The chemical reactions which form SO2 and NOx occur at certain temperatures and are effectively a byproduct of imperfect burn. What modern automation allows you to do is to have such a fine control over the burn process as to ensure that conditions for those reactions are not met at in any region of the burner.
This also increases fuel efficiency.
And again, the German press is correct. The issue is that this particular claim is designed for singular purpose - obfuscation of progress of last few years.
Ask for what happened since 2010. You'll find that CO2 emissions have actually increased by a few percentage points. This is what I'm talking about. Ever since last millenium, Germany's CO2 emissions were in consistent decline.
After Energiewende was implemented, decline was reversed into increase instead. Mathematics of "did it increase or decline compared to starting point" suggest that if you take a point long ago when emissions were much higher, you can obfuscate the fact that trend of lowering emissions, persistent over previous decade was reversed.
Example. You have starting emissions of 100 in 1995. You reduce them by 50% to 50 by 2010. Then you increase them so that it in 2014 you are at 65, an increase of 30% over 2010 numbers, but decrease of 35% compared to 1995.
(Numbers are fictious, used to explain mathematics behind the obfuscation)
If you would be asked what change occurred around 2010, you would have to state that you had a massive trend change and increase since then. But by setting your relative starting point all the way back to 1995 you can claim that you have in fact had a decrease. This obviously implies a "steady decrease" which is the obfuscation - in reality you had a decrease until 2010 and then increase over last few years.
This is the exact kind of obfuscation that media goes into when it's covering up a problem. It gives an appearance of improvement, even if a clear worsening is happening. It's fairly easy to spot once you've seen it used a few times and are informed enough. This is used because their statement is not a lie, it's merely an obfuscation of the issue that they are trying to hide - dramatic change in the trend.
I will stop arguing about the obvious fact that you appear to be in denial of. If you choose to blindly believe that increase in coal building doesn't exist, even though you even linked me the studies which clearly show that electricity generated by coal was on the steady rise over last three years, I won't be able to convince you otherwise. Believe what you will.
On the other point, the reason why I call it "automatic controlled burning processes" is because this has been the single biggest change in the last decade or so, due to increase in both calculation power of automation as well as quality of sensors. Today you can have controls systems that can manage temperature of the burning process to a very fine degree through complex network of real time sensors monitoring everything from quality of fuel to burn conditions inside the burner to the exhaust and adjust input of air and fuel and in some cases even direction of the burners in real time to ensure that conditions are optimal.
This results in something that was completely impossible just a couple of decades ago. You can ensure that conditions under which SO2 and NOx form simply do not occur, resulting in a very clean burn. This eliminates the need to complex and imperfect catalytic filtering systems. It also enables burn process to be so near optimal that particle emissions are reduced greatly, ensuring less stress on the exhaust filtering systems.
This was impossible until very recently, as IT breakthroughs required were only made recently, and this is almost impossible to implement retroactively, as many of these sensors and control systems have to be an integral part of the plant's key systems.
Last winter was EXTREMELY warm across entire continent. This is well studied because of the global "polar vortex" event which occurred on large scale, resulting in massive freeze in US and very warm winter over European continent.
Doesn't need to be low res. Just low bitrate is enough. Relatively small screen size obfuscates many artefacts that become immediately visible on larger ones when watching high res low bitrate video.
I think this will not be so much about screen size as about "do you want a cinema quality, TV quality of phone quality?"
Which will be delivered using different compression algorithms, meaning 1080p on the phone will look good on the phone, but awful on TV screen where you will see all the artefacts that you wouldn't see on the small screen.
Phone version will likely be far more compressed. It's not the "pixels" you're sending nowadays when it comes to video, but key frames and data about changes to the frames (rough simplification of modern video compression algorithms).
So your movie version will be encoded using highest possible quality, TV size will be medium and phone version will be low. This will result in massive differences in file size.
I recommend reading your links. They fully support my facts. Coal burning was on steady increase throughout 2011-2013, and went down only in Q1 2014 for fairly obvious reason - extremely warm winter which reduced need for power to be used for heating.
