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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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).

"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.

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.

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: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.

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

[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

[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?

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]

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

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: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.

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.

I guess it's high voltage direct current

[mc6809e]

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

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: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.

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.