The Great German Energy Experiment

http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/428145/the-great-german-energy-experiment/?ref=rss

by pdelgallego • 14 years ago

243 203 14 years ago

macavity233• 14 years ago

Great article - upvoted. That it's inconceivable that the US or UK government could think about spending such an amount (~5% of GDP!) on a long-term science and engineering project speaks volumes about why the Germans are where they are, and why we're where we are, economically speaking.

From an engineering point of view I think it's foolish to turn off the nuke plants, but public opinion is what it is, and this causes the regulatory requirements to prevent nuclear from being economically viable.

The article does a good job of covering the risks, but personally I'd bet on the Germans here - even if the 'Energiewende' doesn't pay off per se, the rewards from the science and engineering knowhow will be huge. The only comparable project I can think of is the Apollo Program, though a quick google suggests that was never more than 1% of GDP, and the returns from the science on that were massive and lasted for decades. Likewise, CERN, which was about as blue-sky as things get, gave us the World Wide Web: completely tangential to its stated purpose, but what kind of rate of return did that give us?

So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run?

(On a side note, I really want to have a stickybeak around a 30MW AC/DC converter!)

johnchristopher• 14 years ago

> So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run?

Does the superconducting super collider fulfill your criterias (let's forget for a minute that it is about destroying particles in new and exciting ways) ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

macavity233• 14 years ago

Interesting, thanks. A reference from that page - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-... - suggests:

One thing that killed the SSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending. There was even nonsense in the press about spending on potted plants for the corridors of the administration building. Projected costs did increase, but the main reason was that, year by year, Congress never supplied sufficient funds to keep to the planned rate of spending. This stretched out the time and hence the cost to complete the project. Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier.

Leading one to believe that it was actually a good project that was stiffed by a congress in search of tax cuts. Who knows whether that's true, of course.

simonh• 14 years ago

I don't think it's reasonable to count incidental benefits from projects, such as the WWW from CERN. The same basic problem of sharing information between scientists would still have existed without CERN, and who's to say it or something even better, with fewer of HTTP/HTML's limitations wouldn't have been developed if TBL had been working on a different project?

The space race argument is another old sore, it turns out many of the discoveries ascribed to it were actually developed independently, but then were used by NASA who ended up getting the credit. Teflon is often cited, but was actually discovered in 1938 and patented in 1945.

Yes a lot of great technologies were developed for Apollo and used in other areas, but many or perhaps all of them would have been developed eventually anyway.

koide2• 14 years ago

I don't think it's reasonable to discount all the subproducts from such an investment just because many would have been developed eventually anyway.

In this vein, it's just as easy to discount the people who did the inventions/discoveries because someone else would have eventually made the discovery/invention anyway.

Of course that the main project has to be sound, and cannot be justified only due to the subproducts, but "would have happened anyway" is not a solid argument to discount the subproducts, mainly because you cannot know if it would, nor when it would.

yk2• 14 years ago

Governments are quite often rather inefficient, but they are really large. For example, rockets could not have been developed by private enterprise, because it took something like thirty years (and substantial investment) to build somewhat reliable rockets. [1]

A bit more abstract: businesses are good at small incremental development steps, since most of the steps need to have a market. In contrast a government can invest in projects which are both very long term and very expensive, because they have a reliable revenues (taxes).

[1]much longer version of the argument: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...

arethuza• 14 years ago

"has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run"

Having been on large EU funded projects (all part of the ESPRIT II program), I honestly can't believe that they provided good value for money. Now there might have been a lot of indirect benefits, but I'm not aware of the results of the projects I worked on being directly used by anyone.

eru5• 14 years ago

Also the US Space Shuttle had a cost 1000-fold cost overrun, if measured by cost to orbit per unit of mass.

loceng2• 14 years ago

The economics are easy. Money on war 'invests' your resources into other countries (no return, negative return likely), vs. money on innovation and infrastructure in your own country (positive return, long-term; potential for making other things more efficient, more cost-efficient become higher).

gaius• 14 years ago

Sorry, but that's nonsense, you cannot underestimate the impact of military technologies like jet engines, radar, communications satellites, GPS, the internet, superglue... The whole of the modern world is based on military tech. Plus you gainfully employ lots of people (e.g. teaching trades to people who haven't done well in mainstream education) and as a free bonus you get the defence of the realm.

larrydag3• 14 years ago

Some large scale projects that come to mind include Panama Canal, USA Highway system, Alaskan pipeline although you could argue they did destroy some things.

cturner2• 14 years ago

Theere's a basic role of government that's widely agreed upon - that it keeps us from hurting one another and clarity on the use of roads and telecommunications channels and the like. And I realise that opinions diverge above that, but I'll put mine.

Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient, and seems like a bad place to look for inspiration in engineering. When governments set up things like NASA they become political institutions themselves. It's easy for them to grow into organisations that seek self-preservation and always more money to support the glamour of their leadership.

When government gets involved in a field, you get a cross-polination between field-experts and government people. Often the government people end up on the side of workers in the field rather than the public that they're meant to be serving.

Given all these problems, I don't think we should be attracted to the idea of governments taxing us to spend the money on difficult-to-quantify never-never projects. They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects.

eru5• 14 years ago

> They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects.

Or, if you agree that a low-carbon future would be a good thing: Tax carbon usage, and, since you don't like the government spending money, just distribute the proceeds equally among the population. This works out to a net impact, modulo transactions costs, on the average carbon-emitting person of zero, but rewards and punishes the outliers.

minikites• 14 years ago

Under this model, how would we end up with something like the Interstate Highway system?

nihilocrat• 14 years ago

I also think government dilutes the effectiveness of the experts it employs, but at the same time the private sector is amazingly, exceedingly incapable of seeing benefit from anything but immediate profits. Investing in highly risky pilot programs which have high costs and uncertain benefits is something the private sector, except perhaps a few optimistic billionaires, would never do. If we had never supported difficult-to-quantify never-never projects, we wouldn't be finding exoplanets, we would have never discovered that asteroids are clumps of unfathomably abundant resources, we would have never gotten to the Moon, and Europeans would never have explored the New World, because the benefits at the time seemed dubious and the funding came from governments.

I am optimistic just because I have a high amount of trust for German government. They are a lot more cautious and less bandwagon-hopping and more capable of pulling stuff like this off whereas for most other industrialized governments the Energiewende would just be a dramatic stage show created by former-execs-turned-bureaucrats to put taxpayer dollars into contractor's pockets without any concern for actual results.

ClHans4• 14 years ago

"Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient" [citation needed]

"Often the government people end up on the side of workers in the field rather than the public that they're meant to be serving." [citation needed]

Oh, it was all opinion.

That's fine.

In my opinion, government is as efficient as the private sector (ever seen the waste and mismanagement going on in these huge megacorps? it's insane!), and by definition can be _more_ cost-effective than the private sector because there is no need to turn a profit. Private businesses have, built in, a bit of skimming off the top for the owners (and there's nothing wrong with that, of course--that's part of why people start businesses), and government-run services by definition do not. They're not profit-seeking services. They're public services.

(You may disagree on what ought to be a public service, but once we're all on the same page that the government ought to do some things, it's just a matter of hashing out what those ought to be...)

Also...wait... NASA has grown into an organization that works for the glory of its leadership? what? sorry...again...what?

Tichy• 14 years ago

Being German and having voted Green most of my life (until the pirate party came along), I still watch those energy subsidies with suspicion. I am just not certain the money is spent in an efficient way here. As for the jobs in the green energy sector, apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells. So much for that investment.

CrLf• 14 years ago

"apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells"

Yeah, but that's because China can violate any worker rights under the Sun, and pollute as much as it wishes in the process (and producing solar cells pollutes quite a bit).

excuse-me4• 14 years ago

What's the problem?

You close the nukes so everyone with an "Atomkraft Nein Danke" sticker on their VW votes for you.

You give huge feed in tarrif subsidy to anyone who owns a house to put panels on their roof - so the countryside votes for you.

You continue to subsidize coal so the Ruhr votes for you. But burn the coal in Poland and ship the power back - so there is no acid rain to worry about.

A perfect (if expensive) solution for everyone (unless you live east of Poland)

kaybe2• 14 years ago

Other countries ripping the technology off is part of the plan, as far as I understood it.

We can talk them into using less fossil fuels (probably won't work), or use incentives (which would again cost money), or we can create a by then cheap technology for getting Co2-free energy which will be stolen by everyone.

Comparing costs from climate change adaption and avoidance shows that avoidance is far cheaper - and in both cases the developed countries will have to carry the majority. (Just imagine the situation if half of Asia and Africa's harvests fail.)

The investment here is not just an economic one, it goes much further.

mbq3• 14 years ago

The problem is that this money is spent not on how to make usable "green" energy but how to be more efficient in consuming gov's subsidies to "green" technologies.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

You are equating spending towards merely manufacturing PV arrays and wind plants with spending on R&D, that is not the same thing. Apollo isn't even a remotely comparable program because that was the creation of new technologies. The comparable program here would be the interstate highway system, perhaps.

xxgreg• 14 years ago

Not ~5%GDP.