I'm telling you, there is one. Coal building and reopening of mothballed plans is booming across Germany. That is why Germany missed its CO2 targets and trend changed abruptly a couple of years ago from steady reduction to steady increase. I've even heard that Germany had acid rains for first time in decades because older plants without automation controlled burning process still produce SO2 and NOx - something thought to have been long eliminated with modern burning processes introduction.
It's not talked about much because if Merkel told public that project that was supposed to make Germany "green" has done the exact opposite, she'd be politically crucified. And the other three major parties are in the same boat with her. Greens were the chief authors of the plan, SPD supported it and Free Democrats like what it's doing to business, which doesn't have to pay for it by gets huge growth straight from pockets of the consumers and small business.
It's an effective collusion of interests that suppresses the ugly reality beneath.
1. Let's stick with this try instead. You just made a claim that wind is functional as base power AND you made a claim that base power will not be necessary in twenty years. Kindly source me the scientific base behind these outrageous claims. 2. Again, this try. You are attempting to obfuscate the reality by shifting the topic rapidly into politics. Fact is that Merkel and CDU was in fact in favour of keeping nuclear plants open until Fukushima scared the population and forced her to face the exploding popularity of Greens, who's cornerstone policy over last decade or more has been abolishment of nuclear power in Germany, at any cost. You are absolutely correct that it was a political decision. You are incorrect in assuming that I'm unfamiliar with German political landscape. I've monitored it for two decades. The SPD/Greens alliance was the one that attempted nuclear closures at first. It was repealed when Merkel and her CDU and her allied Free Democrats (I think that's the translation for the party that didn't make it to Bundestag in last elections?) with their pro-business agenda, which requires cheap power to maintain heavy industry. CDU basically agreed to start closing nuclear power plants in a political calculation that they would need to contain possibility of SPD/Green coalition toppling them. To do this in a business friendly matter they allowed heavy industries to negotiate deals with government under which they would not have to pay more, and smaller businesses and consumers would shoulder the lion's share of the costs. This was one of the major factors that caused severe dissatisfaction in the lower strata of the society, and was one of the likely reasons why Free Democrats dind't clear the 5% hurdle in last elections.
Did I miss something?
3. While it's true in many cases, as much of industry is "inbred" as in those who produce power own stock in equipment manufacturers and vice versa, these are not monopolies. Siemens' books are in fact looking great for one reason and one reason alone - they are one of the biggest if not the biggest producer of steam turbines for larger power plants. Power plants like coal plants being erected across Germany right now. On the other hand energy giants like E.On and Wattenfall are writing off ridiculous sums of money, well into twelve digits in Euros because of Energiewende at the same time, to the point where Wattenfall actually sued German government under the responsibility contracts and is looking to recoup significant costs from German government for the losses it's taking due to Energiewende. This was such a big evet that it even hit free trade negotiations between EU and US, as US insists on having the same rules in place, and Germany having seen these rules used in such a brutal matter against its state coffers is now rejecting them being put in place. 4. I'm talking about modern custom-fit catalytic/particle filters designed to prevent particle emissions on older plants that do not have fully automated burn processes designed to eliminate those, as well as minimize NOx and SO2 emissions. Sales of these are booming because installing these in your older coal plant's chimney lets you pass certain certifications and sell your electricity at higher price.
P.S. I'm not even talking about lack of plans for new projects. I'm confused why Germany is shutting down its existing ones. I'm talking about the projects where water is pumped up into large reservoirs during excess production cycles, and then the potential energy is extracted back to electrical energy by releasing it back down through a turbine. There was at least one if not several such projects already built around Germany, and last I heard from one was in 2013 when it was in a process of being closed.
In general, I can't shake the feeling that the entire Energiewende project has been nothing but a grand plant of coal lobby executed to perfection to kill its main competitor - nuclear, well knowing that building up wind would result in the massive build up of coal. Shutt
Yes, you have. And the direction was to continue to reduce before Energiewende.
Unfortunately in recent years, the direction of change in emissions changed very abruptly, from steady reduction to steady increase.
The fact that you have to quote 1995 instead of more recent numbers from this decade as a relative starting point shows exactly that which you are trying to obfuscate - that the trend set by last two decades has been abruptly changed this decade because of Energiewende.
