Germany's Energy Catastrophe

https://quillette.com/2022/07/14/germanys-energy-catastrophe/

by jseliger • 4 years ago

56 166 4 years ago

daccle• 4 years ago

Yikes! Totally ignoring the climate impact of nuclear power. Not understanding that nuclear doesn’t play well with renewables (it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time). Finally explaining that there were only 28 deaths after the Chernobyl accident, ignoring all the additional deaths by cancer and deformed unborn children. Sorry, this article is totally wrong in so many ways.

dijonman2• 4 years ago

Nuclear is the best option, no? Of course it has risks but given how awful coal and other traditional power sources run it seems to be the best option.

We are only going to use more and more energy, generating and lowering energy costs will be a net positive for all. Especially to support EVs.

skrause• 4 years ago

Well, let's take a look at France: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

As the European Union moves to cut ties to Russian oil and gas in the wake of Moscow’s war on Ukraine, France has been betting on its nuclear plants to weather a looming energy crunch. Nuclear power provides about 70 percent of France’s electricity, a bigger share than any other country in the world. But the industry has tumbled into an unprecedented power crisis as EDF confronts troubles ranging from the mysterious emergence of stress corrosion inside nuclear plants to a hotter climate that is making it harder to cool the aging reactors. The outages at EDF, Europe’s biggest electricity exporter, have sent France’s nuclear power output tumbling to its lowest level in nearly 30 years, pushing French electric bills to record highs just as the war in Ukraine is stoking broader inflation. Instead of pumping vast amounts of electricity to Britain, Italy and other European countries pivoting from Russian oil, France faces the unsettling prospect of initiating rolling blackouts this winter and having to import power.

Nuclear power is so good that France might have to import energy from German coal power plans next winter to avoid large scale blackouts.

gambiting• 4 years ago

>ignoring all the additional deaths by cancer

Which are, at absolute most and at the most pessimistic estimate, at few thousands excess deaths[0]. The same estimates for coal at are thousands.....per year, not for the last 40 years.

[0] https://ascopost.com/issues/may-25-2021/chernobyl-at-35-year...

cute_boi• 4 years ago

Well, your comparison might also be invalid because we haven't used nuclear power to the scale coal is used. Maybe if there were many nuclear plants we might have seen many disaster?

dna_polymerase• 4 years ago

It needs a catastrophic fail ihre for nuclear to become deadly for the masses. Germany replaced the nuclear power plants with coal and gas based plants whose Modus operandi is deadly for the masses.

Even if you want to shutdown nuclear, Germany did it in an extremely stupid.

flohofwoe3• 4 years ago

Because a picture says more than a thousand words:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#/medi...

Also:

https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...

Nuclear power is mainly being replaced by renewables, not coal or gas.

Natural gas only accounts for 15% of electricity production, the upcoming gap could probably easily be filled with alternatives.

But it's main use isn't electricity, but for heating in private homes and all sort of processes in the industry. About half of all homes are heated with gas, you can't simply flip a switch and replace the gas heating in 20 million homes with electric heating.

TL;DR: the pressing problem that needs solving is how to prioritize private homes versus the industry's use of natural gas, even if nuclear power plants would suddenly spring out of the ground for free, they wouldn't help much with this.

mhh__• 4 years ago

All deaths from nuclear anything ever are a rounding error compared to dirty power sources.

Almost a hundred staff died in a hydro disaster in 2009, for some perspective.

cm21873• 4 years ago

And 200,000 died in a 1975 chinese hydro disaster

elsjaako• 4 years ago

Genuinely curious, because I haven't heard these arguments before.

Totally ignoring the climate impact of nuclear power

What climate impact? I though it was CO2 neutral (except for construction, which has similar costs to wind an solar). A quick google doesn't give me anything.

it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time

I thought nuclear was basically a steam boiler, same as coal or gas plants? Why is the control slower for nuclear?

onli• 4 years ago

It is in no way co2 neutral. Its strongest claim is that it emits less co2 than alternatives. This is based on a bunch of assumptions on how hard it is to get the raw material, that the radiated garbage is transported once (to storage that does not exist) etc. So it is bullshit, but it will always be claimed in these comment threads, right next to the lie of Chernobyl having killed basically no-one.

Nuclear steam boilers are slow to control as their base reaction takes time to cool up or down. Good for base load, not fast coverage of highs.

ok_dad• 4 years ago

Why is the control slower for nuclear?

Maintaining a critical fission reaction is difficult and in a large plant you might have to coordinate hundreds of people in dozens of locations to reduce power. Starting up a plant takes math and precise measurements, and there’s a natural limit to the speed you can do so or else you can cause a runaway supercritical reaction. Also, to be the most efficient, they are designed to run at near capacity for their lifetimes, and reducing the power would cancel that, so it’s simply not designed into the system to be reactive like that, as opposed to a submarine plant which is designed to power up and down a bit over short time frames.

turbinerneiter3• 4 years ago

AFAIK nuclear output can be controlled only in a certain range, but if you go below a certain threshold it shuts off and you then have to restart it, which takes a lot of time.

