the exchange rate, it's only about 30 to 35 percent. Germans use much less electricity (and other energy) than Americans, so their total energy costs are still lower, even with the higher per unit costs.

Solar subsidies are paid for 10 years from the date of installation. The subsidy is paid in the form of a guaranteed price per kWh which is fed into the grid. That price has been slashed repeatedly (as planned). It has been lower than the consumer price for years and, depending on the type of installation, is now close to or lower than the generation price, so new installations are typically built for local consumption, which reduces the power drawn from the grid but does not create direct payouts to the owner of the installation. The premium on the price per kWh due to solar subsidies can therefore be expected to shrink to almost zero over the next 10 years. The solar power installations however will continue to produce electricity far longer (most are rated for at least 20 years). New capacity will still be installed because it is competitive with the consumer price, if you use all generated electricity.

The comparison with California is particularly interesting because California has roughly twice the solar input per area as Germany and uses lots of electricity for air conditioning coinciding with the maximum solar electricity generation capacity, so the numbers would work even better for California.

Re:Uneconomics 101

[joh]

But at what cost?

Apparently Germans pay 2+ times the price that Americans pay.

So essentially this news story is stating that Germans are setting new records at getting fucked by their inefficient electricity generation strategy.

Germans may pay more per kWh of energy, but in absolute terms they still pay less because they consume much less energy.

I'm paying 22 Euros a month (100% solar/hydro/wind), that's $30. How much do you pay? If I'm paying twice as much, you're paying $15, right? Right? Come on, tell me.

Re: Uneconomics 101

[olau]

In Europe, only the people of Denmark pay more than Germans and most of Europe pays ~40% less than Germans.

I'm from Denmark, and no, we're not. You are quoting figures with a tax that has nothing to do with production of electricity from renewables.

Breakdown here for all of Europe.

Please stop spreading misinformation.

Re:Uneconomics 101

[bzipitidoo]

We do know the sign. Global Warming is definitely a cost. Yes, we'll see some benefits, some gains. But those are minor next to the costs. One of the costs will certainly be wars. The fastest way to fire up a war is not over some high minded principles, or religious dogmas, powerful though they are. It's a lack of the basic necessities. What will people do if they are suddenly faced with starvation, but the neighbors still seem to have enough?

But you're willing to plunge ahead with your own religion. Science is never fully settled. 100% confidence is fantasy. Only morons say that we should make no changes because we don't know enough, by which they mean we don't know everything about an issue. The point is, we will never know everything about an issue. Do we know enough to act with sufficient confidence of being right? Yes! Whether the world would be a better place if it was warmer is not the issue. We can always head that direction later, eyes open, by our own choice only, if we decide that is best. But right now, that's not the case. The really peculiar thing is the conservative, anti-change political parties are willing to go ahead and chance the massive changes that ocean level rise will force upon us, to avoid having to make relatively tiny changes now. I've seen that they maintain self consistency with their principles through a fool's technique of denial. Gloabl Warming isn't real, it's a liberal plot! Then I suppose, should ocean level rise come to pass just as we have foretold may well happen, that amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the incredible losses that they'll trot out that loser excuse that there was nothing we could do about anyway, it was God's will.

I'm certainly not doing nothing now, so I can say "I told you so" decades later. That would be damned cold satisfaction. God help us all if we do heed the voices of denial. And as to it being God's will, maybe it is a test. God is always testing us. After all, we have free will. Are we going to be fools, and suffer God's wrath for it? Have we learned nothing? Thousands of years ago, we were far more ignorant. The Roman Empire was smart and industrious, but made many mistakes through ignorance, some of it deliberate. They actually did have hints that lead was toxic, but they brushed it off. Another serious error in basic policy were the walls. Certainly the walls helped keep the uncivlized barbarians at bay, for a while. But ultimately the walls were only a way of putting off the hard work of dealing with the real problems, not a lasting solution themselves. Rome never got around to starting work on those problems before the walls were breached. Today, some politicians want to erect a wall along the US-Mexico border. That kind of brute problem solving totally ignores the underlying issues. It may be that we'll have to build dikes to keep the ocean back. But if it is better to head off ocean rise, surely we should go that route? We should at the least explore all viable options. Making no changes is certainly one of the options, and definitely the cheapest and easiest up front, but likely not the best choice we could make over the long term.

Re:Uneconomics 101

[Anonymous Coward]

150 W / sq. m is a pitifully small amount amount of energy and it requires tons of money to extract. It is not free energy.

Re:Uneconomics 101

[Rockoon]

We do know the sign. Global Warming is definitely a cost.

Poverty is the #1 killer on the planet. Inefficiency increases poverty. Lives will be lost by artificial carbon reduction.

Now what value did you use for a life, and what lives lost estimates did you use and what were the demographics of those lives lost?

The last thing the AGW crowd wants is to admit that carbon reduction costs lives. Not even the UN's IPCC claims that Global Warming is known to represent a cost. But you seem to know better than them, right?

The problem with religion is that you have no citations. Leave the conclusions to the scientists, moron.

"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[Red_Chaos1]

"...that one of Germany's biggest utilities is threatening to migrate to Turkey."

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[maxwell demon]

I wonder how they plan to relocate their nuclear reactors to Turkey ...

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[jklovanc]

If you buy power only at night or when wind generators are not working but require us to keep our plants available 24/7 there is a problem. When you need power from conventional plants you really need it but we can't charge extra to keep up the infrastructure.

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

You will say something different during a winter storm where solar is almost zero and wind generators are shut down due to over speed. It does not matter if you use fossil fuel heat if the electric controls don't work. Welcome to the problem with green energy; you ca not turn it up on demand.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[foniksonik]

And this I why you build hydro reservoirs. Use the excess energy from renewables during peak output periods to pump water up into the lake, then discharge it later during low output times such as your winter storm. Other possibles include molten salt beds, hydrogen production, compressed air tanks or any other energy store that doesn't leak or have a high maintenance cost to manage.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[sir-gold]

It does not matter if you use fossil fuel heat if the electric controls don't work.

Milli-volt gas valves.

If you use natural gas for heat and have a system with a pilot flame, this setup will guarantee you have heat no matter what happens with the power. It uses a thermopile to generate a very small voltage direct from the pilot flame, and this is enough voltage to power the milli-volt gas valve. They work best with mechanical thermostats, the digital ones will need a battery in the thermostat.

Someone, at some point in the distant past, had installed one of these on the main boiler in my house, which totally saved us when we lost power for an entire week when it was still 30-40F outside.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's true that solar and wind power is not stable, but it is still predictable. With modern numeric weather models you can predict power output inside a margin of +-/ 10%(I worked in a company that trained neural networks with data from wind turbines and weather models). That means that you can power down a power plant ahead of time. When you have many farms distributed through out a large country, the law of large numbers also kicks in, making it less likely that you will have big deviations from predicted output. And then you can of course also sell/buy power between countries.

I Scandinavia, where i live, this means that power is sold across borders and Swedish nuclear power, Danish windpower and Norwegian hydroelectric power is all mixed together with conventional power production.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[MightyYar]

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

The problem for Germany is that they import 2/3 of their electricity, so they can drive power companies out, but they still need to buy the electricity.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[jklovanc]

Like I sad there are ways but very few are actually building them. More money need to be spent on storage but that is not as sexy as breaking production records.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, let me tell you about a secret....pumped storage. Yeah, did you know you can pump water into a reservoir you've prepared to use as a reserve electric generator? You can do the same with compressed air.

Goodness me, apparently you've not heard of this, huh?

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[prionic6]

You have been referring to "importing energy" before, but now you're talking about electricity. Germany exported more electricity in 2012 than they imported. And I have a source for that:

https://www.destatis.de/EN/PressServices/Press/pr/2013/04/PE13_125_51.html

Where is your source?

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[Neil Boekend]

Cheaper solution: a cheap UPS on your boiler. If the USA ones are as efficient as the European ones the boiler can continue for long time on a UPS. It doesn't have to be a fast switching one, even my cheap one works perfectly and when I used that one on a computer and pulled the net plug the computer died before the UPS was on. Not quite fast enough.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[bickerdyke]

Where did you get that number from?

What I heard last was that Germany exports roughly as much energy as it imports.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[the_other_chewey]

The problem for Germany is that they import 2/3 of their electricity

Of their energy, yes. Of their electricity, no.
In fact, Germany is a net electricity exporter.

Last year, the surplus was 22,8 TWh(German)

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[AmiMoJo]

Germany is pretty large. Even if the wind isn't blowing in one area (and that almost never happens) it will be blowing elsewhere. There is always a certain base amount of energy available.

Newer turbines don't need to shut down due to high wind speeds, they simply adjust their blades to catch less wind and keep the rotational speed down to a safe level.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Germany an exporter when measuring in Euros? Perception here in the Dutch media is that Germany will for the foreseeable future export electricity almost for free when there is enough sun or wind, since they have no other choice, and buy electricity at a premium when there is not. This creates perverse incentives for neighbouring countries. Germany buys output from our power plants at premium rates, while energy producers (RWE, Vattenfall, GDF Suez, and E.ON) are building additional power plants on the Dutch coast to increase capacity. Germany's energy mix becomes greener, while ours becomes less green. Obviously we could address that problem locally, by following Germany's lead, but there will still be an incentive elsewhere to generate more dirty energy to compensate for the variable output of sun and wind of the countries that strongly favour green energy.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[Anonymous Coward]

But, only keeping a certain percentage of those plants operating should still be able to turn a profit. Sure they might not make it with 20 plants but they could scale down to 2 plants if they would wish, they obviously dont but hey! The market changes, either change along or sod off. The German government might as well but a few of those plants and do it themselves.

Why should the Germans pay for overcapacity?

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Germany may export more than import, but the power is of so poor quality, in that it comes when no one wants power, that its neighbors to the east will soon shut down all German imports.

The price of electricity to regular people in Germany is about to skyrocket from its already lofty levels.

Shutting down a few thermal plants will cause huge wholesale price increases. These increases cannot be wished away with a press release like this.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[MightyYar]

Ahh, thanks. Wikipedia is a bit misleading to this addled brain.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[MightyYar]

Sadly, I got it from Wikipedia - but conflated energy and electricity. I think you are correct.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[MightyYar]

I grossly misread a (IMHO) misleading Wikipedia article. Someone with knowledge on the matter should probably clean it up.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[jklovanc]

Did you look at the detailed chats to see how much wind energy was actually produced? It varies greatly from hour to hour. Yes there will always be some electricity generated but in most cases "some" is not enough. According to this the capacity factor of wind is pretty low. If wind farms follow the calculation in that article one would need to install almost for times the capacity to have the same output as a conventional power plant.

Newer turbines don't need to shut down due to high wind speeds,

You need to do a little more research. All turbines have a cutout speed; even modern ones.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[AmiMoJo]

Wikipedia is controlled by renewable sceptics, I wouldn't trust anything it has to say on the matter.

Your link to some undated, unsourced and unverifiable website isn't a very convincing source. I'll grant you that in extreme winds turbines are designed to stop. Those are rare events though. Current turbines are designed to run in all conditions that Germany normally encounters.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[jklovanc]

capacity factor.
How about you look at the report cited in the article. 30.533 GW installed. 24.4 TWhs produced in 7 months. 30.533 * 7 months * 30 days * 24 hours = 153.9TWhrs.
24.4/153.9 = 16%. capacity factor to wind.

The link to turbines is from a current manufacturer. Just look at the detailed charts starting on page 45. Notice how little sage green there is on many of the charts. That means very little wind power was produced.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[jklovanc]

Sure they might not make it with 20 plants but they could scale down to 2 plants

Look at the variability in day to day green power. Two plants won't be enough to make up for the times when green power is not available. You can not turn up the sun or the wind when needed. A prime example is on page 143. Notice that they used about 700Mw of conventional energy during the weekdays. Solar was almost non existent because it is winter and for some reason there wab not much wind power either. You need to size the base load plants to the maximum requirement; not the minimum.

Why should the Germans pay for overcapacity?

Exactly my point. Why pay for overcapacity on green energy that may or may not be available when needed so that base load plants can sit at warm up state to kick in when needed..

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[jklovanc]

What happens when it is predicted that most solar and wind power will not be available? Sure you can bring plants on line but even idle plants need maintenance and operation. It takes days and a lot of energy to cold start a plant. What if these standby plants are used 20% of the time? Energy would be very expensive as their maintenance costs would have to be recouped in 20% of the time.

By the way, nuclear and hydroelectric are conventional power.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[jklovanc]

How is that heat distributed to the house when there is no electricity for the fan (forced air) or pump (hot water)? Convection is only so efficient.

Re:"Renewables are doing so well, infact..."

[sir-gold]

It's a pure convection hot water radiator system, very common in old houses in Minnesota.

I guess I should have been more specific, I forgot about needing a fan or pump

At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Discussion of technological breakthroughs is meaningless without a discussion of the cost.

We have the technological capacity to build a hotel on the moon and run flights daily. We don't have the means to do it on an even remotely economically reasonable basis.

And in discussing costs, I mean real costs. Subsidies to the renewable energies and penalties/fees to the fossil fuel based energies are distortions to the economic picture and must be excluded for an honest discussion on the topic. Here in California I saw a state sponsored study that attempted to prove that recycling plastic bottles was more economic than treating them as trash. I actually read the study and what I found is that the authors allowed subsidies to be included in the revenues of the recycling agencies and extra fees charged to landfills (and related) to be counted in the costs of the trash side. Naturally if your agenda is recycling and you have regulatory control over the revenues and costs... you're studying your ability to exercise power: not the economics behind an industry.

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

The level playing field argument is difficult to use on a finite resource.
Oil will run out and add it does the cost will rise therefore we can choose to subsidise now or we can leave it for our offspring to pick up the heavier tab in the future.
A bit like 'why would I build a bridge here when it only costs a dollar to catch the ferry'...until the ferry needs replacing.

Re:At what cost?

[reve_etrange]

Subsidies and negative externalities of the fossil fuel and other non-renewable energies and future return to scale of the solar energies are distortions to the economic picture and must be excluded for an honest discussion on the topic.

FTFY

Re:At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I recycle bottles I get money! If I did not do that and put that in trash I would not get money!

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar power costs about 20ct per kWh, assuming German climate, current pricing for panels, electronics and installation, and a 10 year lifetime. The lifetime is on the low end, but let's be pessimistic. In a more sunny climate and with a more realistic life expectancy, solar power can easily cost less than 10ct per kWh, with today's technology. If you can use all the energy from your roof installation, solar is already competitive without subsidies.

Re:At what cost?

[edxwelch]

Have a look at this:
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/8/18/energy-markets/rwe-pulls-31gw-due-renewables
Renewables have made electricity so cheap that RWE is taking 3.1 GW of fossil fuel generating capacity off the market.
"The reason they give for that is that wholesale electricity prices are way down in Germany as a consequence of more renewable in the mix. They would be losing money if they needed to sell at these low prices."

Re:At what cost?

[mattack2]

Why are you ignoring the subsidies to the fossil fuel energy companies too?

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

The level playing field argument is difficult to use on a finite resource.

You have a reason why you think that?

Oil will run out and add it does the cost will rise therefore we can choose to subsidise now or we can leave it for our offspring to pick up the heavier tab in the future.

So we have a choice presented here. We can chose to consume a relatively cheap source of energy to build wealth and have our offspring pick up a somewhat heavier tab in the future. Or we can choose to pay more now so that our offspring are a bit poorer without any change in their tab since the same argument you use now will still apply later. The only difference in the outcome is how much wealthier our offspring will be as a result of our choices now.

Re:At what cost?

[turbidostato]

"Discussion of technological breakthroughs is meaningless without a discussion of the cost."

Discussion of cost is meaningless without allowing those technological breakthroughs achieve savings by means of scale and refinement.

"And in discussing costs, I mean real costs. Subsidies to the renewable energies and penalties/fees to the fossil fuel based energies are distortions"

Just like when your US overlords decided that the country needed roads and telephones all over the territory and by doing so ruined the country for the decades to come?

They call investment when you put first the money and only afterwards you take the fruits.

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

'You have a reason why you think that?'

Yes...see my bridge point.

'Or we can choose to pay more now so that our offspring are a bit poorer without any change in their tab since the same argument you use now will still apply later'

Absolutely...except technological advances will have made production cheaper, therefore benefiting future users instead of lumbering then with even more expensive diminishing oil and startup costs and infrastructure from alternatives. I will cite electronic vehicles as an example.

'The only difference in the outcome is how much wealthier our offspring will be as a result of our choices now.'

Yep

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

Absolutely...except technological advances will have made production cheaper, therefore benefiting future users instead of lumbering then with even more expensive diminishing oil and startup costs and infrastructure from alternatives. I will cite electronic vehicles as an example.

You aren't thinking about this. Those technological advances happen either way. So we can have a wealthier, better future where we used resources now to better ourselves and our future. Or we can choose not to.

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

A bit like 'why would I build a bridge here when it only costs a dollar to catch the ferry'...until the ferry needs replacing.

One needs to analyze both scenarios to see which is better in the situation at hand. A bridge isn't magically better just because ferries need replacement.

For example, a bridge between Juneau, Alaska and Port Rupert, British Columbia which are roughly 300 miles apart by water just doesn't make sense (an overland route is blocked by substantial ice fields and a bridge route would require by my WAG tens of miles of bridges plus roads in difficult terrain). But for the volume of traffic that comes out of Juneau, ferries work just fine.

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

'You aren't thinking about this'

I'm content to allow you to believe this.

'Those technological advances happen either way. So we can have a wealthier, better future where we used resources now to better ourselves and our future. Or we can choose not to.'

They may or may not. If there is no benefit then the conservative, traditional, or even, easy way will prevail.

Either way we will see what happens...the European model is augmented by expensive (tax and cost) energy much of which is not locally controlled. Therefore the need to innovate will prevail.

Can the US afford to idly stand by? Will the US choose a different solution that fits its energy model better?

For sure...they ain't happy with China dumping cheap solar panels on them at the moment.....but they are happy to subsidise electric cars.

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely right. It's about not being blinkered, but by looking at what markets and opportunities are out there...what kind of tax regime, who controls what etc.

How much of a subsidy is fighting oil wars...and how much will be spent on fighting solar panel ones?

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill."
        CEO Nwabudike Morgan "The Ethics of Greed"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlWyV00YLf8

Re:At what cost?

[MightyYar]

Well, that's how the subsidy works. The whole intent is to replace naturally-cheaper fossil fuel and capitalized nuclear with more expensive solar. That a company is unable to sell their gimped fossil fuel power should not be a surprise... that is the policy. There is certainly not an excess of capacity in Germany - they import most of their electricity.

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

I must admit to getting tired of people conflating prudent resource management (which frequently and perhaps a bit unintuitively is "use it up now" such as the case with cheap petroleum) with greed.

The problem here is that there's no better use for cheap petroleum than to consume it now as an energy source to produce human transportation activity of value. That activity helps future generations more than any vague benefit that slightly cheaper petroleum would yield. We don't need that much of it for plastics or pesticides, the next big uses of petroleum.