"the country will spend somewhere between $125 billion and "$250 billion on infrastructure expansion and subsidies in the next eight years—between 3.5 and 7 percent of Germany's 2011 GDP"

The sentence is a bit confusing but I think they mean this:

~5% of 2011 GDP / 8 years = ~0.6% 2011GDP per year.

kfk3• 14 years ago

I don't like this. Instead of heavily subsidizing some technologies, they should tax externalities (i.e. pollution) and let the markets do the rest. It's annoying having to pay 15% more energy bills because somebody has decided that wind and solar are the hot thing of the moment.

Bad, really bad. Same way of thinking that brought us to the debt crisi in Europe.

paganel• 14 years ago

> they should tax externalities (i.e. pollution)

Because that is a really difficult problem to solve. It's easier to tax CO2 emissions, but how do you tax nuclear waste? And by how much?

jsilence2• 14 years ago

Difficult question and even more so when you take a look at the Asse II desaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II

adventureful6• 14 years ago

Taxing external effects like pollution does nothing to ensure the taxes drive benefit toward the technology (renewables) the taxes were created to spur.

If you go looking for technology breakthrough by tax, you'll find nothing unless a particular technology breakthrough is able to be produced in said time and place. Which is why the approach doesn't inherently work, nothing guarantees a meaningful tech breakthrough is waiting in the wings, it might take 50 years for all you know.

On the negative effect side, by attaching the new pollution taxes, you're removing private capital that could have been put toward innovation.

Then to top it off, deciding how to measure and tax pollution and what should be or should not be defined as pollution, is rife with incredible disagreement (and that is not going to change). The games politicians start playing when you open that can of worms....

It's not in any way inherently a better way to go.

ealexhudson• 14 years ago

Europe also brought us the air travel tax, which does target externalities and seems close to sparking a trade war because it covers all flights in the EU, not all EU-based airlines. It's difficult to do.

jsilence2• 14 years ago

To everybody who thinks energy right now is too expensive.

A couple of friends and I built a bike generator station for five bikes. We are using DC-Motors as dynamos and lead batterys for buffering the output.

Five bikers in total can generate between 220W to 250W for an extended time. Let assume they bike at 200W for five hours. They then will have generated one kilowatthour of electricity, which costs 25ct. I'm pretty sure they will be happy with their five cent per person when they get off the bikes after five hours.

Energy is dirt cheap.

larrydag3• 14 years ago

Bike generators are powered by people. People biking require time. What is the labor or opportunity cost of having all of these people sustaining 250W per hour or essentially a .25kW-hour? Just a thought but that doesn't sound cheap.

lispm2• 14 years ago

It is actually totally different.

In the past the governments and the companies gave a shit about public opinion. Government money was used to research and build the nuclear industry. The electricity companies were huge monopolies. Currently we have four huge electricity producers which nicely divide the market into four regions. Competition? Zero. Government support? Max. That brought us huge coal power plants whic brought a lot of environmental problems and a fleet of very expensive nuclear power plants.

Keep in mind that Germany is a relatively small country with little resources (mainly coal) and more than 80 million people.

Several decades ago the green movement was started to be a lobby against this block of politics and industry.

They stopped the expansion of nuclear power and the build up of even more powerful monopolies. They also stopped much of the coal power plants from polluting the country.

The voters brought the green party into power. First they were in regional parliaments, then in the Bundestag and eventually they were even part of the Bundesregierung (Schroeder/Fischer). The latest coup was that they lead the government in one of the Bundesländer where actually is one of the hearts of the German industry.

This happened because the voter placed them there. Over time also the conservative, right wing party, the CDU and its sister CSU, learned to support environmental policies. Part of their conservative ideology is the love to the country and to preserve its nature ('Wertkondervative'). Chancellor Merkel herself has a Dr. in Quantum Chemistry and she was responsible some years ago for the ministry which is concerned with environment and reactor safety. She is an expert on these topics.

What the voter now wants is to put more market, more competition into the energy landscape with a preference for renewable energy. You can see who is the opposition: the four huge electicity producers.

But now you can see the results. Renewable energy is up from 6% in 2000 to now over 20% share in electricity production.

But more important half of the new energy projects is privately owned or locally owned. We are bringing democracy and the local market to the energy system.

Before the grid was tightly controlled and only the big companies had access to it.

Now everyone can demand that his energy will be fed into the grid.

We tax energy use very high. This gives an added incentive to use less electricity and investing in modern technology pays back - if it uses less energy.