Coal has a similar issue, these plants also can't be turned on and off quickly. In fact, the term "base load" originally was driven more by the minimum amount of power that has to be consumed to keep a plant running. Only now with the move to renewables with varying output the meaning has shifted to the consumption side of things.

Gas plants however can be turned on and off and easily, they work similar to aircraft engines. In Germany, the heat produced is then used for district heating, which gives these plants almost perfect efficiency. It's not a coincidence that Germany picked gas as supplement for renewables during the transition to 100% green energy. Gas (in the form of hydrogen directly ~ methane made from hydrogen) is also a key contender for very long term energy storage (in Germany, you have to save energy produced in the summer for use in winter, the batteries needed for that would be roughly in the order of ~50 million Tesla Model S (100kWh) batteries). The cost of overbuilding renewables and storing the energy in gas, with a lower round-trip efficiency, seems to be lower than building the big battery that would be needed. Wind is also better in winter than solar, which is why wind is such an important and hot topic in Germany. Solar doesn't bother anyone, but wind turbines are huge and people can see them in the landscape. Solar does not have this problem, but during the winter, the output goes down to almost nothing.

mvgcf9• 4 years ago

On nuclears climate impact: https://amp.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-nuclear-energy-good-for-...

LunaSea4• 4 years ago

The total number of deaths due to the nuclear energy production works wide is less than the animal number of french people dying due to air pollution by German coal plants.

seszett2• 4 years ago

Not understanding that nuclear doesn’t play well with renewables (it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time).

That's actually not been true for the last 40 years or so. In France, nuclear power plants have been doing load following without problem. They are apparently able to adjust their production by 80% over 30 minutes. One such episode is explained here: https://lenergeek.com/2019/03/07/mix-electrique-nucleaire-tr...

illiac7864• 4 years ago

I read the article and I do not see the 80% mentioned. I really would have loved to read this, but they mentioned only 10GW of variation, that's roughly 20% I believe.

BenoitP3• 4 years ago

it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time

Well, France has been doing it just fine for the last 33 years:

[...] flexible operation of nuclear reactors is possible and has been applied in France by EDF’s 58 reactors for more than 30 years without any noticeable or unmanageable impacts: no effects on safety or on the environment, and no noticeable additional maintenance costs, with an additional unplanned capability load factor estimated at only 0.5%. EDF’s nuclear reactors have the capability to vary their output between 20% and 100% within 30 minutes, twice a day, when operating in load-following mode

From here (pdf):

https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document

illiac7864• 4 years ago

Would love to believe this, but that's EDF writing this. Any other source? Any real life example?

locallost5• 4 years ago

Germany proceeded with their "nuclear exit" in 2011. Had they gone the other way and all in on nuclear, they would be in the same situation as they are today as planning and building nuclear plants takes a lot longer than 10 years. Actually they would be way worse because instead of having 50% of electricity coming from renewables, they would still have 45% of it coming from coal, instead of 25% in 2020 (did not check the latest numbers). On top of all that, for the price they are paying to get renewables basically today, they could only get a fraction of the energy in nuclear. And if that wasn't enough, one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia.

One of the worst articles I have ever read in my life.

anttisalmela2• 4 years ago

They wouldn't have shut down all the working plants. Not that it matters much, wouldn't have been enough.

locallost5• 4 years ago

They were old, some came online in the 60s. Check the situation in France right now -- half of their aging fleet is offline because they basically can't get them to work. The NY Times had an article on it recently.

throw8274747372• 4 years ago

This is repeated over and over again, but you have to shut them down ( or heavily sanitize ), because stuff under radiation fire just ages even more quickly than (simplified) normal ""rusting"".. just look at the increased maintenances that risk in France they get blackouts even they compensate via imports?

Just few days ago there was a documetary in ARD, a neutral one, about building back plants to green lawn, the cost and the almost century long effort to build them back that is ridiculous (multiple billions) , that is usually never priced in.

Speaking of cost I found it surprising again how much just building even the new ones is.. I mean they had to compare to a dam to find something worse, wtf? ( https://www.westerninvestor.com/british-columbia/saskatchewa... )

And then also that even if we accept all those downsides, the unsolved waste problem, (yeah a lot of people will give me armchair proposals or the new non-existing reactors that would just eat everything and leave nothing behind... not), that it is not cost competitive, the risk (yes, you tell me Russians are stupid, Fukushima was an exception, 3mile and other incidents were perfectly avoided, but please consider also war and terror), there just wouldn't be enough fuel for the whole word to go all-in (yeahyeh we just scrub it from the sea.. in theory, as much as we could just get all the drinking water from the sea or scrub all the CO2 from the atmosphere with current tech..).

But even if you ignore that again and believe it will be fine, even then if the world would now decide to go all in, the time it takes to build means it wouldn't even make a dent in 15 years - WHICH IS TOO LATE.

We could have avoided a lot if the world went all in renewables the 20-30 years back where we already knew what was coming.. and this is the most surprising thing to me. We could do so much suddenly in regard to Pandemic and now the war.. but in relation to the climate catastrophe they are minor annoyances, still we don't start acting but deter us constantly from the right thing by dreaming of the assumed easy nuclear solution out. Humans!!!

I derailed, sorry. But it will be bad, and nuclear just wont help even a bit.

