Slashdot Mirror
Germany Is Burning Too Much Coal (bloomberg.com)
Several readers share a report: Germany is widely seen as a world leader in the fight against climate change. Thanks to its investments in renewable power, wind and solar energy provide a third of its electricity, more than double the U.S. share. Germany's goal to lower carbon-dioxide emissions 40 percent by 2020 is significantly more ambitious than that of Europe as a whole or the U.S. After the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed even greater determination. "We can't wait for the last man on Earth to be convinced by the scientific evidence for climate change," she explained. But there's another, troubling side to the German story: The country still gets 40 percent of its energy from coal, a bigger share than most other European countries. And much of it is lignite, the dirtiest kind of coal. As a result, Germany is set to fall well short of its 2020 goal. This dependence on coal is partly a side effect of Germany's abandonment of emissions-free nuclear power and partly foot-dragging on the part of a government wary of alienating voters in German coal country. During the summer election campaign, Merkel largely avoided the subject.
The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted. I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with all the capital investment involved, just doesn't make any sense. Especially when there is little risk of natural disasters in Germany.
If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal, the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment.
That 40% sounds like a required need for base load. I doubt they will be able to eliminate it without much wailing and gnashing of teeth from their utility engineers.
They could have accomplished their goals by keeping those nuclear plants going. Shame they let feelings get in the way of good energy policy.
But but but.. they SAID all the right things and virtue signaled in the prescribed manner!
It's great they completely dumped nuclear power though, because OMG RADEYAYSHUNS!!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
so let shutdown the factory's and jobs. Years after that the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany will come up and make Germany be free of EU control.
They should be burning clean American coal
Clean American coal is the future for America and the world's energy needs
They're going to be screwed once they hit Step 3.
The only country not part of the Paris accord is set to meet their goal. Odd.
Germany has spent 100s of billions on renewables without much to show for it. Their electricity rates are among the highest in Europe, yet they still pollute 10x as much as France" If they spent that money on next generation nuclear their emissions would have dropped. As it currently stands nuclear power is the only viable option to mitigate climate change.
Correction to your headline: They're not burning too much coal, which makes it sound like they're wasting coal by burning too much. In fact, this is just the opposite. The amount of coal they're burning is the amount necessary to provide 40% of the electricity to their country. A more accurate headline would be "Despite their reputation as a leader in renewable energy, Germany is actually burning more coal than most other European countries".
Germany is running out of reliable sources of power generation: If not coal or nuclear, then natural gas would be a good choice. But do they have the political capital to switch from one fossil fuel to another?
Tell that to Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Anyone considered just throwing it off planet?
Turn it into glassy lumps and simply throw it off planet with a linear accelerator. Take some gravitational influences into account and you could even aim it at the sun. The sun wouldn't notice the whole planet falling into and we're just talking about a few thousand tons of radioactive waste. (wait until we hear the arguments about polluting the sun. :-)
THis is to me really off topic.
Polluting the most when you're the main industrial nation of the region is hardly surprising. If Germany lowered their industrial base to that or Italy or Greece they'd also lower their carbon emissions too, but they'd have to import everything. All of Europe would need austerity measures to deal with the loss of the massive amount of capital that Germany injects into the EU economy.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
More likely the Envirowackos.
Nuclear is expensive due to incessant lawsuits and an uncertain regulatory environment. How many other 5 year, billion dollar construction projects are subject to the rules being change on a whim?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Ever since Trump pulled America out of the Paris accords, Merkel has been regarded as leader of the free world. She was going to make a relationship with China, and the Americans could go to the devil. So, I am just rather impatiently waiting for her to do her duty as world leader. Do the things she always criticized the Americans for not doing: following through with actions, not just empty words. Is our world leader going to show us how it's done and lead by example, or do a worse job than the Americans? Because after the shitshow the Americans pulled the last 40 years, I honestly didn't think it was possible to do worse.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Treaty-excited results-ignorant know-nothings.
Nuclear power plants are almost impossible to build at a economically feasible price. A proposed $5 billion plant can end up costing 5 times that before its completed. A number of plants have not been completed after power companies give up after the cost over runs go over %100. Nuclear plants have an extremely high initial capital requirements. When this large initial investment goes up by multiples of the ordinal cost they are no longer viable.
The article seems to say we should rush out there and stop the Germans because of something that got tossed up on \.
...
Based on something that was "widely seen".
In other words "they say" Germany should do something.
Or "the Public" thinks
The Public is not a real entity. It's just a lurid abstraction of our worst cravings. I'm not sure slashdot is very reliable either.
This is just a bunch of weasel words.