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

If there is no benefit then the conservative, traditional, or even, easy way will prevail.

But given the demonstrated economic growth of the past century, most of which has been fueled by consumption of petroleum, we don't need to wonder if there's benefit or not.

the European model is augmented by expensive (tax and cost) energy much of which is not locally controlled. Therefore the need to innovate will prevail.

Can the US afford to idly stand by? Will the US choose a different solution that fits its energy model better?

The US can simply take whatever is demonstrated to work when it convenient and makes economic sense to do so.

So can the US afford to idly stand by? Of course they can. European renewable energy technologies work just as well anywhere else on Earth. Though it is worth noting that the US isn't idly standing by, but using petroleum to build things and useful stuff.

Somehow, the European renewable energy fads are considered more important than fundamental economic activities such as transportation or energy generation. I think that's a huge mistake which is already costing the EU greatly.

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

How much of a subsidy is fighting oil wars...and how much will be spent on fighting solar panel ones?

Not much considering that most of the supposed oil war subsidy is really a subsidy for US military contractor rent-seekers who would still get that funding even in the absence of any protection/control of oil distribution networks and markets. And in comparison, Europe and China are fighting that solar panel battle with substantial funding.

It's about not being blinkered, but by looking at what markets and opportunities are out there...what kind of tax regime, who controls what etc.

Hence, why I advocate continued consumption of oil resources until they are no longer economical compared to rival goods (including intangibles like security and reliability of the supply).

I don't believe the previous AC had a nuanced view of things. He was just offering cut and dry rhetoric that consumption of "finite resources" was somehow bad because there would be less of that resource for future generations. I gather the ferry was supposed to be the finite resource which could be replaced by a bridge.

But I appreciate that you have a more sophisticated view of that. I just think that a lot of people don't understand that the unpopular "consume" strategy can actually be more beneficial to future generations than the "conserve" strategy. It's situational.

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I just think that a lot of people don't understand that the unpopular "consume" strategy can actually be more beneficial to future generations than the "conserve" strategy.

Or it could plunge them into utter misery, with famine, no affordable transportation at all, complete breakdown of the economic system etc.
Some people consider even considering to take that risk makes one an irresponsible ass (not fully my opinion, and not meant to judge you personally anyway, I don't know you). Especially since a good bit of the US fuel consumption is unlikely to benefit future generations, rather the opposite in all aspects like the exaggerated case of people getting fat from never walking even 10 meters.
Or to say it differently: a "consume strategy" could make sense. The problem is just that what the US has doesn't look like a "strategy" at all, but more like "head in sand", which just doesn't look convincing to me.

Re:At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting sick of repeating it, but: Germany exports more than it imports. Some dolt decided to only put the import figures on the wikipedia article, which gives the completely wrong perception without the _higher_ export figures.

Re:At what cost?

[Neil Boekend]

A comparison of the real cost includes the cleanup that is required after the electricity production. All the pollution, including CO2.
Suddenly fossil fuel becomes a net negative in energy. That's only one of the subsidies that fossil fuel gets, they are legally allowed to pollute the planet.
Hell, even including disasters nuclear is far less polluting. There the pollution is usually contained.

Re:At what cost?

[bickerdyke]

While it's not the only factor determining the combined, compareable price for a form of energy production: fossil fuels as to be extracted with huge technological effort and costs. Sun shines for free, wind blows for free.

That's no implied statement about total cost but having that in mind, claiming that fossil fuel is NATURALLY cheaper is a whole bunch of FUD-BS.

Re:At what cost?

[the_other_chewey]

There is certainly not an excess of capacity in Germany - they import most of their electricity.

No they don't.

Re:At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

What subsidies? Last I looked, a special tax was levied at nuclear power plants ("Brennelementesteuer") in Germany. For decades, German hard coal was subsidized ("Kohlepfennig"), but not to be able to compete with unreliables, rather to be able to compete with imported coal, which was never subsidized. There's a tax on owning a car, and about 80% of the cost of gasoline are taxes. Doesn't look like a subsidy to me. Heating oil is mostly tax exempt (compared to Diesel fuel), but not subsidized. The list goes on.

Would you care to present any numbers? Point to actual subsidies, not those imagined by the eco-loonies?

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

Or it could plunge them into utter misery, with famine, no affordable transportation at all, complete breakdown of the economic system etc.

Well, I'll just note that the opposite of that has happened so far. The "utter misery" is hypothetical. The lifting of billions of people out of poverty and that misery can be observed over the past 60 years (and continues a trend that has been evident since 1300).

The problem is just that what the US has doesn't look like a "strategy" at all, but more like "head in sand", which just doesn't look convincing to me.

Here's the problem I have with all this talk. "Head in the sand" is often better than trying to do the proposed conservation strategies. There is something deeply wrong with the choice of problems that people choose to "look" at. When doing nothing is better than doing something, such as the case here, then you need to revisit not only your strategies, but how you look at things.

Running out of oil is less of a problem than poverty or overpopulation is. The alleged effects of human-influenced global warming are less. Sure, in a vacuum it would be better for our actual problems to have oil or reduced costs and damage from climate change, but these things aren't in a vacuum. Depletion of oil and the moderate reported climate change are results of vast economic activity that betters the lives of all mankind.

There are big problems for humanity, but running out of oil isn't one of them.

Re:At what cost?

[Vaphell]

not going to argue for or against, but your comparison is wrong. If you consider wind and sun free, then you should also consider coal and oil free. Just like you have to extract the fossil fuels, you need to spend energy and resources to tap into the wind and solar sources to make any use of them. Don't you have to mine for all these rare earths to make panels and use a shitload of concrete to litter the landscape with towers?

Re:At what cost?

[bickerdyke]

Yes, but that is only a one time investment. And the ressources needed to "tap into wind or solar" is what I'd rather compare to the costs of building a coal plant, which is also a one time investment.

But what blew my top was not the claim that one technology is cheaper than the other. Based on the different cost structures you'll get every possible result for an example comparision. It was the use of the word "naturally" in that "I'm not going to proof that claim, but it is so natural that you've got to be stupid not to see it" way.

Claiming that solar is "naturally" cheaper because the sun is free may just have been the usual tree-hugger fallacy, but claiming fossil energy is "naturally" cheaper while the prices are skyrocketing* is an insult to the reader.

*note that the price is on a logarithmic scale!

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

(not the same AC as others before)

Well, I'll just note that the opposite of that has happened so far. The "utter misery" is hypothetical. The lifting of billions of people out of poverty and that misery can be observed over the past 60 years (and continues a trend that has been evident since 1300).

Yes and no. Billions were uplifted over the years, but they were not uplifted by a "consume" strategy. Unless by "consume" strategy you meant government consumption, because that's what the world experienced in the last 60 to 700 years: the rise and spread of Imperialism, followed by Communism and Socialism (all of which is all about big government). Libertarianism and free markets are exceptions to the rule.

Take the case of China and India (who combined make up over 1/3 of the world population, and a source of people in poverty that need uplifting). They didn't lift its people by consuming oil (though they do consume it). They're uplifting themselves by selling labor to the west. But this transaction is only happening because of socialism from both Asian and Western governments: between central banks manipulating the currency, government regulations, and the presence/absence of government infrastructure, socialism has made it expensive to do business and hire people in the first world.

In other words, it's income distribution. People in the first world, who aren't in poverty, are having their jobs (source of income) redistributed to the second and third world, so the billions in poverty in those places are uplifted.

But I agree, poverty is indeed a bigger problem than running out of oil. The US should continue to keep printing money so it can keep buying stuff from China and India, to help reduce the poverty in those places. People in the US will just have to accept that this is for "The Greater Good" (US population is in the millions, but we're talking about saving billions in China/India!). They'll just have to settle for becoming dependent on government welfare. You won't become rich, you won't be free, but hey - you won't end up in poverty like people in China/India.

Re:At what cost?

[MightyYar]

I can't read German, but Wikipedia has this to say:

Renewable energy is more present in the domestically produced energy, since Germany imports about two-thirds of its energy.

If that is an error, I suggest you make an edit so that shleps like me can speak without looking like an ass!

Re:At what cost?

[MightyYar]

Yes, but that is only a one time investment.

No it isn't. It's exactly the same as building an oil rig. The rig itself (and the well) have a finite life and requires maintenance. A solar panel has a finite life and requires maintenance. When the rig or well is worn out, you have to decommission or scrap it. When a solar panel is depleteld, you have to dispose of it. It's exactly the same. Fossil fuel IS solar power, it's just been buried for a while, and of course it has negative environmental costs. Solar power ALSO has negative environmental costs, mostly from mining and manufacture - but the consensus is that it is a net win.

but claiming fossil energy is "naturally" cheaper while the prices are skyrocketing [wikipedia.org]* is an insult to the reader.

At this point in time, it is a statement of fact. It is cheaper to dig a nugget of coal out of the ground and burn it - even inefficiently - than it is to build and operate a solar plant. That may very well change in the future, but that is the case right now. I fully expect solar to keep decreasing in price and fossil fuel to keep increasing in price, but that is all in the hopeful future. Every once in a while fossil fuels get a tech boost, like fracking, that throws our projections all off.

Re:At what cost?

[MightyYar]

You are correct. My mistake.

Re:At what cost?

[bickerdyke]

At this point in time, it is a statement of fact.

And it may be true or not. That's the part I'm not disputing.(*) But even assuming it is true, it's no unchangeable natural law that makes one energy naturally cheaper than any other. You said yourself that tech will change.

(*) come on, comparing the maintanance of an oil rig to the maintanance of going over PV panels with a bottle of Windex? (**)

(**) statement exaggerated for comical effect

Re:At what cost?

[MightyYar]

I didn't mean "natural" as in "natural law". I meant "natural" as in "without interference". I think otherwise we probably agree.

Yes, an oil rig costs more to maintain than a PV installation, but maintenance is still a significant, ongoing cost. And the semiconductor fabs that the solar cells are manufactured in probably are similar in capital cost and maintenance to oil rigs. Remember that the drilling and exploration rigs are the pricy ones, but they move from job to job. The permanent well is not anywhere near as complex or expensive.

Re:At what cost?

[chilvence]

Wohnst du in Deutschland? This is one of the things I like most about Germany - you take your empty glass and plastics back to Aldi, you get a ticket stub for money off your groceries, and the state gets a society where people don't feel inclined to throw glass bottles every fucking where. Why is this not implemented in other countries?

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

Billions were uplifted over the years, but they were not uplifted by a "consume" strategy.

Ok, why do you think that?

In other words, it's income distribution. People in the first world, who aren't in poverty, are having their jobs (source of income) redistributed to the second and third world, so the billions in poverty in those places are uplifted.

Where did those first world incomes come from? This reminds me of Intelligent Design where one punts a hard problem to another layer without actually explaining why the hard problem is there in the first place. Wealth has never been a fixed thing that just gets spread around. It is created when someone creates things or performs services that other people value.

People in the US will just have to accept that this is for "The Greater Good" (US population is in the millions, but we're talking about saving billions in China/India!). They'll just have to settle for becoming dependent on government welfare. You won't become rich, you won't be free, but hey - you won't end up in poverty like people in China/India.

That's completely misguided. The reason people have all this wealth in the US is because of widespread creation of value, not just among inventors and business leaders, but almost everyone who works. A big part of the reason that the US is declining in wealth is because people are moved from productive work to government welfare.

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did those first world incomes come from? This reminds me of Intelligent Design where one punts a hard problem to another layer without actually explaining why the hard problem is there in the first place.

Strawman. The problem is uplifting billions, not creating the wealth to uplift those billions. It doesn't matter if wealth is created by happy free market capitalism, or if Jesus returned and just willed a billion loaves of bread out of thin air. The problem is still getting all that bread to to people and uplifting them.

Wealth has never been a fixed thing that just gets spread around.

Irrelevant. I didn't say anything that contradicts with that statement.

It is created when someone creates things or performs services that other people value.

So? And who receives that created wealth? Who gets uplifted? In the absence of socialism, it's limited to those who can also produce or performs services that other people value (and a few lucky ones who receive charity and such)

In the absence of socialism, that would have been only the millions of Americans, not the billions of people in China and India.

That's completely misguided. The reason people have all this wealth in the US is because of widespread creation of value, not just among inventors and business leaders, but almost everyone who works.

Again, none of this contradicts with what I said. You're the misguided one. You can create all the wealth you want but it doesn't lift "billions" of people if that wealth is only spread around millions. The US did create a lot of value, but they kept it to themselves. The US used to prefer isolationism, non-interventionism, and the libertarian non-aggression principle. That was great for the millions uplifted in the US and it exploded into an economic powerhouse, but those outside the US were SOL if they can't get into the US.

Uplifting billions only happened when US (and many other nations) moved from Imperialist attitudes to Socialist, and started spreading its wealth around, even to people who really don't/can't produce something of value in return. World population didn't jump from 2 billion to 7 billion today until after WW2, when socialism and government expansion came into full swing.

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

It doesn't matter if wealth is created by happy free market capitalism, or if Jesus returned and just willed a billion loaves of bread out of thin air.

Well, I have a no doubt unsurprising opinion on which is more likely to occur.

The problem is still getting all that bread to to people and uplifting them.

Ok, I guess we just disagree on which problem is harder. Wealth naturally diffuses though maybe not as fast as we'd like. But wealth isn't so easily created.

You can create all the wealth you want but it doesn't lift "billions" of people if that wealth is only spread around millions. The US did create a lot of value, but they kept it to themselves.

At no time during the history of the US, has this occurred. The US has always been a nation of trade. That alone keeps wealth from staying solely in the US (plus the US has supported various activities have opened global trade, such as anti-piracy and more recently open trade). Further, the US has been a nation of considerable charity for a long time.

The US used to prefer isolationism, non-interventionism, and the libertarian non-aggression principle. That was great for the millions uplifted in the US and it exploded into an economic powerhouse, but those outside the US were SOL if they can't get into the US.

I'm puzzled. Why do you think those sorts of policies are worse than powers that interfere, intervene, and otherwise make a bother of themselves?

Uplifting billions only happened when US (and many other nations) moved from Imperialist attitudes to Socialist, and started spreading its wealth around, even to people who really don't/can't produce something of value in return. World population didn't jump from 2 billion to 7 billion today until after WW2, when socialism and government expansion came into full swing.

Correlation doesn't mean causation. Global trade is the obvious explanation. Uplifting billions happened after global trade became fast enough that most products could be made almost anywhere on the Earth and arrive at another market almost anywhere on Earth in a timely manner. While certain ideologies allow for more open trade, global trade would occur even in the presence of imperialist or socialist ideologies.

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I have a no doubt unsurprising opinion on which is more likely to occur.

Sure you do, but it's still irrelevant to my point.

Ok, I guess we just disagree on which problem is harder. Wealth naturally diffuses though maybe not as fast as we'd like. But wealth isn't so easily created.

Again, irrelevant. I wasn't trying to discuss which problem is harder, I'm only talking about one of the problems, and how it was resolved in actual history.

At no time during the history of the US, has this occurred. The US has always been a nation of trade. That alone keeps wealth from staying solely in the US

Again, that does not contradict what I said. Trade implies both sides can offer something of value. Whatever foreign trade US did do was to other productive people, while many more less productive did not receive the wealth.

(plus the US has supported various activities have opened global trade, such as anti-piracy and more recently open trade).

You're proving my point. Those activities that open global trade are socialist actions. Globalization happened under various levels of meddling from state governments. The East India Company, Banana Republics, the Opium Wars, Treaties, Free Trade Agreements, etc. Government is often needed to spearhead the initiative, paving the way for businesses to follow. From one of your examples, absent of socialism, individual private companies would have to hire their own anti-piracy measures. Few people did that, so government stepped in, paving the way for globalization.

Further, the US has been a nation of considerable charity for a long time

Charity has never been enough to uplift billions. Humans have been charitable for far longer than the period we're discussing, yet uplifting was slow.

I'm puzzled. Why do you think those sorts of policies are worse than powers that interfere, intervene, and otherwise make a bother of themselves?

You misunderstand. I'm not saying which is worse (whatever you mean by worse). Your original claim I was replying to was that a "consume" strategy uplifted billions out of poverty. I'm saying what the world actually did was not a "consume" strategy, but increasing levels of socialism.

Correlation doesn't mean causation.

While not having any correlation means there's no causation. I'm pointing out there's no correlation between a "consume" strategy and uplifting billions (unless again, you meant government consumption)

Global trade is the obvious explanation. While certain ideologies allow for more open trade, global trade would occur even in the presence of imperialist or socialist ideologies.

Sure, global trade *could* occur under other ideologies, but that's not what happen. It occurred under imperialism and socialism. We're not talking about some alternate history where the US stuck to its libertarian ideals. We're talking about the actual US, taught by history books which has abandoned them long ago, before the population boom happened.

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

Again, irrelevant. I wasn't trying to discuss which problem is harder, I'm only talking about one of the problems, and how it was resolved in actual history.

If that's what you meant then you shouldn't have written earlier:

The problem is uplifting billions, not creating the wealth to uplift those billions. It doesn't matter if wealth is created by happy free market capitalism, or if Jesus returned and just willed a billion loaves of bread out of thin air. The problem is still getting all that bread to to people and uplifting them.

Now, if the hardness of the problem is "irrelevant", then when are you going to start talking about The Problem of getting breathable oxygen to the people who need it? Someone can't be eating bread and getting uplifted, if they're dead from asphyxiation.

But as it turns out, it's easy to deliver oxygen to people, so we don't have to talk about that as a problem. Similarly, it's rather easy to deliver wealth to people via trade and other economic activity than to create that wealth in the first place. You need to have infrastructure for viable trade, but it's a lot less than what is needed for wealth creation. Hence, wealth creation is the more important problem, not its distribution.

At no time during the history of the US, has this occurred. The US has always been a nation of trade. That alone keeps wealth from staying solely in the US

Again, that does not contradict what I said. Trade implies both sides can offer something of value. Whatever foreign trade US did do was to other productive people, while many more less productive did not receive the wealth.

If that's what you meant, then you shouldn't have written:

The US did create a lot of value, but they kept it to themselves. The US used to prefer isolationism, non-interventionism, and the libertarian non-aggression principle. That was great for the millions uplifted in the US and it exploded into an economic powerhouse, but those outside the US were SOL if they can't get into the US.

Due to centuries of US trade with the rest of the world, we see the above statement was wrong.

Also, we need to recall that just because someone doesn't work in a job that trades directly with the US, doesn't mean that they aren't doing productive labor. Wealth diffuses. Those who earn wealth from the West or create it themselves, then purchase goods and services from everyone else in the community. So that trade with the US doesn't just benefit the relatively small fraction directly involved, but everyone else in the society who works.

(plus the US has supported various activities have opened global trade, such as anti-piracy and more recently open trade).

You're proving my point. Those activities that open global trade are socialist actions.

Socialism is also obstructing global trade and subsidizing piracy allegedly for the benefit of your citizens and the local economy. Socialism can help or hinder just like many potential tools. In this case, it helps when the form of socialism happens to fit other ideological molds as well, such as free trade capitalism.