IfOnlyYouKnew2• 4 years ago

It’s the Phrenology Anthology, what do you expect?

ThePhysicist5• 4 years ago

The nuclear exit strategy dates back to 2000, so 22 years ago already.

vasco• 4 years ago

We can get enough uranium from Canada if needed.

ElKrist• 4 years ago

"And if that wasn't enough, one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia."

To be more precise: 5 countries represent 96% of EU uranium imports: Niger (24,26%), Kazakhstan (22,99%), Russia, Australia and Canada.

A country like France has 1-2 years of uranium stock for its electricity production.

Dependence on Russia is way less critical for uranium than gas.

turbinerneiter3• 4 years ago

That's why France got an exception from sanctions made for a uranium delivery from Russia.

mrtksn2• 4 years ago

Nuclear energy is very cool tech and I think it strikes a chord with techie people and that's why I think nuclear gets a free pass on the economical and operational issues.

Nuclear is so amazing, right? Relatively small, high tech self-contained facilities that rhyme with some of the best science fictions out there.

However, the moment you dive in it you see just how long it gets to build these things, how expensive they get with with each safety failure and you get to see the unsexy parts of it like mining and processing the raw materials and then the nuclear waste that just sits there waiting to be transferred to its final destination.

Working with Russia didn't have to be a bad thing. What makes EU great(you can argue over the other functions of EU) is the peace it creates through co-dependence and shared interest and Russia was very well suited to benefit from it. Russia provides the resources, EU pays for those resources and Russia buys stuff from EU with that money and as a result Europeans get the energy and Russians get the European goods. It's a win-win relationship that fell apart when the head of Russia did not needed to provide with a well being any longer to stay as a head.

I personally wish Russia had stayed a partner. It makes sense to be co-depended with partners but as Europe got the short end of the stick as the relationship fell apart it only makes sense offset any dependence to Russia even at a cost.

pas2• 4 years ago

you know that every form of energy generation today involves some kind of trade off (extraction from the earth, hydro and PV panels and wind turbines require a lot of space, and so on).

nuclear advocates advocate for nuclear when it makes sense.

sexy_panda3• 4 years ago

Just to make things clear: Nuclear energy is just cheap because it gets massively funded by the state.

Nuclear power plants are the most expensive way of generating energy and the least sustainable way.

We don't even have a good way to dispose nuclear waste. We were checking for a "Endlager" which means a place to hoard all the nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Guess what? No one wanted it.

Bavaria tried to keep themselves out of possible regions for waste disposal, while going full PR pro-nuclear.

So nuclear power plants are basically neither a long term solution, nor a short term solution.

avar2• 4 years ago

    We don't even have a good way
    to dispose nuclear waste.

Sure we do, just aerosolize it and vent it into the atmosphere! At which point...

    Nuclear energy is [...] massively
    [subsidized] by the state.

...You'd have a fair comparison to other modes of energy production. It's not nuclear that's massively subsidized, everything else is.

epups7• 4 years ago

Nuclear energy is just cheap because it gets massively funded by the state.

No it doesn't. Not anymore than gas, coal and renewables at least.

The issue of disposal is also simply incorrect. There are plenty of places to store it, France does it, everyone does it. Do you know where the waste from coal goes? Into the atmosphere, where it kills thousands directly and potentially billions indirectly with global warming. So it's comical to criticise nuclear for waste issues.

Barring hydro (which Germany cannot have) and coal/gas, there is no alternative but nuclear. Renewables cannot be a reliable source of energy because they are intermittent. You will always need some stable source, and currently (and for the foreseeable future), it's nuclear.

dispat0r7• 4 years ago

You are right, Germany should have build new nuclear plants in 2000. The renewables make the German energy grid unstable and expensive, we have the highest power cost in the world currently with no end in sight, also no storage for the renewables. You can build nuclear power plants in about 10 Years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant Uranium is not only exported by Russia.

wewxjfq2• 4 years ago

Germany has high consumer electricity prices because of taxation. It's only slightly above EU average if you ignore taxes. And France, the nuclear energy utopia, is only slightly below EU average. And this ignores potential state subsidies, artificial price caps and regulation by the French government, and that Germany uses 1/4 of the electricity price to modernize the grid.

illiac7864• 4 years ago

You can store electricity pretty well, a 20 millions kWh storage went live in Switzerland recently:

https://interestingengineering.com/switzerlands-water-batter...

BenoitP3• 4 years ago

If Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would not be wasting currently 5GW of gas for electricity (and burning much less lignite coal as well):

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia

It is a common false perception that it is a problem, very often pushed by fake news outlets. You might be a victim. Russia produces about 15% of the world's uranium [1], according to UNECE.

[1] https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...

wewxjfq2• 4 years ago

The EU publishes official numbers on where they get their uranium from, there is no need to make guesstimates, Russian uranium accounts for 20%. And this ignores that Russia has the largest uranium processing capabilities in the world, so dependency on Russia is higher than the imports of natural uranium suggest.

Lastly, nuclear power plants produce a constant base load while the coal and gas power plants have a very dynamic output and it's simply misleading to pretend that a GW of nuclear energy can replace a GW of coal or gas without taking all of the production into account.

cschwarm• 4 years ago

If Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would be burning about as much fossil fuels as it does now.

