Germany's Renewable Plan Faces Popular Resistance

diegocg writes "Germany has outlined the details of the new 800km (497mi) high voltage power link that will transport renewable power from the north to the industrial south. It is part of the Energiewende plan to replace nuclear power and most other non-renewable energy sources with renewable sources in the next decades. However, the power link is facing a problem: popular resistance from affected neighborhoods."

Comments

NIMBY

[geekoid]

Strikes again!

Re:NIMBY

[kheldan]

It's Germany, fool! "Nicht in meinem Hinterhof" :-)

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nicht in meinem Hinterhof"

That's what your mother said last night!

Re:NIMBY

[Nimey]

What?

Re:NIMBY

[ackthpt]

Give them a choice - Nuclear in their back yard, Coal burning in their back yard or this. The choice of None Of The Above is only an illusion.

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically all those environmentalists love nature. Now Nuclear Power is bad for nature, all that radiated stuff and so they don't want it anywhere near them and are all for solar and wind power. Now all these solar panels and wind towers are bad for nature, they take a lot of space where plants could grow, stand out which harms that nice mountainous skyline and of course they harm birds, so they don't want it anywhere near them. Good the politicians say lets have all that stuff somewhere where nobody lives and move the electricity through half Germany, great except this requires more power lines and these take a lot of space, harm the skyline, give off electro magnetic waves, etc. so you do not want them anywhere near you. I hope you see the pattern.

Right now we use more coal power to replace the nuclear power plants, because the coal plants where already there and every environmentally "good" solution gets blocked by environmentalists protecting the nature near them.

Re: NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

wanna know what your mom said last night?
nothing. she had her mouth full.

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yes, but this is a little different. The resistance isn't against the power lines as such. It is against overland power lines. The affected regions want buried power lines, which are of course much more expensive, but don't ruin the view, don't have the same devastating effect on property prices and cause fewer health concerns. The conflict is driven in part by the observation that the southern part of Germany has been in opposition to wind power because it would "ruin the landscape", and now they need the wind power from northern Germany, so the middle of Germany, which does not need new power lines for its own benefit, is expected to accept new power lines for the benefit of northern Germany, which is going to sell wind generated power, and southern Germany, to which it is made available. So of course these regions want the version which burdens them the least.

Re:NIMBY

[kheldan]

..so you're implying that "Hinterhof" is what the kids are calling it these days?

Re:NIMBY

[WillAffleckUW]

Actually, if you just replaced the local coal power used in the industrial south with more efficient coal co-generation, using the excess waste heat both at the power generation and at the industrial use to generate power from the waste heat, you'd reduce coal use, reduce waste heat (which impacts water supplies), and replace older dirtier industrial production and older dirtier coal usage with more efficient sources.

Reducing the need for new transmission lines in the first place.

But that would be smart.

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

Such a beautiful language.

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he is implying that this is what the mom of someone posting on Slashdot calls it these days.

Re:NIMBY

[David_Hart]

..so you're implying that "Hinterhof" is what the kids are calling it these days?

...and here I thought that was Hasselhoff..... (evil grin)

Re:NIMBY

[phantomfive]

You don't know what NIMBY is? Or you didn't read the subject line?

Of course, it's understandable. You shouldn't have to read a subject line to understand a post.

Re:NIMBY

[ultranova]

Give them a choice - Nuclear in their back yard, Coal burning in their back yard or this. The choice of None Of The Above is only an illusion.

The choice is real, it's consequences - rolling blackouts - are fantasy. You regard whatever you're used to as normal, the default state of affairs, even if that something is a grid of social and physical infrastructure that costs billions per year to upkeep. And, regarding it as the default, the idea that it needs to be actively upkept is rejected by the mind - a world without roads and electricity is put to the same category by the brain as worlds with elves or dragons. It's not regarded as something that can actually happen, thus the upkeep cost is classified as "waste" at the emotional level - which is why governments like to "save" by letting the very basis of the economy to slowly crumble - and the idea that you actually need to make new construction to keep the lights on is rejected as absurd.

This happens all the time, and is the main reason why humans suck at making rational choices.

Re:NIMBY

[macpacheco]

Until someone proves hormesis wrong, I believe its true.
Consider 1 or 2 aspirin a day is PROVEN to be better than zero. One hundred aspirin a day will eventually kill you.
Hormesis means, a little radiation is good, while too much is bad.
Except that the NRC, EPA, and other government agencies involved with the multiple aspects of nuclear stuff blatantly disagree.
Lets separate two things:
- Small radiation releases even from nuclear power plants are good (alpha, beta, gamma, neutron radiation)
- Releases of radioactive materials that are proven to harm humans, not so much, but as long as that only happens due to an accident, it's not a big deal, the problem is ingesting those materials, not receiving radiation from them
The anti nuke environmentalists mix the whole thing up, add a huge dose of cold war trauma, and presto, we have the any nuclear thing is horrible speech.

So we have two big issues:
1 - Nuclear power is severely over regulated, because it's based on an assumption the inverse of hormesis (any radiation you get from nukes is bad), licensing a nuclear reactor takes over 2 years in North America, most of Europe, and any other developed countries out there, while a coal power plant that outputs one thousand times as much radiation all the time (coal has little amounts of uranium and thorium), however even one part per million out of ten million tons of coal is ten tons, and uranium/thorium is naturally occurring, coal gets a pass, while nuclear gets buried with bureaucracy.
2 - Your average chemical industry is a much worse hazard than a nuke, yet you don't see protests to close them. Specially a terrorist attack on a large chlorine / fluorine tank will kill people by the boatloads if those tanks are within a few miles of a large population, yet the worse, most stupid nuclear accident to ever happen (that will never happen again) Chernobyl killed just one hundred people from direct radiation exposure (several thousands got cancer), but if Chernobyl had the most basic secondary containment structure present in every nuke in a developed country (and most developing countries too), Chernobyl wouldn't be much worse than three mile island (zero radiation deaths, no cancer cases attributed to that event).

Double standard anyone ? The real question is if the environmentalists actually cared about saving the environment, they would go after the true targets, which are coal burning, the most hazardous chemical industries and oil burning. Instead they go after the good guy, cause nukes have prevented millions of deaths due to billions of tons of coal that weren't burned instead, so even if you consider all nuclear tests, the WWII detonations over Japan, and the worse case, most absurd studies on cancer deaths due to all nuclear accidents, still nukes are safer than coal by at least 2 orders of magnitude, and safer than natural gas by at least one order (the deep horizon accident was a natural gas explosion, and if you add up all natural gas related deaths, there are close to one hundred per year worldwide).

My conclusion is, there are no honestly anti nuclear environmentalists, they are all in cahoots with the oil lobby, because they know that solar and wind won't displace home heating, and that electric vehicles will take 15 years before they are 20% of new cars produced (and 30 years before they are 50% of the operating car fleet, best case).

Do you know that many anti nuclear folks in youtube are also climate change denialists ? I tried to argue with a few of them. My login is the same of slashdot and youtube, if you bother you can find the posts.

Finally, I point you one guy that has lots of $$$ (a billion of them) reasons to be anti nuke, Elon Musk, the guy is the largest shareholder of Solar City, yet if you search, you will see him saying the US should be building more nukes. Because he's a true environmentalist that is actually spearheading the electric car revolution.

Re:NIMBY

[macpacheco]

Large, powerful, long range transmission lines aren't that expensive. My Brazil transmits many tens of GWs worth of electricity over distances around 2000km. They are great if you have a cheap electricity source (large hydro), that you can't really choose where to build (you must build in the strongest flow rivers that have enough vertical gradient).

Instead, old fashioned water cooled nukes can be built anywhere you have a cold water source like the sea, a river, a lake. They only have problems where the water is too hot (like over 30C / 80F in the summer). Proposed high temperature reactors could even be air cooled, and don't require cold air either, so they can be built anywhere. Nuclear isn't cheap, but if you don't have a big old hydro plant, they are the only low cost, reliable, clean electricity source a country can have. Spent nuclear fuel (SNF) is not a real problem, if we build the LFTR / Thorium reactors, since they can burn the uranium SNF (like 95% Thorium for 5% SNF), and there are other solutions to burn the SNF too. If all SNF in the world were fissioned, it would make up for a few decades of our entire electricity supply !

Don't let others tell you that nuclear must be expensive. Half of current nukes cost is a direct consequence of anti nuclear lobby to over regulate nuclear power plants and the cost of multiple stop/resume construction due to political pressure to shutdown nuclear power plant construction. Nukes seem expensive, but when you consider that the uranium is cheap (less than 15% of the total nukes cost) over it's lifetime a nuke is cheaper than coal (don't even need tax breaks, just low interest loans, since the nukes cost is mostly before it starts operating, much like hydro).

Re:NIMBY

[whistlingtony]

Logical Fallacy: burden of proof. "Until someone proves hormesis wrong, I believe its true." Well, I believe that eating unicorn flesh is keeping me young, and until someone proves me wrong, I'm going to believe that too. I'd reeaaaally like to see this properly done study showing that a little bit of radiation is good for you. The old Natural Philosophers used to drink mercury too....

The rest of your post is just one logical fallacy after another, and a giant stereotyping of environmentals, pretty much so you can bash on them. If you were interested in defending nuculear power, you'd do that. Instead you spend your time bashing environmentalists, which leads me to believe that's what you're actually trying to do..... Perhaps I'm wrong. Either way.... https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c... Look 'em up.

Re:NIMBY

[macpacheco]

I believe hormesis is true from this:
I was born and raised in Vitoria-ES-Brazil, an hour drive away from Guarapari-ES-Brazil, yep, that city on Pandora's Promise, that shows up to 30 uSv/s on the geiger counter.
I spent all my summers from age 9-19 either in Guarapari or Marataizes (both monazite sand beaches). And I'm not an isolated case. I have many hundreds of family, friends and acquaintances that did exactly the same. I know dozens of people that lived their entire lifes in Guarapari.
My mom spent a good portion of her last 25 summers doing the same. She's 64, and is extremely healthy. She knows a couple hundred people her age that did the same, only a few had cancer, like 2 or 3% cancer rate.
In Guarapari alone, tens of thousands of people are subject to at least 1 uSv/s 24x7, or 30000mSv yearly. That's many thousands of times maximum recommended yearly exposure.
Studies show Guarapari cancer rates within Brazilian average.
Studies also show that people in Denver and Salt Lake City have less cancer than in sea level cities.
Airline cabin crew (pilots and flight attendants) are subject to 2uSv/s exposure while at cruising altitudes.
Please show me studies with elevated cancer levels among airline crew members.
Guarapari is also know as "cidade saude" or "city of health", it's sands are known to have healing properties, people with chronic diseases go there for their healing powers.
What do you think are in the waters of those hot waters Franklin Delano Roosevelt treated himself in Georgia (hot springs), that's right, also radioactive waters. There are hundreds of similar cases.
There's a nuclear reactor in the UK that is nicknamed a shining reactor, because it glows in the night for neutron radiation that is continuously emitted by the reactor, where are the cancers from that ?
There are a few videos on youtube that show some of this information.
The data is concrete. I challenge to be proved wrong.