Charity has never been enough to uplift billions. Humans have been charitable for far longer than the period we're discussing, yet uplifting was slow.

So? Why is such a big problem supposed to be solvable with only one tool? But having said that, why do you think the one true tool is "socialism" rather than "trade".

I'm pointing out there's no correlation between a "consume" strategy and uplifting billions (unless again, you meant government consumption)

Well, there is the wealth generated by that strategy which then gets distributed throughout society. That's easily observable (for example, look at fracking in North Dakota state in the

Re: At what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, if the hardness of the problem is "irrelevant", then when are you going to start talking about The Problem of getting breathable oxygen to the people who need it? Someone can't be eating bread and getting uplifted, if they're dead from asphyxiation.

But as it turns out, it's easy to deliver oxygen to people, so we don't have to talk about that as a problem.

So? Just because one problem may be harder or even more important than the other doesn't mean the lesser problem isn't hard nor important, and that I can't talk about it. So when you say:

Hence, wealth creation is the more important problem, not its distribution.

I say again, "so what?"

Due to centuries of US trade with the rest of the world, we see the above statement was wrong.

No, "centuries of US trade with the rest of the world" does not show my statements to be wrong. Saying the US keeps to itself (my earlier post) is not mutually exclusive with US trading with the rest of the world (it's not a false dilemma between opening markets and old Communist China style closing up borders). As I explained (my second post), the trade occurs between parties who can offer something of value to each other. Those who do not are left out and are not uplifted.

Also, we need to recall that just because someone doesn't work in a job that trades directly with the US, doesn't mean that they aren't doing productive labor.

Wealth diffuses. Those who earn wealth from the West or create it themselves, then purchase goods and services from everyone else in the community. So that trade with the US doesn't just benefit the relatively small fraction directly involved, but everyone else in the society who works.

You're just agreeing with me. Wealth diffuses to those who work. Not "everybody else in the community" works.

We need to recall that in the Bad Old Days, there were also more division between the classes, so wealth diffused VERY slowly if at all. US may trade with the rich European guys, but the rich European guys wouldn't trade with the European peasants and poor starving people. He (well she) just tells them to eat cake, even if the poor European guys are, as you say, also doing productive labor.

The productive poor traded mostly with other productive poor. The wealth created amongst the poor was not enough in the aggregate to uplift them. Social mobility was low. Those who managed to move up and uplift themselves were exceptions, and they become famous (or infamous, depending on your view)

Even in the supposedly very free and capitalist US, robber barons were (in)famous because there's only so many of them, and not everybody could be like them.

In that respect, I say no to your statement that wealth creation is harder. You said later:

Are you seriously claiming that you need either ideology to have trade? You just need people who have things to trade and a means to do it. It's pretty low maintenance and happens in every society no matter the ideology.

So trade is easy. It's low maintenance and happens in every society. Trade is easy, so wealth creation is easy. The hard part of distributing it

Socialism is also obstructing global trade and subsidizing piracy allegedly for the benefit of your citizens and the local economy. Socialism can help or hinder just like many potential tools. In this case, it helps when the form of socialism happens to fit other ideological molds as well, such as free trade capitalism.

Sure, I don't see how that contradicts with what I've been saying. So the socialism that happened was the type that fit free trade capitalism.

So? Why is such a big problem supposed to be solvable with only one tool? But having said that, why do you think the one true tool is "socialism" rather than "trade".

That's not what I meant bro. If anything, it's w

Re: At what cost?

[khallow]

So? Just because one problem may be harder or even more important than the other doesn't mean the lesser problem isn't hard nor important, and that I can't talk about it.

Hence, why I quoted you extensively so you could see the context for my remarks. But there is another important reason to be concerned. Distribution of wealth has intimate connections with the creation of wealth via trade and ownership. If I make something, but am unable to trade it to another who desires it, then that greatly weakens the value of the thing to me. Wealth is often such because of its ability to be transferred at one's choosing to others, like money, precious metals, property, etc.

I reverse the roles you assign to trade. My view is that trade is the most significant tool of wealth distribution that we have today, but a lesser contributor to wealth creation.

Socialism here is a double edged blade. It can aid wealth distribution, but it can also hinder it. For example, it is rather easy for the politically connected to suborn a wealth redistribution scheme so they are a recipient of it. I'm more concerned here with wealth transfer than with the creation of public goods, but both can be suborned in a way that inhibits wealth creation and diffusion.

To give a more concrete example, a few years back I received unemployment insurance which is a socialist intervention that happens to distribute wealth. But my money was accessible only via debit card from an account with US Bank (which as you can gather from the obvious name is a US-located bank), a concentration of wealth since they then would pull in fees from my account and increase their concentration of wealth. In other words, in the process of redistributing wealth, the state agency in question had created a rent seeking opportunity for US Bank.

Here, the net effect was probably to distribute wealth, but that's not always the case with socialist programs.

Another problem with socialist wealth transfer is that it can hinder wealth creation either directly by harming wealth creation efforts (if you take wealth away from someone who is creating it, then they have less capital on hand to create more wealth) or by creating incentives to engage in behavior that destroys wealth (for example, the "Cash for Clunkers" automobile program in the US in mid 2009 which subsidized the destruction of usable autos).

The primary power of socialism is in the creation of infrastructure that assists in wealth creation and distribution. For example, the presence of private ownership of capital is capitalist in nature. The creation of rules that allow anyone to be private owners of capital and to prevent the strong from taking that capital by force is socialist in nature.

Well, I already explained above that the wealth doesn't get distributed quickly enough. For every person who managed to migrate to the wealth generating US and uplifted themselves, there's more who didn't outside the US. You win the battle, but you lose the war. So "that" is not so much a strategy as it is a tactic.

I don't think you get my point. With the exception of some peoples who are near completely isolated from the rest of the world, the US is distributing wealth to the entire world wealth via trade. You don't have to live in the US to receive these benefits. Nor do you even have to trade directly with a party of the US.

I already acknowledged the US did fine for itself when it isolated itself (yea yea it also did some trading). However, the rest of the world that US distanced itself from did not see much uplifting.

The US has always done a lot of trading with the rest of the world. That's not what caused the absence of uplifting. Instead, I'd say that deep flaws in these other societies and their governments created the conditions for economic stagnation and great income variance.

That's easily observable (for exa

Re:At what cost?

[Stephan Lehmke]

Discussion of technological breakthroughs is meaningless without a discussion of the cost.

Absolutely! Total subsidy for nuclear power in Germany is around 300 billion Euro (including cost for dismantling out-of-order plants), which makes 4.3ct on every kwh, compared to around 2ct currently for renewables. http://www.greenpeace.de/themen/atomkraft/nachrichten/artikel/atomkraft_mit_304_milliarden_euro_subventioniert/ (sorry, I only have this source in German, but google translate seems to work pretty well on it). We shouldn't stop subsidizing renewable energy before reaching this level!

B.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

BundesScheisse?

Re:B.S.

[fritsd]

Big Shitstorm.

Germany has eminent domain authority?

[fustakrakich]

Just nationalize the plants that are being shut down and keep them running only as long as necessary. Oh wait... Maybe the banks won't like that, and we don't want to offend them.

SUBSIDYS!

[Anonymous Coward]

..lots and lotts and lotttsss and lotsssss of..

Not Subsidies but Close

[StarWreck]

Obviously there are subsidies to encourage buying solar panels. However, whats really burning the utilities is how the pricing is worked out in Germany. The utilities have to pay top tier price for small scale solar power (ie if you have solar panels on your roof, generating an excess). The way the ends up working is that each kilowatt hour your neighbors put into the grid, the more you have to pay to pull power from the grid. More solar power drives the price up.

I don't see how this can last long term. California has a much more common sense approach - equal pricing. The utilities have to pay you back equal to what you would pay.

Most other US states, the utilities can pay you back less than they charge you.

Re:Not Subsidies but Close

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually happy that Germany is unfairly propping up solar power. I want there to exist a nation running mostly on solar power. It will be key evidence to help tip the rest of the world over as solar power becomes more and more viable (and fossil fuels more and more expensive).

Re:Not Subsidies but Close

[reve_etrange]

Interesting. Actually, first incentivizing consumers at the expense of utilities, and then later doing the opposite, might make sense from the perspective of a revenue constrained country like Germany.

The trouble with California is that the rules depend on when and where you bought in. Some people are only allowed to earn back up to the connection fee.

Re:Not Subsidies but Close

[MightyYar]

Unfortunately, they are doing this with an early version of the technology that is not economically feasible and it will probably become evidence for the other side.

Meanwhile in France...

[Anonymous Coward]

a single nuclear plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Plant) produces 38 Twh or about 7.5 times more than ALL of Germany's solar power! Don't get me wrong, I think renewables are amazing but the numbers look impressive until you compare them to how the world really powers itself...renewables have a LONG way to go.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[edxwelch]

Ever considered what would happen if an asteroid hit that nuclear power plant? It would be like Fukusima, except that there would be no one to pore water on it, because everyone would be dead. With no one to control the meltdown, it would just burn uncontrollably, turning everything downwind into a nuclear wastland.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[sgt scrub]

I think your post would have been more interesting if you would have included the length of time comparison. How long does the NPP put out 38 Twh per amount of fuel compared to renewable's 7.5?

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that shit keeps me up at night. Seriously, it does. I shake in my boots....
 
Get a life you fucking fucktard fuck cunt fuck fag bitch asshole shit bag.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[GarethIwanFairclough]

Renewables just aren't going to cut it imo. Energy density and physics are horrible bitches when you try to stand against them.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever consider what would happen if a asteroid hit downtown NYC, London or Tokyo. It's just as likely (which is to say, not even worth considering).

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[Anonymous Coward]

A single nuclear plant is poisoning the pacific ocean. It will take something like 5.81+++ trillion yen to clean up disasters like fukushima, if they can EVER clean it up. At this point, we don't even have the technology to clean up fukushima which is an ongoing meltdown disaster. 5.81 trillion yen doesn't include the medical costs for all the people that will get cancer because of it, the fishing industry that it is ruining, etc.

If we put solar concentrators all over Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Africa, plus solar on every rooftop that could power the world. Solar concentrators are ready to go!!! Do your Research! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_concentrator)

If Germany can do this in a few years time since the fukushima disaster began, every country can do it.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[MightyYar]

You serious? You are concerned that an asteroid - of sufficient size to blow through a containment building but not big enough to wipe out a city - will hit in exactly the right place to cause a nuclear catastrophe? I'd calculate the odds, but I'm on my old 32-bit computer.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[Anonymous Coward]

'The World' is quite a big place:

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/7/11/renewable-energy/sa-verge-30-renewables

For those who won't bother, the Australian State of South Australia has gone from zero to 30% renewables in 15 years. At times wind power makes up 70% of the output. Note: no hydro power. Governments have stopped subsidising home solar installations but people keep installing them anyway.

Comparing Germany to the USA suggests the USA has far more potential for solar than Germany.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[wonkey_monkey]

Ever considered what would happen if an asteroid hit that nuclear power plant?

Ever considered what happens when a werewolf bites a vampire?

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[Neil Boekend]

According to some stories they both die.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[edxwelch]

why does it have to be not big enough to wipe out a city?
You think nuclear power plant is vunerable only to small asteroids?

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[MightyYar]

So a city gets wiped out and you worry about the nuke plant?

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[edxwelch]

Yes, becuase you have an uncontrolled meltdown. You're talking about a radiation fallout spume across the whole of europe

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[MightyYar]

Like Chernobyl? Chernobyl killed far fewer people than a city-killer asteroid.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[edxwelch]

Your logic is really screwed up. Because a city has been destroyed, does not cancel out the effects of the nuclear accident. Basically, you have 2 major disasters on top of each other. And by the way, Chernobyl adversly effected the health of millions of people and made a large part of the Ukraine uninhabitable

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[MightyYar]

Let me get this straight... an asteroid comes in and wipes out a city, killing at least thousands and perhaps millions depending on the city. You have a "Chernobyl" style fallout event that makes the now-uninhabited region uninhabitable and elevates cancer rates a bit. On the scale of horrors, I'd say the city getting wiped out is far, far scarier than the fallout. To me, the possibility of such an impact would drive me to build a defense system - not worry about second order effects, which are comparatively minor.

To borrow from the other commenter, I'd lose sleep over the asteroid impact, not that it might hit an area with a nuclear power plant.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[edxwelch]

Again, the crazy logic. One single city wiped out - and somehow that makes it okay that a large part of europe has become uninhabitable because of fallout

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[MightyYar]

You are exaggerating the risks from fallout. Chernobyl did no such thing, and the worst areas hit by radiation would be wiped out from the asteroid anyway.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[edxwelch]

If Chernobyl had been hit by an asteroid, they probably never been able to contain the fire. The entire building would have been destroyed and the spent fuel poll would go up as well.
"the worst areas hit by radiation would be wiped out from the asteroid anyway"
have you considered that you might want to repopulate that area again? Besides the fallout is going to be an area far bigger than the blast radius.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[chilvence]

For one thing, there isn't a lot of desert in Germany

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[MightyYar]

The entire building would have been destroyed and the spent fuel poll would go up as well.

What makes you think that there would be a building or fire left to put out? And asteroid impact is as likely to bury or scatter the plant... I'd find it unlikely that containment could be breached but otherwise the plant left in place.

have you considered that you might want to repopulate that area again?

Not really, no. If everyone is dead then who cares if you have to wait 400 years to populate it again? If Chernobyl didn't kill anyone or displace them from home, it would have been much less of a tragedy. Fallout is a pain it the ass, but very manageable and nothing compared to the vaporization of a city.

Re:Meanwhile in France...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a life you fucking fucktard fuck cunt fuck fag bitch asshole shit bag.

Blink 182, is that you?
"Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cock-sucker,
Mother-fucker, tits, fart, turd, and twat."

Re: NO NO wait! What about clean coal!

[Anonymous Coward]

There has to be something better then renewable energy.

What will happen to all those to big to fail oil and gas
companies when they are only needed for occasional back
up power.

The sky is falling, The sky is falling...........

Percentages, please

[rogerz]

Perhaps I should RTFA, but looking at the Wikipedia page on Energy_in_Germany, that looks to be about 10% of monthly electricity consumption, (generously, given that it's summer), and less than 2% of total energy consumption.

Re:Percentages, please

[westlake]

Perhaps I should RTFA, but looking at the Wikipedia page on Energy_in_Germany, that looks to be about 10% of monthly electricity consumption, (generously, given that it's summer), and less than 2% of total energy consumption.

You were expecting better reporting in a post to Slashdot?

The US has vast reaches of desert land in the southwest for sola and n the plains sstates for wind. The northeast and the northwest for hydropower. The Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts for a mix of technologies beyond coal and oil.

It is the difference between the natural resources of a continental empire and those of a single central European state.

Re:Percentages, please

[sociocapitalist]

Perhaps I should RTFA, but looking at the Wikipedia page on Energy_in_Germany, that looks to be about 10% of monthly electricity consumption, (generously, given that it's summer), and less than 2% of total energy consumption.

Are you comparing the monthly value of 5.1 TWh or the yearly value of 38.14 TWh against the wiki value for consumption ?

Re:Percentages, please

[AmiMoJo]

Wikipedia is trolled by pro-nuclear editors who are hell bent on promoting it over renewables. I wouldn't believe what you read there.

Re:Percentages, please

[Anonymous Coward]

You were expecting better reporting in a post to Slashdot?

The US has vast reaches of desert land in the southwest for sola and n the plains sstates for wind. The northeast and the northwest for hydropower. The Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts for a mix of technologies beyond coal and oil.

Yeah, we could do that.
But the environmentalists don't like wind power because it kills birds and makes noise, the installation of solar will ruin habitat for some endangered species, ruin the view, and other impacts. Hydro takes up a large amount of land and disrupts downstream habitat and migration of aquatic species. Because of all of that an NIMBYism, expect that none of those things to ever get started for another decade until all the lawsuits & impact studies are completed. That's assuming that there is any funding left for it after the entitlement cancer takes its fill of govt resources.

Errrrrr....

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone translate this to DeLoreans?

Re:Errrrrr....

[flargleblarg]

$ perl -e 'printf "%.3f DeLoreans\n", 5.1e12 / 1.21e9'
4214.876 DeLoreans

Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

They told you the real story here. The solar and wind guys are getting huge government subsidies and tax breaks. Where as the coal and nuclear providers have to pay all sorts of fees, extra taxes, and of course regular taxes.

So guess who is being more profitable?

You can crush any business by doing that. Anything. You could make growing rice in Antarctica viable doing that. Just offer a big enough subsidy for every ton of rice grown there. Boom. Profit.

The question is can the german government sustain these subsidies indefinitely. As in forever. And if/when they stop providing them what will happen to their renewable programs?

I live in California. We've gone through many renewable programs going back to the 1970s. This has been our experience.

First, we give the renewable company a lot of money.

Second, they build their plant.

Third, we give them big tax breaks for subsidies which last for five to ten years.

Fourth, they operate for five to ten years.

Fifth, the subsidies stop.

Sixth, the renewable power company dies almost instantly.

Seventh, the power station is left abandoned in the desert to rot. There isn't even enough money left after to tear it down. Our deserts are littered with these power plants. Dozens of them. Every time one closes we tend to start up another one. And another ruin is in the making.

I want renewable energy. But I want it to be self supporting.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's wait a few dozen years for oil to run out. Maybe then. But I guess we'll have to rely on nuclear anyway.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[edxwelch]

Are you joking? Nuclear gets the biggest subsidies of all:
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-subsidies-report.html
The insurance is cappedat at ridiculously low value, meaning if there is an accident the taxpayer will have to pay.
Without the insurance cap nuclear power would not exist.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[connor4312]

I want renewable energy. But I want it to be self supporting.

Why? There really is not much reason to require it to be self-sustaining.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Anonymous Coward]

then also make sure that other industries pay their real costs
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Pleasant_Prairie_Power_Plant

I used to work down the road from this place.

Wonder who paid the $200 Million dollars in health costs from the coal burning ? Not the coal company.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I see while traveling through the country, I expect more than 90% of all solar panels installed in Germany to be on the roofs of private homes. So there is no fear of them being shut off if the subsidies stop.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Ryanrule]

Oil/coal/gas get non expiring subsidies.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Anonymous Coward]

I want renewable energy. But I want it to be self supporting.

Careful what you wish for. Renewable energy becomes self-supporting on the condition that non-renewable energy becomes much more expensive.

The reason all those renewable plants got subsidies was partially because the government predicted that non-renewable energy was going to keep getting more expensive (which was a reasonable, but wrong, prediction a few times in the last half-century). If the prediction was right, the plants would have survived when the subsidies ran out, because renewable energy would have been competitive or cheaper than alternatives--not because renewable got cheaper, but because non-renewable got more expensive.

The chances of anyone exactly predicting with accuracy the point where sustainable energy becomes self-supporting are nil. The only two realistic scenarios are 1) that the prices for fossil fuels eventually rise rapidly and stay high, and we belatedly scramble to create a sustainable energy infrastructure after-the-fact in the middle of a crashing global economy, or 2) that we try to get that infrastructure set up in advance while the global economy isn't in complete tatters, and end up not being able to use some or even most of it because we did it too early.