The 'Energiewende' is not a government project. It's the opposite. It took several decades of hard work of many citizens, a new party, ... to actually get the governments to support it.

It means lots of research, new industries, new companies, ... some will survive, some won't.

Much of the investment into new energy infrastructure is necessary anyway - because some of the infrastrucute is getting old - we direct more investments into renewable energy, than we had done in the past.

cturner2• 14 years ago

    > You can see who is the opposition: the four
    > huge electicity producers.

And responsible-budget people. Germany is running in defecit beyond it's European treaty obligations. A factor contributing to the bottom line is expensive energy and expensive energy projects.

kfk3• 14 years ago

Just some quick answers.

* It is difficult, no doubt. But it is also difficult to find a way to efficienlty store solar and wind power. It is difficult is not a good excuse not to do it.

* It does not help innovation. Not true. It does. Taxes will lower the margins of the businesses with externalities and capital holders will look for more efficient technologies. Less cost and/or more profit are the only way you incentivate innovation.

* Energy is cheap. That doesn't mean it couldn't be cheaper. I mean, I prefer to spend my money on what I like, not on energy bills. And again, cheapER, bettER, are the real incentive to innovation.

* Politics. Don't know, don't care. If I had to go with politics, I'd say that solar and wind are mainly politics: it helps with votes and reputation, but only that (at least now).

* Nuclear. There is research also there. There has been progress for decades. Why that research is not as good as the one for solar and wind power I don't understand.

macavity233• 14 years ago

Politics. Don't know, don't care.

Fair enough - but not caring about this will leave you unable to fix serious problems, and incurably unhappy with the state of the world. Every problem, every issue, every project of non-trivial size is critically dependent upon politics of some stripe or other. History is riddled with excellent ideas that failed because they didn't consider politics (and for that matter, terrible ideas that succeeded because they did).

I agree with you that the public revulsion over nuclear power is unwarranted - but that battle is lost. No reasoned argument can hope to win over emotive shots of Chernobyl and Fukushima. We have to look forward.

Engineering is about achieving goals within constraints. Good engineering takes political constraints into account as well as technical and budgetary ones.

Addendum

Whoever is downvoting this guy, STOP. You might disagree with him, but he is promoting a debate in a civilised manner, and that's how we move forward.

adventureful6• 14 years ago

Said taxes can just as easily destroy the capital holders you claim will go looking for other investments. It's a fluid pool, you can't suck a billion out of the private economy without impacting all other private capital.

And that is all premised on getting the taxes right. If you miss in the guess work, you'll cause massive damage and dislocation of capital. The US has done that on numerous occasions (eg ethanol 1970s).

Energy is politics. There's really no other industry on the entire planet that is more defined by politics due to its importance and nature (from land for solar to drilling in Nigeria, to tar sands in Canada, to windmills killing birds and on and on).

If you don't know and don't care about politics when it comes to energy, then you're going to get nowhere.

adventureful6• 14 years ago

Stephan Reimelt, CEO of GE Energy Germany: "Germany is forcing itself toward innovation. What this generates is a large industrial laboratory at a size which has never been done before. We will have to try a lot of different technologies to get there."

It has been done before, at far greater scale. WW1 and WW2. Some of the best innovations or inventions are derived out of a person or a nation having their back to the wall. Hence the famous saying: "necessity, who is the mother of invention" (dating back a mere 2400 years or so, and it's probably older as a known premise).

I would anticipate very impressive industrial breakthroughs in renewable energy coming from the German experiment.

pcrh2• 14 years ago

I also wonder how much benefit is to be had by not paying other countries for your energy compared to paying yourself...

adventureful6• 14 years ago

In the case of the US, a shockingly massive benefit. We import between $350b and $500b per year worth of petroleum products (depending on the price of oil).

rumcajz• 14 years ago

> [They] decided to build a polysilicon plant in Tennessee, partly because energy costs in Germany were so high.

This makes USA look like a 3rd world country being used as a haven for environmentally harmful industry installations.

maxerickson• 14 years ago

Not really. Undeveloped countries tend not to have cheap abundant electricity and are generally less politically stable than the U.S. (both of those things are part of a desirable context for billion dollar investments).

I suppose if you decide that U.S. environmental standards are useless you might have a point.

onli13• 14 years ago

The article has a heavily biased view. Some points it gets wrong:

>"If you close eight nuclear plants, which were carbon-free, overnight, you will increase carbon emissions,"

Nuclear plants are not carbon free. Getting the uranium, transporting the nuclear waste, transporting the people who run the plant costs a lot of carbon emissions. You need to look at the whole picture.