Finally, please show me cancer studies that show workers from modern nuclear power plants have more cancers that average. I think you will find they have less cancer than average.

Re:NIMBY

[Talderas]

I thought the allies, and later Russia, broke up the partitions of Germany? You mean they still behave that way?

Re:NIMBY

[angel'o'sphere]

A nuclear plant has no problem if the water for cooling is over 30celsius ... the lake or stream has a problem if the plant puts so hot water back into it.

Re:NIMBY

[macpacheco]

One example:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com...
Water above 75F (24C) requires shutting down the reactor.

Water cooled nuclear plants operate at 350C, 20C difference in cooling water reduce the thermal cycle which reduce turbine efficiency.
That the part I understand exactly why.

It could be one extra example of NRC overregulation, I'm not sure this is really necessary, or just, the reactor hasn't been tested with temperature above a certain temp, so we can't allow it to be operated at such and such temp.

I know LFTR reactors are designed to operate between 700 and 800C, and specifically allow for cooling from water or air.

Re:NIMBY

[dunkelfalke]

Germany was very divided since forever. In fact, Germany as a state did not exist before 1871, it was divided into severall small kingdoms, duchies and so on before that.

Different dialects of German are often not even mutually intelligible. It is so bad that even though I speak fluent standard German, I cannot understand someone speaking full Bavarian dialect. As a comparison, as a fluent Russian speaker I can sort of understand other Slavic languages, even these that are as far away from Russian as Czech or Serbian.

Re:NIMBY

[Quila]

He was describing the phenomenon commonly known as NIMBY.

At least they are better than the BANANA environmentalists.

Re:NIMBY

[angel'o'sphere]

If you link something you should read it first.
That particular plant cooled its pumps with that water.
France shuts down its nuclear plants because they are not allowed to put the heated cooling water back into the rivers.
A huge difference!

I also don't get why you always bring up your pet project: LFTR reactors. They only exist on paper. And unless one builds one and we see how it holds up under production we know nothing about it.

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 Interesting

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

> the southern part of Germany has been in opposition to wind power because it would "ruin the landscape"

While that is true in principle, I don't believe there was any less opposition in the north. The reason there aren't many in the south is that despite (or rather because) of the many hills and mountains wind power just doesn't work that well in the south.
Solar power does, but isn't as cheap.

Re:NIMBY

[Oceanplexian]

It's all because of the the LNT model

There's definitely a lot of evidence that low exposure is not dangerous (beneficial...the jury is out). A lot of the wildlife around Chernobyl had dramatically recovered despite high levels of radiation. I don't think this is unusual -- lots of places on Earth see elevated background radiation and we have a history of cosmic events. Most life probably has some yet-to-be-discovered adaptation mechanism.

We know that high levels of radiation are dangerous but statements like "A million people are 1% more likely to get cancer" grind my gears because they're based on a poor model.

Re:NIMBY

[V for Vendetta]

This is Germany, we're talking about, so that's not NIMBY, but the St. Florian Prinzip: "Heiliger Sankt Florian / Verschon' mein Haus / Zünd' and're an! (Saint Florian / spare my house / burn others' (house) down).

Re:NIMBY

[macpacheco]

I know exactly what LNT means. And it's BS. Search hormesis in youtube, and you'll find a few medical PhDs defending it.

If the max recommended exposure of 1 mSv/year was anything credible, Guarapari would have very elevated cancer levels, off the scale. The workers in a nuclear power plant that get the most radiation get a tiny fraction of what Guarapari inhabitants get.

I didn't say 1% out of one million people get more cancer than usual in Guarapari, quite the opposite. A typical quote is 30% of us will get cancer over our lifetimes. So people in my mom's age range of 65 (and their same aged friends) should already have around 10% cancer incidence, and we're seeing one order of magnitude less.
And it's not just the monazitic sand radiation, there's also very strong sun radiation as well.

Please lookup radiation from ground radon as well. Most radiation we get is actually from Radon (resulting from decay of Thorium and Uranium in the earth's core).

Re:NIMBY

[Jappus]

A lot of the wildlife around Chernobyl had dramatically recovered despite high levels of radiation.

Actually, all that Chernobyl's wildlife proves is this:

It is beneficial to wildlife populations to not exist in proximity to humans.

Given that fact, the recovery and increas in Chernobyl's wildlife becomes suddenly very, very uninteresting. Add to that the fact that the average life expectancy of somewhere around 90% of species living in the wild is below 20 years, and you get while doing longterm exposure studies on them is also kinda moot.

Re:NIMBY

[HornWumpus]

Generate power from the waste heat of a steam plant?

Back to thermodynamics for you. Pay particular attention to any formulas you find for maximum theoretical efficiency and how that relates to hot and cold side temperatures.

Also be informed, Europe is denser then the USA. Many European cities already have central steam systems running off waste heat. Like NYC. Between using the initial waste heat and heat pumped out of the north sea the Dutch get greater then 100% heating efficiency from their fuel (and boy are they smug about it). That just doesn't work when you need AC, not heat, most of the year.

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so Germany has it's industry in the Netherlands? Nifty!

Re:NIMBY

[whistlingtony]

Chernobyl's wildlife had some REALLY ugly birth defects, mutations, and cancer rates. Once all THOSE died off, yeah, it went gang buster. I suspect that has more to do with an abundance of food and space, and no humans bulldozing everything and shooting them.

Re:NIMBY

[Anonymous Coward]

B.S. Show some studies showing the number of birth defects, mutations, and cancer in the wildlife there

Re:NIMBY

[macpacheco]

Coal kills hundreds of thousands yearly. Any normally operating coal power plant (and the mine its supplied from) is a constantly occurring environmental disaster.
A Chernobyl type accident won't happen again, ever. The reactor had no secondary containment vessel, if it had one, it would have been much like three mile island. The reactor would have been a total loss, but there would have been no deaths, maybe a few cancers.
Even then, if you consider every mutation, every cancer as a death, Chernobyl is about the same monthly worldwide deaths from coal !
Stop cherry picking what you don't like about Nuclear and ignoring the rest.
Even natural gas mining and distribution kills hundreds yearly. As well as oil exploration.

Re:NIMBY

[Uecker]

You base your opinion of how many people defend something on youtube? Seriously? No wonder you think LNT is BS.

Re:NIMBY

[Uecker]

For those who are interested into the true state of the scientific kowledge, this seems to be a good review from Nature Reviews Cancer:

http://www.nature.com/nrc/jour...

It discusses various aspects and acknowledges that there might be non-linear effects and low doses which are not yet completely understood. However, I want to give two quotes that make clear that the LNT is the currently accepted standard:

From the introduction:
"The current generally accepted pragmatic approach to low-dose risk estimation recommended for the regulation of radiation exposures and endorsed by the Biological effects of ionizing radiations (BEIR) VII report of the US National Academy of Sciences 12 and the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) 13 is that a linear non-threshold (LNT) extrapolation of cancer risk from high-dose data is most appropriate (FIG. 1) . The LNT model implies that there is an increase in risk to health proportionate to the radiation dose received down to the very lowest levels. The model indicates that there is no safe level of exposure -- that is, there is no threshold dose below which no increase in risk to health is posed."

And from the conclusion:

"However, there remains a lack of understanding regarding how the cellular- and tissue-level responses to radiation, be they linear or nonlinear, in aggregate affect cancer risk. Without this knowledge, uncertainty will remain in the cancer risk estimates for low-dose radiation. Nonetheless, the results discussed in this article do not provide compelling evidence to abandon the LNT approach adopted for radiation protection."

Re:NIMBY

[macpacheco]

Flies into the face of real world data. It's in direct conflict with people that make a living out of flying at 30 thousand feet and higher (lots of cosmic rays due to thinner atmosphere). It's in direct conflict with every large population that lives on top of large monazite sand resources (large alpha emitters).
We are continuously exposed to lots of radioactive Radon gas and it's decay, it seeps from underground everywhere (generated by decay of thorium in the earths core, then seep towards the surface).
If LNT models were true, Three Mile Island would have caused dozens of cancers from nuclear workers that had to cleanup the reactor. TMI was 35 years ago, where are the cancers ?
Notice workers don't really shield themselves from radiation, instead they shield themselves from inhaling radioactive materials. They don't even cover 100% of their skin, they have decontamination showers afterwards (to remove the radioactive materials, but the rays already made it through).
We're talking about effects of radiation on people, or the ingestion of radioactive Caesium, Strontium, Cobalt, Iodine that is documented to have serious health effects.
Most decays are alpha decays (uranium, thorium, radium, radon), but Potassium 40 which is inside our body has a gamma decay.
In LNT were true, then we should all live alone, far from others, since we emit gamma rays from Potassium 40, beta rays from from Carbon 14.
Plus cosmic rays have lots of high energy protons.

The whole math doesn't add up in those studies.

This isn't about youtube. Stop cherry picking only the easy to attack data on my posts. If NLT were true, we would see very elevated cancer levels in cities that I visit every other month. Huge alpha radiation. Have you watched Pandora's promise ? Specially the part where they come to Guarapari (my mom lives 90 days per year there, I have spent cumulatively at least 2 years there).
Tens of thousands getting over one thousand the maximum recommended radiation level. Recommendation is 1mSv / year, they get 2000 to 5000 mSv / year to permanent local residents. This city swells from 200000 population off season to at least twice that much in the summer.
If it was just ten times, then maybe. But one thousand times of something so "dangerous" ! Yeah, I'm being sarcastic.

Re:NIMBY

[macpacheco]

Please watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
30 hours in this beach = one year total natural radiation in london or LA
1 hour a day for a year = maximum allowed radiation exposure a nuclear worker can receive
After I watched those videos, I started believing in hormesis, because I have spent about one full year sunbathing in those beaches for about 4 hrs/day.

Re:NIMBY

[HornWumpus]

Halfwit.

Re:NIMBY

[Uecker]

Sorry, as much as I would love to, but I have no time to discuss this with random people on the internet anymore.

I just pointing out that the scientific community generally accepts the LNT. If you have a different opinion - please write down what you think is "obvious" and submit to a journal. E.g. if you find a math error in a published study, please write a letter to the editor of the journal. You will soon find out, that it is not as obvious as you think. Do you really think scientists don't know about Three Mile Island, about intercontinental air traffic or places with higher natural radiation?

Finally, even if you believe the LNT is not true: A first step to a serious discussion is to acknowledge that the scientific community generally does accept it (and yes, I know it has been challenged). I gave you a reference to a review in a prestigious journal summarizing our current understanding. So please stop running around telling that it is BS because no MD or PhD would defend it youtube or similar nonsense.

Re:NIMBY

[Uecker]

Let me comment on the beach thing (no I did not watch the youtube video) and the general idea that natural background radiation does not contribute to cancer or even have a beneficial effect. This is clearly not a mainstream scientific opinion. In fact, the opposite is true. I just spent a few minutes searching for reviews (so this is not a comprehensive review of the literature), but just a few examples:

Jolyon H Hendry et al 2009 J. Radiol. Prot. 29 A29
Human exposure to high natural background radiation: what can it teach us about radiation risks?