That's because without the opposition to nuclear, the motivating reason to build up renewables would have been gone, so it wouldn't have happen. Which means Germany would have continued with about 10 % (of primary energy) nuclear and the rest would have been fossil fuels.

locallost5• 4 years ago

Which makes them one of the largest exporters of uranium in the world, including to the EU, which is what I've said. A victim of what exactly? Knowing the facts?

Imagine the importance of Russian uranium if there was a nuclear renaissance and the world suddenly built terawatts of nuclear plants, which is what this article is proposing and presumably you too. And also, Russians are one of the last countries that actually builds them including abroad, so a nuclear surge would mean countries lining up to have Russian nuclear plants built.

The article is devoid of not only data, but common sense.

TheChaplain• 4 years ago

Sweden built one in 6 years (Barseback) and another in 5 years (Oskarshamn), both ran fine without causing nuclear disasters.

And now almost 50 years later we have way waaay more knowledge, experience and technology to build safe powerplants within a short time.

The hindrance is bureaucracy. Ask anyone who is or have been working for the government how incredibly inefficient it is.

locallost5• 4 years ago

In the US, there was one nuclear plant that went online in this century: it is the second unit of the plant in Tennessee whose construction started in 1973. It was finished in 2016, after 43 years. There is also a construction in progress in Georgia, currently approaching 20 years of development.

The problem with government inefficiency and nuclear is that the governments are the only ones that dare spend money on it. An example of a private investment was the plant in South Carolina that was halted after 9 billion spent. The reason was that they realized they would not make it in time to cash in on a subsidy, and without that the project would never ever be profitable. And normally you could say it happens, it's the company's money, but the debt is being paid by the utility's customers. They're paying for electricity from a power plant that does not exist.

I don't understand the people that think this is a rational solution.

throwoutway• 4 years ago

Where do you justify your numbers? 45%? They make no sense to me.

gdy• 4 years ago

"planning and building nuclear plants takes a lot longer than 10 years"

Russia or Korea build a nuclear power unit in approximately 8 years, China - 6.

mvgcf9• 4 years ago

This op-ed is getting things so utterly wrong, I don‘t even know where to start.

The Energiewende (so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility) here in Germany is working just fine. It is a reasonable investment in our future.

The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy. The lack of gas is problematic because it is a preliminary product used in chemical processes. This is where a looming recession might derive from.

On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7.

On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint.

Zanfa• 4 years ago

On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7.

Grid-scale storage (apart from hydro, but that's basically maxed out or unsuitable for most geographies) is still an unsolved problem for renewables, even the largest lithium-battery ones are basically a rounding error. You'd need multiple weeks worth of battery capacity to really run on renewables. Not even sure if there's enough lithium to make this work theoretically with current tech.

On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated

Same is true for every other power source as well. Energy storage for renewables is never included, so you need backups, the €100 billion German defence package announced a few months ago is a direct consequence of "cheap" Russian gas, the millions of people suffering/dying from air pollution related issues from using coal.

There's no perfect solution, but nuclear is definitely a strong contender for the best way forward.

VaxWithSex3• 4 years ago

It's a solved problem for Germany. Electrolyze Hydrogen, store it in the existing gas infrastructure for the winter. Use the gas plants to burn it in the winter.

ben_w5• 4 years ago

There's no perfect solution, but nuclear is definitely a strong contender for the best way forward.

Absolutely! But:

Nuclear was approximately as cheap as the equivalent LiIon storage a few years ago, but the batteries are getting cheaper and the reactors are not.

There are also other chemistries, and other storage options, which I'd include under the banner of "no perfect solution, so let's do everything".

You'd need multiple weeks worth of battery capacity to really run on renewables.

I have no idea why this meme propagates. How many people live where there is no sunlight for multiple weeks at a time? And it's not like we don't already have some long distance power lines.

PV is so absurdly cheap that overproduction is seriously not a bad solution if you're just concerned about cloudy weeks.

WanderPanda• 4 years ago

On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7.

More probably you‘re running on green (washing) electricity certificates from Norway…

VaxWithSex3• 4 years ago

Nope, 100% green energy in the hands of the citizens.

timbre1234• 4 years ago

"The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy."

Yeah, I stopped reading here. This is just a flat out untruth. I'm sorry if this article doesn't agree with how you wish the world could be, but simply saying things like this that aren't true doesn't help.

ThePhysicist5• 4 years ago

Those renewable energy contracts were mostly a scam in my opinion, most of these providers just bought renewable electricity from the stock market when it was cheap and sold it to consumers at a premium, creating zero new renewable capacity in the process. Greenwashing at its finest. And last year when prices for renewables went through the roof due to several unanticipated factors most of them went belly-up and had to "fire" their long-time customers (myself included) because their business models stopped working as they had built zero renewable energy production themselves.

The whole "Energiewende" feels a bit like that: Electricity production was privatized and more than 300 billion € in subsidies went into investors' hands. Now the infrastructure that was created is mostly privately owned and even though renewable energy production currently peaks the prices go through the roof because consumer prices align with the stock market price of electricity and not the cost of production. It really matters how you create renewable energy.

mvgcf9• 4 years ago

While you do make a fair point on greenwashing being a problem in general, your opinion does not apply to my non greenwashed contract. 100% green energy and a coop investing heavily in more capacity.