>Inevitably, some hot July week will come when a high-pressure system stalls over Europe, stilling turbines just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners

The summer in Germany isn't that hot. Middle europe, not california. Accordingly, we don't have air conditioners (in general)

Look at who is cited - People from large companies loosing their monopoly and Sinn, a conservative "expert".

toemetoch5• 14 years ago

>Inevitably, some hot July week will come when a high-pressure system stalls over Europe, stilling turbines just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners

The summer in Germany isn't that hot. Middle europe, not california. Accordingly, we don#t have air conditioners (in general)

These scenarios do happen. They're not always as straight-forward as the one suggested (low production/high demand). A few weeks ago there was a sunny/windy holiday in Belgium (May 28th). Due to overproduction and low demand they had to avert a national blackout by paying France to sink the surplus energy. In Belgium, renewables account for 7% of energy. That weekend it was 3 times as much.

onli13• 14 years ago

I don't know about Belgium. Maybe air conditioners there are more common? In Germany, it is said that cold winters are more dangerous for the energy balance, as the cold also increases energy demand and the photovoltaik-cells aren't as useful as in a hot (and sunny) summer.

adam-a2• 14 years ago

I had no idea too much electricity could be a problem? I was trying to read more about this effect but google has no answers for me.

Also, surely the obvious thing to do would be turn off some of the turbines in that situation?

ars22• 14 years ago

> Nuclear plants are not carbon free. Getting the uranium, transporting the nuclear waste, transporting the people who run the plant costs a lot of carbon emissions.

But shutting them down when you already paid all the costs is clearly stupid.

And he didn't say carbon free. He said "increase carbon emissions" (he probably meant carbon dioxide emissions), and it clearly will increase them.

maigret• 14 years ago

Shutting down was driven by fear, not by cost.

onli13• 14 years ago

He said carbon free. I cited that sentence.

Also a working nuclear "you already paid for"-plant costs money and produces carbon emissions.

sneak• 14 years ago

> The summer in Germany isn't that hot. Middle europe, not california. Accordingly, we don't have air conditioners (in general)

Germans are always saying this. It was 90F in Berlin yesterday. That is air conditioner weather, period.

The part about most people not having them is true, though. This US expat is hooking his up this week, despite power costing twice here what it does in California.

Xylakant5• 14 years ago

Climate differs wildly throughout Germany. Berlin tends to get hot days, but those are of a moderate number. The upper Rhine valley where I come from has a warmer climate, but less extreme summer heat (lots of forest area around). The coastal area is generally cooler during the summer.

So yes, we do get hot days, but it's still rare that people have air conditioning in their flats. Modern office buildings have air conditioning though and most shops as well. Still, when the temperature difference is lower you still need less energy to power them. Another point is that it's a rare occurrence to have no sun (hence no solar power) and massive heat.

sjwright3• 14 years ago

Fahrenheit? What is this, the nineteenth century?

(90F = 32 degrees Celsius)

kaybe2• 14 years ago

Do you have a normal German house, with shutters and thick stone walls? Normally they're good for at least a week when it gets hot - only open up at night and during the day close the shutters and don't open the windows. And heat waves that last longer than a week are very rare. All of Europe lives like this, even in the southern countries. There are some places where this doesn't work though, like the flat directly underneath the roof..

soc884• 14 years ago

> That is air conditioner weather, period.

Whine whine whine

Symmetry3• 14 years ago

Nuclear plants are not carbon free.

No, but of course solar power isn't carbon free either by the same logic. The problem is that in the short term the power that those nuclear plants were providing is being made up for by coal plants, which are much worse for the environment.

onli13• 14 years ago

>made up for by coal plants, which are much worse for the environment

This is exactly the point the article is missing. According to the german public, for the environment and the whole humanity the risks from nuclear plant are that high that coal plants, even though they are now used more and are unhealthy, are way less dangerous.

Keep in mind that the plan is to shutdown all nuclear plants, substitute them with green energy and use coal only as long as needed in between the change.

DasIch4• 14 years ago

I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative. It's better to work on the problem now, developing knowledge that helps our economy and makes us a worldwide leader than holding it off unless we are near collapse due to oil prices or worse have to engage in a war about resources, especially since the latter is something Germany must not engage in.

lmm• 14 years ago

>I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative.