No shit. It's super profitable for Siemens and others involved in the buildup. They're the ones who get a lion's share of that massive investment - they build the turbines after all.
It's the people who have to pay for the those investments that suffer, as well as those that have to live in the world where CO2 emissions in Germany stopped being reduced and are increasing as the amount of coal burners that rotate Siemens turbines increases.
I give up. You do not understand the most basic aspects of power generation, you do not understand the basic statistics such as "massive change in trend of CO2 emissions" means nor do you understand what base power actually means.
Instead you are regurgitating the many times debunked bullshit that German Green party has used to attempt to divert attention from failure of its political cornerstone project - closure of all nuclear power plants in Germany.
By the way, here's a little stock market hint: if you can invest in cheap stocks for companies that install modern catalytic/particle filters that bring CO2 emissions from older plants to tolerable level, you should do so asap. It's like winning a lottery, those companies cannot produce fast enough to satisfy demand from Germany.
Of course, you won't find any cheap stock, because unlike people like you who polish rhetorical bullshit, smart people already foresaw the need and invested in them. And now they are reaping the benefits - filters that have no use in the newer, heavily automated burn process plants that emit few if any particles and no SO2/NOx because of burn process control.
Must be german elves buying them.
P.S. Germany is also mothballing its biggest electricity storage projects as we speak by the way, ones designed to pump up water during excess production cycles. I am as confused to the reasons behind that as I am confused as to many other contradictory aspects of Energiewende. Perhaps you can tell me why.
I'm sorry, but that is an outright lie. The reason I know this is because I have family working in one of the biggest hydrocarbon power plant design and contsruction firms. They are talking about massive inflow of tenders for new plants, and old ones are NOT getting decommissioned - instead whenever possibly they are being fired up to run again.
In fact, it's so bad that after Energiewende started, Germany which had goals to reduce CO2 emissions, which it was meeting, had to give those goals up. Instead of reduction, firing up of all the older coal plants and newer ones getting started cause CO2 emissions of Germany to actually increase for the first time in many years, and this particular trend is only picking up pace. It's actually pretty hilarious to see many environmental organisations complain about this issue, when their lobbying for wind as "kinda sorta" base power and shutting down nukes is the direct cause of this occurring in the first place.
And of course reactors are still running. There aren't enough mothballed coal plants to replace all the production you'd lose. Instead they are being mothballed as older and newer coal plants that replace them come online. That's what's causing the increase in CO2 emissions in Germany.
If that were so, they'd be going at it aggressively and around the world. Or more likely, they'd be getting into the business now.
Remember, just because you make people pay a bit more for solar on their roofs isn't going to stop industrial rollout if such a thing was possible. In fact, you'd likely make it easier because prices on the panels would drop as consumer demand for consumer sized panels dropped and there would be more incentive for production lines to switch to those hypothetical industrial size panels that actually could threaten coal.
Where do you get that drivel? German politicians disagree with you, German media disagrees with you. Even German power generation industry as a whole disagrees with you, and they are currently building more new coal plants than they have in decades, as well as firing up all the dirty ones that were mothballed. Because shutting down nukes requires base power, wind on which they bet isn't base power so they have to restart all the old plants to keep up with the production.
At the same time, consumers are bearing the brunt of the costs, because most of the heavy industry got an exemption from having to pay surcharges that are paying for the Energiewende. Which does in fact mean that people in the lowest strata of society can no longer pay their electric bills, and in Germany, they can turn your electricity off if you do not.
Spiegel, one of the most respected neutral and trustworthy investigative media sources in Germany (they were, for example, granted access to source material by Assange and Snowden) have a very good article on the issue dating less than a year ago here: http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
Shills from coal industry in Germany talk about German Energiewende like about manna from heaven. They're massively building up coal and firing up all the old plants as much as they can becuase of it and raking in massive profits.
If I could be seen to be shilling for anything, it's not shutting down fission in Germany and replacing it with coal, as Energiewende has basically done.
Civilization as we know it will likely not exist several hundred years in the future regardless. We can't keep consuming the way we are, and we'll run out, causing us to change the consumption model.