This article basically states that we have no direct evidence for most areas with high natural background radiation (HBNR) because the effect is too small (but also no evidence for no effecit or even a beneficial effect), but we have evidence for example for populations in areas with high radon levels:

"Much of the direct information about risk related to HNBR comes from caseâ"control studies of radon and lung cancer, which provide convincing evidence of an association between long-term protracted radiation exposures in the general population and disease incidence."

Mehdi Sohrabi, World high background natural radiation areas: Need to protect public from radiation exposure.
Radiation Measurements,
Volume 50, March 2013, Pages 166â"171

This is interesting because he specifically discusses the areas you mention:

"There it was found that the radiation level in Guarapari can be considered as normal except at hot spots on the beaches and in the fishing village of Meaipe (Sachett, 2002)."

It also mentions previous studies in two areas with high background radiation in Brazil which finds elevated cancer rates, (also this is probably not caused by radiation). But this contradicts your anectode that people are super healthy there.

Another review:

MÃller, A. P. and Mousseau, T. A. (2013), The effects of natural variation in background radioactivity on humans, animals and other organisms. Biological Reviews, 88: 226â"254.

From the conclusion:
"1. We reviewed the literature on responses to natural variation in background radiation. There was evidence of a significant, but small effect of natural variation in background radiation on mutation rates, DNA damage and DNA repair.
2. There were significant effects of natural variation in background radiation on immunology and disease including cancer.
3. The findings reported here are inconsistent with a general role of hormesis from low levels of natural background radiation.
4. ..."

Re:NIMBY

[macpacheco]

Most scientists nowadays were raised with the nuclear bad, peace good mantra.
I believe we need both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
I believe we didn't had WWIII exactly because of mutually assured destruction from nukes.
I am in favor of no more nuclear tests, ever. But I'm not in favor of reducing the USA nuclear arsenal to a few hundred nukes. And I'm not in a NATO country.
I believe Canada, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, ... and other advanced societies should have each about 5-50 nukes proportional to their population.
It's an excellent deterrent to prevent war is the solution mentality that happens in many dictatorships.
You need to look no further than the current China overtures to take over Islands that have been Japanese since WWII. They don't really mean it. It's used to take the Chinese minds away from their serious internal problems.
Iran would need to be a real democracy for at least 50 years before they are elegible. Saudi Arabia would also need to become one.
China and Russia would be forced to give them away, since they aren't real democracies anyhow. I know, one can dream.
I'm from Brazil, and I'm not sure my country is stable enough to have them yet, but there are rumours that the USA provided us with a few during the cold war.

Just like that, people lock on to any shred of bad nuclear energy news as justification we need to get rid of it, a faustian bargain, blah blah blah.
We need nuclear now, it's the only solution that would fix global warming.
I'm willing to bet big bucks that 10 years from now, wind and solar will still not have offset not even 50% of coal and natural gas from electricity.

We need to separate getting radiation (alpha, beta, gamma, neutrons, x-ray, neutrinos/anti neutrinos, photons) from ingesting radioactive materials. The former aren't a real problem. Some types of the latter are.

Re:NIMBY

[macpacheco]

The video I posted isn't an area flagged as don't sunbathe here, dangerous radiation.
Every square ft of both beaches mentioned are crowded right now (10AM, summertime here).
If there was any real danger, the area would have been marked off limits.
If there was any real danger, with the area not isolated, there would be lots of isolated cases of cancer among young people.
Again, those radiation hot spots are sought after because they are KNOWN to alleviate chronic diseases sintoms.
Any studies that fail to recognize well known facts by the local population, of the health benefits of those hot spots, have anti nuclear biases.
Do you know most smoke detectors contains about 0.29 micrograms of Americium-241 producing 37000 becquerels, enough to make a geiger counter spike hard if you jam one into the Am-241 inside it. Ok a fraction of a microgram is tiny, but it's not a mile away, it's right in your house !
Am-241 isn't a natural element. It can only be made inside a nuclear reactor or some other neutron source (U-238->U-239->Pu-239->Pu-240->Pu-241->Am-241).
Tens of millions of people walk right up to one of those every day.
Stop with the anti nuclear scaremongering.

"popular resistance"?

[Mr. Slippery]

TFA article does not use the term "popular resistance", but properly labels it "not-in-my-backyard" resistance. TFA notes that "Germanyâ(TM)s Energiewende, or energy transformation, has enjoyed widespread citizen support.".

Submitter and editors either do not know what "popular resistance" means, or deliberately spun this post.

Re:"popular resistance"?

[DigiShaman]

Ohm's law will do that. Popular indeed.

Re:"popular resistance"?

[ackthpt]

Yeah. 3,300 Ohm resistors were some of my favorites, but for popularity it's mighty tough to beat the trusty 47 KOhm 5% tolerance 1/4 watt film resistor for popularity.

Re:"popular resistance"?

[plover]

Submitter and editors either do not know what "popular resistance" means, or deliberately spun this post.

It's obvious: popular resistance = popular voltage / popular current.

But I can't help but wonder if the author intended to refer to popular impedance.

Re:"popular resistance"?

[serviscope_minor]

3,300 Ohm resistors were some of my favorites,

Me too, but eventually, I found that the 3,300 Ohm ones couldn't reproduce the richness of base base I'd come to expect. There also lacked depth and there was a certain tinnyness quality, too.

I found that the 3,301 ohm ones (more expensive, but worth the price) were a substantially better match to my Denon cables.

Re:"popular resistance"?

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

for popularity it's mighty tough to beat the trusty 47 KOhm 5% tolerance 1/4 watt film resistor for popularity.

.
You are outright populistic! A crowd pleaser with no vision whatsoever! Someone really caring about others would at least mention that resistive and capacitive balasts must be balanced!

You rightwing chauvenist pig! You!

Re:"popular resistance"?

[LordVader717]

The energiewende is just a euphemism for scrapping nuclear power. No extra commitments to alternative energy were made, and it certainly isn't clear if any projects enjoy widespread support.

Re:"popular resistance"?

[angel'o'sphere]

The german plans are that we are 100% renewable till 2030, wich extra commitments do you want further?
This plan has wide spread suport, obviously everyone believes they won't build a wind park in front of his/her house or a power transmission line.

Look, all energy has downsides

[WillAffleckUW]

Seriously, all energy transmission involves impacts. Visual impacts, noise impacts, perceived risk factors from electromagnetic effects.

The only way around that is on-site generation and co-generation.

Maybe they should stop making "more" transmission lines for power and start using co-generation of their waste heat in the industrial south so that they "need" less energy.

And slap some solar panels and some passive solar on those buildings, reducing the cooling power usage by better building and manufacturing designs.

That would be wiser.

And less dependent on stolen Greek money by German banks that never paid WW II reparations for looting Greece.

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[viperidaenz]

Or just use the excess geothermal power available from up north... Since it can provide base load power, unlike solar.

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[Nethemas the Great]

Maybe they should stop making "more" transmission lines for power and start using co-generation of their waste heat in the industrial south so that they "need" less energy.

Partly right. If they don't want transmission lines then perhaps they should answer "NIMBY" by using wireless microwave transmission instead?

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[ackthpt]

How about no power lines, no power for YOU!

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[Ralph Wiggam]

Or just use the excess geothermal power available from up north.

Could you provide more details on this? The only geothermal plants I see in Germany are tiny 5MW deals. It would take 200 of those to replace one nuclear reactor.

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[WillAffleckUW]

Ignores the energy loss due to transmission. Smarter to modernize outdated industrial processes so they use cogeneration on-site. No need for new transmission lines, less vulnerable to terrorism, less vulnerable to 100 year events that climate change is making happen every 2-3 years now.

Easiest way to do that is remove capital depreciation on older plants that don't use cogeneration and provide 1 percent interest capital loans with 5 year payback cycles for installing new cogeneration equipment. Carrot and stick.

Problem solved.

NEXT!

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[Ralph Wiggam]

Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of co-generation. A 5MW geothermal plant costs about $25M. Replacing a 1GW nuclear reactor with 200 of those would cost $5B. That's a 20%-40% price premium over nuclear.

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[WillAffleckUW]

You're ignoring the increased power cost to build, ship, and regulate loads of power over long distances.

Co-generation allows one to REDUCE power used, REDUCE pollution (since site location means no transmission), and also reduce heat impacts on the environment.

All supposed aims of the German government.

Plus, it's cheaper.

But it does require you to stop subsidizing old inefficient methods of industrial production.

Which, surprisingly, creates more German jobs for Germans.

Can't have that, right?

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[Ralph Wiggam]

You're ignoring the increased power cost to build, ship, and regulate loads of power over long distances.

Co-generation allows one to REDUCE power used, REDUCE pollution (since site location means no transmission), and also reduce heat impacts on the environment.

All supposed aims of the German government.

Plus, it's cheaper.

But it does require you to stop subsidizing old inefficient methods of industrial production.

Which, surprisingly, creates more German jobs for Germans.

Can't have that, right?

High voltage transmission loses less than 1% per 100 miles. Germany isn't even 500 miles across.

You think that building 200 power stations that involve drilling 5000m deep holes will have no environmental impact?

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[WillAffleckUW]

I think you're focused on the "new" power stations. I'm talking about cogeneration, which is a method used in advanced societies like China and Vietnam, whereby you turn the waste heat at all levels into power.

Perhaps Germany isn't up to that level, sadly, but maybe they can join the 21st Century soon and, instead of making "new" power generation, cut the energy use they currently waste in power generation (coal plants) and in heating/cooling buildings (most can use passive solar to drive fans and cut energy in industrial storage and prefab in half) and in industrial production (cogeneration using waste heat again).

But, hey, I used to be a member of USWA, so what does a former steelworker know about such things that have been around for more than 30 years but never were done because the old methods were/are subsidized .... even if I have college courses in that and am reading all the power generation scientific papers on what's happening in this field in preparation for my doctorate.

No, let's just stick to the old wasteful energy-inefficient tax-subsidized methods and build more power plants and transmission lines we don't need.

There's a reason why we in the Western US (CA,OR,WA,BC) are eating your shorts in terms of GDP per capita. And it has to do with letting go of the past and becoming more efficient.

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you check if the industry in the south of Germany produces excess heat that can be harvested?
The big ironworks are in the west of Germany (i.e. NRW). Bavaria is, apart from BMW, mainly high-tech industry.

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[Applehu Akbar]

Germany has been there and done that. An ancient volcanic structure in southwestern Germany was explored for geothermal potential. Wells were drilled and water was injected. But when a 3.5 earthquake rattled dishes in Basel just across the border, the eco-weenies abandoned geothermal as being another power source too horrendously dangerous to contemplate.

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[Anonymous Coward]

how can you compare Germany and a product like BMW to the advanced society of Vietnam?

Re:Look, all energy has downsides

[HornWumpus]

Dude, the cogen build out has been going on for decades, world wide, driven by market forces.

At this point they are building hot houses besides rural power plants, in some cases to functionally replace cooling towers. The low hanging fruit is long gone.

