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

[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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.