This is true for gas (heating) and electricity, btw.

ucha3• 4 years ago

On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7.

How can you receive energy purely from renewable energy sources when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? Germany doesn't have any significant capacity for electricity storage. It's such a bold statement but it seems physically impossible.

mvgcf9• 4 years ago

One example: my energy provider builds biogas plants. Guess what, they turn agricultural waste into electricity. Even at night.

Your argumentation is similar to suggesting Tesla should stop developing electrical cars because there is no charger infrastructure. So 2010.

disgu• 4 years ago

On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7.

No you don't. Just because you pay for Ökostrom or whatever doesn't mean that the electricity you actually use was produced by renewables. It's one grid. You use the electricity produced by coal plants just like everyone else.

mvgcf9• 4 years ago

I am glad you got my point: My share of energy consumption is completly covered by renewables.

dispat0r7• 4 years ago

On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. On paper maybe, most people are actually using electricity generated from conventional power plants most of the time, and we are paying the highest energy prices in the world for that.
On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint. Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint.

ben_w5• 4 years ago

Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint.

False dichotomies. See for example Flugplatz Brandenburg-Briest: https://goo.gl/maps/WATEJANE9wiHk7UAA

And pastureland can continue to be used as pastureland simultaneously with both PV and wind.

dang• 4 years ago

so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility

Please omit swipes like this from your HN comments. They're against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and they weaken your argument.

foepys• 4 years ago

You can still not safely eat mushrooms from the south-eastern parts of Bavaria because they are still contaminated by the Chernobyl desaster. The anti-nuclear stance is not irrational, it has strong roots in reality.

inglor_cz• 4 years ago

Could this be case of an extreme regulation, much like "everything is known to cause cancer in the state of California"?

Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine are much closer to Chernobyl than Bavaria is, and the populations there regularly pick and eat mushrooms without suffering a wave of extra cancers.

stewbrew• 4 years ago

I'm tired of these probably nuclear industry backed articles that are wrong and miss the point.

1. Nuclear energy is no solution. See here for an example how things turn out in real life (in German): https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Deutsche-Solaranlagen-haengen...

2. Germany doesn't really lack electricity. You cannot replace gas in industrial processes that need heat just like that with electricity. If you could, you could also use renewable energy. Things change very slowly on this side.

mvgcf9• 4 years ago

This.

ThePhysicist5• 4 years ago

There's a difference between peak energy production at noon in summer and let's say 10 pm on christmas eve. And yes, the energy grid probably won't collapse in winter, removing 12-16 GW of baseload power will have a strong effect on prices though. Phasing out nuclear could have been fine, it's just that we didn't have any plan to replace it (again, mind the difference between base load and intermittent power production), e.g. no large-scale storage solutions planned whatsoever, which makes us reliant on gas, coal and the EU grid to match supply and demand.

DocTomoe6• 4 years ago

Germany doesn't really lack electricity.

... yet.

There is an interesting report on the ARD Mediathek [1] right now in which - among other nuclear-involved people - the guy responsible the flow of electricity talks about power production and consumption. He points out that while it is true that at some points in time, renewables provided 95% of our consumption, there are still other times where they make up less than 1%. He then proceeds to explain that we do not have the energy storage to survive that, and that such an energy storage - with our current technology - will not be technically feasible, and that our neighbouring countries will not be able to support us if bad comes to worse.

His prognosis is that if we proceed with the nuclear shutdown, we will perpetuate coal burning for the foreseeable future.

Oh, right, some genius also decided to stop that.

We like to think of ourselves to be enlightened trailblazers. But maybe we should take a step back and consider if we might be wrong.

[1] https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/dokus-im-ersten/dokumentar... - the part I'm talking about starts at about 35:35, German only (unfortunately)

epups7• 4 years ago

It's amazing how many well intentioned people cannot grasp this very simple point. There is no way to run a grid solely on solar and wind. Therefore the choice isn't between those and nuclear, it's between nuclear and coal/gas.

ucha3• 4 years ago

1. Your article on nuclear energy just says that France has reactors that need maintenance. It also says they produce less electricity because they need cold water which is not currently available because of heat waves and droughts. Both are temporary problems that can be planned around or avoided by over-provisioning capacity. As the original article notes, you cannot over-provision capacity with renewable energies because they tend to produce 100x less power on windless or cloudy days.

2. It's more efficient to burn gas and collect the heat for industrial processes that go through an intermediary step of converting heat into electricity. I don't think it has anything to do with gas being irreplaceable as a source of heat. Gas can be necessary as a chemical precursor in some reactions - which can't be replaced by electricity - but that has nothing to do with heat.

simonCGN• 4 years ago

Another of those propaganda articles by nuclear lobbyist.

RandomLensman2• 4 years ago

There is no quick going back to nuclear power and right now the past is irrelevant - the future matters. Might as well skip on new fission and then maybe build fusion power plants (if and when).

By the way: using coal as an emergency backstop if there is no gas was always the official plan.

ssl232• 4 years ago

Is Germany still capable of mining enough of its own coal for its own needs during such emergencies?