The funny thing is that many continue to rip on America and then compare to Germany and China.
Yet, both Germany and China have high % of their electricity from coal. Germany is 45% and rising, and CHina's is around 80% (they refuse to allow external monitoring and their numbers change constantly). In fact, Germany has 45% coal, and 10% nat gas/mineral oil.
Germany's electricity is not only more CO2 / KWh than is America's, but is much dirtier since the majority of theirs comes from Coal and NOT nat gas.
America's electricity is about 28% coal, and 30% nat gas. BUT, America's coal continues to drop while Germany continues to build new coal plants. To be fair though, Germany's new coal is mostly about replacing old coal and nukes. By replacing their old coal plants, they are cleaning up the air, while getting more electricty.
And while America is slowly building up renewables compared to Germany and CHina, our electricity remains much cleaner due to heavy use of nat gas as well as nuclear.
In terms of Germany, they need a base-load system and solar/wind, even with storage, will NOT do the trick. So, if not nuclear, then what? Geo-thermal? Hydro? Nope to both.
China continues to build out coal, but they are also building up nuclear, along with hydro, both of which are base-load powers. Germany has some HARD choices to make.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Germany's heavy dependence on fossil fuels is an _major_ problem now that Russia's shown their true their colours, and is attacking and undermining the West on all fronts. Further abuse and humiliation from the Russian side is now more likely, since Putin did his (plagiarised) PhD on how to wield the oil weapon.
Far from understanding all this, Merkel then decided it would be a good idea to transition away from nuclear. Guess what fills the gap? Fossil fuels -- controlled by the strong adversary (Russia) and the weak adversary (the Muslim countries).
And these people are purportedly the strong centre of Europe. With clowns like these, Putin has nothing to fear. Well done guys!
I see two very wrong assumptions in the article and in this forum:
* Coal still being used because of "voters in German coal country". Sorry, but those are way too few to concern the political parties in Berlin. The times when a considerable amount of jobs actually dependet on coal mining are long gone. Today the work ist done by heavy machinery, observed by very few humans in the process.
* So much coal being burnt to fulfill baseline needs. Nope: Germany currently exports lots of electric energy into neighbouring countries, and that is done only because burning coal is still so cheap and profitable these days. The European power grid would already allow Germany to retire much of its coal power plants, replacing them by partially imports and partially ad-hoc powered up gas power plants, when required by a temporary lack of sunshine and wind.
And yes, this is kind of embarrasing for Germany, but the question is not whether, just by when coal power plants will be history.
More likely the Envirowackos.
Follow the money... and don't be stupid.
Either Global climate change is a big enough worry to warrant the possibility of a local disaster such as Fukushima, or it is not. There is little chance of holding warming to 2 degrees if you significantly lower the %11 of world wide electricity being produced by nuclear reactors. In-fact most grid engineers will tell you, we should be doing the exact opposite and increasing nuclear generation capacity
With Merkel letting in all those Afri- oh wait, you didn't mean THAT kind of "burning coal".
Circumcision is child abuse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
... a nuclear power no thanks sticker on a VW Diesel driven by a Merkel voter going to his lignite mine job.
40%... down from over 50% ten years ago. And that's WITH a decline in nuclear capacity.
I'd say Germany is making pretty good progress on a tough goal.
=Smidge=
battery tech will soon evolve to the point it is cost effective to implement (and recycle when spent) so that stored energy from hydro, solar, and wind, can cover fluctuations in both generation and usage demands.
Just as I suspected. German women are coal burners.
These slashdot idiots can't comprehend that nuclear power plants emit nuclear waste, because it is a solid. And they're just that painfully stupid.
Slashdot has been telling me otherwise for a long time:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
"According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total.
Yow-- that little??? Nuclear power plants provide about 11 percent of the world's electricity production now, so multiply that 230 years by 0.11, and it says we have a twenty-five year supply of uranium fuel if all of the world's electricity were nuclear.
I retract whatever I may have said earlier-- according to this, nuclear (at least, uranium-based fission nuclear reactors) is not a viable long-term solution.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
>"The country still gets 40 percent of its energy from coal, a bigger share than most other European countries. "
And, I might add, by percent of their electricity production, Germany uses significantly MORE coal AND natural gas than the USA and LESS nuclear. USA electricity production in 2016:
Natural gas = 33.8%
Coal = 30.4%
Nuclear = 19.7%
Renewables (total) = 14.9%
So the REAL picture is USA CO2= 64.2% Germany CO2= 52%. When you look at it that way, it doesn't seem as impressive, despite all the headlines. Of course, the USA is a much bigger country (almost 4x the population). But, still interesting.