I admit option #2 is wasteful. I'm not sure it's worse than option #1 though.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

They're smaller then the fees and extra taxes they have to pay.

look into the facts.

Its getting pretty silly in the US. The taxes on refineries especially account for nearly 1 dollar on the cost of gasoline in the US. Think about that the next time you go to the gas station and buy gas. A dollar per gallon of what you're paying is going entirely to pay EXTRA taxes and fees that only the refineries have to pay. That is on top of other state and federal taxes.

So with all due respect, claiming it is an even playing field is ignorant. You do not know what you are talking about.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

As you wish, Comrade. We'll just run everything as a government program under the aegis of our glorious fearless leader.

Seriously? You don't know why it has to be self sustaining? If things aren't self sustaining then they have to draw energy and money from other things to sustain. Especially in matters of FOOD and POWER you need things to be self sustaining because you cannot have disruptions in food or power.

But you know what... I don't care. We'll see what happens. In california, what has happened every time is that the subsidies eventually ran out. And when they did... when they couldn't operate 50 percent on government welfare they shut down. Another ruin.

So we'll see what the germans do here. If the big power companies say "f' it" and walk will the green power be able to pick up the slack? Remember, it has to be subsidized which means everyone's power bill will go up MASSIVELY. And don't forget germany has big industry with big power needs. Germany's industry is already getting lots of tax breaks and subsidies. They'll need their power costs subsidized. Which will mean all those costs will slam down on the German citizen. Not the corporations.

How much do you want to pay?

Green energy is great. I'm all for it. IF it can compete. If it can't... then it can't. I'm not crying over that. I'm moving on.

In the real world you have to pay your bills.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

I don't know how much the subsides are put in place to off set other taxes, fees, and administrative costs.

Your antipathy towards nuclear power makes nuclear power more expensive. I'd need a cost break down to see where the costs are happening.

Furthermore, there is an issue of large government projects being used a piggy banks. So someone wants to build a plant... to get the permit they have to agree to use certain labor or different work contracts which ultimately make someone else rich. The company can't afford that but not to worry says the politician because I'll give you a subsidy that can pay for it so its not your money.

Clear out the corruption and how me a transparent system and I'll have more confidence in your estimates. Furthermore, you need to provide some reasonable place to dispose of spent nuclear fuel. We had a place and a means of dealing with it that was responsible but the anti nuclear lobby has complicated that. So most spent fuel is being stored onsite which is not optimal.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dozens of them"? I live in California and I don't know about any dozens of abandoned and left-to-rot solar power stations littering the deserts. In fact, the only non-operational one that comes immediately to mind is the joint SCE, LADWP, DOE Solar 2 near Barstow.

So far as wind power is concerned, there are what appear to be non-functioning wind towers scattered around desert passes. Like many other things (including solar power facilities) sold as tax shelters to the wealthy, when the tax advantage was all used up there was no longer an incentive to keep them in service. Better to abandon them in place and take the write off than to undertake the long term commitment to maintenance in return for some small and unpredictable (maybe the wind quits blowing, maybe the sun quits shining, maybe the price of electricity falls, etc) income from selling the electricity generated.

Rich people and corporations don't like long term open-ended commitments to expenditures without iron-clad guarantees (from government) of profitability.

Zero carbon footprint? Who cares. No imported petroleum consumed? So what.

Without something expensive to burn (oil, coal, natural gas) utilities have no excuse to raise rates when the feel like it. Fairly difficult to make a convincing argument that sunshine or breezes have gotten more expensive.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Waffle Iron]

The taxes on refineries especially account for nearly 1 dollar on the cost of gasoline in the US. Think about that the next time you go to the gas station and buy gas.

That doesn't even begin to pay for the external costs of petroleum use. The tax ought to be tripled.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Anonymous Coward]

Green energy is great. I'm all for it. IF it can compete. If it can't... then it can't. I'm not crying over that. I'm moving on. In the real world you have to pay your bills.

There's a couple problems here that are why the government is intervening (not necessarily intervening correctly, but why they are doing something to encourage non-fossil fuel energy): (1) most importantly, fossil fuels being cheap is a temporary thing. At some point Germany (and the rest of the world) will no longer have access to cheap fossil fuels. Replacing them is a multi-decade project, and private industry is very bad at looking at far ahead so the government has to put different incentives in place. (2) Less importantly, the pollution caused by fossil fuels is largely an externality, which is to say private industry will ignore its costs because it doesn't seem them directly and it's the job of the government to make sure it does see those costs.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Anonymous Coward]

GOOD. That's exactly how government mandate SHOULD work. You subsidize the things that are good, and tax the things that are bad. It's pretty simple.

Renewable energy is a good thing. You may not like it, and it may not be the best market option. But market options have NEVER given a rats ass about the future, and they never will. That's why market regulation exists.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[lecoupdejarnac]

The energy industry need not be self sustaining. It can be run by the government as a public service and paid for entirely with taxes. No more govt sponsored energy monopolies.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Anonymous Coward]

At least in Germany, nuclear and coal got much more subsidies than renewables got so far. The thing is, the put the subsidies for the renewables on top of the electricity price while nuclear and coal subsidies have been paid from general taxes. This was intentional: It is meant to encourage saving. Which is good.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

You can't quantify those costs and your position is almost entirely ideological.

There is no point in getting into a debate with you about your beliefs. They're not empirical or factual. They're opinions. And that's fine. You are entitled to your opinions such as your favorite color and what songs you like to hum along to... but that's all you've got on that point, chum.

The costs of petroilum are VASTLY outstripped by the benefits. It is a product used throughout our society in many industries. Plastics, pharmaceuticals, lubricants, fuels, pesticides, etc.

Remove this from our supply chain and indifferent to gasoline and fuel it would bring our industry to its knees and BILLIONS would suffer.

You don't care or think about that though. It doesn't matter to you. You have your precious little beliefs and reality is someone else's problem. Fine.

Hold what beliefs you like. But while you're entitled to have them you're not entitled to anyone else's respect for holding on to irresponsible, irrational, and ignorant positions.

Want to ACTUALLY disagree with that? Present some facts that deal with the meat of my argument. Short of that... continue to rhetorically masturbate.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

Most energy monopolies are government owned because they MAKE money not because they cost it.

Look at the Norwegians. Look at the Saudis. Look at the Venezuelans. Look at the Russians.

These are not state institutions because they cost money but because they generate huge sums of money. In fact, in the above cases, those properties form the bedrock of those economies. You presume not only take all that money away. Because remember, now you're not making money... you're spending. But actually to start draining the national treasuries to fund your pet projects?

Tell you what, sport. We're in the middle of a global economic recession. Where is the money for your idea going to come from?

I assume you'll be selling unicorn turds? Blue chip industries are struggling to make ends meet. National governments are defaulting on debts. And you think the best idea is to raise taxes, increase energy costs, and go green for gaia?

Compost yourself. Do it for the planet.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Waffle Iron]

your position is almost entirely ideological.

So is yours.

I'm not even going to try to discuss this topic with you, because you're simply going to claim that anything that I say is opinion, whereas anything you say is a fact. QED.

So long.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[MightyYar]

Do the solar companies pay to clean up the dysprosium, terbium, europium, neodymium and yttrium mines in China and Africa? Do they account for all of the water and energy used in the manufacture of photovoltaic cells? Do they set aside decommissioning costs when they construct a plant? Why are you holding other industries to a standard that you don't hold solar to?

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[MightyYar]

If the subsidies stop, no one is obligated to buy that power at the high rates that justified the installations.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[jelizondo]

Look at it closely: you will see that you get renewable power plants producing renewable power!

Why stop at simple renewable power when you can get renewable, renewable power?

And it is self-sustaining every renewable power plant that dies, engenders a new one!

This schema actually enriches everyone(1)!

NOTICE FOR SARCASM-CHALLENGED PEOPLE: ABOVE POST CONTAINS SARCASM. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

(1) Everyone on the racket, that is. You complain because you're from New York or not part of the racket. People from New York complain, even if they are part of the racket.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

when that happens we'll have a lot of time to adapt. The supply won't just disapear in a year or so. It will be over many years if not decades which is more then enough time.

Furthermore, this doom and gloom talk has not been backed up by reality. The peak oil crowd said we'd be out of oil about 30 years ago. Well. We're weren't and are not now. So maybe you want to take a wait and see approach since your predictions aren't coming out the way you thought.

Or arrogantly presume to predict the future despite failing to accurately do so at any previous point.

You choose.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

I'm afraid it isn't. My position is logistical, economic, and scientific.

Logistically, coal and nuclear make more sense. They're more economical. And the environmental issues associated with them are manageable.

There is furthermore no other source of power that can give us the amount of power we need on an ongoing basis. We have hundreds and hundreds of years of coal left. Possibly thousands. And at least as much if not more nuclear fuel. At the same time, the solar technology we have now is GARBAGE. It is expensive, inefficient, and fragile. The maintenance costs alone make solar prohibitive. Were we to magically get all the solar panels we need and installed for free my magical elves and fairies the costs would still exceed coal etc because the damn panels don't last that long and have to be replaced.

So sorry. The technology isn't ready. Stop pushing it on us until it is ready.

For a side example, consider cars in the 1870s. They existed. I think most of them were steam driven. Would you recommend that everyone get rid of horses at that time and go for expensive, unreliable, feature poor steam driven cars?

No. Because that's a recommendation a halfwit would make. And you're not a half wit... are you?

Good day, sir.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Neil Boekend]

The costs of petroleum are not paid yet. The impact the massive amount of CO2 in our atmosphere has is still in our future. If you include the cost global warming is going to have then petroleum is expensive.

Don't exclude the costs from pollution in the cost/benefit analysis.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Anonymous Coward]

Your antipathy towards nuclear power makes nuclear power more expensive.

Even if the cause is, as you say, the nefarious influence of edxwelch's antipathic mind waves on the poor nuclear industry, that doesn't change the fact that nuclear power is still more expensive.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[serviscope_minor]

And the environmental issues associated with them [coal] are manageable.

u mad bro?

Not sure if you have heard of "global warming". It's happening for sure and it's not known what the environmental impacts will be, besides rising sea levels and stronger storms. What is likely to happen eventually is change in ocean currents and weather patterns. The precise form of those is totally up in the air.

Therefore there is no logical way you can claim those as "managable".

Were we to magically get all the solar panels we need and installed for free my magical elves and fairies the costs would still exceed coal

And nothing to do with coal not having to pay any of the costs in terms of pollution and carbon. No sirreee. Thing is, coal gets massive, totally hidden subsidies by pushing the costs of cleanup and pollution on to everyone else globally.

Stop pushing it on us until it is ready.

Well, that'll make it get ready real quick...

And you're not a half wit... are you?

And you're using reasoning by analogy to make an argument. That does make you a halfwit.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Alioth]

"The peak oil crowd" (whoever they are) never said that at all. A particular geologist made a prediction on when US oil production would peak. It did peak not too far off his prediction and has been declining ever since. It is highly unlikely that US production rate will ever hit that peak again. World conventional oil has also peaked, and the gap is only being filled by unconventional (i.e. expensive, dirty, with poor EROEI) oil sources.

The world as a whole will also one day peak including the increasingly expensive unconventional sources.

The problem is we have an economy based on continual growth. Since all economic growth so far and into the forseeable future also requires a growth in use of energy, while oil is winding down there will be a LOT of economic pain and constant recession. The danger is this constant recession will mean that there just isn't enough money left over to research alternatives if we sit on our hands and just wait until the decline is well under way. Just with the recession caused by banking, many countries have ceased all research in alternatives because the money isn't there. It would be prudent to prepare alternatives so that when the inevitable decline in global oil production does start we are already well placed to fill the difference with something else and not suffer this long recession which might make the development of alternatives longer and slower (and therefore much more painful) than they would be if we get a head start on it now.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Alioth]

Probably not because solar doesn't use those things. You're confusing solar with wind (which might use rare earths for generator magnets).

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[MightyYar]

Yes, some rare earths are used in wind and some are used in solar panels. I probably should have thrown indium in there. Either way, the mining of raw materials and manufacture of the panels themselves obviously have environmental consequences.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a side effect of the ludicrous US legal system. Costs like that don't exist in other countries.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

Actually, the first prediction I know of was in 1919 by the US director of mines... a geologist... who claimed the US would peak its oill production in about two to five years... after which there would be a decline.

Didn't happen. And neither did about the next 20 such predictions.

Is current production down? Yes and no. Much of our production is down now because the federal government isn't issuing new drilling licenses either off shore or on shore.

Despite that, fracking is increasing in production geometrically. But only on private land.

We do what we can. But you can't legally forbid something and then claim that we can't physically do it because we're not doing it.

Give oil companies the licenses to drill AND THEN make your claims.

Forbidding them to drill and then saying "SEE SEE WE"RE RUNNING OUT OF OIL" is either deceitful or idiotic. Pick one.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

Friend, this isn't going to stop. Even if you stop it in germany that is as nothing to the expansion of coal plants in china.

Give up. Your crusade against carbon is a lost cause. Accept it and come up with something else to be annoying about.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

You can't quantify your costs so you can't bill them.

Quantify them. Prove them. Its all conjecture from you people at this point.

And also grasp that you have to calculate the benefits as well.

Assuming for the sake of argument that all this stuff happens there will also be places that will be improved. Are you willing to credit carbon producers will that or merely continue your witch hunt and try to burn them?

Its not rational. You can't quantify any of this stuff.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Neil Boekend]

It's not quantifiable yet. That's because the results aren't here yet. Are you still willing to risk most of human life on the hope that it'll be all right while we continue to put so much CO2 in the atmosphere?

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[connor4312]

I mean, no one complains about schools being funded by the government, although private schools do exist. They invest in the future of the people, why not publicly invest in the future of the world?

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[wwbbs]

So when Canada imports gasoline from the USA are we paying the hidden subsidies/taxes at the refinery level? If so I would suggest that it's high time we implement more refinery capacity in Canada. $1US/Gallon is a massive amount of revenue heading south that could be redirected back into Canadian coffer's. In the 90's when the Canadian dollar was only worth $0.65 vs US$ I was paying $0.32 Liter for #2 Fuel Oil, the price in 2013 $CDN 1.3889/Liter. Similar increases have occurred throughout the entire petroleum industry.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

unlikely that Canadians have to pay it because the taxes are mostly implemented through stupid requirements on fuel standards.

For example, the US federal government requires that US gas have a certain amount of ethanol in it or the refinery pays a fine but the auto companies have said that if gas is put into their cars that is one HAIR over that amount it voids the warranty. As a result, gas companies sell gas with less then that federal requirement of ethanol and pay a fine. That fine currently exceeds the total cost of labor and several other costs the refineries pay. All told, the fine accounts for about 1 dollar to the cost of gasoline in the US. And all that money is collected as a "fine" by the federal government. Effectively its a tax.

If I tell you that you pay a fine if you don't stand on your head at all times and no one can possibly do that then we all start paying and it becomes a lot of money flowing into federal coffers.

That said, canadian gas prices probably are a bit higher due to this sort of thing.

Various US states also have different fuel standards which means that refineries have to make different blends of fuel to comply with rules in different states. And making different blends increases the cost. Some of the blends are even seasonal. There are summer blends and winter blends. And you can't sell the wrong blend at the wrong time of year. All of that increases costs and the refineries pass all of that on to the consumer.

You could very easily drop the price of oil in the US by about 1 dollar simply by reforming these stupid laws and making them rational. Obviously we need some regulation but it needs to be reasonable.

We need one fuel standard that is acceptable at all times and that fuel standard must be reasonable.

Furthermore, ethanol requirements simply need to be retired. Corn is a terrible fuel crop. If you want to have some kind of bio fuel that is fine. But have a reasonable one. Algae or one of the weedy oil plants. No alchohol based fuel should be considered since the energy density is lower and the only real application of it is fuel. Where as an oil based bio fuel can be used in plastics, pharmaceuticals, lubricants, etc.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

I'm not buying a ten trillion dollar pig in a poke.

Either lower the costs of your environmental program so that I can feel safe speculating on it. Or you must quantify it.

When you propose programs that will cost us hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars you need to quantify everything.

If you won't or can't do that then you can't have the money.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Neil Boekend]

I am not a climate scientist. They know how to quantify that. I just believe them, while I lower my CO2 footprint.
And if you aren't convinced by the projections from the climate scientists by now then I fear you are a lost cause, or you believe in the FUD that some spread.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

Scientists didn't get their respect in society through blind faith.

That's how priests and religions work.

You don't give someone trillions because you "believe"... that isn't science.

If you want the money. If you want to shut down global industry. If you want to completely change the way our society works at a basic level possibly causing HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS to die.Then you need something more substance.

And yes. A massive disruption in global industry on the scale you desire will kill a percentage of the human population.

Mostly poor people in poor countries that depend on aid or are very vulnerable to changing economic conditions.

Furthermore, the weaker our economy gets the less able we'll be to supply you with more resources.

Some governments will refuse to cooperate. And the only way to stop them will be to go to war. Some of those countries are nuclear powers. So have fun with that.

All in all... its a completely silly proposition.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Neil Boekend]

Since this discussion isn't going to change either of our minds and it will not change the global policies I'll agree to disagree.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

You can choose to bow out if you like, however the point remains that you've confused religion with science.

Science is not about belief. You either understand or you don't.

I don't understand quantum mechanics and so have no strong opinions on it.

In regards to the environmental science issue, there are likewise many things NEITHER of us understand. I must understand this if I'm going to sign off on an expenditure of that size. It is not acceptable for me to just trust them.

Were the money asked for a more modest amount then that might be something worth risking. However when you get into trillions of dollars trust is not an option. You have to "know".

Really, that is a huge underlying point with this issue. Its really the scale of the bill that raises the standards of evidence.

Radically lower the amount of money you want and we can accept it on trust and that can be an end to the issue. But have it be trillions and open ended funding... and saying "just trust us" is irresponsible. We have a responsibility and a right to audit and understand expenditures of that scale. We are talking about money in excess of what is spent on major world wars.

Saying we should just take that on faith is idiotic. You can choose to bow out of this discussion but there would be no way for you to justify that sort of expense granted on faith without audit.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Neil Boekend]

It's not faith. I could choose to check the calculations and assumptions. I just choose not to and I choose to default to what I consider to be least ridiculous theory. The theory supported by calculations and projections done by climate scientists all over the world.
We must prevent climate change or live with the consequences. You assume the consequences will be little. I assume they will be big. Since neither of them can be proven until it's to late both of us act a little on belief.
I will give one last argument: If a rock is dropping from a great height directly at your head you step aside to prevent it from dropping on your head. Why? It hasn't been proven that it'll fall on your head! Same with climate change.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

When you're willing to drop TRILLIONS on a policy you admittedly don't understand very well and haven't done much research on then you're either showing faith or are stupid.