RandomLensman2• 4 years ago

Kind of, it has a lot lignite mining and still some proper coal. If things last longer it certainly has lignite for quite a while and still thermal coal mining.

dividedbyzero8• 4 years ago

No, but coal wouldn't work the same way as an instrument for political pressure the same way as pipeline-supplied gas does right now. Store enough for a few months and get coal shipped from elsewhere, same infrastructure etc. Buy someone else's shipments if need be, like with LNG currently, lots of poorer places are going to receive less than what they bought because Germany and the EU pay just about anything right now.

ajuc7• 4 years ago

The funniest thing is - Germany was repeatedly warned by Eastern European states that this (literally this) will happen if they continue to build Nord Stream 1 and then Nord Stream 2 and try to "fix" Russia by trade. Russian government already poisoned Ukrainian presidential candidate in 2004. Killed opposition and journalists both in Russia and in EU. Invaded 2 countries (Chechnia and Georgia - I don't even count Lithuania cause it was technically USSR) and committed war crimes (especially in Chechnia). And Germany just ignored this cause cheap gas and "they will surely change if we just give them money".

Like how dumb can you be?

Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania and probably others warned Germany and the rest of EU about this for decades.

Polish president in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia said "Today Georgia, tomorrow Ukraine, and then, perhaps, my country - Poland". It wasn't some genius foresight- this was mainstream opinion in Poland and many other EE states for over a decade already. We warned about Russia using the pipelines for blackmail and about their ambitions to recreate USSR against the will of the people in post-communist states.

By 2010 Russia already shut down gas for various EE states on several occasions to blackmail or punish them. Germany knew this and just ignored it. Probably cause it "couldn't happen to Germany and fuck EE".

In 2014 Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time and annexed Crimea. Also supported dictator Assad in murdering his own citizens and used hybrid warfare on EU by helping him push refuges to EU which created a huge political crisis.

Germany knew this and still sucked that gas like there's no tommorow and continued to build Nord Stream 2.

Last year Russian agents blew up a big ammo warehouse in Czech Republic. Germany still continued with Nord Stream, cause you know, who cares about Czech Republic (their ally in NATO and EU).

Oh, BTW - Germany also sold weapons to Russia and helped them train soldiers all through that time. They were supposed to stop after 2014 but they didn't.

All the warnings and pleas to stop doing business with Russia and especially to stop sending them weapons and increasing energy dependency were dismissed by Germany (and other EU states to a lesser degree) as "russophobic" because these countries were "understandeably traumatized" and "didn't understand modern global politics". Basically Germany treated us like dumb kids while commiting slow extended suicide.

It's mind-boggling how a big European state like Germany with big ambitions and supposedly independent media could be so ignorant for 3 decades with nobody in the country taking the warnings seriously.

Tozen2• 4 years ago

Good points. Germany has long been warned from so many sources (both domestic and international) that something like this situation could happen, yet they ran full speed and head first into it anyway.

iammjm• 4 years ago

I very much agree with this post. Also, don't forget about Russia's decade-long war against democracies via bot farms, support for populist parties, bribes, and assassinations (even on German on British soil). Many German politicians behaved like arrogant morons and ended up drinking their own cool aid. Now they are trying to minimize the damage by throwing Ukrainians under the bus. They find the war annoying, because it disturbs their business as usual. I feel like they have more of a problem with Ukraine than with Russia, because Ukraine is putting up a fight and complicating Germany's relations with Russia. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised as this is the country that started both world wars and let Hitler just do his thing as the Holocaust unfolded. Some of those people are still alive. I live in Germany by the way.

qayxc• 4 years ago

It's mind-boggling how a big European state like Germany with big ambitions and supposedly independent media could be so ignorant for 3 decades with nobody in the country taking the warnings seriously.

That's a warped perception. There has been a huge controversy (also in the media), it was the government and primarily chancellor Merkel who pushed for a adopting a soft line with Russia.

Critique was small since the Left traditionally sided with Russia, the Right was very sympathetic to authoritarian regimes in general, and the libertarians saw nothing but economic opportunities (cheap resources). Since military strength hasn't been a focus ever since the early 90s, economic ties were seen as both an effective measure to keep peace and an advantage to the domestic industries.

EE states have of course their own concerns, but let's be real here: every country is first and foremost focusing on their own interests and tends to ignore or downplay the interests of others, especially "small fish" like states that have little economical and political weight. Sounds harsh, but that's the reality of politics everywhere and not particularly surprising.

ajuc7• 4 years ago

Sounds harsh, but that's the reality of politics everywhere and not particularly surprising.

The funniest thing is - Germany trades more with Poland ( $92.3 billion) than with Russia ($31.5 billion). In fact Germany even trades more with Czech Republic than with Russia. If you add up all EE states it's orders of magnitude more. Yet somehow Russia is more important to them.

If it was just realpolitik I would be outraged but not astonished. But it's not a rational foreign policy. German foreign policy is not only morally wrong - it's also irrational.

mads_ravn• 4 years ago

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it —- Upton Sinclair.

But agreed that this boggles the mind. The only explanation I’ve been able to come up with is lobbying by German industry.