You miss my point. Consequences of not having power are several orders of magnitude worse. Power has to be generated somewhere. And unless you have a perpetual motion machine, or invented functional fusion reactor (or a way to improve fission's reputation in the eyes of the public) we're pretty much stuck with coal.
What makes you think that? Germany's Energiewiende is a horror show of failures and disgusting cost overruns so far going so far as to actually provide direct proof for some of the claims in the story (after it was implemented, Germany actually started to have a concept of energy poverty, people who cannot afford electricity). Coal is about the only reliable and cheap source of power that we have enough raw materials for for several hundred years into the future that can be easily maintained or expanded as needed (other than nuclear which has a serious PR problem, which may have something to do with the same lobby).
Sad reality is that coal seems pretty safe today. For all the incentives, it's still far too good to pass on. They're likely trying to simply ensure that solar doesn't get any kind of foothold at all and going for very long term strategy here. It's just one of the ways that shows that US is indeed an oligarchy rather than democracy today.
I suspect most will continue to work, because they will simply change their IP ranges if providing access to Hulu is at all important for them.
You can't really block someone on the internet reliably with an IP ban. Or well, you can, but the effort you'll need to keep on swatting the changing IP addresses is going to be significant.
It occurred to me that we're arguing about the details while agreeing on the whole, but my way of expression may give a different impression.
My main point is not to deny that this was happening, it's the scale of it occurring, which has exploded in a very short time, causing severe growing pains for services which now have to produce services that used to be very limited and expensive aimed only at elite. Now they need to be produces cheaply and en masse as amount of people requiring these services has exploded.
But that was a shift of parenting within a family unit, which was nuclear family throughout most of human history. It touches on another major socio-economic change that is dissolution of nuclear families which is also stressing social assistance networks to the extreme as they struggle to compensate for quickly changing care requirements for elderly.
Slashdot Mirror
The chemical reactions which form SO2 and NOx occur at certain temperatures and are effectively a byproduct of imperfect burn. What modern automation allows you to do is to have such a fine control over the burn process as to ensure that conditions for those reactions are not met at in any region of the burner.
This also increases fuel efficiency.
And again, the German press is correct. The issue is that this particular claim is designed for singular purpose - obfuscation of progress of last few years.
Ask for what happened since 2010. You'll find that CO2 emissions have actually increased by a few percentage points. This is what I'm talking about. Ever since last millenium, Germany's CO2 emissions were in consistent decline.
After Energiewende was implemented, decline was reversed into increase instead. Mathematics of "did it increase or decline compared to starting point" suggest that if you take a point long ago when emissions were much higher, you can obfuscate the fact that trend of lowering emissions, persistent over previous decade was reversed.
Example. You have starting emissions of 100 in 1995. You reduce them by 50% to 50 by 2010. Then you increase them so that it in 2014 you are at 65, an increase of 30% over 2010 numbers, but decrease of 35% compared to 1995.
(Numbers are fictious, used to explain mathematics behind the obfuscation)
If you would be asked what change occurred around 2010, you would have to state that you had a massive trend change and increase since then. But by setting your relative starting point all the way back to 1995 you can claim that you have in fact had a decrease. This obviously implies a "steady decrease" which is the obfuscation - in reality you had a decrease until 2010 and then increase over last few years.
This is the exact kind of obfuscation that media goes into when it's covering up a problem. It gives an appearance of improvement, even if a clear worsening is happening. It's fairly easy to spot once you've seen it used a few times and are informed enough. This is used because their statement is not a lie, it's merely an obfuscation of the issue that they are trying to hide - dramatic change in the trend.
I will stop arguing about the obvious fact that you appear to be in denial of. If you choose to blindly believe that increase in coal building doesn't exist, even though you even linked me the studies which clearly show that electricity generated by coal was on the steady rise over last three years, I won't be able to convince you otherwise. Believe what you will.