And China's CO2 electricity? 64.1%
In spite of the riff everybody is doing on germany not doing enough, they are a western country which has a high standard of living and have about half the emission per capita of CO2 than the US has... https://data.worldbank.org/ind... for those not wanting to click : per capita USA 16.5 metric ton per person, Germany 8.9 metric tons per capita. And that is in spite of all that lignite burning.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Just to watch Trump get all tongue tied having to say something nice about them.
It's true, coal burners and mud sharks are destroying Europe.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
lignite, the dirtiest kind of coal. ... regardless if hard coal or lignite.
That is no longer true since 20 or 30 years.
All coal plants have scrubbers
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Bloody nuke alarmists."We;ll all drown in smog if we don't use nuclear!!!!".
They signed the Paris Accord, after all... Doesn't matter what actually happens, it's just the pledge that matters!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
More likely the Envirowackos.
Movie stars and hippies are not as good at nuclear physics as media columnists think they are. We need to look more closely at who benefits from their hysteria.
The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted. I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with all the capital investment involved, just doesn't make any sense.
It makes perfect sense. The components of a Nuclear reactor become brittle and fragile from neutron bombardment over time making any potential failure much more serious.
40 years is the expected operating lifespan for a Nuclear Reactor and the risk from operating one in a place as densely populated as Europe risks making large areas uninhabitable from any one accident. Controlling that risk across all of the operating reactors of similar age is extremely difficult.
If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal, the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment.
The Human Genome is more important than living standards, that is what artificially created radionuclides from the nuclear fuel cycle threaten when they bio-accumulate in foodchain. Gathering an understanding of the risks and a country deciding if they what to expose themselves to it is a perfectly reasonable and rational thing to do.
We were handed a carbon issue from the previous generation because they didn't fix the issue. Our generation has to decide if we are going to be as selfish and hand a radionuclide issue to future generations.
For now, it appears, that Germany has decided they won't.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Nuclear energy isn't unlimited
Neither is solar,
I'll just point out that the sun has been in existence for longer that the Earth, human civilization and is likely to still be going long after the human race as faded into memory. Let's talk about the Suns limits after 500 million years.
but we can run our civilization for 10000's of years with nuclear. That makes is sustainable.
Not without a massive re-engineering of the entire Nuclear Industry, this comment is essentially a strawman and I doubt you have considered it deeply. I welcome a discussion on IFR though, but before you do please read SEC 600 of the 2005 US Energy act and tell me why the funding exists to completely destroy the technology. After that you could explain away the funding loopholes that exist for big oil and coal to exploit nuclear deployments for tax credits.
If we include seawater extraction and thorium we can run our civilization for millions of years.
We've been over seawater extraction so many times. The density of uranium fuel in seawater is so low that you have no energy return on producing uranium fuel this way.
As for thorium it was a great idea in the 50's if we didn't want to have MAD but we chose Uranium and the thorium fuel cycle does not provide anyway (that I have seen) to deal with the existing waste problem we have with Uranium and plutonium. What it does is create a Thallium waste problem with all of the varied and unstable waste products it produces.
It's a lot easier to blame greenies and NIMBYS than Oil and Coal interests that control energy production in the world, so it is unlikely we will see any advancement in nuclear power, battery technology or anything else to produce the outcome you describe that threatens their dominance of those industries.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Any measure of the value/cost of a thing needs to take into account both the upside AND the downside.
You apparently only favor whatever measurement makes the political point you want to make for other reasons.
You're only arguing about which way to measure one side of the issue --- and you prefer the method that makes the US seem bad.
I, on the other hand, would argue that what is needed is an assessment of the effectiveness and efficiency of the use of energy.
I do NOT CARE if somebody burns 10 gallons of oil very cleanly if he is doing it to run the movie theater in the mansion of a billionaire. Somebody burning that same oil a bit dirtier but using it to power a hospital, or to power manufacturing parts for a replacement railroad bridge etc would be a better use of the energy and a better benefit in exchange for the emitted carbon. As such, any screeching about us emissions whether "per captita", or by country, or any other measure needs to take into effect the amount of productivity gained from those emissions. By that metric, the US is rather efficient in its use of many resources including fossil fuels, and that's only by cosidering productivity and before even allowing for any moral qualities of what the energy was used for.
There are regularly stories on Slashdot which attack American behaviors/policies regarding energy which read like propaganda from Europe (asnd often Germeny) in which places like Germany are presented as morally superior becuase their politicians are all-in on "green energy" while Americans are presented as backwards boneheads. Americans are presented as evil or idiotic for not killing-off the US coal industry and going fully to wind/solar like out very enlightened German friends have done.