Not exactly

[timeOday]

"Germany's Renewable Plan Faces Popular Resistance" implies that Germans in general are opposing renewables. In fact it is a simple case of objection to a particular development project by the specific people who live in its path. It's no different than if somebody were building a shopping mall or a road; some people are adversely impacted and they want to be compensated or block the development altogether.

Re:Not exactly

[PPH]

This.

Its a poor use of the word "popular" which can mean "of the people as a whole". Resistance by affected neighborhoods' residents doesn't imply that it is common or shared by the German population in general.

Re:Not exactly

[Dorianny]

The opposition to this project is in fact just local opposition by people being affected by its construction but unfortunately it underscores a big problem that switching to Renweable Energy faces, namely the need for a lot of land and ugly infrastructure. In industrialized nations where land is expense, property rights are strong and citizens are very vocal in their opposition its almost impossible to envision a large scale sustained switch to Renweables.

Re:Not exactly

[mjwalshe]

Depends as with the flooding in the UK are these important people with big houses in rich areas or poor people in rented accommodation.

Re:Not exactly

[timeOday]

Oilfields and strip mines aren't particularly attractive either, and the problem faced by the Germans in the path of this power line are no different than those in the path of the new Keystone XL pipeline, except that a power line can't burst open and flood your property with flammable toxins. I happened to be visiting Canada last year when this happened and people were not amused.

It's true that solar and wind aren't very dense, on the other hand you can use the same plot of land indefinitely instead of stripping it and moving on to consume yet more land, and solar can use rooftops that are wasted space (in fact we pay good money to get rid of the heat they collect). This also generates power onsite so their is no long-haul infrastructure. Here in New Mexico a lot of people are putting up solar panels on their homes. It is real.

the transmission would go further

[Bender Unit 22]

Norway (and Denmark iirc) have plans on laying down more (sea) cables to Germany so I guess this link in reality would connect southern Germany to Norway.
The countries are already trading energy and I would guess they would need this as a mini super grid to make a larger percentage of the energy renewable.

Bonus nerd info. Heres a link to a almost live view of the input and output of electricity and natural gas from Denmark: http://www.energinet.dk/Flash/...

Re:the transmission would go further

[Yaotzin]

Norway is, I think, mostly hydroelectric and probably at peak coverage already. I wonder, how much power can they supply Germany with? Cool map by the way.

Re:the transmission would go further

[angel'o'sphere]

No the project mainly aims to connect the northern german wind plants to the south. Often there is so much wind power produced that plants need to be disconnected/shut down. Of course connecting Denmark and Norway as well will likely happen, but in relation to our own wind production they both don't deliever so much power.

Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[Dr. Spork]

It appears that no source of power is clean enough for the Germans, except brown coal (the shittiest, dirtiest, world-destroying-est source of electricity of all time). In order to make up for the closure of non-polluting nuclear powerplants, they built brown coal burning plants, and yet they still felt all smug about it - as their carbon footprint went from bad to terrible. And now this. Germans!!!! (fist shaking)

You already have the most expensive electricity in Europe, and since your Atomaussteig, you also have some of the dirtiest electricity in (Western) Europe (in emissions per MW). You're not good at this game!

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[viperidaenz]

Price is the reason they're burning brown coal instead of gas.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget ceding sovereignty to Russia in return for natural gas. Those pipes get turned off, there will have to be major emergency precautions taken to prevent tens of thousands of Germans from freezing.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[Anonymous Coward]

In California we're facing much the same dilemma. State law is calling for fully one-third of all electricity generated in the State to be from renewable sources in less than 10 years. This simply won't happen and it'll be very interesting to see what happens when the legislature is faced with this reality.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying a policy where you replace 20% of your power generation with eco darling renewables and offset the cost of those extravagantly expensive sources with the cheapest, filthiest crap on Earth for the 80% part isn't particularly admirable?

but, but, but Germany is a Leader in Green Energy and so is our bestie friend China Leading the way to Green Energy herp derp not the stupid fat merica and the dirty pollute they make no!!!1

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears that no source of power is clean enough for the Germans, except brown coal (the shittiest, dirtiest, world-destroying-est source of electricity of all time). In order to make up for the closure of non-polluting nuclear powerplants, they built brown coal burning plants, and yet they still felt all smug about it - as their carbon footprint went from bad to terrible. And now this. Germans!!!! (fist shaking)

You already have the most expensive electricity in Europe, and since your Atomaussteig, you also have some of the dirtiest electricity in (Western) Europe (in emissions per MW). You're not good at this game!

Um, let's compare to the US, shall we? Germany, 2013, 810 million tons CO2, 607 million MW h / yr. US, 2010, 5,369 million tons CO2, 3,886 million MW h / yr. Germany is more efficient in power per CO2 emissions.

Don't feel bad, though, because whoever wrote the summary is also ignorant -- it is the north, not the south, that is most industrial.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[mischi_amnesiac]

Just a small correction. It's Atomausstieg. Ie is a prolonged i. Ei is similar to the english "I" as in "I am ".

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[jafac]

Same thing they do on every other issue.

"Fuck you" to the rural communities, and "whatver you want/need" to the big cities, and especially the Prison Guards' and Police Unions.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[The Grim Reefer]

Um, let's compare to the US, shall we? Germany, 2013, 810 million tons CO2, 607 million MW h / yr. US, 2010, 5,369 million tons CO2, 3,886 million MW h / yr. Germany is more efficient in power per CO2 emissions.

Don't feel bad, though, because whoever wrote the summary is also ignorant -- it is the north, not the south, that is most industrial.

I don't know where you got your numbers, but here's what is on Wikipedia for CO2 And GWh generated. Let's at least compare the same year for each country.

• US: CO2 6,750,000 / 4,256,100 GWh=1.59 tons of CO2 per GWh
• Germany: CO2-810,000 / 617,600 GWh=1.31 tons of CO2 per GWh

It's certainly better than the US, but considering this big push the Germany is in for clean energy and the US is only half-ass moving in that direction, I'm a little surprised it is as close as it is.

France is on the better side of this by far at: CO2-370,000 / 560,500 GWh=0.66 tons of CO2 per GWh

On the other side of the scale you have India: CO2-7,440,000 / 1,053,900 GWh= 7.06 tones of CO2 per GWh.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Subsidized local industry is the reason they're burning brown coal instead of gas.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[jonwil]

If the governments of this world took all the subsidies and concessions and things away from the coal, oil and gas industries, coal wouldn't be as cheap and the incentives to use better alternatives to generate electricity would be higher.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[Kohlrabi82]

I don't know where you got your numbers, but here's what is on Wikipedia for CO2 And GWh generated. Let's at least compare the same year for each country.

• US: CO2 6,750,000 / 4,256,100 GWh=1.59 tons of CO2 per GWh
• Germany: CO2-810,000 / 617,600 GWh=1.31 tons of CO2 per GWh

It's certainly better than the US, but considering this big push the Germany is in for clean energy and the US is only half-ass moving in that direction, I'm a little surprised it is as close as it is.

This is because Germany now uses coal power plants instead of nuclear plants to produce the necessary electricity.

France is on the better side of this by far at: CO2-370,000 / 560,500 GWh=0.66 tons of CO2 per GWh

How surprising, nuclear energy is green energy.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a little surprised it is as close as it is.

21% better is stretching the definition of "close".

France is on the better side of this by far at

France is also far less industrialized.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[Uecker]

This is because Germany now uses coal power plants instead of nuclear plants to produce the necessary electricity.

Not really true, I posted numbers here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Use an underground cable

[ebno-10db]

Use an underground cable. They build underwater HVDC lines all the time, so you can build underground lines. One of the nice things about HVDC is that the capacitance between conductors doesn't cause losses, so you can put the conductors close to each other as long as you have sufficient insulation.

IIRC in the past the problem w/ buried HVDC lines is that the cables were so thick, and couldn't be bent too much, so you needed cable reels so big that they could only fit on a ship. I believe that problem has been solved, and you can now use cable reels that will fit on a truck.

Re:Use an underground cable

[Rhywden]

I'm all for it - as long as the guys opposing the "normal" cables also pay for the increased costs. Last time I looked DC high voltage cabling was about triple the costs of AC, all things considered (like the need to convert from AC to DC to AC)

Re:Use an underground cable

[ebno-10db]

HVDC cost is a function of line length. If it was always higher why would anyone use HVDC? The converters are expensive, but the actual cables are cheaper. The electrical losses are also lower for long distances, so that saves money too. Breakeven point for cables on land is about 500-600km, and this is an 800km link. The article doesn't say one way or another, but it'd be surprising if they weren't planning on using HVDC anyway. The cost of underground and overhead HVDC lines is about the same. It's actually surprising that the overhead isn't more expensive, considering the cost of building the towers.

Re:Use an underground cable

[thegarbz]

I was with you till you said underground. If you had the kind of money to lay underground transmission lines across an entire country you may as well fund free solar and battery storage on every roof of every house.

Re:Use an underground cable

[ebno-10db]

Do you have an estimate of the cost for these two approaches? I don't, and unless you do, how can you decide which is cheaper?

Re:Use an underground cable

[thegarbz]

I don't, but it wouldn't be too much of a difference. It's one thing to dig a small hole in your yard. It's quite another for a major government project to do it. Burying stuff is unbelievably expensive when done as a major project. If I want to provide power to the shed I get a shovel and start digging. If the government does it they get soil tests, get the lawyers to look into if they can, do underground surveys, and the project blows out before they even scratch the dirt.

I say this as someone who works and costs such major projects. We recently built a large overhead bridge structure to support a 6" oil pipeline, complete with wireless sensors to detect and alert large trucks of the obstruction because it was cheaper than digging under 3m of road.

Then you have the major problem of digging anything in Germany which is every time you dig into the ground near a city you end up uncovering an unexploded ordinance left over from the war. Going underground is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than going overhead, if not closer to 2 orders of magnitude.

Re:Use an underground cable

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

I was with you till you said underground.

Since 'undergroud' was the third word in his post, you weren't with him for a long time, it seems ;-)

Re:Use an underground cable

[Talderas]

Then you have the major problem of digging anything in Germany which is every time you dig into the ground near a city you end up uncovering an unexploded ordinance left over from the war. Going underground is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than going overhead, if not closer to 2 orders of magnitude.

I'm comforted by the fact that when the alien overlords destroy humanity and conquer earth we'll have left plenty of booby traps for them as they dig for resources.

Re:Use an underground cable

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably not an 800km line with connections only at the ends, instead, there will be multiple taps all across the country.

The "underground" part may be much more expensive in Germany than in the US, as it should be a lot harder to find a path using undeveloped land that is cheap and easy to dig up.

Re:Use an underground cable

[thegarbz]

Post? I lost him in the title :-P

Re: Use an underground cable

[Anonymous Coward]

You are joking but ordenance disposal teams find old bombs nearly daily 70 years after the war. Every couple of years a construction worker or farmer is killed by such bombs.

Do what the Swedes do

[carlhaagen]

Dig the power lines down instead of hanging them on pylons. In addition to pandering towards the senses of complaining house owners, it also solves the problem of critical outtages during storm seasons, which is why the Swedes are in the middle of dismantling pylons and moving their grid under the surface.