Either way you void your opinion. in the process.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Neil Boekend]

When you are willing to risk trillions by preventing an expenditure of billions you void your opinion.
Most climate saving stuff isn't all that expensive. Trillions in cost is the heavily exaggerated version of the oil industry. The real pricetag is far lower.
If you see a rock falling towards your head you move. Simple as that.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

I'm afraid it isn't an exaggeration. It is the cost of Kyoto. And its a non-starter.

That said, you say you only want billions?

How many billion? Because if you're willing to end this at the cost of a few billion... done.

But then its over. No more. Funds paid and situation concluded.

Deal? Or will you come back like the rapacious blackmailer to extort more and more? And every time we say yes, that merely serves as license to increase the payments again.

If you're not going to offer up a proper justified argument then we're going to treat it as a shake down for money.

And that's fine. We pay various nuisances all the time to leave us alone. Its frequently cheaper. But you need to limit your request to an agreed upon amount and then hold to it.

If you pull a north korea on us and try to have it both ways... we're going to pull funding.

Doubtless you think this is an unfair position and we should just close our eyes and hand you our check books without any consideration or auditing.

Dream on.

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Neil Boekend]

Of course there should be consideration and auditing. But there are enough climate scientists that agree on the fact that we're going to have a big problem if we don't fix it to invest in it.
Why are you comparing this to some war-like situation like North Korea? The investments are required to prevent starvation. Not to keep the climate scientists from going to war with you.
Climate change is not a shake down. It's the future and we must prevent it or deal with the consequences. Are you so sure the consequences will be minimal to bet the lives of millions of people on it? Even when the scientific community is extremely sure that it won't be minimal?

Re:Tell me when the subsidie run out

[Karmashock]

See, you say things like "enough climate scientists agree" and then you say we're going to starve if we don't sign off on your agenda.

That's actually a contradiction of the current balance.

While most climate scientists agree AGW is happening and is a problem, the actual consequences of AGW and how it will effect our civilization are extremely controversial AMONGST the climate scientists.

There are some that offer images of doom... our whole species going extinct as famine, war, pestilence, and death consume us to the last screaming child. Then others say effects will be very mild with areas experiencing changes in climate conditions that aren't either good or bad but simply different.

I'm not averaging these predictions. Someone is right and someone is wrong. I'd like to know who because the damage to my civilization from this situation is relevant to how highly I will prioritize resources to solving the problem. If the problem does not pose a serious threat to my civilization then I'm not going to take it very seriously. If it poses a major threat then I'm going to take it a lot more seriously then I think you can even comprehend.

Stop and think for a moment what we would do if we believed that the only way to save the world and future generations was to stop the carbon economy?

Grasp that incredible atrocities could be justified in the name of species survival. Grasp further that such atrocities would probably be required to get the carbon economy to shut down to the most extreme levels the climate scientists say we must meet.

As it is, the problem the climate scientists have is the world is not warming right now and hasn't been warming for over a decade. You're probably too brainwashed to be aware of that embarrassing fact. I don't say that with malice or spite. You just strike me as a well meaning though indoctrinated and not particularly free thinking individual. As a result, you believe what you're told by authority figures without personal consideration, evaluation, or questioning. And when you're young and don't know anything that's a reasonable policy especially when guided by people that actually care about you. But once you become an adult such attitudes are a liability.

Every day there are people working angles. Trying to scam some money off of you one way or nickle and dime you another. Every level of adult society does it to every other level of adult society. Those that are better at it tend to profit beyond their contribution to society while those that are inferior at it tend to be taken for chumps.

So long story short, if you want to take control of global industry, impose an extremely harsh tax regime on top f an already over taxed economy, disrupt our industrial and technological supply chains, put BILLIONS at risk of starvation, etc... I need something more solid then "this group of experts agree".

Its not enough.

Months vs years...

[Anonymous Coward]

"In 2006 the plant produced 38.14 TWh". In a full year. The 5.1 TWh of solar power was for a single month.

Renewables still have a long way to go, but it's 12 times better than you think. :)

Re:Months vs years...

[Knightmare 1]

Not exactly 12 times. 5 TWh is for the month of July which is probably one of the peak months in the year. You can see in the linked PDF the graph for monthly production. Mininal production was 0.35 TWh in January. I don't know how much of an impact is the growing number of solar panels and how much is the seasonal effect. We can have a better look when we get the data for the rest of the year.

Re:Months vs years...

[Anonymous Coward]

so it'll do that in January too?

Re:Months vs years...

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion since TWh is expressing energy production or consumption for a year in an ideal environment the production of solar energy in this year WILL be 5.1 TWh, that means for a single month the production of solar energy WAS 48.5 Megawatts versus 324.5 Megawatts for a single month (of year 2006) for nuclear energy.

Re:Months vs years...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not really. Multiplying by 12 is a (big fat whopping) lie. I know about winter being cloudier than summer, I know about sunrise coming later in winter, and sunset coming earlier. Solar is suddenly less fun. Since the power came from a combination of both wind and solar, you can't multiply by 12. It might be 6 times as good, or 8 times, but not 12 times. Nope.

Re:Months vs years...

[Anonymous Coward]

" but it's 12 times better than you think. :)

Given that the results were for July, I'd wager your 12x estimate is way too optimistic.

Re:Months vs years...

[Dagger2]

I found this: Solar power in Vermont which suggests a ratio of 7-8x is about reasonable. (Vermont is at 44 degrees north, Germany is at about 50 degrees north; I'm not sure how big a difference that makes.) By that estimate, Germany's July production would translate to about 7.5 * 5.1 TWh = 38.25 TWh in a year.

Which, interesting, is almost exactly the amount the nuclear plant in the great-grandparent post produces per year.

Re:Months vs years...

[Anonymous Coward]

"In 2006 the plant produced 38.14 TWh". In a full year. The 5.1 TWh of solar power was for a single month.

Renewables still have a long way to go, but it's 12 times better than you think. :)

I don't think they'll get the same amount of solar power during in winter months as they do in July.

Re:Months vs years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really, not much sun in Germany in winter. The record was for July. The minimum was 0.35TWh in January. Installed solar is 34.558Gw meaning the effective insolation is 4.76 hours a day in the best month of the year.

Re: Months vs years...

[Beleglin]

Twelve times but only if every month is as good as July. I very much doubt it :)

Does this mean

[SnarfQuest]

Does this mean that Godzilla will immigrate to Germany, because they have more power lines to walk through? With 5.1twh of electric power, how can he resist the temptation? How can Japan possibly compete, with their Nuclear plants mostly shut down?

Re:Does this mean

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the lack of a big power line connecting the wind turbines at the coast to the south is an often cited problem these days.

Why migrate to Turkey?

[sgt scrub]

I can't see Turkey putting out more energy than coal or natural gas. Surely it wouldn't be any cheaper, or cleaner, to burn Turkey than what they are using now.

Re:Why migrate to Turkey?

[allsorts46]

Burning all 783,562 square kilometres of Turkey would probably provide quite a lot of energy.

Re:Why migrate to Turkey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus: the reality is that Turkey has way more daily sun than Germany. Plus even more; the Turks are not dumb.

Re:Why migrate to Turkey?

[prionic6]

Well, germany rears about 30 million turkeys a year.

Source: http://www.zdg-online.de/en/presse/data-facts/

Re:Why migrate to Turkey?

[RivenAleem]

Given how turkeys are themselves a renewable source of energy, I fail to see why they feel one should supplant the other. I did read somewhere though that electricity produced from the consumption of large quantities of turkey seemed "sluggish" and "sleepy" for several hours and needed a nap prior to being somewhat productive.

Re:Why migrate to Turkey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Turkey is renewable, though, and the rendered lard 37kJ/g.

Re:Why migrate to Turkey?

[bittmann]

In the "strange but true" category, you can actually convert Turkey into light petroleum. A few years back, a Thermal Depolymerization plant was built next to a ConAgra Butterball Turkey processing plant, intended to convert feathers and other waste into oil.

A Thermal Depolymerization demonstration plant was completed in 1999 in Philadelphia by Thermal Depolymerization, LLC, and the first full-scale commercial plant was constructed in Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards (91 m) from ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball turkey plant, where it is expected to process about 200 tons of turkey waste into 500 barrels (79 m3) of oil per day.

So, while it may not be "cheaper" to burn Turkey than coal or natural gas, it is arguably "cleaner", at least from a net-CO2 perspective.

Still small

[Lawrence_Bird]

Germany uses on the order of 4,000 TWw per year. 5 TWh in the peak solar month... still a long ways to go. Then again, Germany sticks other countrys with over half of its energy needs.

Re:Still small

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the PDF in TFA Germany is a net energy exporter.

Also according to the PDF Germany produced about 280 TWh in the first 7 months of 2013, which means that you are about an order of magnitude off in your 4000 TWh number there.

Re:Still small

[Lawrence_Bird]

Hmm.. Did I misread this first table? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany. I believe you are only looking at electricity production.

Clarification requested on "load priority"

[cpm99352]

The Forbes article states "Under current regulations, electricity generated by renewable energy resources are given priority access to the grid. As a result, electricity generated by coal and gas-fired plants is only used “to make up for any shortfalls,” according to the AFP."

Does this mean that the nuclear stations have to divert their power when the wind picks up or the sun comes out? I'm certainly no expert, but I thought in the US it is the opposite, so that the wind stations have to go on bypass and the dams/nuclear stations have priority. Or is the Forbes article simply incorrect?

Re:Clarification requested on "load priority"

[Rockoon]

Does this mean that the nuclear stations have to divert their power when the wind picks up or the sun comes out? I'm certainly no expert, but I thought in the US it is the opposite, so that the wind stations have to go on bypass and the dams/nuclear stations have priority.

In a free market the two would have a price war to determine who gets to sell during those times. The benefit of this is that the loser would have an incentive to invest in ways to efficiently store their over-production.

Re:Clarification requested on "load priority"

[Fierlo]

Not sure how it works in the US, but in Ontario, there is the Feed-In-Tariff program (FIT). Otherwise known as a way to make money from renewable energy. Depending on the scale / method of electricity produced, you are guaranteed a different rate. Something like $0.13/kWh for wind, and $0.40/kWh for solar. And I think the term they use to describe them is 'non-dispatchable', in that, the grid must always accept the energy provided by these generators. Other generators (natural gas / hydro) are generally responsible for curbing output and maintaining adequate spinning reserves.

I assume it is somewhat similar in the US but don't know the details.

Nuclear plants aren't usually asked to reduce power, as they provide baseload generation. It is simpler to ask a fossil plant to shutdown.

Re:Clarification requested on "load priority"

[Anonymous Coward]

The way incentive programs work in Europe, is that renewable electricity is required to be bought at a premium by utilities no matter what even when it's not needed. Since renewable production fluctuates, and customers to not like electricity cuts, the system produces sporadic surpluses by construction all year round. Germany then tries to sell them to less renewable-afflicted neighbours but that is not enough and at times electricity prices in Europe are negative (you pay to produce, while renewables have a guaranteed price so they can continue to pump unneeded electrons in the grid). Not to mention that thanks to the Joule effect if you try to transmit electricity far enough it just dissipates as cable warming (so the "let's produce in deserts and transmit to the other half of the continent" schemes are idiotic too, especially at climate warming time).

This kills the profitability of conventional plants of all kinds. They can not be stop/started fast enough to follow renewable's erratic production, so utilities can not avoid running them even during surpluses, pay for this running, pay the negative production prices, pay for the grid extensions needed to connect the myriad micro-producers, and buy renewables at subsidised guaranteed price at the same time (so they get sucked four times). And of course if they rebel and stop their plants in deficit they get crucified for the resulting electricity brownouts when renewable production decreases.

Every single article about renewable successes is a vast joke, they all write about averages and total production, and forget about variations. With averages you can "prove" double-glass windows are more energy efficient than triple-glass (triple glass blocks more solar contributions in summer, when it's hot as hell and you *want* it to be blocked, but it looks bad when you do yearly averages).

The proper way to decrease conventional electricity use is to isolate homes (that way use decreases continuously instead of erratically). But it offers less room to get-rich-quick schemes than blindly subsidising renewables. It's unpopular with lobbies of all kinds as a result.

Re:Clarification requested on "load priority"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, renewables (including dams) have priority. And thats the reason nuclear powerplant operators are pissed. The operating cost of a idling NPP is nearly identical to a full powered NPP and only run economical with high loads. They run their NPPs near 100% and do load balancing with coal, gas or pumped storage hydro power stations.

Re:Clarification requested on "load priority"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, they have to throttle down (stop selling). Which is an indirect tax, as the marginal costs of nuclear are minimal.

The problem is now that spot prices fluctuate with alternative energy availability. When it's not available, prices rise quite a bit. There's not a lot of conventional sources power capacity, so they're quite lucrative. This pays for the fixed costs, When there is plenty of alternative energy (like now), prices would decrease, so the German government forces a price hike by banning non-alternative energy from the net until all the alternative energy is sold.

It's clear that this is not an global warming-related policy, as the ban could be restricted to carbon-positive sources such as coal. It also hits nuclear quite hard, because its fixed overhead costs are already paid by the times energy prices are high/alternative energy is unavailable.

Re:Clarification requested on "load priority"

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no single answer. It depends on the regional ISO/RTO policies. These regional grid operators include New England (ISONE), New York (NY-ISO), the Chicago-New Jersey-DC area (PJM), the area west of that all the way to the Dakotas (MISO), OK+KS+NE (SPP), Texas (ERCOT), California (CAISO), and the rest of the west (WECC). The electrical regions don't follow state lines, so these are approximations. The southeast doesn't have an ISO or RTO.

The point is: day ahead and real time locational marginal prices (LMPs) are used to help optimize dispatch and provide market signals. If we get to an hour where nuclear plus intermittent renewables plus must-run-hydro plus fossil units which just can't be turned down any more right now [coal, gas steam sometimes] EXCEED demand, then the LMP goes negative, and the system pays wholesale purchasers to use more electricity... and all of the generators operating on the real time market have to pay out of pocket for each MW they are producing at that moment, because they are all contributing to the overload. This typically doesn't last long, because somebody figures out how to turn off to avoid having to pay. That written, the ISOs and RTOs are currently putting policies in place about how to use "command and control" to force somebody to turn it down... but keep in mind that in this time of overgeneration, all generators which are operating are responsible, so forcing one kind of generator off-line might be reasonable from an engineering standpoint, but the economics suggest that the other generators will have to throw in money paid to make the generators forced off-line to make them "whole".

I'd also note that this simply doesn't happen very often anywhere in tUSA. We just don't have that much wind and solar, and we have lots of long-distance transmission to help spread "overloads" to areas which aren't overloaded. We're getting lots more wind though, so it could happen more often... except that we're also retiring lots of coal over the next decade, and those inflexible coal plants contribute to the overload too, so retiring them will reduce the problem just as increased wind is adding to the problem.

I didn't read the Forbes article, but this is my line of work. Bottom line: it's a rare problem, it might become slightly less rare, but it might not. Exception: California, who is bringing on lots of renewables (especially PV), but is working hard to handle these problems through storage, transmission, and improved market rules.

Re:Clarification requested on "load priority"

[Stephan Lehmke]

In a free market the two would have a price war to determine who gets to sell during those times. The benefit of this is that the loser would have an incentive to invest in ways to efficiently store their over-production.

Well the nifty thing about solar power is that its production peak occurs exactly during the peak of demand (round noon), so the chance of over-production is nil, while the most expensive plants (gas for instance) which would only kick in for peaks of demand can be kept off line.

Shortfalls

[jklovanc]

That is the problem. Notice that conventional electricity generation is used when there is not enough green power produced. Storms that would over speed wind power and block most of the solar power happen quite often and could drop green power generation drastically. During those times convention power plants need to be available. If they are not profitable then they will not be available and brownouts and blackouts will occur due to lack of power. The problem with green power is not generation; it is storage so it can be used when needed and not just when produced. Sure there are some technologies available but they are not widely used. More money needs to go into the storage issue.

Electricity production from solar and wind ..

[dgharmon]

According to the Fossel Fuel lobby in the UK, solar and wind isn't economical, drives up the cost of electricity and gas and is bad for the environment, the money should be given on the Fossel Fuel companies instead ..

Why is Wind power so expensive? An economic analysis

Npower delivers clarity on the changing cost of energy

This may not be a good thing folks..

[bobbied]

Germany is subsidizing renewable energy production heavily, very heavily. Their top electric producer is now struggling to maintain their business, keep their nuclear and fossil fuel plants profitable so they are threatening to close up shop and leave Germany at the mercy of renewable. Electricity essential to keep a modern economy going and "running out" is simply NOT an option. If you run low on electricity, you have to shut off stuff, because if you don't EVERYTHING will shutdown. Many renewable energy sources are NOT reliable, the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow and chances are one or both will go away when you need it most. (Heck, fossil fueled plants fail, albeit less often than the weather forecast.. )

While renewable energy may sound good, there are some serious problems looming for Germany if they continue down this path too quickly. Eventually, government money can run out and the subsidizing of renewable energy will stop. Then what happens if all the rest of the electric producers are out of business and the sun doesn't shine on a calm day? Down goes the electric grid. Folks are going to find that Germany is back in the horse and buggy days, only nobody kept any horses around just in case. Bringing up the electric grid in a whole country would take times measured in weeks and would surely adversely impact the German economy.

My German friends, tread carefully. Government subsidies never really work out like you think. There is always a down side...

Re:This may not be a good thing folks..

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact it wouldn't stop, Germany would buy it's power from neighbors. But probbly at great cost too.

We're #1! We're #1!

[Isara]

The US produces %0.11 of our electricity via solar. just over 2 TWh (source [PDF]). We have how much landmass and we don't even come close to Germany's output. Depressing... I'm curious to know what programs Germany has in place to support adoption of solar and wind energy production. Although it would likely never happen, it would be nice if we could replicate some of that here, in the more weather-stable parts of the country. Even better if we could have some decent mass storage solutions to allow solar to really support the whole grid on a larger scale (as opposed to locally).

Solar power reduces electricity price ..

[dgharmon]

"Oh, the solar power haters* are going to love this oneâ"a recent study by Germanyâ(TM)s Institute for Future Energy Systems (IZES), conducted on behalf of of the German Solar Industry Association (BSW-Solar), has found that, on average, solar power has reduced the price of electricity 10% in Germany (on the EPEX exchange). It reduces prices up to 40% in the early afternoon, when electricity demand is peaking and electricity typically costs the most. Thereâ(TM)s a visual of that (in German) here:" link

Re:Solar power reduces electricity price ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, the SOLAR POWER INDUSTRY study says solar power is cheaper! Who knew? Can you try for a less biased source?

Re:Solar power reduces electricity price ..

[Rakarra]

Do you have a problem with their actual numbers, or do you just like to shoot the messenger?