BenoitP3• 4 years ago

One upside of this crisis, is that the holy German liberal process of economic-politics will self-regulate: After the next winter's gas prices and lack thereof, there will not be any money left going into lobbying.

It is a shame that it will come at such price, though. Who could have predicted that? Literally everyone.

flohofwoe3• 4 years ago

Not to rain on your parade - a few points are definitely justified - but Poland has just switched to fill their "natural gas gap" with imports from Germany when it was cut off by Russia recently. Did you ever ask yourself where that "German" natural gas is actually coming from?

ajuc7• 4 years ago

I'm aware that Poland is in bad situation too. I live here and I don't support my government (especially their idiotic effective ban on wind power).

But that's just the last 7 years out of 33 years that we're independent, and even the current government mostly did the right thing when it comes to Russia.

Poland was in much worse situation than Germany. In 1989 we got independent and all of our infrastructure was tightly coupled with USSR. We were also dirt poor and had infrastructure in shambles. Since then we decoupled a little, built interconnects with other countries, an LNG terminal which provides about half our our gas, this year we also finish Baltic pipe to Norway and when it's ready we'll be fully independent of Russian gas.

Germany went the other way and increased their dependency on Russian gas in last 3 decades.

rasz• 4 years ago

Did you ask yourself why was NS1 build in the first place? and why was Yamal pipeline shut down?

Glawen• 4 years ago

I find Merkel's legacy quite bad. Germans never wanted to take a side on international stage, but pressured EU country in the backstage to accept policies favouring them. How many times we restrained car emissions laws because it would kill the almighty German car industry?

In the end, this shopkeeper attitude burst into their face very hard and I don't feel sorry for them.

BurningPenguin3• 4 years ago

Like how dumb can you be?

Well, several of those countries are using Russian designed nuclear reactors, where only Russian fuel is authorized to use. Why did they not change that in the last.. idk.. 30 years or so?

planb• 4 years ago

We don’t have an energy problem. We have a gas problem.

I’m open for (re-)discussing nuclear energy here in Germany, but we could run 100% on nuclear or coal and a full gas stop by Russia would still have catastrophic consequences. We need gas for industrial/chemical processes and heating our homes. In fact, if the Energiewende had progressed a bit further, then more houses would have installed a heat pump by now.

ajuc7• 4 years ago

You have foreign policy blindness problem, no independent media problem and most of all - "everything except making cars and exporting them doesn't matter" problem. Otherwise I can't explain how you were so dumb for 3 decades.

It's not like Germany is so poor it can't afford to pay 50% more for gas. Or that it couldn't build an LNG terminal just in case. Poland which is much less wealthy - managed to do it. How come nobody in Germany seriously raised these issues for 3 decades? Mainstream didn't care cause industrial output was the only thing that mattered. And EE countries are russophobic, we Germans are so much smarter. They will understand eventually that it's for their own good.

You have a lot of rethinking of your foreign policy to do. Germany can't continue to be an informal leader of EU with such obvious incompetency (and I'm charitable here, cause if it's not incompetency it's betrayal).

DocTomoe6• 4 years ago

Germany is so poor it can't afford to pay 50% more for gas

Germany isn't. Many Germans are. If missing gas leads to industry breaking down, more Germans will be.

Germans being made poor, especially for no good reasons other than the decisions of politicians abroad, tends to lead to unintended, but severe consequences. Already, wannabe autocrats are winding up their propaganda. Guess which countries they will have a look at first.

dividedbyzero8• 4 years ago

Germany is very, very corrupt and extremely risk-averse at the higher levels of politics. Russia is very good at buying and enabling the right people to further their interests (point in case: ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder). That's pretty much all there really is to that. It's one of those cases where the root really is malicious intent, not stupidity.

ggeorgovassilis• 4 years ago

no independent media

This cannot be overstated. The entirety of German media (excluding niche outlets) across the political spectrum align on every important topic.

someweirdperson• 4 years ago

We don’t have an energy problem. We have a gas problem.

As soon as the risk of running out of gas turns into reality, and people won't be able/allowed to heat their homes as usual, many will start plugging in their electrical fan heaters. The gas problem might expand into an electricity problem. How much of a problem, we'll probably find out soon.

schroeding• 4 years ago

But even still having all nuclear power plants wouldn't help us much in the current situation, would it? We need gas not for power generation (we do, but that's only ~ 1/6 of the whole consumption, and will be lower if we use gas only to stabilize the power grid - we still have coal power plants on stand-by that can reduce the load on the gas power plants), but for our industry and heating. It's mostly burned directly.

Sure, we could have replaced every boiler with a heat pump in the last 10 years, but we didn't. So we need gas for half of all buildings and that cannot be replaced by nuclear power. And we need a steady supply, as many gas boilers have old fuses that kick in if the gas pressure changes, bricking the boiler until a specalist resets it. So we can't even realistically ration it. :(

jillesvangurp2• 4 years ago

Of course the flip side is that Germany is going cold turkey on coal and gas in the next few years. Once that process is completed, it will have a huge head start on other countries looking to slowly transition to being carbon neutral. That's actually a good thing.