Except of course that, as this article makes clear, these arguments are just dishonest propaganda.
France is HEAVILY dependend upon ageing nuclear power plants, Germeny is heavily dependent upon some very dirty coal, and much of Europe generally is still powered by various fossil fuels. Ignorance is what allows many people to be convinced that Europe is morally superior and running on unicorn farts and pixie dust. The people of Earth would be far better served if we spent some time making the power sources we all currently use cleaner and safer than by pretending that we are all using wind and solar or even could depend primarily upon wind and solar any time soon.
How easily people forget that the world in the 1700s and 1800s was primarily wind, and sun, and "renewables" powered. People used wind and water to power machines and people dried their clothes on lines outdoors where the wind and the sun did the work. Ships were powered by the winds and people got around on the backs of animals or in carts pulled by animals while those animals ran on grasses and produced biodegradeable waste. It turned out that coal was vastly better.
Usually I am pretty nonchalant about politics, but as a German now living in Japan this really pissed the shit out of me back in the day on multiple levels and it still does now. Not only did we abandon a perfect good energy source by following what is now known as Merkel’s characteristic “we will make it!” approach without considering what the costs to our environment and our economy would be, we also turned a tragedy into a bloody farce. This was the worst disaster to hit Japan in decades with tens of thousand dead. This was worse than the 9/11 and worse than anything that has happened to us after the Allies accepted the surrender seventy years ago. Yet all our compassionate nitwits focused on was that a reactor got damaged and contaminated a surrounding area. Not only that, but they somehow decided that we should turn off our reactors despite being about as remote from both earthquakes and tsunamis as you can get, justifying it largely as being too expensive because they themselves could not work out a system where the tax payer would not subsidize the energy companies running the damn things.
The people I’ve spoken to about it then somehow believed that we will switch to renewable—which in themselves are not a bad concept but nowhere close to powering an industrial nation of this magnitude. So here we are now: Japan is happily using cheap nuclear power and my TEPCO electricity bill is a pleasure to look at; we are surrounded by nuclear plants in other countries; and we are burning coal with the only moderately feasible alternative being burning something else or buying electricity from France, which is again entirely nuclear. God, this naïveté will really screw us over at some point.
What did they expect? Germany approves of Merkel's rapefugees.
As people cut down on carbon emissions, we must all come together to increase them once again. Carbon is a natural element and is healthy for us.
Drive those cars, waste electricity and burn more coal!
I think it's a very good thing that we are decommissioning nuclear fission and leading the way in doing that, but the burning of coal needs to stop too. Given, Germany has the most advanced coal reactors too, some of which produce little to no CO2 and filter nearly all emissions, but they still basically are steam age technology and need to go.
It's because of these that Germany is slacking in the climate saving department, despite being an adamant advocate of it.
This is a regular subject in German news and I hope that soon we'll finally see some regulations and decommissioning of coal plants.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Informative++
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I stopped reading after the claim "emissions-free nuclear power". Since when is nuclear power emissions free? Look at any one of the nuclear power plants and each of them leaks radiation. They also expel highly radioactive and poisonous end products that most countries in the world have a tough time finding a final resting spot for because these end products stay that toxic for thousands of years to come. I don't claim that soft coal fired power plants are better. Nothing good can come from burning potting soil. The key to meeting emissions limits is by lowering energy consumption. So turn off all the bitcoin miners, street lights at night, and the avalanche of always on devices that now crawl into every crook and nanny as IoT.
You really think that a bunch of environmentalist protesting is enough to defeat multi-billion dollar companies and their armies of lawyers?
And if so, how come they fail so hard in other areas, like stopping fracking, or getting Trump to agree to Paris, or preventing non-nuclear environmental disasters, or banning inefficient fossil fuel vehicles...
And how come the anti-environmentalists fail to block wind farms?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you're making a point, and one that moderators turn out to think is "Score 5; insightful", there's no need for the 'casual' racism. Actually, there's no need for racism if you're not making a point either.
What if nuclear costs more to operate than building new renewables? Would you still be averse to shutting down nuclear? That's exactly whats happened in Illinois. Existing nuclear plants are insisting on getting paid $16.50 per megawatt-hour of energy produced (above the market baseline), while new wind and solar (blended) are asking to get paid $4.26 per megawatt-hour of energy produced. Which would you rather spend your money on?
Sure, it will take some time for renewables to put out the sheer amount of energy that nuclear puts out, but that wind will be blowing long after the nuclear plant is a contaminated shell.