On the other point, the reason why I call it "automatic controlled burning processes" is because this has been the single biggest change in the last decade or so, due to increase in both calculation power of automation as well as quality of sensors. Today you can have controls systems that can manage temperature of the burning process to a very fine degree through complex network of real time sensors monitoring everything from quality of fuel to burn conditions inside the burner to the exhaust and adjust input of air and fuel and in some cases even direction of the burners in real time to ensure that conditions are optimal.
This results in something that was completely impossible just a couple of decades ago. You can ensure that conditions under which SO2 and NOx form simply do not occur, resulting in a very clean burn. This eliminates the need to complex and imperfect catalytic filtering systems. It also enables burn process to be so near optimal that particle emissions are reduced greatly, ensuring less stress on the exhaust filtering systems.
This was impossible until very recently, as IT breakthroughs required were only made recently, and this is almost impossible to implement retroactively, as many of these sensors and control systems have to be an integral part of the plant's key systems.
Last winter was EXTREMELY warm across entire continent. This is well studied because of the global "polar vortex" event which occurred on large scale, resulting in massive freeze in US and very warm winter over European continent.
Doesn't need to be low res. Just low bitrate is enough. Relatively small screen size obfuscates many artefacts that become immediately visible on larger ones when watching high res low bitrate video.
You still do not understad. SD and HD are different RESOLUTIONS.
I'm talking about different COMPRESSION QUALITY.
It's completely possible to make a video at 1080p that will look far worse than 480p encoded well.
I think this will not be so much about screen size as about "do you want a cinema quality, TV quality of phone quality?"
Which will be delivered using different compression algorithms, meaning 1080p on the phone will look good on the phone, but awful on TV screen where you will see all the artefacts that you wouldn't see on the small screen.
Phone version will likely be far more compressed. It's not the "pixels" you're sending nowadays when it comes to video, but key frames and data about changes to the frames (rough simplification of modern video compression algorithms).
So your movie version will be encoded using highest possible quality, TV size will be medium and phone version will be low. This will result in massive differences in file size.
This is doable.
I recommend reading your links. They fully support my facts. Coal burning was on steady increase throughout 2011-2013, and went down only in Q1 2014 for fairly obvious reason - extremely warm winter which reduced need for power to be used for heating.
I'm telling you, there is one. Coal building and reopening of mothballed plans is booming across Germany. That is why Germany missed its CO2 targets and trend changed abruptly a couple of years ago from steady reduction to steady increase.
I've even heard that Germany had acid rains for first time in decades because older plants without automation controlled burning process still produce SO2 and NOx - something thought to have been long eliminated with modern burning processes introduction.
It's not talked about much because if Merkel told public that project that was supposed to make Germany "green" has done the exact opposite, she'd be politically crucified.
And the other three major parties are in the same boat with her. Greens were the chief authors of the plan, SPD supported it and Free Democrats like what it's doing to business, which doesn't have to pay for it by gets huge growth straight from pockets of the consumers and small business.
It's an effective collusion of interests that suppresses the ugly reality beneath.
1. Let's stick with this try instead. You just made a claim that wind is functional as base power AND you made a claim that base power will not be necessary in twenty years.
Kindly source me the scientific base behind these outrageous claims.
2. Again, this try. You are attempting to obfuscate the reality by shifting the topic rapidly into politics. Fact is that Merkel and CDU was in fact in favour of keeping nuclear plants open until Fukushima scared the population and forced her to face the exploding popularity of Greens, who's cornerstone policy over last decade or more has been abolishment of nuclear power in Germany, at any cost.
You are absolutely correct that it was a political decision. You are incorrect in assuming that I'm unfamiliar with German political landscape. I've monitored it for two decades. The SPD/Greens alliance was the one that attempted nuclear closures at first. It was repealed when Merkel and her CDU and her allied Free Democrats (I think that's the translation for the party that didn't make it to Bundestag in last elections?) with their pro-business agenda, which requires cheap power to maintain heavy industry.
CDU basically agreed to start closing nuclear power plants in a political calculation that they would need to contain possibility of SPD/Green coalition toppling them. To do this in a business friendly matter they allowed heavy industries to negotiate deals with government under which they would not have to pay more, and smaller businesses and consumers would shoulder the lion's share of the costs. This was one of the major factors that caused severe dissatisfaction in the lower strata of the society, and was one of the likely reasons why Free Democrats dind't clear the 5% hurdle in last elections.