Short term it's disruptive for sure but it is already leading to huge public spending. Which of course also is the classic recipe to mitigate the risks of any potential recession and might actually set Germany up for huge economic growth soon after. That recession is arguably already happening. I don't think it will stay limited to Germany either. We've experienced those before. It will be fine.

Russia may or may not pull the plug on German gas revenue. Hard to tell right now and they don't seem to be very rational right now. But by merely putting the threat on the table, they've set a few things in motion already. Their gas revenues are going to shrink a lot as the result of their recent actions. It's just going to be a function of how badly they need the cash by how quick that process will go.

It's more than a little bit academic for me as I live in Berlin which is very dependent on Russian gas for heating and warm water. There's a very real chance I will have to deal with some level of heating and shower issues in the coming winter. I'm fully confident that whatever happens, Germany will figure it out though.

Now that it has come this far, I'm actually in favor of ripping off that band aid and get it over with. Putin is threatening me personally with a cold shower. I'll take that cold shower when/if it comes to that. Putin might be good chess player but his poker game sucks. His bluff has been called. And now, we'll see if there ever was more than that. So far it just looks like a country self destroying its economy for no good reason at all.

cm21873• 4 years ago

I think the revenues will shrink to Russia ultimately as europe will cut its dependancy on gas, but in the short term, the squeeze on gas supply created a price hike that more than offset the reduced volumes for Russia. That may continue and finance Russia’s war.

jillesvangurp2• 4 years ago

Of course. The question is when. If they Russia cuts off the gas they basically will just destroy their economy faster. And it's a matter of time before production elsewhere ramps up to compensate. The coming winter will be a challenge, the winter after that it will be solved one way or another. Probably at great cost but it will be a lot less of an issue.

Also, Russia needs more than just cash to fuel the war. They are currently cut off from a lot of essential imports and the international market and their army clearly is under-performing because of apparent logistical, supply, and morale issues.

I think Germany might prove to have a lot more stamina than Russia. Riding out the next winter without Russian gas won't be fun but it will be able to deal with it. On the other hand, I don't think a second winter in the Ukraine is going turn things around for the Russians either and I think they are well aware of it. So, Putin can commit economical suicide or he can come back to the negotiation table. The question is what he has to bring to the table. It's not looking like he has much to offer.

spockz• 4 years ago

I’m not so sure Russia will depend on Europe for it’s gas price/revenue. Oil is already being diverted east and to India that are willing to buy. So ultimately Russia has the same income, the environmental pollution will be the same, and yes Europe may have green energy.

Tozen2• 4 years ago

However, it will still take Russia many years to do the transition of supplying India and China (and whoever else), to the same level they were to Europe. In the near future, Russia will be somewhat hurting itself, as it's hurting Europe.

China has claimed it wants to reduce its reliance on oil, particularly starting from the 2030s, but that all gets tricky if Russia will be supplying very cheap oil and gas or if China will be wary of relying so much on Russia as a matter of policy.

It's possible that Europe will spearhead ways to reduce the reliance on gas and oil, not replace, but figure out various new strategies and technologies around renewables and alternatives. Conventional nuclear doesn't seem to be on the table, because of the very long construction times, unless we are talking something like SMR nuclear.

llampx2• 4 years ago

Its cute that you think this all boils (sic) down to cold showers. Typical out-of-touch mentality. Maybe a few thousand elderly and children dying in unheated 70s apartments will wake you up better than cold showers in the morning.

la_fayette• 4 years ago

It will be a though challenge, although this text is just a nuclear power marketing. The numbers are also a bit different then reported: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE...

epups7• 4 years ago

Germans simply won't admit this. I talked to some people who are in high positions in the Green Party, and they all have this obviously stupid belief that we will simply switch to renewables instead of reactivating nuclear. What they don't grasp is there is no such option. It's either nuclear or coal/gas. Any argument against nuclear must take into account the extreme damage Germany is doing to the environment with their current strategy.

BurningPenguin3• 4 years ago

Yet another one, who thinks it's about electricity. We don't have much of a problem with that, since gas only makes up about 10% of the energy mix. About 75% of all households in Germany use gas and oil for heating. Your magic nuclear reactor won't change that. Switching those things takes some time, and it won't be done until next winter. All companies specialized in that are already booked out and there is a shortage on the necessary parts to build that stuff.

rich_sasha• 4 years ago

They are quite fungible for heating.

I don't know how prices compare, but UK is on a big drive to replace gas boilers in private homes with heat pumps. The main obstacle is actually poor general building standards and insulation. I believe German standards are quite a bit higher. Basically, the peak temperature produced by air-source heat pumps is lower than that from a boiler, so without better insulation they don't work so well (or something like that).

BurningPenguin3• 4 years ago

Idk what the exact differences are. I only know, that newer buildings are already required to have proper insulation, so for those that are built or (properly) renovated in, idk maybe the last 20 years or so, should be fine. But we also have plenty of older buildings, that need some work. That's probably also one of the reasons why many people go for wood pellets to replace the gas heater. Add to that all the really old buildings, that can't be renovated due to urban heritage protections.

But as said, all the companies are booked out and parts aren't available fast enough, thanks to outsourcing to China...

Germany's Energy Catastrophe

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