There's one obvious alternative: Build and run nuclear power plants. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries, and the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables.

skore16• 14 years ago

> We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries

That's incredibly short sighted. And not just the measure of 'centuries' (even if that were true, it's still arguably just postpone the problem). Energy demand is going up, sharply, as more countries join our standard of living. We will, definitely, need technologies that are as clean as possible to meet the demand, eventually. No amount of pollution that is avoidable is acceptable at the scale we are going to witness. Which brings us to

> the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables

I've stopped buying this argument and I'm sick of seeing it again and again - it's complete and utter Bullshit. The only way we have come up in terms of "dealing" with the highly toxic waste that nuclear energy produces (letting alone the often brushed over but equally horrifying ecological cost of mining the fuel) is to store it away "somewhere". The kicker is: We have not figured out that "somewhere". In Germany, there is exactly one site that is being developed for this. We literally ship the containers there and they sit in a holding facility above the salt mine because we have not even figured out how to get the fuel from the shipment containers into the storage containers. Oh, and the storage containers haven't been fully developed either. This is a catastrophe just waiting to happen.

Years and years of politics playing nice with (and pushing money into) the nuclear industry have produced no results that a reasonable person could support. What the government had done was basically doubling down on what is often - in this thread as well - requested: To let the market figure it out. Oh they have figured it out alright. Just not the part about it also being reasonable. Or even sane.

And this is only for the waste that was produced so far. The technology and storage capacity for centuries of waste simply doesn't exist. At all.

Story time: They actually did have the "solving" of this in mostly private hands for a long time - a semi-government agency (under strong, yet curiously absent oversight) conducted "experiments" on how to store the waste in a different salt mine [1]. They "experimented" with things like whether they roll or "throw down" barrels into caves. When they "noticed" that they had a problem with huge amounts of radioactive water rising up everywhere, they "solved" it by pumping it down into a deeper cavity. That whole agency was abolished and replaced and put under proper (and horrified) oversight when the extent of the disaster came to light in a huge scandal.

They have been "working on" trying to clean up this mess since nineteen frigging ninety five. They haven't even figured out how to drill into the closed off cavities to get the improperly stored fuel out of there, for crying out loud! All while cancer rates are going off around the site.

So yeah, great environmental impact. Go sell your snake oil somewhere else.

Very few things piss me off as much as nuclear defenders selling their technology as reasonable. Zero Carbon Emissions, Woo! Give me a break.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II - the German version is a lot more in-depth: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse - the English version seems to brush over much of the issues.

DasIch4• 14 years ago

Nuclear technology is extremely risky and prohibitively expensive even if we ignore the cost of accidents and waste disposal covered largely by governments because not a single company controlled by sane people would ever build a nuclear power plant otherwise.

That being said it is not at all clear whether there is enough uranium for a couple or even one century, especially given the massive increase in demand that we will see in the next couple of years.

Even if we assume it is cheap and will last for centuries it is still not a long term solution, which is what Germany is aiming for.

ars22• 14 years ago

> I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand

It's not that complicated. Making a solar panel costs more energy than it produces for decades. So all Germany is doing is making China foot the CO2 bill.

China makes the solar panel with all the associated CO2 costs, Germany installs it and claims no CO2.

Globally they are doing nothing useful, except maybe pushing the costs down.

I especially find shutting down the nuclear plants stupid. The one and only technology that actually would work, and they are spurning it.

skore16• 14 years ago

That's false on a number of levels.

A) It's not just solar.

B) A lot of the manufacturing actually happens in Germany. It's just that recently, China is spinning up the competition. Market at work.

C) "costs more energy than it produces for decades". Even if that were true, it would still be a better deal. You provide no source for proof because there is none - Particularly considering technological progress, this will soon be even more laughable.

D) It's not about frigging CO2. That's part of the deal, but reducing it to that is dangerously close to obfuscation.

E) "except maybe pushing the cost down" - there is a gold mine of discovery and realization being brushed away with crushing ignorance there. "pushing the cost down" is quite the magic thing in the history of mankind, you know?

F) "The one and only technology" - Yeah right. Tell you what, there is an article linked at the top which talks about the actual, one and only technology. It's already working and being implemented.

kokey• 14 years ago

I think you touch on a rather important point. Germany has to make these technologies work, because the alternative is having to rely on gas from Poland and Russia and nuclear energy from France, oil also from Russia and coal from somewhere not nice either. I'm not a big fan in government spending on less efficient technologies, except that in this case I believe the wars and uncomfortable partnerships that can be avoided this way will make it pay for itself.

jorleif2• 14 years ago

One of the things that always surprises me when talking about lulls from wind and solar power, is that the assumption always is that we _have_ to provide continuous power. Would it not be possible to have industrial facilities that run in bursts when the energy is available (or more likely cheap), and then turn off again? Sure, this is not as easy as the old way to do things, but seriously, this is not impossible, nature essentially works in this way. Prime candidates would include extremely energy intensive industrial processes with short runtimes.