Did I miss something?
3. While it's true in many cases, as much of industry is "inbred" as in those who produce power own stock in equipment manufacturers and vice versa, these are not monopolies. Siemens' books are in fact looking great for one reason and one reason alone - they are one of the biggest if not the biggest producer of steam turbines for larger power plants. Power plants like coal plants being erected across Germany right now.
On the other hand energy giants like E.On and Wattenfall are writing off ridiculous sums of money, well into twelve digits in Euros because of Energiewende at the same time, to the point where Wattenfall actually sued German government under the responsibility contracts and is looking to recoup significant costs from German government for the losses it's taking due to Energiewende. This was such a big evet that it even hit free trade negotiations between EU and US, as US insists on having the same rules in place, and Germany having seen these rules used in such a brutal matter against its state coffers is now rejecting them being put in place.
4. I'm talking about modern custom-fit catalytic/particle filters designed to prevent particle emissions on older plants that do not have fully automated burn processes designed to eliminate those, as well as minimize NOx and SO2 emissions. Sales of these are booming because installing these in your older coal plant's chimney lets you pass certain certifications and sell your electricity at higher price.
P.S. I'm not even talking about lack of plans for new projects. I'm confused why Germany is shutting down its existing ones. I'm talking about the projects where water is pumped up into large reservoirs during excess production cycles, and then the potential energy is extracted back to electrical energy by releasing it back down through a turbine. There was at least one if not several such projects already built around Germany, and last I heard from one was in 2013 when it was in a process of being closed.
In general, I can't shake the feeling that the entire Energiewende project has been nothing but a grand plant of coal lobby executed to perfection to kill its main competitor - nuclear, well knowing that building up wind would result in the massive build up of coal. Shutt
Yes, you have. And the direction was to continue to reduce before Energiewende.
Unfortunately in recent years, the direction of change in emissions changed very abruptly, from steady reduction to steady increase.
The fact that you have to quote 1995 instead of more recent numbers from this decade as a relative starting point shows exactly that which you are trying to obfuscate - that the trend set by last two decades has been abruptly changed this decade because of Energiewende.
No shit. It's super profitable for Siemens and others involved in the buildup. They're the ones who get a lion's share of that massive investment - they build the turbines after all.
It's the people who have to pay for the those investments that suffer, as well as those that have to live in the world where CO2 emissions in Germany stopped being reduced and are increasing as the amount of coal burners that rotate Siemens turbines increases.
I give up. You do not understand the most basic aspects of power generation, you do not understand the basic statistics such as "massive change in trend of CO2 emissions" means nor do you understand what base power actually means.
Instead you are regurgitating the many times debunked bullshit that German Green party has used to attempt to divert attention from failure of its political cornerstone project - closure of all nuclear power plants in Germany.
By the way, here's a little stock market hint: if you can invest in cheap stocks for companies that install modern catalytic/particle filters that bring CO2 emissions from older plants to tolerable level, you should do so asap. It's like winning a lottery, those companies cannot produce fast enough to satisfy demand from Germany.
Of course, you won't find any cheap stock, because unlike people like you who polish rhetorical bullshit, smart people already foresaw the need and invested in them. And now they are reaping the benefits - filters that have no use in the newer, heavily automated burn process plants that emit few if any particles and no SO2/NOx because of burn process control.
Must be german elves buying them.
P.S. Germany is also mothballing its biggest electricity storage projects as we speak by the way, ones designed to pump up water during excess production cycles. I am as confused to the reasons behind that as I am confused as to many other contradictory aspects of Energiewende. Perhaps you can tell me why.
I'm sorry, but that is an outright lie. The reason I know this is because I have family working in one of the biggest hydrocarbon power plant design and contsruction firms. They are talking about massive inflow of tenders for new plants, and old ones are NOT getting decommissioned - instead whenever possibly they are being fired up to run again.