Re:Do what the Swedes do

[Anonymous Coward]

Dig the power lines down instead of hanging them on pylons. In addition to pandering towards the senses of complaining house owners, it also solves the problem of critical outtages during storm seasons, which is why the Swedes are in the middle of dismantling pylons and moving their grid under the surface.

Moving the cable underground has drawbacks. First of all it involves a whole lot of slow and expensive digging. Later you will have to dig again to check/repair the cable.

However there is a non-financial side to it as well. Using a ground cable mean the cable has to be insulated and that there is a ground connector on the other side of the insulation. This makes a crude capacitor, which knocks voltage and current out of phase. The more they are out of phase, the bigger the energy loss in the cable. This makes buried cables a bad idea for the environment. You can get around this issue by using DC as only AC is affected by capacitance. However using DC means expensive investments in ACDC converters.

The positive part about buried cables is that they are more resistant to storms. The most common cause of storm problems is trees falling over and Sweden has a lot of trees. Way more than Germany. This mean the risk is noteworthy lower in Germany, which is an important factor to remember when considering if it's worth the price to start digging. It's also claimed that they should be immune to lighting strikes. However lighting has a nasty habit of finding and melting underground cables meaning this problem will not go away. In fact I suspect the grounded wire on top of high voltage lines serves as better protection against lighting.

Another thing the Swedes do is use nuclear power (4 plants). However they are often out of the action due to maintenance or repairs and Sweden imports quite a lot of electricity. This mean even though Sweden claim not to use coal, it only mean they don't burn the coal themselves. They happily (ignorantly?) use electricity produced by burning coal elsewhere. Around 10 years ago a nuclear powerplant was kicked off the power grid. Another kicked in to save the voltage, but it shorted something and was kicked off as well. The result was a blackout for hours in the entire southern Sweden and Eastern Denmark. Both powerplant failures were due to lack of maintenance of the transformers at the plants.

All in all I'm not sure "just do like they do in Sweden" is a valid argument in an investment in the scale of billions. They (hopefully) do consider quite a lot before spending the money.

Re:Do what the Swedes do

[Anonymous Coward]

"First of all it involves a whole lot of slow and expensive digging. Later you will have to dig again to check/repair the cable."

compared to a whole lot of slow and expensive pylon raising/repairing and a whole lot of slow and expensive pylon construction+setup, you mean? and check the cable when? it's protected under ground, in a concrete pipe tunnel, inside a thick, cozy and insulating pvc pipe. are you stupid or something?

"The most common cause of storm problems is trees falling over and Sweden has a lot of trees. Way more than Germany. This mean the risk is noteworthy lower in Germany, which is an important factor to remember when considering if it's worth the price to start digging."

that passage in your post was so stupid, on so many levels, that i don't know where to begin. you write that as if any country on the planet decides to put up powerlines right next to trees without thinking about the risks. you must be trolling.

"However they are often out of the action due to maintenance or repairs"

no, they are not out of action often, or even rarely.

"They happily (ignorantly?) use electricity produced by burning coal elsewhere

"they" don't power their country on any noteworthy amount of that. e.on, the biggest seller of electricity in sweden, imports a -tiny fraction- of coal power into their grid to drive the so-called spot price up, since coal is more expensive in sweden due to environmental taxes. it's a trick that e.on - not sweden, but one actor on the market - use to get to sell their hydro/wind/nuclear power for a higher price. the fraction of coal power imported is somewhere in the region of a hundredth of a percent of the total annual consumption.

but hey, it's just a country known to have among the finest engineers, economists and city planners in the world. they should just have their govt's infrastructural planning organ hire you to do the maths on this instead.

Re:Do what the Swedes do

[Anonymous Coward]

I have worked in Germany on energy grid connection projects both onshore and offshore.
Two of the very few international companies that have the capability to do what is needed are ABB (Sweden) and Siemens (Germany).

Let's just say that laying HVDC cables onshore and offshore is a different beast. And we are talking about the big ones here, with integral effects on net stability.

Underground cables of this dimension are unpopular. Securing the rights to lay down this kind of length is really hard, you need contracts with almost all land owners and deowning for others (which is a bitch of course). Then, you need to do the actual laying on a tight schedule for every land owner individually. Anyone who has worked on this with (doesn't matterr if Swedish, German or Danish company doing it) knows this is impossible.
Another issue is that digging up earth is quite often easily more regulated and time consuming for environmental issues than building a few masts.
You think you could plan this all out, but you just can't.
Then, there's the issue of cable maintenance and net stability for these "backbone" grid connections. There's a lot of clever shit available, but if the whole system isn't n-asmuchaspossible, everyone is really, really unsure about the project. Germany has excellent net stability, almost no blackouts. The population really has no tolerance for power outages...
Combine that with the challenges of the Energiewende (Conventional energy is now close to unprofitable, nuclear in the south is shut down, renewable is only relatively stablle in the north)...

Shit ain't easy

Re:Do what the Swedes do

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have a solution for the problem! I am so smart! Why are you not just doing what you would do, if it would not cost like ten times?"

Yes, underground is possible. Yes, people would like to did them into the earth. Yes, it's also much more expensive to build and maintain.

Guess why pylons are picked here? Could it have to be with the fact they want to keep the price below like 10 bazillion and be able to maintain it for prices in the tens millions and not 100s of millions over the years?

Re:Do what the Swedes do

[khallow]

compared to a whole lot of slow and expensive pylon raising/repairing and a whole lot of slow and expensive pylon construction+setup, you mean?

Replace that with "fast and cheap" and you have it. For above surface work, you've just mentioned all the infrastructure needed. It's a lot cheaper and faster than digging extensive tunnels.

Re:Do what the Swedes do

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure you read that properly? In Sweden they put the individual house connections and other lower-voltage connections underground.
Something that was _completed_ in Germany over 10 years back (I know it, because that's when we stopped having regular outages during thunderstorms).
They certainly don't put the high-voltages ones underground. I know it because there are massive protests about extending one nearby, Worse. in difference to Germany they put them so low that it's not unusual for people cycling under them to get an electrical shock even at the current capacity. I've never even _heard_ of something like that happening in Germany (though I may just be ill-informed),

Re:Do what the Swedes do

[Anonymous Coward]

> However using DC means expensive investments in ACDC converters.

It will be a DC line anyway by current plans.

> The most common cause of storm problems is trees falling over and Sweden has a lot of trees.

This is utter nonsense in this context. We're talking about high-voltage lines. Trees don't fall over these since the trees are _far below_ them. And they are cut down long before they come even close, if you had the misfortune of a redwood tree managing to grow under your German powerline.

Re:Do what the Swedes do

[Anonymous Coward]

sweden removed their pylons between houses and inside city limits about 60 years ago during the 1960s. there isn't a single city where you find house connections on pylons anymore - at "best" you can find part of an industrial area in a city using pylons and hanging wires, but none of that in urban parts, since 50 years. yes, the op was right - sweden is indeed burying THEIR GRID under ground, the large pylons that connect across the countryside, those cables are what they are burying. there was a huge discussion about it, huge news, huge announcements etc.

How much is this going to cost?

[blindseer]

I think "green" energy would be great if it didn't cost so much. I may be mistaken but I recall that Germany has some of the most expensive power in Europe. The prices would be higher if they weren't buying electricity from France.

Part of what makes wind and solar expensive is that it is almost never where you need it. People like to live by water, fresh water to drink, sea water for cheap transport of goods. Industry likes to be where the raw materials are or can be transported to cheaply, by water usually. This may not always be where the wind blows, and sun shines. Granted, being by water can mean power from the natural flow of that water. If that was enough they they would not be running these power lines.

It's these long power lines that add to the expense of the power. I assume that over time people might move to where the power is cheap but then you now have a long transport line for food, water, clothing, whatever.

I see one of two things happening. "Green" energy is going to have some great leap in technology and there won't be arguments over power lines, we'll be able to produce the power where the people are because wind and solar will be so cheap and efficient. The other option is that people will change their minds on nuclear power. The status quo on burning coal, oil, and natural gas will only last so long as we can find it cheaper than wind and solar.

Last I checked wind costs twice as much as coal. Solar three times as much. Natural gas costs about the same as coal, unless used for peaking power then the price doubles. Electricity from burning oil costs about three times what coal power does so that's only done in special cases. Nuclear power costs about the same as coal power. With Germany rejecting nuclear power means that they will continue to have high electricity costs, and they'll only go up.

Government subsidies for "green" energy only mask the true costs, they will still be paying more but it will show on their tax bill instead of their utility bill. Subsidies don't lower the costs, it raises them, because now you have the government as a middleman. Nuclear is the only real option I see. Some leap in "green" energy technology might change that but it hasn't happened yet.

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[carlhaagen]

The argument isn't over power lines, it's over house owners on the countryside not wanting their scenery ruined.

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[blindseer]

Windmills and solar panels will change the scenery. Whether they "ruin" it is a matter of opinion. The power lines to connect them are inherent side effect to a power source dependent on location.

Nuclear power plants can be placed where the power is needed. Doesn't always remove the need to run ugly power lines but it does reduce it. Nuclear power plants could also be put underground if that is what people want. They can and have been put under water too.

The argument is about power lines now. It will be about windmills next time. Building delays, court cases, advertising, and other PR issues will add to the cost. As I pointed out before the cost for "green" power is already high and this will only drive it higher. I'm thinking that at some point these tree huggers will have an epiphany and BEG for nuclear power. The other options are freezing to death or pushing over trees to make room for windmills, power lines, and solar panels.

That "green" power isn't sounding so "green" any more, am I right?

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I may be mistaken but I recall that Germany has some of the most expensive power in Europe. The prices would be higher if they weren't buying electricity from France.

First part is right, second is grossly false.
Actually, Germany is exporting much more power than importing (if viewed over the year).
Especially in hot summer and cold winter the French nuclear grid is prone to outages - they are not allowed to overheat the rivers in summer and in winter they have similar problems with ice. Very unreliable!
The hot summer time on the other hand is great for German solar output while in winterly weather the windmills almost saturate the net.

Why is the power still so expensive, you might ask? (1/4 € per kWh)
Well, same explanation as for the gas price (1,6 € / Litre, thats over 7 $ / gallon). Someone makes great profit. And the state cashes in the taxes, benefitting from these high price.

Actually, the renewable energies are the only practical solution for decreasing prices in the middle and long sight.

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[angel'o'sphere]

I think "green" energy would be great if it didn't cost so much. I may be mistaken but I recall that Germany has some of the most expensive power in Europe. The prices would be higher if they weren't buying electricity from France.
Power prices depend on your contract, some have expensive power mine is rather cheap, calculated it a few days ago to something like 25cent/kW/h. I don't know what you mean with "green power is expensive". Wind power right now is the cheapest power.
Usually we export more power to france than we import. Someone pointed out that this was 2013 not the case, but I checked that not yet, the years before we usually exported to France every year more than we imported. And: how should importing power from france influence renewable power prices in germany??