Amazing

[PopeRatzo]

Any mention of solar or any other renewable energy on Slashdot brings out an army of trolls, dolts, nincompoops and people who haven't commented on a story in ages, but suddenly have a pressing need to hold forth on solar energy. People who say, "It takes 7TW just to build a goddamn solar panel!" or, "Solar's no good because it's only 10%, and since coal is 30%, then that means coal is better because clouds!!" as if we'd passed the limits of technology in the 1890's and had better just get used to what we've got. I don't know what motivates people, or what brings them out for these stories, but it's pretty clear that if there is a concerted corporate effort to spread disinformation about energy, it's definitely working.

The same people who will discuss seriously the best type of deep space drive for a manned mission to the Cygnus constellation will aver with absolute certainty that solar energy is just a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream.

If I was a sociologist, I'd study the phenomenon. But that would just depress me.

Re:Amazing

[fustakrakich]

If I was a sociologist, I'd study the phenomenon.

Just watch Animal Planet. It saves you all the boring philosophy.. cuts straight to the chase... Fight; Eat; Fuck; Sleep

Re:Amazing

[AmiMoJo]

I think a big part of it is outrage at the "idiots" who are don't understand nuclear power and are afraid of it, ruining the party for everyone else. You see a lot of people ranting about the "scientifically illiterate greens" and hippies who want to go back to the stone age, so it's clear they don't listen to or understand the actual arguments or developments in technology.

It's a common problem everywhere. Find some group to blame and vent anger at and the momentum builds by itself.

There is also a belief that more watts = better quality of life, and any kind of energy saving involved being less comfortable or not being able to turn on the computer when you want. It's odd to see it on Slashdot because clearly energy saving has massive benefits for anyone who uses a battery powered device, which is everyone. More watts does not make a smartphone better, it makes it worse.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

People here want power plants which could later evolve in power sources for an intersletar mission. No study is needed.

Re:Amazing

[PopeRatzo]

There is also a belief that more watts = better quality of life, and any kind of energy saving involved being less comfortable or not being able to turn on the computer when you want.

That's very true. Some years ago, my wife and daughter and I decided to see if we could turn down our energy consumption and still live happy modern lives. By our energy bills, we're now using about 25% of the energy we used in 2002 when we started this. A big part was my wife accepting a job at a University about 6 blocks from our house instead of a 40 minute commute. Another was that we put in more convenient and automated switching for lights and appliances in our house. I know this isn't about powering an entire industrial economy, but at least here in the US, we really don't have as much of an industrial economy as we did in the 1970s.

Re:Amazing

[AmiMoJo]

The US doesn't even need "high tech" solutions like automatic switches. Most houses are poorly insulated, for example.

Meanwhile...

[gigaherz]

... in spain they tax us extra for renewable energy, because otherwise it would be "unfair" to the industry...

Solar prodiction

[jklovanc]

The chart says that there is 34.558 GW of solar capacity installed. They then show that 19.4Twh of energy was produced in the first seven months. Lets do some math. The longest day in Frankfurt is 16 hours and 23 minutes while the shortest day is 8 hours and 3 minutes. Therefore, on average the sun is up for 12 hours.19400Gwh / 7 months / 30 days / 12 hours = 7.4 Mw produced on average. That is 22% of capacity. That would mean that when the sun is up solar plants are producing, on average, 22% of their installed capacity. What happened to the other 78%?

Lets do the same calculation for wind power. 24200 TWh /7 months/ 30 days / 24 hours = 4.8 Mw. 4.8/30.533 = 16% (wind works after dark so not daylight adjustment). Where is the other 84% of capacity.

Re:Solar prodiction

[zippthorne]

Woah, hang on there on the daylight calculation. You have to factor in the angle to the sun. At dusk and dawn, your panels will be rotated at glancing incidence to the sun, they won't be presenting very much surface area to be illuminated.

Assuming the produced power scales linearly with received intensity (I'm not willing to bet on this assumption....), if I've done my math correctly, you can only expect the average to be about a factor of 1/pi of the peak. How do your calculations work out if you normalize to a 7 hour 38 minute day of constant illumination?

Also, there is variation month to month, so you need to apply a corrective factor to that as well. Also, clouds and maintenance periods...

Re:Solar prodiction

[zippthorne]

Also assuming that the atmosphere itself has constant transparency regardless of the path length.....

Re:Solar prodiction

[jklovanc]

My point is that the realistic capacity of the installed solar generators is far below the theoretical capacity. This discrepancy causes cost calculations to seem to be much better than they really are. For example, if It costs $5M to build a 5MW facility then the cost per watt is $1. If that 5MW facility actually produces 1MW that is $5/watt.

Re:Solar prodiction

[Anonymous Coward]

The power produced does *not* scale linearly with intensity. Higher intensity usually menas higher temperatures, which means lower efficiency.

Perhaps it would be linearly in an ideal world where you could have the panels stay at 10C or so, but in real life efficiency is better in january than in juli. If there's irradiation in january and no snow on the panels...

Re:Solar prodiction

[Anonymous Coward]

The local climate and the geometry of the installation are factored into the calculations. The peak power output is still relevant, because it is achieved occasionally, so the electronics and the grid have to be built to handle it.

In Germany, a typical installation produces about 1000kWh/year per installed 1kWp, which translates to a little over 10% of the peak rate on average (24/7). 1kWp installed costs about 2000EUR. With the rough cost and yield estimates, you can expect to produce 20000kWh over 20 years for 2000EUR. Without capital costs, that translates to 10ct per kWh, less than half the current consumer electricity price.

Re:Solar prodiction

[Anonymous Coward]

... which is why Germany is building a bunch of coal and gas power plants.

Re:Solar prodiction

[olau]

Hey, dude. Read up on capacity factors as opposed to peak capacity. There's no conspiracy.

Capacity factors are a well-understood phenomenon in energy production, although, may I add, not really sufficient to understand that much about the energy source anyway as reality in a grid with varying consumption rates is much more complicated. Many journalists don't really understand it, though.

Re:Solar prodiction

[AmiMoJo]

Installed capacity is not peak capacity, it's what the panels produce on average.

Re:Solar prodiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Therefore, on average the sun is up for 12 hours.19400Gwh / 7 months / 30 days / 12 hours = 7.4 Mw produced on average. That is 22% of capacity.

Presumably you lose some efficiency when the sun isn't directly overhead?

Re:Solar prodiction

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloudy days reduce solar panel output, panels reduce in output with age, angle of incidence reduces output over the day. 22% is still surprisingly low but not shocking. 16% for wind also seems low given that the official load factor for wind is 30% and the overall measured load factor of UK installations is 20%. Basically solar and wind just struggle to get anywhere near their nameplate output. They still work out as economically viable but you need to take real-world factors into account when calculating EROEI and value.

Re:Solar prodiction

[jklovanc]

Did you notice that there was no entry for solar in that chart? From my calculations the capacity factor of solar in Germany varies from 2% in January to 11% in July. Considering that baseload power plants could be as high as 90% one would need up to 45 times the solar capacity to match the output. When most people see an installation of XMW capacity of solar they think it can replace X MW capacity of fossil fuel plants. That is not true.

Re:Solar prodiction

[jklovanc]

Then why is the actual production so much lower than the installed capacity?

Re:Solar prodiction

[jklovanc]

Without capital costs, that translates to 10ct per kWh, less than half the current consumer electricity price.

That is without capitol costs and without operating costs and therefore only part of the story. By the way, where do these installed costs figures come from? Citation please.

This is not all that it may appear

[Anonymous Coward]

http://phys.org/news/2013-08-german-energy-giants-conventional-power.html

Details from the English report

[steveha]

Here are the numbers from the chart on page 4:

Electricity production: first seven months 2013

Uranium -- 52.1 TWh
Brown Coal -- 85.1 TWh
Hard Coal -- 65.5 TWh
Gas -- 23.8 TWh
Wind -- 24.2 TWh
Solar -- 19.4 TWh
Run of River -- 10.5 TWh

Total energy production was about 280.6 TWh, renewable was 54.1 TWh (or about 19.3% of all energy production).

Also interesting is the chart on page 9, "Monthly Production Solar". It is a bar graph, so these numbers are mostly my eyeball estimates:

January: 0.35 TWh (exact number)
February: 0.6 TWh (my estimate)
March: 2.3 TWh (my estimate)
April: 3.1 TWh (my estimate)
May: 3.3 TWh (my estimate)
June: 4.3 TWh (my estimate)
July: 5.1 TWh (exact number)

So winter really is bad for solar in Germany, but other months it isn't bad. Interestingly, wind does better in Winter... chart on page 10, "Monthly Production Wind", same deal as above (mostly eyeball estimates with two exact numbers):

January: 5.0 TWh (exact number)
February: 3.2 TWh (my estimate)
March: 4.7 TWh (my estimate)
April: 3.3 TWh (my estimate)
May: 2.8 TWh (my estimate)
June: 3.3 TWh (my estimate)
July: 1.7 TWh (exact number)

It doesn't look like renewables will be able to produce 100% of power needs any time soon in Germany, but they are producing about 1/5 of all energy. More than I expected.

Critics claim that Germany is paying six times as much for power, to finance all the renewables. (Per that article, 18 billion Euros paid on power that has a market value of 3 billion Euros) See also the Wikipedia article on Renewable energy in Germany.

Presumably though this is an investment and the renewables will keep providing power once their costs have been paid fully. I'm wondering if, over the operational lifetime of the solar and wind power equipment, they will wind up producing enough power that they will have actually been a good investment?

IMHO it would make more sense for them to keep the nuclear power plants and try to shut down coal plants, but that's not their plan.

Re:Details from the English report

[Anonymous Coward]

> they will have actually been a good investment?

You think "good investment" == "earned money". That is not the way the thinking goes in this case. Money can be printed arbitrarily and has no value by itself.
Instead, what makes them "good investment" is that they are an insurance: An insurance against nuclear power issues, an insurance against rising fuel prices (which btw. does include uranium, which does not exist in unlimited amounts either, and a lot of it in countries you want to deal with even less than the ones having oil), an insurance for guaranteed development of the technology in general.
Another part is just an infrastructure overhaul which is overdue anyway. The electricity network just hasn't seen the attention it deserves, in many cases deteriorating since decades with little investment. Renewables are more of a "good excuse" to do what should be done anyway.
And maybe even a bit of a huge scale science/engineering project, i.e. consider it in part a research subsidy (which also can be "good investment" without making money).

> IMHO it would make more sense for them to keep the nuclear power plants

You know, part of the problem is that some of those plants are so old that they either should have been or soon should be replaced. So "keep" would actually mean investing into building new ones, which politically but probably also due to cost reasons isn't really going to happen.
The alternative of keeping the plants running even further beyond their designed life-time isn't politically acceptable either (and it's questionable if it is a good idea, nuclear power isn't the best thing to test the "eventually anything breaks" theory on).

Re:Details from the English report

[steveha]

part of the problem is that some of those plants are so old that they either should have been or soon should be replaced. So "keep" would actually mean investing into building new ones, which politically but probably also due to cost reasons isn't really going to happen.

Well, IMHO what they should do is build 4th-generation nuclear to replace coal... but Germany doesn't care one bit what I think, and I am sure you are correct that new nuclear plants just aren't going to happen in Germany anytime soon. I also agree with you that running nuke plants past their design lifetime isn't the cleverest thing to do.

If the solar and wind power works out, the economy in Germany may benefit from cheap electricity (no fuel costs). But right now, are the high costs of energy slowing the economy?

Would Germany have been better off choosing some other technology than solar and wind?
Given that fracking is causing natural gas to be plentiful and cheap, maybe what Germany really should be doing is building natural gas.

Really I'd rather see just about anything other than coal, but Wikipedia says Germany has been burning more coal as they decommission nuclear plants.

Re:Details from the English report

[Anonymous Coward]

The really interesting thing will be 3 to 4 years from now when a lot of the systems put in a few years ago are completely paid off. There's nothing to stop the price of electricity from plummeting to near nothing, to cheaper than tap water.

Re:Details from the English report

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering if, over the operational lifetime of the solar and wind power equipment, they will wind up producing enough power that they will have actually been a good investment?

Wind is already a good investment, if you ignore all the people complaining about noise disturbances. Wind on the sea is probably OK investment in places like Germany because of very high energy costs.

Solar, on the other hand, is probably not that good of an investment as wind. But then the end-installer has to pick up maintenance there.

Neither wind or solar lasts 30 or 50 years. It requires major maintenance. While solar panels may physically last a long time, the electronics do not (insulators break down, capacitors die, etc.) and panel efficiency drops.

For example, I have *thermal* solar heating for pool, house (in winter) and hot water. It pumps about 20kW of heat at a cost of $10k (so $0.50/W). But even that breaks down and then it is a mess. Plastic pipes can burst due to overheating. It can overheat when power goes out - storm knocks down power lines, sun goes out, oops, antifreeze all over the place! So if you use copper pipes, that would be prohibitive capital cost - you have to live with plastic. The only solution would be to have 200W solar panel just to power the circulation pump, which increases costs, decreases ROI. And this is for 80+% efficient system at heating the house, and 60+% efficient at heating hot water - I'd say it is just about break even for house/hot water (pool ignored).

Photoelectric panels are complete no-go around here unless I lived off-grid somewhere.

IMHO it would make more sense for them to keep the nuclear power plants and try to shut down coal plants, but that's not their plan.

Mr. Obvious! :P

Politicians like coal because coal provides low-skill jobs. That's one reason why they are willing to kill nuclear and keep coal.

Re:Details from the English report

[Anonymous Coward]

> Well, IMHO what they should do is build 4th-generation nuclear to replace coal...

I kind of agree, it would be good to have at least a bit of a backup plan. But for some reason, continuing running ancient nuclear plants is more acceptable than building a new one, which I can't really understand. To much emotion involved I guess.

> But right now, are the high costs of energy slowing the economy?

Well, the investments done have a good chance of actually boosting the economy.
There are a few things to keep in mind about Germany:
1) Germany has always been bad at consumer spending. More money in people's pockets does not translate into more consumption like it does in the US
2) A faster economy when the rest of the Eurozone is in a bad state isn't necessarily that great. I creates envy and political issues.
3) Coal for a long time (and possibly still) is a political issue in Germany. Coal mining has been subsidized extremely heavily, basically since it was the only major energy source available within its borders, but also due to regions being dependent on the industry.
4) Almost everywhere in Germany is heavily populated and wet. Which makes fracking more risky, both due to pollution and possible property damage (e.g. an accidentally scratched water barrier has caused permanent and continuing damage to a village in Germany due to the ground rising as the it soaks up water).

Apart from that, I think the plan is to have more gas plants, but that will take time to implement, and things just never work out that straight-forward as planned anyway. So I am sure you will hear quite a few "horror stories" in the future. And I don't consider that such a big deal. At least I believe people in Germany are better at actually learning from mistakes than the Japanese sometimes seem to be (thinking of their broken nuclear oversight...).

Re:Details from the English report

[zAPPzAPP]

Yes, it would make much more sense to go for the 'non polluting' option of renewables + nuclear.

Sadly this is not possible, because the political driving factor behind the rise of renewables (the green party) was also founded (!) on anti-nuclear sentiments.
It is hard to imagine them giving up their very core believes now that they have almost reached their goal.
On a general note, people who are in favor of renewables are usually also politically close to the green party, which hates on nuclear by principle.

So we are going for the 'green' option instead, even though it does not make much sense and will cause more pollution in the forseeable future instead of less.
Good idea + political dogma = mediocre results

Re:Details from the English report

[sociocapitalist]

Critics claim that Germany is paying six times as much for power, to finance all the renewables. (Per that article, 18 billion Euros paid on power that has a market value of 3 billion Euros) See also the Wikipedia article on Renewable energy in Germany.

Presumably though this is an investment and the renewables will keep providing power once their costs have been paid fully. I'm wondering if, over the operational lifetime of the solar and wind power equipment, they will wind up producing enough power that they will have actually been a good investment?

IMHO it would make more sense for them to keep the nuclear power plants and try to shut down coal plants, but that's not their plan.

It's also possible that Germany taxes energy use deliberately in an attempt to decrease consumption.

Re:Details from the English report

[bickerdyke]

Given that fracking is causing natural gas to be plentiful and cheap, maybe what Germany really should be doing is building natural gas.

Unlike the US, Germany does not have huge areas of spare, uninhibited land that can be turned into toxic desserts. Oh wait... PA is NOT uninhibited....

Re:Details from the English report

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would we want to deal with less than the nations of the Middle East? It it weren't for Saudi oil, we could crush the Wahabbist terrorists in their nest.

Re:Details from the English report

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, Gasland is propaganda, not a factual documentary.

Re:Details from the English report

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike the US, Germany does not have huge areas of spare, uninhibited land

That's okay, they can just buy natural gas on the open market. And it will be cheap because it is plentiful now.

toxic desserts

I think you meant "deserts".

uninhibited

I think you meant "uninhabited".

Anyway, you are mistaken: fracking does not cause land to be turned into toxic desert.

http://fuelfix.com/blog/2012/01/04/opinion-fracking-fears-mostly-unfounded/

Re:Details from the English report

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing to stop the price of electricity from plummeting to near nothing, to cheaper than tap water.

This seems unlikely. According to the report, Germany has met about 20% of its energy needs using renewables. If we assume that the renewables are fully paid for and don't require any maintenance, the renewable power is free, but that would at best result in a 20% cut in costs; the other 80% of the electricity would still need to be paid for. And those assumptions are silly: renewables do need maintenance and upkeep, which means the expenses will never be zero.

Still, if the renewables work out, that's 20% of Germany's energy needs met very cheaply. If the cost of the non-renewables went up a lot, the renewables plan would be proven to have been a good investment.

However, it appears that fossil fuels are getting cheaper, not more expensive. So from a pure economic point of view, Germany's huge build-out of renewables is not looking like the best investment it could have made.

Personally, I daydream about buildings having solar roofing tiles, so that everyone can run air conditioners on hot summer days almost for free. And I daydream about giant solar plants in desert areas. I don't think solar can meet all or even most of our energy needs, but I think it has a place. So I'm hoping Germany's grand experiment will help develop the technology and help bring costs down.

Whether or not this was the best investment Germany could have made, it's the one Germany did actually make, and I hope it works out in the long run.

Re:Details from the English report

[Anonymous Coward]

It is unfortunate that you are uninhibited against posting without spell-checking.

Re: NO NO wait! What about clean coal!

[maxwell demon]

The sky is falling, The sky is falling

Since the sky seems to fall quite often, maybe we should build skyfall power plants.

And I've got some Florida swampland to sell 'ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so they made a lot of power in one summer month. Show us a graph of their production for a year. I've been to Germany in the summer and the winter (used to work for a German company) and I know what it's really like there. Hope they've got a lot of storage and low demand...

Even at peak it is inefficient

[jklovanc]

On page 22 of the report it states that 1.32 TWh were produced in calendar week 29. According to page 3 there are 34.558 GW of installed capacity. Lets do some math; 13200/7/16= 11.8. That is 34% of capacity.

Re:Even at peak it is inefficient

[zAPPzAPP]

Oh noes, we are wasting precious sunlight with all this inefficiency!