DasIch4• 14 years ago

It is not possible because those industries that consume massive amounts of energy are typically those that operate under the assumption that machines are never and in some cases cannot be turned of.

adam-a2• 14 years ago

It seems inevitable that we will have to change some of our fundamental ways of working if we want to get rid of our reliance on fossil fuels. Before the industrial revolution the world didn't have 24/7 assembly lines, it's only since coal/oil/gas that we've been able to work in this way. I guess that's the point, it is a large paradigm shift, comparable to the introduction of the steam engine. We can't expect the world to remain unchanged.

The unfortunate thing with solar panels means that we'd all be at work when the sun shines and get our days off when it's cloudy :)

Xylakant5• 14 years ago

The problem with many large industrial processes is that they cannot be run that way. Think a steamcracker for example: Shutdown takes days, starting up as well. It's so (energy) hungry that its cost-efficient to leave all parts in the chain running if one fails and just burn the resulting light oil. (Makes for a spectacular flame on the skyline). Aluminum processing falls in the same category.

There are other processes where this is possible (steel smelting via electric power for example) and where this is already done. Those plants usually run at night and consume large amounts of the base load. The issue with solar/wind-energy is that the availability may fluctuate within very short time frames - sometimes minutes - so that you cannot use this.

In a smaller scale this works the other way round. There are some small-scale fuel-powered plants that can be used to heat/cool a house or a block as well as produce electricity and those power up when electrical power is needed and store the heat for when it's needed (it's somewhat easier to store heat). This can be used to cut off some of the load spikes.

jorleif2• 14 years ago

I know very little about heavy industrial processes, but probably in many cases there are alternative processes that are not optimal in the case of continuous power, but with fluctuating power supplies they might become viable.

A possible alternative would be running some process which produces some valuable output, which can be stockpiled. What I'm thinking about is that rather than trying to store energy, one could rather make e.g. PET bottles (probably a stupid idea). Then if there is too many PET bottles, they are burned for energy, but otherwise they are slowly consumed.

What about making a small piece of some ridiculously grand project, slowly, little by little. For instance, building a train tunnel across the Atlantic with robots that only run when power is available? The bad points with that is that it will only be useful when ready, but perhaps a similar kind of mining operation? Dig a little deeper every time energy is cheap enough.

Surely most industrial operation would not work, because the startup costs are large, making the returns convex in the size of investment. But maybe there are concave operations? Many human operated tasks are. It is easy to make a good meal for 4 people, but much more difficult for 40. With robotics at least, one would think that operations with similar properties would be available.

pkteison• 14 years ago

Can somebody explain to me the part of the article where it says you have to convert AC to DC to travel long distances (for far offshore wind power)? I understood it to be the exact opposite, that AC could go long distances without major loss and DC needed a new station every few blocks.

eigenvector• 14 years ago

You don't 'need' to convert it, but HVDC transmission is emerging as more efficient and cost-effective than conventional HVAC transmission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

rmccue• 14 years ago

From what I gather from the Wikipedia page, it's due to the transmission cables being underwater and hence having a much larger capacitance, which is a larger loss than normal DC loss. (Correct me if I'm wrong on that.)

So, while AC is still more beneficial for transmission via cables in air/ground, DC appears to have less overall loss for underwater transmission.

wakoumel• 14 years ago

I liked the article but think that it's missing the point: very soon there will be no other choice of what direction to take. We are saying "It's risky! Let's just sit back and watch." as if the status quo can go on as our energy consumption and populations both continue to grow. There will be mistakes made along the way, but mark my words, the Germans are going to be eating our lunch faster than you can say Energiewende.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

I guess the problem with a long article, even an interesting long article like the one submitted here, is that it is hard to read to the end. Near the end of the submitted article is this paragraph:

"A second problem is that even when it comes to alternative energy sources, Germany doesn't reward carbon dioxide reduction. Rather, its policy establishes well-defined subsidies for specific technologies: a kilowatt-hour of solar power is rewarded more than power from offshore wind, which in turn earns more than power from onshore wind. Even though solar subsidies have been reduced to rates far lower than the ones Leurs locked in, solar power still pays the highest rates. If reducing emissions were the focus, however, more money would be directed toward reducing energy use. 'If you could choose the optimal instruments, focusing on those areas first where you can achieve your goals most inexpensively, you would focus not so much on renewables but much more on efficiency,' says Pittel, the energy economist from Munich."

This ignores the advice of Amory Lovins

http://www.rmi.org/Amory+B.+Lovins

(Amory Lovins profile page at Rocky Mountain Institute website)

http://www.ted.com/speakers/amory_lovins.html

(TED profile)

http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_a_50_year_plan_for_ene...