My ex-fiancee was right next to Fukushima back in the day. If her medical bills weren't covered by Japan, I would be certain to forward them to you.
Fukushima's nuclear reactors actually would've been illegal to operate in the US. The NRC realized that if the gas generators got knocked out due to flooding and electricity got knocked out, operators wouldn't be able to shut down the reactor properly and forced all reactors of this design to have gas generators in buildings that couldn't get flooded. Japan actually passed a similar regulation and reactors 2 and 4 had this and I recall reading that cables were run to the other reactors but the switching stations to switch to these for 1,3,5 and 6 were in the generator rooms that got flooded (and yeah, facepalm). On the positive side, these reactors have negative void coefficients and the reaction started shutting down immediately (but without cold water getting pumped in to cool it, some fuel melted). As DivineKnight says in another comment, Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient and the nuclear reaction raced off uncontrolled.
From your history, it's unlikely you would be aware of your own arse being on fire.
surprise, freakin' surpise. Dump your Nucs with no valid other alternative & what's left? Dirty Coal...nice going Germany. Here's an idea, use the proper tool for the job without regard to your 'hopes & pipe dreams'. Nuclear energy has been or should have been a valuable contributor to reducing carbon emissions for 50 or so years, instead people with an agenda based not on facts but emotions made decisions that simply added to the mess. These people need to be 'voted off the island'.
Firstly you did not read the link otehrwise you would have known the number for germany is *dropping* too. Don't trust me on my word click the link and tehre is a ncie little red graphic. guess what ? it is downward. Secondely per capita exists for a good reason : to normalize among countries with different economies, politics. That is why we count death per capita, co2 per capita, or similar measures. For example china or India may have more CO2 absolutely than the US, but per capita it is abysmally lower.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Xi is forcing coal now. That's a new low even for you. Xi has personally halted the construction of over 100 coal plants. Do your lies know no bounds?
If anything, he's not powerful enough. Local governments hate closing coal plants as it causes loss of jobs and local revenue. And the locals have to pick up the tab. They do everything they can to disobey him as long as they can.
You can continue to lie, but the facts speak otherwise.
Emissions from the transportation sector surpassed those from the power sector during 2016—a trend that persists through at least 2040 in the Reference case projections in EIA’s 2017 Annual Energy Outlook.
Yes, 2 years or 20+ whats an order of magnitude between friends.
And that's only energy related. Add on your transport increases as well for the total increase...
You silly troll, for a start they have 5 year plans. They have a hard limit on the amount of coal they will use.
So in China’s latest five-year plan, Chinese officials put a hard cap on future coal capacity at 1,100 gigawatts. Then, they ordered provinces to cancel 104 coal projects in the works that were worth an estimated $30 billion. Of those, 47 projects were already under construction, according to a Greenpeace analysis
How many times before it gets into your thick head. Capacity isn't consumption...Capacity isn't consumption...Capacity isn't consumption...
Capacity isn't consumption... The new plants are replacing older less eficient ones. The newer ones wont even be run at half capacity.
Currently, Beijing is forcing every plant in the nation to run at the same utilization rate, which is approximately 47.7 percent of total plant capacity. In 2016, plant utilization fell to levels that China had not seen since the 1970s, when the nation was just emerging from the cultural revolution.
Capacity isn't consumption...
Transportation is moving to EV faster in China.
Xi is shutting down coal. Trump is trying to force people to use more, even when they don't want to because its uneconomical.
America is not building newer cleaner more efficient plants, they are continuing to use older dirtier less inefficient ones.
By 2020, every Chinese coal plant will be more efficient than every US coal plant.
If current U.S. regulatory trends continue, by 2020, every coal plant operating in the United States would be illegal to operate in China.
No plant on the U.S. top 100 list can currently meet these efficiency standards. The United States currently does not have any enforceable federal emissions standards for carbon pollution from power plants, and the Trump administration is in the process of reviewing—and potentially weakening or nullifying—the Obama-era carbon emissions standards for new and existing power plants. If current U.S. regulatory trends continue, by 2020, every coal plant operating in the United States would be illegal to operate in China.
Despite the fact America is one of the dirtiest countries with respect to CO2. Twice as bad as Germany and China, way over three times the world average. You still managed to troll a bunch of people into focusing on China and Germany.
China and Germany could literally double their coal use. Just burn it all for fun, don't even make electricity or use the heat. Just stick it in a big pile and light it on fire, and they would still be cleaner than America.
Do we need to add geology to the list of things you know nothing about?
https://www.digitaltrends.com/... https://hardware.slashdot.org/...