Re:Even at peak it is inefficient

[jklovanc]

When the cost per watt is calculated on installed capacity as opposed to actual capacity the figures are at least 1/3 of what they really are. That makes solar appear much cheaper than it really is. Maybe that is why the cost of household electricity in Germany has gome up by 61% since 2000 making it the most expensive in Europe.

Re:Even at peak it is inefficient

[zAPPzAPP]

The cost of electricity has gone up, because electricity companies have to buy renewable energy from the producers for a set (high) price.
Then they push this price on to the customer.

So not the inefficiency is pushing up prices, but the actual amount of energy produced is.
If those things were more efficient, energy prices would be even higher.
Yes this is a stupid system.

Re:Even at peak it is inefficient

[jklovanc]

They have to buy at the higher price to compensate for the higher cost for constructing green projects.

When one build a plant one must pay for the plant. The cost per Kwhr is calculated by taking the construction cost and dividing it by the the amount of energy produced over the repayment period. If the cost is calculated based on the installed capacity it would be less than 1/3 the actual cost. Even at the higher prices the projects won't pay for themselves.

Page 71

[jklovanc]

Take a look at page 71 of the report. Notice that as solar becomes more prevalent there is more electricity being imported.at dawn and dusk and more surplus exported around noon. What if every country tried to do that? There would be shortages at dawn and dusk and massive surpluses at noon. This is why I say that electricity generation is not the problem; electricity storage is.

Re:Page 71

[denzacar]

What if every country tried to do that? There would be shortages at dawn and dusk and massive surpluses at noon.

Good thing we live on a sphere then. Instead of, you know, on a flat two-dimensional surface.

And then there's this.

Re:Page 71

[Anonymous Coward]

Peak demand (and thus peak prices) is in the afternoon. Afternoon is also when solar PV reaches its maximum production. In the US, peak demand is typically 3-4x base (night) load. It's a very nice fit.

But PV can't supply all a grid's power needs (nor can nuke or hydro btw, see France and Brazil respectively). PV coupled with wind, which peaks at night, is an excellent match. If the grid is large enough, US/EU scale, then regional weather variation is negated.

Re:Page 71

[jklovanc]

Until we get superconducting power lines resistance in the line will limit distance. There is no way electricity generated on North America will be used in Europe.

By the way, just because someone is trying does not mean they will succeed.

Re:Page 71

[hweimer]

Notice that as solar becomes more prevalent there is more electricity being imported.at dawn and dusk and more surplus exported around noon. What if every country tried to do that?

Then someone will get rich by building energy storage plants and using them to profit from the price difference between day and night. Or probably not, because companies are already starting to do precisely that.

Re:Page 71

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice that as solar becomes more prevalent there is more electricity being imported.at dawn and dusk and more surplus exported around noon. What if every country tried to do that?

Damn you're right...what a shame the Earth isn't a spherical shape that rotates, with different time zones etc.

Re:Page 71

[Anonymous Coward]

If every country did that, there wouldn't be a storage problem. You know, the earth is not flat, it's always daytime somewhere on this sphere...

Re:Page 71

[denzacar]

Until we get superconducting power lines resistance in the line will limit distance. There is no way electricity generated on North America will be used in Europe.

Well for one, that has nothing to do with the previous point of "shortages at dawn and dusk and massive surpluses at noon" which are mitigated either by time-zone shifting of electricity to the east or west OR by producing electricity closer to the equator and "pumping it" north and south.

Two... nobody really needs to move electricity across entire oceans.
Which means that High-Voltage Direct Current transmission does just fine for most of the world.
I.e. HVDC could allow Texas to supply all of the electricity to everything in the radius of 1500 miles.
That's New York, San Francisco, Calgary and Guatemala powered by solar and wind power harvested in Texas deserts.

Same goes for any hydro, geothermal, wind, nuclear etc. source - no superconductor necessary.
It would be nice to have it, but it is not necessary.

just because someone is trying does not mean they will succeed.

I somehow get the feeling that you haven't bothered to read the links I gave you. Cause if you did you wouldn't confuse "trying" with doing.

Re:Page 71

[jklovanc]

At dusk in England where is the power going to come from? It wold be dark all the way to Japan even in summer. At the equator the day length is always 12 hours. So in winter it would be 4 hours/day more than Frankfurt and in Summer it would be four hours less. So in summer It would be dark along the entire longitude. So where would the solar power to supply England and all of Europe and Asia to Japan come from? Same thing for dawn in Japan. Can that longitude supply all of Europe and Asia? Sure there can be storage involved but that is my point; not enough money is going into storage.

Texas to supply all of the electricity to everything in the radius of 1500 miles

And where does Texas get the power when it is dark during a storm?

I somehow get the feeling that you haven't bothered to read the links I gave you

They have signed a lot of agreements but I don't see them having built many production plants in the Sahara yet. The TuNir project is still on the drawing board. The only plant that had gotten off the ground is a 500MV plant in Morocco. A lot more needs to be done to power Europe.

Re:Page 71

[denzacar]

It wold be dark all the way to Japan even in summer.

That's why the plans include wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass and concentrated solar.
Take a look at the map in the links above - PV is just a fraction of the whole thing.

And where does Texas get the power when it is dark during a storm?

You always put all your eggs in one basket like that?

"HVDC could allow Texas to supply all of the electricity". It COULD.
I didn't say that it WILL or that it MUST supply all of the power.
Relying on a single source or form of power would be stupid.

The point of that comment is in the fact that you CAN transport power all across the continent without much loss and from various locations where particular renewable source is readily available.
Again - you don't need superconductors. It can be done TODAY.

A lot more needs to be done to power Europe.

It is a project planned out to 2050 with SuperSmart Grid covering EU by 2030 and 50% of EU's own electricity production being from renewable sources - only then the first power transfers from North Africa would start.

Re:Page 71

[jklovanc]

That's why the plans include wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass and concentrated solar.

Wind; Unreliable look at the charts in this document starting on page 53. Notice how muchce the sage green varies from day to day? Some days it is significant and some days it is nonexistent.
Geothermal; Very restricted areas of natural sources. Can cause earthquakes if injecting water. Uses a lot of water which is becoming scarce if doing injection.
Hydro; most viable sites are already in use.
biomass; very expensive power.
Concentrated solar; very expensive with heat storage.

The point of that comment is in the fact that you CAN transport power all across the continent without much loss

Where are your loss figures? All I have seen is that it can be transported but not how much the loss is.

It is a project planned out to 2050 with SuperSmart Grid covering EU by 2030 and 50% of EU's own electricity production

It is a plan that has not been approved or funded yet. Plans are easy implementing them is much harder.

5TWH !!

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that's a great place to put the next PRON video server - fast fiber, plenty of energy.....

Nuclear

[the eric conspiracy]

The 900 lb gorilla in the room is the shutdown of nuclear generation. This is causing a much faster increase in coal consumption and construction of more coal burning plants in Europe.

A lot of what is being mined and burned is nasty brown stuff too.

The idea is that it's going to be replaced by renewables. Someday maybe, but I bet not in my lifetime. The upshot is that despite all this solar etc. the EU is spewing more CO2 than ever.

The Economist has a great article about it. They call it the 'Golden Age of Coal'.

Re:Nuclear

[DNS-and-BIND]

Nuclear power is far more dangerous. Did we not all see Fukushima? WTF dude, you can't trust private companies at all. Shutting down nuclear is the right thing to do. Look, when environmentalists say it's a good idea, it's a good idea. If you have clean skies and clear water in your city, thank an environmentalist.

Re:Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

WRONG.

Coal burning is worse than nuclear. It releases stuff just as bad and more of it.

Re:Nuclear

[DNS-and-BIND]

Then we just need to use less power, period. There shouldn't be any new coal OR nuclear plants allowed. If this leads to brownouts then that's just too bad. We should have thought of that before polluting the environment to serve our own selfish needs.

Re:Nuclear

[Nemyst]

Sure, start by not using your car, computer and everything else you assume you have available. Also get friends and neighbors do the same. We'll see how this works out for you.

Look, it's quite simple: if your solution is to get people to use less power, you're fucked. People won't use less power unless they're entirely unable to do so. You need to work off that fact instead of trying to handwave it away.

Re:Nuclear

[Nemyst]

Fukushima, that badly inspected, badly maintained, badly regulated, overdue for decommissioning power plant which still managed to last through a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and accompanying 40m-high tsunami, all while not actually killing anyone? I'd love to see any other power plant last through that and come out with only a few injuries. Ironically, the plant should've been decommissioned years ago but wasn't because people pressured against building new (safer, better, more efficient, more powerful) nuclear plants, which gave an energy deficit that could only be filled by keeping old power plants online.

The shitty part about it all, though, is that because nuclear has such a bad reputation (thanks to people like you), Fukushima overshadowed the tsunami itself which killed over 15,000 people. Fuck the power plant, the tsunami was the actual disaster.

Re:Nuclear

[the eric conspiracy]

The solution is to wise up and do research on advanced nuclear designs.

The crappy old designs we have now have a decent record, and we haven't put any money at all into improved designs.

Get some decent Thorium based tech going.

Re:Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends. The economic and monetary price of Fukushima seems likely to overshadow the tsunami long-term. Particularly the dead _old_ people on the other hand are actually a win in those terms.
As to nuclear in general: The thing is there simply is no 100% safe. No matter how well you design it, there's always a way those running them can mess it up and cause a desaster. The problem then is, how do you calculate in the cost of an extremely unlikely but also extremely costly desaster?
Like with climate change, all it seems to result in seems to be mostly an ideological pissing contest, and very little real discussion.
Or in the case of Germany, the decision that we can actually _afford_ to try something "foolish" in the hope that it will actually lead to a much better result long term.

Re:Nuclear

[slew]

Get some decent Thorium based tech going.

This is classic top down thinking that leads to sub-optimal solutions...

1. Assume that a certain technology direction that you read about on the internet is the best to go.
2. Bully all people that suggest research decide the best solution, because they are wasting time and the clock is ticking.
3. Then force your best engineers to ignore all other options and attempt to make it work whatever the cost.

Although you may assume that thorium technology is magic technology that solves all problems but is "suppressed" by the powers that be, you can make the same argument about cold fusion.

Does this sound like a thought process that a pointy haired boss would follow? Perhaps if your manager had a thought process like that you might be the first to call them on it, but of course in an internet forum, this type of manager-think is de-rigueur...

Just say'n... ;^)

Re:Nuclear

[DNS-and-BIND]

It doesn't work on the individual level. Without the power of government backing it, people will never accept it. We need a sustained advertising campaign and supportive personalities in the media and popular culture before it can succeed.

Re:Nuclear

[indeterminator]

Look, it's quite simple: if your solution is to get people to use less power, you're fucked. People won't use less power unless they're entirely unable to do so. You need to work off that fact instead of trying to handwave it away.

That's why the GP said no more power plants allowed (not sure why he objects nuclear though). Prices go up, man becomes entirely unable.

Hopefully the fossils who want to burn fossils start to die off soon. It's time for new kind of thinking and the old folks just are not agile enough. Makes sense, they don't need to stick around for the consequences.

I live in a house that has 24 apartments. There are 5 garages at the ground floor, and parking places for 6 cars in front of the house. Can't see in the garages, but the outside parking is empty on a typical evening. Conclusion: people will stop using cars when they're unnecessary.

Re:Nuclear

[thegarbz]

Yes look at all the lives which were lost .... oh wait.

Re:Nuclear

[bickerdyke]

Fukushima, that badly inspected, badly maintained, badly regulated, overdue for decommissioning power plant

That's exactly the same cool-aid they poured on us after Chernobyl. Yes yes... that only could happen in Russia because Russian reactors are " badly inspected, badly maintained, badly regulated, overdue for decommissioning". This NEVER can happen in modern, western nuclear plants.....

And now, surprise surprise, it is discovered that a high-tech nation as Japan ALSO has "badly inspected, badly maintained, badly regulated, overdue for decommissioning power plant[s]"

So, what exactly, besides the "fact" that it hasn't spilled it's nuclear inventory all over the place yet, makes you so sure that the plant next to you is so much better maintained and so much more safe than Fukushima, which was also assumed to be safe?

Re:Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a couple of huge nuclear explosions and everyone gets all sniffy about nuclear, what gives!

Re:Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

More dangerous than the consequences of global warming?

Re:Nuclear

[SleazyRidr]

Well, the US (and I'd imagine any other country using nuclear power) also has badly inspected, badly maintained, badly regulated and overdue for decommissioning power plants. It's just that we've been lucky so far and none of them have gone china syndrome yet. I do include the "yet" there as it is only a matter of time. No one is pretending that it isn't a problem. Most pro-nuclear people want to build new plants with better designs and shut-down these old things making the whole nuclear industry look bad.

Re:Nuclear

[SleazyRidr]

Stop throwing ridiculous hyperbole around. Using less power does not mean an immediate return to the stone age. It just means using less power, and using what you do use more efficiently. Think of power like money. You need to save for retirement, but that doesn't mean that you never spend money on something that isn't entirely necessary for your survival. Sometimes you might go out to eat, or buy a new video game, or whatever, but you're always thinking about how much it costs, and whether it's really worth that price. Same with power, we'll keep using power, but we'll think about how much we're using, and try to keep within our "budget."

Re:Nuclear

[the eric conspiracy]

No. it's not top down thinking. It's an example of an alternative technology that might be work.

A posting on slashdot is hardly a command decision.

Now perhaps if Congress passed a law stating something like this THEN your criticism would be appropriate.

Re:Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the OP was talking about Fukushima anyway; but isn't the possibility of poor management causing catastrophic results a problem in itself? I don't understand why Slashdot in general is defensive over nuclear power in this manner.

Re:Nuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

Clean skies and coal burning hardly go hand in hand.

Meanwhile coal generation is rising in Germany...

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar is "working" thanks to bailouts (oops... subsidies) provided monthly to the producers by the rate/taxpayers. And meanwhile power provided by coal and gas fired power plants has risen 12% in the first half of 2013. (Search "coal power in germany" for all the information you could ever want)

The only thing that is working is a glorious example of rent seeking crony capitalism.
1. Rate payers pay much higher electricity rates
2. More coal plants - more emissions
3. Politicians get to claim "I'm green! Elect me!". Likely earning kickbacks along the way
4. Government guaranteed profits to green energy producers
5. Everybody wins!!

doing the reverse dance

[Anonymous Coward]

my god, this is AWESOME. the next step will be to use the earth as battery; instead of discharging the earth battery (pumping out oil and coal and gas and "morsche atome") finally someone can recharge mother nature ... assuming this trend continues. it will not be easy ... nobody has even thought about these kinds of technologies ... uplifting natures energy instead of breaking her apart. any ideas?

Re:doing the reverse dance

[Nefarious Wheel]

Gosh!

Re:NO NO NO. No? YES.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and who was the fool that put a nuke plant in a coastal tsunami prone part of the world. The problem isn't nuclear. The problem is the fuel. Uranium style reactors were developed as a kinda afterbirth of the manhattan project. Uranium plants can produce plutonium needed for the bomb. The soviets just took a further approach and made all their reactors, the RBMK series, produce plutonium as a direct byproduct of fission chain reaction. With a high void coefficient and poor management we saw what happens with being careless with nuke plants did in 1986 and the power of location in fukishima. However the gates foundation is funding research into thorium based reactors. Very much safer and if something were to happen, the by products have very short half lives and don't have the bio consequences of Cesium 137 and Strontium 90. Fusion isn't around but probably because it keeps getting defunded. They thought fission was impossible too at one point.

The problem isn't the technology, the problem is the fuel. But then again listening to the far left on energy works all the time. Too bad Solyndra isn't around to sell to Germany. Not that the right is even better. Oh wait... this is slashdot.

Green lies

[Anonymous Coward]

Any propaganda coming out of Germany with links to the 'Green' party can be considered dishonest in the extreme.

This is how Germany's actual 'green' policies work. Recently acquired a Bosch tool. The flimsy and near useless instruction manual was made from recycled toilet paper (as per Germany's 'green' laws) and actually near enough dissolves if wet (no exaggeration). In the same packaging were glossy, plastic-coated, near indestructible promotional leaflets for other products from Bosch. Green laws meant that the thing you need to keep and refer to (the instructions) are crap, and the junk advertising literature is as non-environmentally 'friendly' as possible.

The EU, led by Germany, recently placed massive tariffs on cheap solar energy panels from China. Apparently 'green' thinking doesn't spread to encouraging consumers by giving them access to the cheapest 'green' technology possible.

In the UK, fake solar panels are seen in many places- pretending to power decorative lighting, for instance. The fake installations have cost far more than the electricity they PRETEND to save, but that point is moot since the real power still comes from the ordinary electricity grid. The fake panels represent the attempts by councils to hit local 'green' targets.

Here's a clue. Germany is NOT a sunny nation. Here's another clue. The German government, since long before the end of the last great war, has had a policy of out-right lying to its sheeple for reasons of social engineering. The Allies and the Soviets both compounded this habit considerably when they took over their halves of Germany.

In reality, and any visitor can attest, Germany is THE meat and potatoes industrialised nation of Europe. Behind the 'green' propaganda lies a nation that actually does everything conventionally, and very effectively. Those involved in industry know the truth. The dribbling sheeple that need to believe 'green' propaganda don't have opinions that matter.

Now this isn't to say that Germany's concern about reducing pollution and looking after the environment isn't a good thing- it is. However, such concerns have NOTHING to do with 'green' propagandists/politicians and everything to do with improving the living experience of the general population as a nation advances, grows richer, and is able to keep its house in better order.

The 'greens' in Europe have proven themselves time and time again to be neo-fascist, and as such are a VERY disturbing political block. Renewable energy, like eugenics, are bad jokes, but both have found traction in Germany as mechanisms to further much darker political objectives. German 'greens' were fully in favour, for instance, of providing the obscene racist state of Israel with free German submarines specifically designed to carry Israel's genocidal nuclear warheads.

Re:Green lies

[bickerdyke]

Here's a clue. Germany is NOT a sunny nation.

Doesn't that make those 5.1TWh even more remarkable?

Re:NO NO NO. No? YES.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and who was the fool that put a nuke plant in a coastal tsunami prone part of the world.

GE.

Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't the article say that ... the SUN produced (whatever) amount of power ... and didn't even notice it? Germany is just learning another way of harvesting the output of that nuclear furnace.

Re:Meanwhile coal generation is rising in Germany.

[D'Sphitz]

Ah yes, crony capitalism. Like all of the cronies who have collected the ~$10T we've pissed away over the past decade on such national treasures as our multiple ongoing wars, an unmatched prison-industrial complex, corporate welfare and bailouts for billionaires, and national defense and security. A hefty price tag, but I guess we did get a lot for our money. We got a new surveillance state, militarized police forces, dismantling of the constitution, and a recession bordering on depression while the elite have never been richer or contributed less. Let's also not forget that we nailed down the #1 spot on the Incarceration Rate Hot 100 (not to mention the #1 spot on many other prestigious charts), and as a bonus, our global resentment is at an all time high!

But I hear you, let's focus on the negative waste like green energy subsidies that cost less than what is filtered to war profiteers every month to keep Operation Occupy Afghanistan running indefinitely. We should also probably bitch about even thinking about providing healthcare to our citizens, and don't even get me started on those leeching retirees who demand a monthly cash handout just because they worked their whole lives paying into social security. What a waste.