Part of what makes wind and solar expensive is that it is almost never where you need it. People like to live by water, fresh water to drink, sea water for cheap transport of goods. Industry likes to be where the raw materials are or can be transported to cheaply, by water usually. This may not always be where the wind blows
Modern plants are build offshore, so yes we need special cables to transport it. Also most wind power is produced relatively north. And the south has more heavy industry concentrated. However in an existing grid that is no issue. So this "power is not produced where needed" is nonsense. As the article points out however: if we have a super windy day where power production surges, then we can not transport all that power south.

It's these long power lines that add to the expense of the power. No its not. The line mentioned costs something in the 4billion Euro range. It is only 800km long, so transmission losses are negligible. The rest of our country is full with similar lines, and cross bordering lines are longer, or do you think France and Germany trade only with cities/factories at the borders??

I see one of two things happening. "Green" energy is going to have some great leap in technology and there won't be arguments over power lines, we'll be able to produce the power where the people are because wind and solar will be so cheap and efficient. The wind is not where the people are. And it changes nothing at the fact that people don't like a wind farm in front of their house. Also: wind power is already very efficient. The only progress will be bigger windmills and cheaper windmills in the smaller range, and perhaps for home users better converters and storing solutions.
Last I checked wind costs twice as much as coal. Solar three times as much. Natural gas costs about the same as coal, unless used for peaking power then the price doubles.
Perhaps you should check again and make up your mind about what you want to talk: production costs, consumer prices, market prices at peaks etc.

With Germany rejecting nuclear power means that they will continue to have high electricity costs, and they'll only go up. Prices at markets already are dropping, consumer prices are expected to follow soon. In 15 years we are fully renewable, at the latest then the prices will drop.

Government subsidies for "green" energy only mask the true costs, they will still be paying more but it will show on their tax bill instead of their utility bill. That is why only homeowners get very small and moderated subsidies. The rest is payed by market rules that force grid operators to pay relatively high feed in traffics. Hence the price is payed by the customer and not by the government or by taxes.

Some leap in "green" energy technology might change that but it hasn't happened yet. It has happened. It happens all the time. You are blind because you are focused on Germany (without even paying attention what really is happening there) There are plenty of countries that have a much higher percentage of renewables than Germany has right now. You just don't pay attention to them :) Big mistake, they are also nice countries to make vacation ...

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[HornWumpus]

You lost us at 25cents/kWh being cheap.

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[Uecker]

The thing is, government subsidies and un-accounted external effects (health, CO2) mask the true costs of all kinds of energy. Nuclear would not even exist without a lot of governement funded research. The German subsidies for green seen actually not unreasonable high compared to former and current Nuclear subsidies, and there is reason to believe that this is money well spent. The difference is that they have been implemented by imposing a fee on electricity, and are not paid with general taxes.This was intentional to not have subsidies on the production side, but to penalize consumption, i.e. to avoid induced demand. This is smart, but puts a larger burden on low-income households.

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[Uecker]

Case in point, GB had to offer investors garantueed energy prices 2x the current market price to get them to invest in a nuclear power plant.

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[blindseer]

You lost us at 25cents/kWh being cheap.

Exactly. In much of the USA the price is less than 15 cents per kWh. I assume that the GP is talking about Euros compared to my dollars which does not help. With the exchange rate being about $1.40 to the Euro then I'm paying nearly 1/4 for electricity here as compared to Germany.

Saying that nuclear power in unreliable because France has to shut down their plants at certain times of the year is like saying all airplanes are unsafe because the Boeing 737 has issues with it's rudder getting stuck. France chose their reactor designs and sites poorly. That is why we don't make them like that any more.

New reactors can operate all year without concern of heating the local water supply. That is because there are new reactor designs that are air cooled and operate at much higher temperatures. Current reactors operate at about 300C, which can be an issue if the temperature outside is 40C. A molten salt reactor operates at about 600C. Even if the temperature was 50C outside the reactor could still operate.

Even the most efficient windmills can only work if the wind blows. Solar panels only work when the sun shines. Nuclear power, properly designed, can work all the time. I will grant that wind power prices may be cheap, and may be getting cheaper, but that still does not make the wind blow when we need power.

Perhaps you should check again and make up your mind about what you want to talk: production costs, consumer prices, market prices at peaks etc.

No, I don't need to make up my mind. That is because I am talking about the total cost of wind power, or the "real" cost of wind power. Wind power around here is cheap for the consumer, or at least it appears that way. It's cheap because it is subsidized by the government and backed up by cheap natural gas. Remove the subsidies, and the natural gas, and it gets real expensive. It gets expensive because storing electricity in batteries is expensive. The losses in transmission lines, the cost of building and maintaining those transmission lines, for windmills far from where the electricity is consumed also adds to the cost.

I'm probably wasting my time and should have stopped long ago in explaining this. I will say that in the USA we get about 4% of our electricity from wind, Germany gets probably over 10% from wind. In the USA our prices for electricity is less than half what it is in Germany. I believe this is more than coincidence.

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[angel'o'sphere]

You forget that:
a) I use very little energy, so one big chunk of my personal price are fixed costs (something like 1500 kWh a year)
b) you in the USA use often far more than ten times the energy ... if you would reduce your energy usage your prices would go up, too. Nut you would likely still safe money
c) a third of my power price is taxes, I bet more even. In the USA the power prices are artificially hold low to keep the populace happy.

Well if you can not make up your mind about costs, talking about costs is pointless. You don't even come clost to any true costs that way. E.g. why should your wind plants have back up gas plants? That makes no sense to me, we certainly have not.

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[HornWumpus]

I have worked in utility simulation for operations and planning, clients on six contents.

I guarantee your wind plants have some sort of backup spinning. Because every control/transmission (terminology varies) area is required to keep backup spinning equal to it's largest generation source or interconnect line. That's why hydro plants are so valuable. You leave them idle, ready to pickup the load whenever something else goes down. Most don't have enough water to run full time in any case. So you use them as peakers and 'spinning' reserve*. You spin for your biggest power source (most often an nuke or a transmission line), but it enables you to use unscheduled power like solar and wind. Philosophically you could argue that the cost of the spin should be born by the big generator as that's what drives the legal issues, or you could argue that the cost of the spin should be born by the generators that actually cause the system to call on the reserves. In practice Wind generators are usually unable to make firm power delivery commitments. So they get paid an un-firm power price or arrange backup power on their end. Spinning units get paid a capacity charge for being ready to go when called on.

Also note the 'capacity factor' for wind generation is low. Capacity factor = actual generation/theoretical maximum generation for a given study period. Wind has a nasty tendency to fluctuate inconveniently. Less so in offshore, but still.

*Hyrdo plants are often not actually 'spinning' but spin up fast enough to meet the definition.

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[HornWumpus]

Also power has a backwards sloped supply curve in your imagination? It we used less, it would be cheaper.

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[angel'o'sphere]

According to your view every plant would need a backup. and then you would need a backup for the backup and so on.

Perhaps you mean "reserve energy". Reserve energy you have ready regardless of the source of the power, so it does not matter if that is wind or nuclear or coal.

The cost schema for that works quite similar as you propose.

The capacity factor depends on many things and is only interesting if you plan/build a plant. Offshore plants have a capacity factor of 130% or more. They usually produce 45% of the time power at rated level and over 50% of the time ABOVE rated level. Perhaps 300h - 500h per year they produce less or are standing still

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[HornWumpus]

Not my view. I'm trying to explain how things are.

Reading comprehension: Every plant does not need a backup. You need to spin for the largest single power source in the area. No plant has perfect reliability.

You're bad at math aren't you? Capacity factors can't be over 100%. In reality they can't be 100%. You can't improve your capacity factor by de-rating your plant. Only an MBA would even attempt such topery. Bullshit on your #s.

Quoting wikipedia:

As of April 2011, the Danish wind farm Horns Rev 2[3] (the world's largest when it was inaugurated in September 2009[4] comprising 91 Siemens SWT-2.3-93 wind turbines each of 2.3 MW) with a nominal total capacity of 209 MW, has the best capacity factor of any offshore wind farm at 46.7% having produced over 1.5 years 1,278 GWh.

cites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

AGAIN: BULLSHIT ON YOUR NUMBERS!

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[angel'o'sphere]

Most capacity factors are simply wrong and written into wiki pedia by hobbyists (and plant operators don't use that term anyway, it only exists since a few years invented by forum posters).
Windmills are designed for a certain expected wind speed, if the wind is constantly higher they produce more power than rated, it is that simple. Offshore plants usually produce far more power than rated. (Check the baltic sea plants of http://enbw.com/

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[HornWumpus]

My cite wasn't to Wikipedia it was to Wikipedia's cite list for the # I posted.

Power is limited by winding size in the generator. You can't just generate 150% of rated power when the wind is stronger then the design speed. When that happens they shut the windmill down to prevent damage. Again: You are bad at math and physics, aren't you?

At this point I have posted a cite supporting my position. You have an irrelevant site and unsupported opinion.

So readers decide for yourself: Value supplied by EE supported by cite, 48% or value boldly asserted by someone who obviously doesn't understand how an alternator works, 140%...

You have never talked to a plant operator! Much less anybody from the grid control room. The grid control guys run 'my' (team lead) software to do day and week ahead Monty Carlo simulations with real time initial conditions from SCADA.

Capacity factor has been used for decades. Plant operators get worried when their plants capacity factor goes too low, they know it means they may be working at a new plant soon (depending on the plant type). Mostly plant operators keep their plant running and stand watch for any problems. System planning guys are the ones with plant lists sorted by capacity factor.

Re:How much is this going to cost?

[angel'o'sphere]

Power is limited by winding size in the generator. You can't just generate 150% of rated power when the wind is stronger then the design speed. When that happens they shut the windmill down to prevent damage. Of course you can, happens roughly 25% od the running hours of a wind plant, and it is not 150% it is 300%, roughly 50% they run at rated, another 25% above rated and bottom line something like 2% they are offline (substract the 2 wgere you like it best)
Why don't you check http://enbw.com/ and click on english and search for "wind park" or "baltik 1" (or baltic 1) and you get nice reports about the two research wind parks of the EnBW?

Again: You are bad at math and physics, aren't you?My math might be rusty but actually I have a degree in both, euqivalent of a bachelor, actually a bit higher. Wa a side effect when I studied computer science.

At this point I have posted a cite supporting my position. You have an irrelevant site and unsupported opinion. Why is EnBW.com irrelevant? It is a majour power company.

So readers decide for yourself: Value supplied by EE supported by cite, 48% or value boldly asserted by someone who obviously doesn't understand how an alternator works, 140%...
You forget several things. The 48% you post is the actual, power produced by the plant. As the load on the grid varies from roughly 40% (in fact lower) in the night between 1:00 and 5:00 to 100% at peak, obviously the plant has to be powered down. Especially if you take into account that Denmark (you linked a danish plant, no? Or no it was our parent) produces a high amount of its power by wind and at that time in the day they rarely find buyers on the international market.