(TED Talk video "A 40-year plan for energy")

and generally the advice of any thoughtful scholar on how to improve worldwide energy efficiency. The German Energiewende plan is a remarkable example of intentionally wrong policy choices that waste the money of German taxpayers and utility rate-payers and delay innovation. It's a good thing that other countries have differing policies that better encourage innovation, especially innovation to reduce energy consumption.

AFTER EDIT:

Another subthread here talks about the economics of importing energy versus producing it domestically. An astute HN participant mentioned the principle of comparative advantage. For onlookers who may not have seen a good reference on comparative advantage, I suggest "Ricardo's Difficult Idea,"

http://www.pkarchive.org/trade/ricardo.html

by an economist who has been awarded the Nobel memorial prize in economics, an essay that explains why trading for resources is generally much, much better than trying to produce all resources within national borders.

There are some other good explanations of the principle of comparative advantage easily found via an online search:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadv...

http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/cadv_e.htm

http://iang.org/free_banking/david.html

ThomPete• 14 years ago

Great quote in there

"If a problem can't be solved, enlarge it"

Eisenhover.

Edit: Oh and buying the book for sure. Good stuf thanks.

lukeschlather• 14 years ago

This isn't a decision grounded in economics, obviously. This is about minimizing side-effects from energy production. The sun blasts roughly 10,000 times our electricity needs at us each year. (And that's just what directly impacts the surface.) I'd say we have some wiggle room in which it makes sense to focus on being cleaner rather than more efficient.

We should worry about efficiency if we have serious scarcity issues, but I don't think we really have a scarcity problem at the moment. (We could definitely get there surprisingly quickly, but I think the cleanliness risk is serious and immediate, and we shouldn't focus on hypotheticals.)

andreasvc3• 14 years ago

This 10,000 times figure is meaningless because it is theoretical; in reality that energy comes in diffuse rays which make it very difficult to capture anywhere near the amount of electricity that is actually needed. Hence the need to turn on coal power plants, which are harmful to the environment (very unwise to have turned off those nuclear plants IMO). Therefore, we SHOULD worry about efficiency, to avoid such things as much as possible.

Loic• 14 years ago

You and the article are missing several things, Germany is already one of the most energy efficient industrial country in the world and the regulations are drastically forcing companies and people to save energy. Houses which are built nowadays are nearly passive house and this by law. Also, the German bank for development is giving everybody around 100k€ loan at about 1% to improve the energy efficiency of old and new houses.

Germans are extremely serious about energy use and savings and they know how to do an energy balance. I wish this level of engineering would cross the border to France a bit more often.

Xylakant5• 14 years ago

We do have quite a couple of taxes and regulations aimed at improving energy efficiency, so the subsidies for renewable energies are a more of a complement for those. We have tax breaks for cars that use less fuel, we do have extra tax for fuel consumption, we do have support for energy efficient housing, ... All in all we're doing pretty fine on that side. Primary energy usage in Germany has been dropping since the eighties and is now close to what we consumed in 1970 (309 mio toe in 1970 vs 319 mio toe in 2010) while the USA have been rising pretty steadily with a small drop-off since 2008 (1627 mio toe in 1970 vs 2285 mio toe in 2010). [1] There's a limit where the ROI in reducing energy consumption is lower than the ROI in producing renewable energy and after that we're still going to need energy, so I think while reduction should be the first priority, we still need to invest into second and third priorities pretty much right now. And that's what we're doing.

The different subsidies are explained by the fact that the subsidies are intended to support the uptake of those technologies. Solar energy just needed more of a push to achieve critical mass and so does offshore wind. Now that solar panels are cheaper and more efficient, the subsidies get lower and lower each year. There are still a plethora of problems surrounding this approach, but I must admit that I don't see how other approaches would have less problems.

[1] see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Staaten_mit_dem_h%C3...

ralfd• 14 years ago

Crazy. The United States have only four times the population of Germany, how can they spend 7.5 time as much energy?

mohawk• 14 years ago

This is not an 'experiment'. But please go on telling us that it is impossible, we'll get it done it even quicker. For an engineer, there is no better motivation.

justwrote• 14 years ago

I'm living in Germany and to support this 'Energiewende', I'm only buying green electricity. It is more expensive but I'm happy to pay more if I can boost the industry around it and also help our environment. Many young people think like this.

soc884• 14 years ago

"just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners"

I hope the rest of the article wasn't researched as "good" as this.

The Great German Energy Experiment

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