In fact, it's so bad that after Energiewende started, Germany which had goals to reduce CO2 emissions, which it was meeting, had to give those goals up. Instead of reduction, firing up of all the older coal plants and newer ones getting started cause CO2 emissions of Germany to actually increase for the first time in many years, and this particular trend is only picking up pace. It's actually pretty hilarious to see many environmental organisations complain about this issue, when their lobbying for wind as "kinda sorta" base power and shutting down nukes is the direct cause of this occurring in the first place.
And of course reactors are still running. There aren't enough mothballed coal plants to replace all the production you'd lose. Instead they are being mothballed as older and newer coal plants that replace them come online. That's what's causing the increase in CO2 emissions in Germany.
If that were so, they'd be going at it aggressively and around the world. Or more likely, they'd be getting into the business now.
Remember, just because you make people pay a bit more for solar on their roofs isn't going to stop industrial rollout if such a thing was possible. In fact, you'd likely make it easier because prices on the panels would drop as consumer demand for consumer sized panels dropped and there would be more incentive for production lines to switch to those hypothetical industrial size panels that actually could threaten coal.
Where do you get that drivel? German politicians disagree with you, German media disagrees with you. Even German power generation industry as a whole disagrees with you, and they are currently building more new coal plants than they have in decades, as well as firing up all the dirty ones that were mothballed. Because shutting down nukes requires base power, wind on which they bet isn't base power so they have to restart all the old plants to keep up with the production.
At the same time, consumers are bearing the brunt of the costs, because most of the heavy industry got an exemption from having to pay surcharges that are paying for the Energiewende. Which does in fact mean that people in the lowest strata of society can no longer pay their electric bills, and in Germany, they can turn your electricity off if you do not.
Spiegel, one of the most respected neutral and trustworthy investigative media sources in Germany (they were, for example, granted access to source material by Assange and Snowden) have a very good article on the issue dating less than a year ago here:
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
Shills from coal industry in Germany talk about German Energiewende like about manna from heaven. They're massively building up coal and firing up all the old plants as much as they can becuase of it and raking in massive profits.
If I could be seen to be shilling for anything, it's not shutting down fission in Germany and replacing it with coal, as Energiewende has basically done.
Civilization as we know it will likely not exist several hundred years in the future regardless. We can't keep consuming the way we are, and we'll run out, causing us to change the consumption model.
You miss my point. Consequences of not having power are several orders of magnitude worse. Power has to be generated somewhere. And unless you have a perpetual motion machine, or invented functional fusion reactor (or a way to improve fission's reputation in the eyes of the public) we're pretty much stuck with coal.
What makes you think that? Germany's Energiewiende is a horror show of failures and disgusting cost overruns so far going so far as to actually provide direct proof for some of the claims in the story (after it was implemented, Germany actually started to have a concept of energy poverty, people who cannot afford electricity). Coal is about the only reliable and cheap source of power that we have enough raw materials for for several hundred years into the future that can be easily maintained or expanded as needed (other than nuclear which has a serious PR problem, which may have something to do with the same lobby).
Sad reality is that coal seems pretty safe today. For all the incentives, it's still far too good to pass on. They're likely trying to simply ensure that solar doesn't get any kind of foothold at all and going for very long term strategy here. It's just one of the ways that shows that US is indeed an oligarchy rather than democracy today.
I suspect most will continue to work, because they will simply change their IP ranges if providing access to Hulu is at all important for them.
You can't really block someone on the internet reliably with an IP ban. Or well, you can, but the effort you'll need to keep on swatting the changing IP addresses is going to be significant.
It occurred to me that we're arguing about the details while agreeing on the whole, but my way of expression may give a different impression.
My main point is not to deny that this was happening, it's the scale of it occurring, which has exploded in a very short time, causing severe growing pains for services which now have to produce services that used to be very limited and expensive aimed only at elite. Now they need to be produces cheaply and en masse as amount of people requiring these services has exploded.
But that was a shift of parenting within a family unit, which was nuclear family throughout most of human history. It touches on another major socio-economic change that is dissolution of nuclear families which is also stressing social assistance networks to the extreme as they struggle to compensate for quickly changing care requirements for elderly.
Only the upper classes who could afford this. Vast majority never could.
All I can say is that South Korean government disagrees with you and agrees with me.