In 2013, it’s estimated that $7.3 billion — 45 percent — in energy tax subsidies, will go towards renewable energy, according to Congressional testimony by Congressional Budget Office senior advisor Terry Dinan. Another $4.8 billion — 29 percent — in energy tax subsidies will be for energy efficiency.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/03/14/cbo-most-energy-tax-subsidies-go-toward-green-energy-energy-efficiency/

wait, what?

[slashmydots]

Can't 50MW run a decent sized city and a couple GW run a small country or US state? This is 5 TW of just solar? That's 5 million megawatts. There's just no way unless they covered their entire country in solar panels.

Re:wait, what?

[ACluk90]

Well, you misunderstood. They produced 5TWh of energy in July, the month of July has 744 hours, so the average power from photovoltaics was 6.72GW. This is comparable to about 15 nuclear reactors. When you look at presentation linked in the article, you see that this drops 0.35TWh in January, i.e., an average power of 0.47GW. In Germany the price for electricity is about 3 times that of the U.S., at least partially due to the subsidies of renewables.

Re:wait, what?

[bickerdyke]

That's 5 million megawatt hours in a month DIVIDED BY 24 * 30 hours in a month.

Dude.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen people with bugs up their asses over religion, abortion, copyright and just all kinds of things which I can understand people being passionate about one way or another.

But you..?

You appear to hate the Sun.

That's messed up, man.

Re:Dude.

[jklovanc]

I don't hate the Sun. I hate people who think that more production from green power is the answer to our problems. Green power production is one part but it is too unreliable to be counted on. Much more money needs to be spent on storage and transmission of electricity so that it is available when and where it is needed and not just when and where it is produced.

Background Info

[Tom]

Some more info - I am a German living in Germany, and I've been following non-mainstream media on this very topic for quite a while.

Solar and wind are exploding, much quicker than anyone expected. In fact, so quickly that it has the government in panic, probably courtesy of the big energy corporations. You see, most solar and wind power is decentralized, deployed in small batches by thousands of small companies or private owners. The plans for big off-shore wind parks are moving ahead much, much more slowly.

So, the government broke their own promises, retro-actively(!!!) changed the law and reduced the subsidies for clean energy. When you read "subsidies" you should realize that both coal and nuclear are also heavily subsidized. With the recent changes, more so then renewable energy.
In addition, a law that exempts the really huge energy users in the industry was massively expanded and these days most energy-heavy industrial users are exempt from energy taxes. This makes electrical power a lot cheaper for them then for the consumer, who of course needs to pay for the difference. The purpose of this is obviously to reduce public support for renewable energy, because it has all been accompanied by a massive PR campaign about rising energy costs.

The fact is that the actual price of electricity has come down. If you look at the power exchange (like a stock exchange, just for energy prices), there were days when the price of electrical power was negative for several hours. Yes, that's right, there was so much energy being produced that the producers paid you for taking it off their hands. Sounds insane, isn't - electrical energy can't be stored easily, and you can't just make it vanish. If supply and demand aren't in balance, the stability of the energy network is in danger.

Of course, private consumers didn't notice and weren't given cheap energy. See above.

There's a massive political tug-of-war going on within Germany right now. On the one hand there are hundreds of mostly small or medium-sized companies that are driving the renewable energy market, building and installing wind turbines and solar panels. On the other hand are about half a dozen big old energy-power companies who simply missed the boat and are still heavily invested into coal and nuclear. There's a whole story there about the Germany government's flip-flopping on nuclear power over the years, too much to include in this post.

Re:Background Info

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't understand much about this.

1) Look at countries with little to no solar + wind near you. They all have cheap (like 1/2 to 1/3 the price) electrical power.
2) Look at Denmark - incredible power bills.
How can wind + solar lower bills, when everywhere they are installed there is very expensive electricity?

3) The wholesale price of power is low because its a rigged market. People have to buy hugely subsidized wind + solar, so the coal and gas plants are left stranded. What these thermal operators have just announced (read the original press releases to see what is happening), is that they will shut down some plants to essentially starve Germany of power 10% or more of the time. This will make them a lot of money. They were playing nice, but those days are over.

Re:Background Info

[Tom]

The price is rigged in multiple ways.

First, the government added a tax to the power prices, to finance the subsidies on clean energy.
Then, they dropped those subsidies much, much faster then they had promised. The tax, however, remains the same.
At the same time, most industrial customers are exempt from the tax in addition to getting massive discounts by the energy companies (not unethical, that, it's typical for large bulk buyers to get discounts).

All of this results in consumers paying huge prices that have little to no relation to the actual cost of power.

Finally, the energy companies never played nice. The same companies that own most of the large baseline (coal, gas, nuclear) plants also own the power networks. For several years it was common practice of them to shut down wind and solar farms they didn't own by refusing to accept their power output into the grid. The official reason was fear of grid instability. The practice largely stopped when investigations found out it was mostly bullshit.

Re:Background Info

[munozdj]

Man, that looks interesting. Have you got some links to further investigate this? I'd really appreciate those!

Re:Background Info

[Tom]

If you can read german, there's a good collection of articles here:

http://www.heise.de/tp/news/enews/default.html

Re:Background Info

[jwhitener]

Curious, does the government own the power grid / power lines in Germany?

Re:Background Info

[Anonymous Coward]

Additionally, those poor, poor big energy companies make record profits every year. They profit in two from the situation in Germany: Little mobility of consumers leads to the ability of price fixing, giving them their current huge profits especially with the low rates for electricity at the market. These high prices are then mostly blamed on renewables, which as said above threaten their core business, big, huge power plants.

Energy prices rising and falling at the same time

[garry_g]

Due to the over-production of renewable energy (which of course is a good thing), prices for electricity at the markets are constantly dropping, with some electricity actually being paid to the recipients (!) at times ... at the same time, guaranteed prices for its production (in an attempt to stimulate building of renewable energy sources, with fixed rates for 20 or 25 years!) at rates of 3-4 times the wholesale market prices are causing EEG-rates (sort of a tax to pay for the guaranteed prices for the producers) to rise further and further, leading to constantly rising prices for consumers ... to add to that, energy-hungry production processes are exempt from that "tax", which again is added onto the tax for regular consumers ... so instead of profiting from the dropping prices on the market, consumers are forced to pay more and more ... great job, politicians!

Add to that the almost "fraudulent" way of making consumers responsible for delays e.g. in the building of ocean wind farms ... if some wind farm can't be put up and in production in time, again the consumers have to pay the fines ... WTF???

Re:Energy prices rising and falling at the same ti

[garry_g]

P.S. - apart from the above, there have been laws put in place, forcing communities to use a certain percentage of their land for renewable energy production. Neat idea as such, but depending of the area, this causes some problems ... e.g., the area I live in has large woods, moderate farming and cities in the range of 30-60k people (core cities). According the scientific research, there aren't many places for wind energy production, and the only ones that come even close to a break-even point for production are naturally on hills/higher plains. Which - not very surprisingly - aren't where the cities or farming is, but the dense woods. In order to fulfill the required ratio of renewable energy areas, the generators need to be placed in the middle of the woods, destroying not only the rather large space of woodland around the generators, but also requiring infrastructure (wider asphalt roads), power lines, and causing additional damage to the fauna by constant noise and infrasound ... also we're talking not about some small windmill, but 600+ft high ones, with 400ft diameter rotors ... to add to that, our local government decided to sign a contract with a company for them to build the generators even before any results of the surveys were done, or before involving (or even telling) the community about it ... therefore, if the local people should successfully stop the project either through political pressure or legal channels, the community is probably liable for damages claims from that company ...
And then politicians wonder why people are fed up with politics ...

Windup

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

"I'm sure in the future you can just generate nineteen point twenty one jiggawatts from a windmill, but in the 1950s it's a little hard to do."

Some data

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't let yourself be distracted by these impressive-looking numbers. After shutting down half of the nuclear power station, german electricity is generated mostly from coal. Solar and wind is just a small fraction. Less than 20%. Nevertheless the added cost of solar and wind is about 10 cents per kWh. This is already threatening to drive energy-intensive industries out of germany (which would undoubtedly be welcomed by the greens). If we continue to subsidize solar power as much as we do, energy will be so expensive that all major industry will move out of germany or produce their own power.

Conventional power production
http://www.transparency.eex.com/de/freiwillige-veroeffentlichungen-marktteilnehmer/stromerzeugung/Erzeugung-des-Vortages

Solar power production
http://www.transparency.eex.com/de/daten_uebertragungsnetzbetreiber/stromerzeugung/tatsaechliche-produktion-solar

(guess why they don't put them in the same plot. Solar and wind would look too pathethic)

Now don't get me wrong: in places like the south-west of the US where there is a lot of continuous solar power and the peak power demand is at the same time as peak solar power production due to air conditioning, it is a no-brainer to produce as much as possible from solar power. Especially given the very low panel prices. But germany is really not the right place to put solar panels. Offshore wind is OK since at least it produces peak power in the winter where the power demand is highest. And in some places in southern gemany there is enough sun to make solar power competitive.

But the subsidies need to stop, or we will have an economic desaster.

Look at the numbers

[jklovanc]

It is a great project and I am all for it. They are trying but need investment and that is hard to come by because most investors are interested in production and not storage.

By the way did you notice that the efficiency of the two existing compressed air plants are 42 and 54%. That would mean that the daytime rate would have to be about twice the night time rate to break even. That does not take into account the costs for running and maintaining the compression plant. with that taken into account the night time rate would have to be 1/3 the daytime rate. That is not going to happen any time soon.

Finally, Germany does not have separate day/night rates.

Re:Look at the numbers

[hweimer]

By the way did you notice that the efficiency of the two existing compressed air plants are 42 and 54%. That would mean that the daytime rate would have to be about twice the night time rate to break even.

Yesterday, one MWh of electricity at the European Energy Exchange (EEX) cost 25€ at 5am, but 53€ at 8pm. That's even more than a factor of two.

Re:Look at the numbers

[jklovanc]

That is the price paid to producers and is based on supply and demand. As demand goes down and price decreases. The storage companies will have an effect on this supply and demand.If storage companies started buying electricity during low periods it the demand will rise and so will the price. As they put electricity back into the system supply will rise and price will drop. This will decrease the swing between high and low prices. Even at 2 time it is not enough to pay for construction, maintenance and operation of the storage plants. All prices would have to rise to subsidize them.

High prices.

[jklovanc]

According to this electricity prices have risen 61% since 2000 making it the most expensive electricity in Europe. That rise is blamed on renewable. It is cool to break records but at what price?

Unsustainable

[Anonymous Coward]

In Portugal solar energy had guaranteed subsidized rates (feed-in) around the 300€/MWh, or even 500 €/MWh in microgeneration (for a few years). The price in the free market where all the energies are negotiated have an average price of 40€/MWh. Wind energy have a guaranteed rate around 90€/MWh. This is completely unsustainable, making our energy cost extremely expensive, although the price to the public still not reflect the total cost, the difference is accumulated in an tariff deficit, a kind of debt. In Portugal this deficit is around 4000 million € in Spain 20 million €. It's a time bomb.

record production, burning transformers all around

[emilper]

Renewables are doing so well in Germany that their neighbours have cut the German grid out, got tired of seeing their transformers burn: http://www.praguepost.com/news/15258-region-german-green-energy-push-needs-a-rethink.html

and German companies are moving to inhouse power generation because they can't take the losses caused by power fluctuations: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/instability-in-power-grid-comes-at-high-cost-for-german-industry-a-850419.html

Money will talk bullshit will walk

[blauwbaard]

The charts do not demonstrate the total cost to the consumer. There is only one way to determine this cost, look at the wholesale electricity price, this can be found here (coupled to the German market): http://belpex.be/marketdata/dam/public/images/CWE-MCP-Chart-FP-Big.html you can see the price is dropping when the sun is shining. Solar is being subsidised as the holy grail. Even the government cannot continue to swim against these market currents. It is better to look at alternatives like gas-(or wood pellet)-cogeneration, saves large amounts of CO2, this has at least got some flexibility in it, and it can be produced during "expensive periods". Wholesale prices have a lower boundary at +- 17-20 Euro per Mega Watt hour, an upper boundary of +- 60. Have a look at your bill and tell me "what explains the difference ??". This is all about excessive overhead in ex-government monopolies with some juice of unrealistic greenery on top. Nothing to see with a technical solution.

German Military report on Peak Oil

[fritsd]

(1) most importantly, fossil fuels being cheap is a temporary thing. At some point Germany (and the rest of the world) will no longer have access to cheap fossil fuels. Replacing them is a multi-decade project, and private industry is very bad at looking at far ahead so the government has to put different incentives in place.

The German Army may have something to do with it: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/peak-oil-and-the-german-government-military-study-warns-of-a-potentially-drastic-oil-crisis-a-715138.html

Re:Meanwhile coal generation is rising in Germany.

[Anonymous Coward]

The other 55 percent (8 Billion) in tax subsidies goes to Oil/Coal industry PRODUCTION (you conveniently forgot to mention the remainder.)
The energy efficiency tax breaks are not part of the production subsidy amounts as they go directly to millions of energy consumers. Not energy producing industries.
Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, and cherry-picked percentages.

Solor power or power from solar?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, did Germany make solar energy, or did they make electrical energy from solar power? If the first, that's an awful waste, as normally it's free, if the second, most of the original post is incorrect! ;-)

Euro this and that

[Anonymous Coward]

Eurozone countries? You realize that's only the sub-group of countries within the EU that use the Euro currency? 50 countries in Europe, 28 members of the EU, 18 that use the Euro (Eurozone).

Hold back on the Solar Panel

[mrjimorg]

The solar cells cost is largely measured in the energy made to create it. Efficiency = output/cost. We just reached parity in 2010- that's pretty pathetic. And that doesn't include the costs of transportation, loss due to damage from hail, etc, and other such issues. Until this ratio becomes really large (10x), solar cells aren't much better than a battery- you put energy in and get it back out later.
There have been many promising technologies 'on the horizon' that are supposed to make solar cells cheap (made with little energy).
This is the most recent article of printable solar cells. I read one just like this 10+ years ago:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/17/a3-printed-solar-cells
Then you have the "new material" of the hour:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517811/a-material-that-could-make-solar-power-dirt-cheap/
And all the other stuff, such as:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163561-the-key-to-cheap-solar-power-may-have-been-discovered-over-150-years-ago
Until something radically changes, these 'investments' in solar companies are really just there to line to pockets of political cronies, like the 33 companies that made large donations to our president and received even larger 'investments' which were paid out before the company declared bankruptcy
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/10/18/president-obamas-taxpayer-backed-green-energy-failures/

Re:Meanwhile coal generation is rising in Germany.

[taiwanjohn]

Well spoken, Bruce!

Re:NO NO NO. No? YES.

[BranMan]

This is likely just feeding a troll, but nuclear plants run by using fission to produce heat. That heat heats water to steam to run through turbines to make electricity. That steam needs to be cooled. The fission reactor needs to be cooled.

So nuclear plants need HUGE amounts of water. Big lakes, big rivers, or the ocean. That's it - it needs to be by one of those three. Coincidentally, that's where people live in large numbers. If we could stick the plants out in a remote desert we would. We can't.

You plan as best you can - they did pretty good in Japan actually. First you had the earthquake - boom. As a result you shut down the nuclear plant. So no power to run the pumps. Use backup generators for that. Tsunami hits - bigger than the protecting wall can handle. Takes out the backup generators, so no cooling again. Get portable generators in - oops! Can't hook them up - power couplers are incompatible. Guys running the plant don't make all the correct decisions from there - they make a few mistakes, wait too long to do some things, trying to save the plant rather than wreck it forever.

And there you have it - all of that had to go wrong, in order, for ONE reactor at ONE nuclear plant in all of Japan to have a meltdown - that was contained pretty well all things considered - while 10s of thousands lost their lives to natural disaster-S that caused it.

Friggin' Monday Morning Quarterbacks, the lot of you.

Clouds, clouds, clouds

[amaurea]

Germany is one of the worst places in the world for solar power, partially due to the latitude, but mostly due to the cloud coverage. These maps show the effective insolation, taking into account cloud coverage and sun position averaged over a year: Insolation world map, and Germany compared with the USA.

34% is remarkably high when taking into account how cloudy Germany is (and most months do worse than that). It is amazing that Germany has made solar power work as well as it has. Solar power in California would automatically be 2.5 times as economical as it is in Germany, and it would be 3+ times as cheap per W in Australia.

So people shouldn't be thinking "Germany is showing us that solar power is inefficient", but rather "If even Germany can make solar power work, then it will be trivial for everybody else".

Re:Clouds, clouds, clouds

[jklovanc]

It works in the summer. In winter that 34% drops to 4%. This is the problem with reporting the highs and ignoring the lows.

You're confusing the units here

[amaurea]

They produced 5.1 TWh/month = 7.1 MW. I wish they had produced 5 TW, but you're off by a factor of 720!

orly

[Anonymous Coward]

 

Fat and lazy us

[yusing]

I'm ready for the flood of excuses (technical and not) about how the US could do it but...

Man, we are so fat and lazy.

OK. You're officially trolling.

[denzacar]

You are obviously not here to have a conversation on the original topic nor are you looking for information.

Cause clearly, you're the only intelligent person on the planet and no one came up with those questions before, prior to starting to invest billions in that fad of a project they've been running for years and plan to continue running for decades to come.
Clearly, all those people with their sciency engineerity and stuff are buffoons and morons, throwing all that money on a pie in the sky. Buffoons I say!

Or... It could be that your goal is to just keep being negative, bringing up one irrelevant argument after another.

Cause if it weren't so, you'd find both answers to your loaded questions and rebuttals to your foregone conclusions in the links I gave you previously.
I actually COULD have spent this post answering to all your pointless questions and tearing down every single one of your nonsensical points (which is to say ALL of them) but I simply refuse to do it.
Nope. I won't even let you know what are the HVDC losses. Let me check if I remember them correctly. Yup. I do.
But I won't tell you. Look it up yourself. Clearly you are capable of hitting Ctrl+f.

I've wasted way too much time and patience on you as is. This conversation is over. Good night.

Not if they keep burying it

[Anonymous Coward]

Hemp doesn't compete with woodpulp, either, but both make paper.

DAWES.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear manages 60%, solar and wind 20-30%.

Your calculations are based on your hoped for conclusion, not reality.

Darwin's heros

[englishstudent]

They'd be foolish to evacuate..... If they left they'd miss out on that Darwin award! http://evacuatefukushimanow.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/%E7%A6%8F%E5%B3%B6%E3%83%BB%E3%81%84%E3%82%8F%E3%81%8D%E5%B8%82-swimming-in-fukushima/

Record sun

[algoa456]

Record power in the summer sun. Talk to me about a shitty February day and I'd be impressed.

*nods*

[goldcd]

As a Tsunami hit them - let's ban "Acts of God" and all make a saving on our insurance.
*shakes fist at the sky*