You have never talked to a plant operator! Much less anybody from the grid control room.
As I wrote or was involved in developing nearly every software used by them: yes I was in their comtrol rooms and talked to them (lots of talks as I worked 30% of my time as requirements engineer)
The grid control guys run 'my' (team lead) software to do day and week ahead Monty Carlo simulations with real time initial conditions from SCADA. Sounds pretty strange but interesting. Are you sure it is not just load profile based prognosis with weather data and actual data from today? What should a monte carlo simulation help in running a grid? Never heared about something like that.

Capacity factor has been used for decades. Perhaps the term is so old that it got phased out already? Frankly, unlike as a hobbyist who wants to have a plant on his own property (and can not freely chose the position or orientation of the plant) the term is pretty useless. As a matter of fact: no databse of www.enbw.com contains that term.

Plant operators get worried when their plants capacity factor goes too low, they know it means they may be working at a new plant soon (depending on the plant type).
Surey ... sigh, and how should that happen? A coal plant can lose pipes, they tend to burst overt time and get replaced during maintanace ... but what other kind of plant should lose 'capacity factor' ... there comes nothing to mind.

Mostly plant operators keep their plant running and stand watch for any problems. System planning guys are the ones with plant lists sorted by capacity factor. Erm, system planning guys are those who plan to build new plants? Or the dispatchers who dispatch a fleet of plants? The software (s) I worked on, which is used for all plants of the EnBW certainly has no such field, and I know for sure that none of the databases have that field. So if they use it for something in planning it must be via Excel sheets :)

Put money where mouth is

[Cajun Hell]

My algorithm for NIMBY is "I'll let this be in _my_ backyard, for n dollars/euros," where you set n to zero and slowly increase it until you get a combination of bids that can be assembled into a working solution. Then you charge the NIMBYers whatever cost that is, to pay the bids. You wanna pay an extra 7 cents per KWh to have the lines be somewhere else? Ok. You don't want to pay it? Ok, you get the lines, and lower energy costs than your stuck-up neighbors.

How does everyone not win (or at least break even) in such a scenario?

Re:Put money where mouth is

[thegarbz]

Unionising. When you start at zero and work your way up you'll meet group resistance from the people affected. We had this here recently with tunnel projects. The properties which needed to be reclaimed at the tunnel exit were eventually all sold to the government for nearly 8 times their actual value.

I would love a government to try and build a HV transmission line in my backyard. I should get nearly $8m for my property if history is anything to go by.

Re:Put money where mouth is

[Cajun Hell]

I would love a government to try and build a HV transmission line in my backyard. I should get nearly $8m for my property if history is anything to go by.

And everyone lived happily ever after. Take the $8M if that's what everyone insists upon shoving in your face. The people who paid it, feel good. I'd add "comma chump sucker" to the end of that, but everyone (including you) is laughing their asses off, so it's hard to type. That is how appropriate the "everyone lived happily ever after" thing is.

Re:Put money where mouth is

[thegarbz]

Yep, until my next rates notice says I owe $10 more due to rising government costs.

Re:Put money where mouth is

[swillden]

Yep, until my next rates notice says I owe $10 more due to rising government costs.

You have $8M!

Re:Put money where mouth is

[thegarbz]

Only if it was my property being sold. A few years ago the government reclaimed an entire town in order to build the dam. Just before approval the greens managed to get it knocked down because of a single species of frog that lived in the area. They are now sitting on $1m worth of land they spent over $200m on.

Naturally this $200m black hole had to come from somewhere.

I'm not saying there's a better way, but this is far from a simple way of building infrastructure which can quickly lead to cost blowouts as people come together to try and screw the government ^H^H^H^H everyone else out of money.

how do you say...

[slashmydots]

What's the German translate of boo-fucking-hoo you whiney, self-important, stuck up assholes? When a global warming-induced hurricane makes landfall so far it hits Germany, that might have a bigger effect on their house than a construction crew and some wires to look at.

Re:how do you say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Btw., we learnt from the three little pigs decades ago.

Re:how do you say...

[Applehu Akbar]

"What's the German translate of boo-fucking-hoo you whiney, self-important, stuck up assholes?"

Schadenfreude.

Cut them off

[Anonymous Coward]

Take them off the grid a few hours. Then come back and ask the question again.

Ah, the perennial ice storm argument...

[rmdingler]

Underground electrical is more expensive to install.

Underground burial greatly reduces heat transfer from transmission lines, as the surrounding earth eventually becomes a saturated heat sink.

Underground repairs are more common and more expensive than aerial repairs, so unless freezing rain is a seasonal issue, it doesn't pay once the initial investment is surrendered.

Underground service lines are not free of problems, and fail with more frequently due to lightning strike and flooding.

Legacy lines are mostly overhead, so we're talking massive outlays of money to rebuild a new grid.

Re:Ah, the perennial ice storm argument...

[ebno-10db]

Legacy lines are mostly overhead, so we're talking massive outlays of money to rebuild a new grid.

We're talking about the construction of an entirely new line, not rebuilding an old legacy one.

Also, are you talking about underground distribution in general, or HVDC in particular? They're different issues.

Why is renewable power centralized?

[Karmashock]

It doesn't need to be and shouldn't be centralized.

I can't power my home with a personal coal power plant or power my home with a personal nuclear power plant. But I CAN power my home with a personal solar array or wind mill or whatever. Renewable power should be decentralized.

Rather then pushing these big renewable plants, instead give home owners a machine that lets they use locally sourced power in their home electrical grid. So the system will take from local power before it draws from the grid.

This makes more sense for a lot of reasons.

1. The land required for renewable energy is huge. But if everyone uses a little of their roof space then its no big deal. And they don't need to supplant ALL energy consumption just some of it.

2. You don't waste energy in transmission or over supply. The point should be to have homes be more self sufficient so they don't need as much power from the grid. Not to supply the grid with their power. That isn't economical. Rather simply have people need less because they produce some of their own power.

3. Personally sourced power is largely immune to price fixing, political blackmail, and other attempts to control people through energy supply. This is because the power is supplied by solar cells and other similar things that can be bought from many sources. The issue with the Russian pipeline is really only the best known example. There are many examples on a daily basis all over the world.

4. Nothing is as likely to get renewable energy installed and maintained then personal participation in it. The world is littered with failed green energy projects on all continents. But the solar power cells on people's roofs... those work. Those are maintained.

etc...

It shouldn't be centralized. Renewable energy should be decentralized.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[Nemyst]

Because of efficiency. Renewables aren't magically less prone to efficiency benefits with scale. Large-scale solar plants don't use the same photovoltaic cells that you will on your roof because they're absolutely terrible for efficiency (in terms of space, but more importantly cost) - they'll use large-scale reflectors and water tanks. The wind mill you put in your backyard will never reach the same peak capacity that industrial wind mills get; it's too small and not high enough. Let's not even talk about hydro, which isn't trendy but still is a renewable by all accounts.

There are advantages to distributed power, and they can be combined, but relying purely on distributed renewables is a bad idea.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[Karmashock]

You lose a lot of that efficiency in the rest of the system.

Panels on your house don't need hundreds of miles of cable. They don't need big transformer stations. They don't need the grid itself. There is so much cost added and efficiency lost in the transmission that you really are playing a zero sum game.

And if you supply even a SMALL amount of power locally it adds up.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

I can't power my home with a personal coal power plant or power my home with a personal nuclear power plant. But I CAN power my home with a personal solar array or wind mill or whatever.

Those who complain about a powerline close to their home are certainly not be willing to have a huge windmill close by. And for your information: a small windmill in your backyard isn't going to cut it. You need a big industrial mill to get any meaningfull power output. This was the outcome of a study ordered by the dutch government where they were comparing several types of small windmills to see wich was best (none of them, they are all crap).

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[khallow]

Well, it's worth noting that both hydroelectric and pork are heavily centralized power sources. That's what's being serviced by these lines IMHO.

4. Nothing is as likely to get renewable energy installed and maintained then personal participation in it. The world is littered with failed green energy projects on all continents. But the solar power cells on people's roofs... those work. Those are maintained.

If solar gets cheap enough, then it'll be worth putting these things on your house even if the utility won't buy your excess power.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[Anonymous Coward]

Renewable energy in Germany isn't centralized. It just happens that the north has all the flat countryside with steady high winds, while the south has the industry that needs energy. "Personal" windmills aren't very useful, you need a suitable location and a very high tower to get something efficient.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[Anonymous Coward]

but it does not work that way.

- as far as I know the bigger part of problem are coastal wind turbine farms. you can't put wind turbines at roofs
- it would not solve anything. they don't want the new power lines to power homes. they need them for industry at south Germany. so the required new power lines would go not from wind/solar farms but from housing areas.
- it would be less efficient. people buying "budget" solar cells, thousands of small inverters and power meters would be much less efficient then "industrial" solar cells and few big inverters / transformers
- it would be much more expensive overall
- administration! energy companies are buying the power back from people.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[Karmashock]

If its their wind mill that they put by their home they might be fine with it.

For one thing, it could be one they bought to go with their home. Possibly it would look like one of those old dutch windmills.

  The ones used by the wind farms are ugly and industrial. If you had to sell them to home owners they might look very different.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[Karmashock]

Why should the government buy solar cells for power plants but people have to pay for them directly for their roofs?

What I am suggesting here is that INSTEAD of the centralized power plants we instead GIVE solar for people's roofs.

We don't even need to give the panels. Just give people the box that lets them plug a panel into the home and install it. Then they can decide if they want to buy a panel and put it in.

If it just canceled all the day time power use of all the residences that would be significant. Yes, that isn't their peak power usage. But they do use power then and if you did this they would use almost none.

Industry uses most of its power during the day. Well, residences use most when they come back from work. So the power can shift there.

once the system is in place for everyone to put solar on their roof with no hassle, I think you'll find more people doing it.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[khallow]

Why should the government buy solar cells for power plants but people have to pay for them directly for their roofs?

Because society is retarded?

What I am suggesting here is that INSTEAD of the centralized power plants we instead GIVE solar for people's roofs.

Why? I don't see the value in doing so. Either it's economically viable on its own in which case people will do it without need for such support. Or it's not, in which case we shouldn't be subsidizing poor economical decisions.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[Karmashock]

Except for they're building the solar power plants so your zero sum game argument isn't taking that into account.

Would I prefer if the government didn't try to social engineer everyone all the time?

Yes.

But if they're going to do it... and they are... then I want it to do it in a way that is more healthy.

Putting the units at everyone's home means people can install panels there without having to install anything else. All the electronics etc to wire into the home electrical grid would be there. So all an installer or a home owner has to do is buy a couple panels, screw them into the roof, and run a cable to the unit. DONE.

If everyone just had ONE solar panel at their house it would have a big impact of power consumption. It would mean most of the power used by homes during the day would be nullified.

And places with a lot of sun and probably a lot of heat... people would have an extra incentive to put more panels on the house to cancel out the AC.

Guilt free air conditioning.

Now, obviously your argument is that if this were practical people would do on their own.

Yes and no. Sometimes you need a catalyst to get things going. And simply having the electronics installed to handle panels in all homes would get people over that hump.

