| ▲ | cbmuser 4 hours ago |
| Wind and solar power do not provide dispatchable power and they therefore do not replace conventional power plants. Germany isn't keeping their coal-fired power plants and they're not building new gas-fired power plants despite the energy transition but because of it. You're spreading conspiracy theories when you claim Katherina Reiche is a fossil fuel puppet. She is doing what has always been the plan for the energy transition: Building gas-fired power plants. That plan is even in the DENA study for the energy transition: https://www.dena.de/fileadmin/dena/Dokumente/Pdf/9262_dena-L... (p. 29) And before you claim DENA is some sort of fossil fuel lobby organization, they're not. DENA belongs to the German state and was founded in 2000 by SPD and Greens: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Energie-Agentur |
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| ▲ | sajithdilshan a minute ago | parent | next [-] |
| I remember reading somewhere that they are planning on using excessive wind/solar energy to generate Hydrogen gas and use that for energy instead of Hydrocarbon gases. |
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| ▲ | foota an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Wind and solar power do not provide dispatchable power and they therefore do not replace conventional power plants.
Germany isn't keeping their coal-fired power plants and they're not building new gas-fired power plants despite the energy transition but because of it." 4 hour storage battery operated renewables are now cost competitive with gas plants. |
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| ▲ | planb 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sorry, but in Germany there isn't even much of a debate anymore about whether she is a puppet of the gas industry. She even asked EnBW for arguments in favor of gas-fired power plants in order to avoid holding a technology-neutral tender process as required by the EU: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/katherina-reiches-minister... |
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| ▲ | yangm97 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes, the so called base load isn’t the strength of intermittent renewables and yet Germany turned off clean, nuclear power in favor of gas and coal plants. I wonder how that happened… |
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| ▲ | crote 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Base load is an obsolete concept. A renewables-heavy grid simply doesn't work that way. Renewables like solar have a per-MWh generation cost of zero. You literally have to make the electricity price negative before it makes sense for the operator to shut it down. Their profitability depends only on the average electricity price: the high market price during the winter makes up for the near-zero market price during the summer. In a free electricity market there is absolutely zero demand for a power plant which generates a constant amount of power and acts as the "base supply". With dirt-cheap renewables its capacity simply isn't needed during the summer and its nonzero running costs makes it unable to compete. What is needed instead is a peaker plant which can supplement renewables, and which is profitable when it operates only during low-sun low-wind "dunkelflaute" winter weeks. Nuclear is fundamentally incompatible with this. It is the most expensive form of electricity generation and its costs are dominated by the need to pay back a massive construction loan. In a free market a nuclear power plant would only be able to operate for a few weeks per year, which instantly kills its business case. Want nuclear? Then you'll have to accept that it will require huge government subsidies, and that during high-supply moments you'll be turning off free renewables to make space for expensive nuclear. If anything, one could say that renewables will be the new base load supply. The real question is: who will be doing the peaking? | |
| ▲ | b2ccb2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Fear. I grew up when the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl reached us. I didn’t grow up eating mushrooms. We still measure radioactivity here, ask any hunter. When Fukushima happened, it tore open an old wound. Is it rational? I’m not sure, but I remember my parents taking in 2 Ukrainians for a month to detox in Germany. | | |
| ▲ | ba1afd89f34cb23 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think this is spot on. It is not rational, but it's deeply rooted. I vividly remember the children's TV explaining nuclear chain reactions, what happened in Chernobyl, and why kids couldn't play in sandboxes on the playground anymore for a while. Die Sendung mit der Maus had a whole segment with ping pong balls on mousetraps, setting one off, and that cascading into hundreds of mousetraps shooting the balls everywhere. Much like middle-aged American adults in 20 years are going to remember Sesame Street having very special episodes about Katrina or 9/11, middle-aged Germans remember a very fearful time around a nuclear disaster that happened close enough to home that it impacted them - fortunately not in a truly disastrous way. And that has an impact on public opinion, emotionally. | |
| ▲ | Krasnol 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We measure radioactivity in Germany because boar and deer are still contaminated. Especially in southern Bavaria. Samples exceeded the EU limit value for consumption by up to 25 times. A study found that most of the contamination these days doesn't come from Chernobyl anymore but from nuclear weapon tests. https://www.infranken.de/bayern/warum-wildschweine-in-bayern... PS: hunters with contaminated boars have to pay for the disposal themselves but can get the money back from the state. So, like with everything around nuclear: in the end it's the taxpayer who has to pay for it. https://www.bayern.landtag.de/www/ElanTextAblage_WP17/Drucks... |
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| ▲ | mschuster91 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > and yet Germany turned off clean, nuclear power Oh ffs. Nuclear power is not clean. Look what the GDR left us with the Wismut "heritage" - mining for uranium is incredibly toxic, and safely disposing of the spent fuel and all the other irradiated remains is incredibly expensive. We just don't see it in our Western nations because we get our uranium from Russia, other -'stan countries and remote regions in Australia and Canada where barely anyone lives to care about the destruction. As for the disposal, over half of the already measly budget for the Ministry of Environment goes to take care of the nuclear waste - 1.4 billion euros A YEAR [1]. In contrast, only 400 million euros are spent on environmental production. Nuclear power wasn't just never clean, it also was never cheap because the true costs were never accounted for. [1] https://taz.de/Budget-des-Umweltministeriums/!6102402/ | | |
| ▲ | crote 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | On the other hand: it is significantly cleaner than power generated by burning fossil fuels, and we don't exactly account for the environmental impact of renewables either. Like it or not, people care only about the direct impact it has on them, and it has been long enough since Chernobyl that nuclear isn't scary anymore. An anti-nuclear argument based on waste might not be wrong, but it isn't going to convince many people either. Want to convince people that nuclear is a bad idea? Forget about the waste, the dangers, and the overseas environmental impact, and instead focus purely on the cost. The business case for nuclear in a renewable-heavy grid is extremely poor, and very few people like nuclear enough that they would willingly pay massive subsidies to choose it instead of any of the alternatives. For most people nuclear is a necessary evil and a magic-solve-everything solution to the climate crisis: they don't like it enough to stick to it when more attractive options exist. |
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| ▲ | martin_a 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > conspiracy theories when you claim Katherina Reiche is a fossil fuel puppet lol, wtf?! Before becoming a minister she was employed by E.ON (for non-Germans: one of the big four energy companies in Germany) to lobby for their interests. She is _the_ prototype of a fossil fuel puppet. |
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| ▲ | cyberax 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > and they're not building new gas-fired power plants Uh... Whut? They're not just building them, but actively subsidizing them: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-government-appro... Because of pinky-promises about 'hydrogen' some time in future. |