A simple array can be bought for about a dollar a watt. Does that make it competitive with the grid? Again... you don't need to replace all power use. Just take care of the power that homes eat during the day when no one is there. That alone will be a big step in the right direction.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[khallow]

But if they're going to do it... and they are... then I want it to do it in a way that is more healthy.

First, what makes you think this is more healthy? Distributed generation has its own problems. And the subsidy efforts have been tried before. There's just not that much value in slapping expensive panels on the sides of houses.

If everyone just had ONE solar panel at their house it would have a big impact of power consumption. It would mean most of the power used by homes during the day would be nullified.

While that would be nice, there isn't much need for it. After all, the current distribution system works quite well.

Also, you're in the peculiar grounds of the "politically feasible". Here, centralized power generators and distributors provide more reliable kickbacks, making their pork more "feasible" than it would be for distributed generators.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[Karmashock]

1. They have at no point tried GIVING people the box that lets you wire solar panels into a house for free as well as subsidize the installation 100 percent. That has NEVER been done.

Instead what they do is build tens of billions of dollars in boondoggle solar power plants in the desert that ultimately shut down after anywhere from five to ten years.

Have you ever seen the deserts of California? The ruins of abandoned green energy projects going back to the 60s are littered across the sand for hundreds of miles. We have them all over the country and likely the world. Google abandoned solar plant... you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

2. The current distribution system works well for nuclear, coal, geothermal, hydroelectric, natural gas, and other ALWAYS on generators.

It is however piss poor terrible for renewable that almost without exception product power unreliably and require vastly more land.

Look at all those empty roofs. Nothing on them. That is unused land in the middle of developed land. It has better access to the sun the anything else on most properties and it is a prime place to "A" panel.

You don't have to get crazy with the panels. Just providing a couple hundred watts at EACH home would be a major contribution.

And we don't need to trickle the excess power into the grid. For one thing the power companies hate that because it makes everything a lot more complicated. And for another the idea is to use 100 percent of locally generated power so there would be nothing to send anyway.

Using this system the grid would supply UNUSUAL power or power when your system wasn't generating anything. But the rest of the time your home could be self sufficient for power. That's a big deal.

And that would also spur people to use energy efficient technology more so then jacking up the price of electricity because people could potentially pay ZERO to the utilities if they manage their power carefully.

Or we can just pretend like its 1950 and run the power distribution system much as we did then... and then get upset when that system doesn't work well with defuse unreliable power sources like solar or wind.

The germans are finding this out in spades. There has been an explosion in coal power plants in germany because for every green wind mill power plant you need a coal power plant back up. Why? because the damn wind isn't reliable. It sometimes isn't windy. So if you want to avoid brownouts, you need to have coal power plants to take over.

Well what exactly does that accomplish? You now have lots of coal power plants taking over for nuclear power plants. YAY for the green revolution!!! Fucking morons.

For grid power, you need reliable power. Only reliable sources should even be hooked up to the grid. Which means, solar and wind shouldn't be on the grid at all unless you have a reliable means of storing power that so a constant rate of power can be produced. How practical is that? Not at all.

However, you can put solar and wind and even geothermal at people's homes and it works because what it really does is lower their energy consumption. And as a penny saved is a penny earned those are watts the grid doesn't have to provide.

Whatever though... you want to do things the stupid way... lets do it. Let just cover ourselves in honey and go wrestle bears!... RAWR!

fucktards.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[khallow]

They have at no point tried GIVING people the box that lets you wire solar panels into a house for free as well as subsidize the installation 100 percent. That has NEVER been done.

What makes this any better a use of public funds than chucking money at the usual suspects? Giving people stuff for free that they don't need doesn't strike me as an improvement.

You don't have to get crazy with the panels. Just providing a couple hundred watts at EACH home would be a major contribution.

Economically, you really need more than that. Installing panels isn't going to be cheap and the labor cost of putting even a small panel up on a roof is going to have a considerable ante (for most installations, someone will have to drive out, climb on the roof, and do some non trivial stuff which potentially can damage the roof). Similarly, the DC to AC conversion will cost considerable money even if it's just 200 watts instead of 2000 watts.

My view is that the price of the panels and of the various support equipment just isn't cheap or good enough at this time to justify mass installation.

And as a penny saved is a penny earned those are watts the grid doesn't have to provide.

If you spend a lot of pennies (even if it is Other Peoples' Pennies) to get to that point, then you're not actually saving pennies.

Re:Why is renewable power centralized?

[Karmashock]

1. In regards to what makes this better, because this way you're doing several superior things.

A). You're not screwing up the existing grid with unreliable power.

B). You are more efficiently using renewable energy by using it locally.

C). You are ACTUALLY enabling people to install solar on their homes at a very low cost. You can find panels on Amazon or ebay that retail for a couple hundred dollars. You'd need lots of them to power a whole house but all we want is to lower in the introductory cost of solar.

D). Local use suits solar better then municipal use because the unreliable nature of it is easier to mitigate if the local user is backed up with the grid. Rather then plugging these things into the grid and forcing the power company to try and make sense of it.

2. As to the panels, they're plenty cheap enough if you're only buying a couple of them. Its less then a thousand dollars. And as to the AC/DC equipment its no worse at the residential level then it is at the municipal level. So that's a zero sum game.

As to the cost of installing it... there are a lot of ways to bring that cost down. Area wide contracts for one could lower the per house installation cost. We find ways to pay for far more extravagant things all the time. I don't see why this is uniquely unaffordable.

3. Your answer is no solar or renewable energy at all. Which is a point that has merit until you understand that there is huge political support for doing something with renewable energy. As such, your "none of the above" answer is dead on arrival.

You don't have that choice.

Your choices are as follows:

Option 1: You can spend tens of billions building various green energy complexes that will be abandoned and defunct in 10 years.

Option 2: You can spend tens of billions letting average americans manage their own energy use and possibly give people some freedom from the grid.

Those are your choices.

Your option of none of the above simply won't happen. Be realistic.

I guess it's high voltage direct current

[mc6809e]

Otherwise we'd be talking about the project facing popular impedance rather than popular resistance.

Thinking laterally

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they just move the industry to where the power now is? The only reason the south is industrialised is because that's where the coal is.

Re:Thinking laterally

[Anonymous Coward]

The coal is not in the south of Germany, there is industry in the north, and it would be very strange if BMW left Bavaria.
Seriously, the south doesn't have more industry. It just makes more money.

Re:Thinking laterally

[BlackPignouf]

It might have to do with the fact that modern automobile was invented in Stuttgart (south of Germany).

The government is sabotaging the switch to renewab

[Anonymous Coward]

Together with the established power companies the do everything they can to stop renewables.
Corruption at the highest level, otherwise Merkel and her ministers would do something about it.

But they all hope for a warm seat after their political "career".

The new power line faces resistance from the people because it was deliberately designed to run close to residential areas and protected habitats.

The german population WANTS to shift to green energy. We are even willing to pay a little bit more for energy if we can shift from coal and nuclear power.

Sketchy Purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

What the article fails to mention (as do most german publications):
This DC high voltage overhead power lines are not primarily intended to transport renewable wind energy from the baltic sea wind parks to southern Germany - their primary use will be to transport power from the gigantic new coal power plants in eastern Germany to the south.

Still, the protests are likely about NIMBY anyway and not related to the intended use of the lines.

Typisch Deutsch

[BlackPignouf]

Typisch Deutsch:
* We don't want nukes
* We care about the environment
* We want big cars
* We want good air quality
* We have a lot of coal so why not use it?
* We want electric cars
* We don't want wind turbine, radioactive waste or power lines in our backyard
* We don't want to reduce our energy consumption
* We understand global warming is a big problem
* We want to fly to Mallorca twice a year
* We want cheap gas
* We want cheap electricity

I'd say most of the German population would agree with all those statements, without realizing that many of them are in direct contradiction.

NIMBY

[DrXym]

Not in my back yard. You can always count on people to pull excuses out of their asses why public infrastructure projects should go somewhere else just so long as it doesn't go through their area. In the case of power lines, all the usual excuses are pulled out - it affects health (no it doesn't), it affects property prices (it might, it might not and compensation might be offered in some cases), it should be buried underground (not always practical and vastly more expensive). And so on.

Ireland is suffering a similar public campaign for an interconnector meant to supply power to the West of Ireland more attractive to business by ensuring adequate power provision. You'd think people in the region would be happy about that since it would mean tens of thousands of jobs but a relatively small number of people affected by the route and politicians scared by the outcry have put the entire project on hold.

"Non-polluting nuclear"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, I see...
All this radioactive waste, which we cannot get rid of and cannot store safely, that is of course no pollution!
Better ask the Japanese or the Ukrainians about radioactive pollution.
Then please tell us your solution to the storage problem.

There's another problem for nukes

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't like being flooded.

So you place your nuke plant near the ocean and then the ocean floods it.

Bugger.

Oh and yes, nuclear can be cheap. As long as you run on a shoestring and don't clean up safely. Of course, you're then killing people, but they can always take you to court, right?

Re:There's another problem for nukes

[macpacheco]

Nothing "likes" being flooded.
If you are talking about Fukushima, they were warned that their Tsunami defenses were inadequate. Water cooled nukes are required to have three diesel backup generators, they put all of them such that if their insufficient Tsunami barriers were breached, they would all get flooded. They should have put at least two in a roof. Should they just took care of that there would have been no Fukushima accident.

Making Indian Point Redundant

[mdsolar]

There is a transmission bottleneck North of NYC as well. There is lots of renewable energy available from Quebec Hydro but few ways to get it to the city. One plan that avoids overhead transmissions lines is to run transmission lines under the Hudson River. This has the potential to replace power from Indian Point. Indian Point has a particularly troubled safety record and, owing to high surrounding property values and the Price Anderson subsidy for nuclear accident liability, could cause the federal government to default on its obligations in the case of an accident. Shutting Indian Point down thus has a great attraction, and the transmission plan may help with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Wrong

[DarthVain]

It has nothing to do with nature. I have had a lot of experience with the pointy end of many "environmental" groups.

Most environmental groups I have seen are made up of about 1% of people actually concerned about nature. The other 99% (particularly the money and resources they use for lobbying), is made up of land owners, and financial interests looking out for themselves and their investments. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but using the thin veneer of environmental concern to hide their more mundane purpose is a bit gutless.

Perfect example is the wind farms they have been trying to build off shore of Toronto, Canada. An environmental group has been fighting it successfully for over 10 years. Using things like the wind mills killing birds and such as an excuse. In reality the group is a bunch of rich pricks that are part of a cottagers association that own multi-million dollar cottages (if you can even call them that anymore), and don't want their property possibly hurt by the potential bad aesthetics of how the wind mills look off shore ruining their million dollar views.

100$ says the people and the money making up that environmental lobby opposing the power line, are not so ideologically opposed to the idea, but rather have actual land involved that will either be taken by the government (or at a price they don't think fair), or that the sight, or presence will somehow lessen the value of their land, etc...

The idealists that you see on the news standing up in front of these groups actually concerned for bunnies and trees unfortunately do not make up the larger population.