[HN Gopher] Germany boosts renewables with "biggest energy polic...
___________________________________________________________________
Germany boosts renewables with "biggest energy policy reform in
decades"
Author : martin_a
Score : 254 points
Date : 2022-04-06 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cleanenergywire.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cleanenergywire.org)
| Faelian2 wrote:
| For those interested, here is the primary energy use of Germany.
| There is still a long way to get rid of coal.
|
| https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/chiffres_en...
| martin_a wrote:
| That is totally outdated, here are more current numbers:
| https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...
| m_eiman wrote:
| Looks like there's a lot of opportunity to install geothermal
| heating systems.
| martin_a wrote:
| Using geothermal energy is surely a niche thing in Germany,
| yet. I've heard about two or three people who used it for
| their homes, but nothing large at all.
|
| Here's a German article from two months ago on that:
| https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/geothermie-in-deutschland-
| roa...
|
| 440.000 installations so far, mostly surface-near (around
| 100 m depth).
| WithinReason wrote:
| You're right, coal has really jumped in 2021
| lkbm wrote:
| Ugh, wind dropped ~11% in 2021? I heard new capacity has
| paused for some reason. Is this just that + old capacity
| being retired? Or just some temporary downtime for
| maintenance? Or is it just that 2020 was super-windy and 2021
| was calm? Seems like a big change.
| zhte415 wrote:
| Like a lot of articles about power or energy as related to
| 'green' or renewables, this article is about electricity and not
| total power. Only a fraction of energy consumption is from
| electricity.
|
| From [1], total energy consumption in Germany in 2021 was 3364
| TWh. Total electricity consumption was 581 TWh. That's quite a
| difference. Electricity at around 20-30% of total energy
| consumption is in the ball park for developed/industrial
| economies.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany
| Gwypaas wrote:
| How much of that 3364 TWh is lost fighting Carnot's theorem and
| similarly futile endeavors?
| chess_buster wrote:
| That's why Germany is planning to do Sektorenkopplung. Don't
| know the english word.
|
| Basically everything is switched over to electric.
| Transportation, Heating, ...
| lkbm wrote:
| Looks like the translation is "sector coupling" or
| "integrated energy", but I think the real key in translating
| this is that we typically use a different framing in English.
|
| German "Sektorenkopplung": We're explicitly unifying all
| sectors to a single source of energy, and it's implicit that
| this source is electricity.
|
| English "electrification": We're explicitly switching sectors
| to electricity, and it's implicit that this will ultimately
| tie every sector to a single source of energy.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't speak German.
| NortySpock wrote:
| The English-language podcasts I listen to have dubbed it
| the "electrify everything" movement.
| chess_buster wrote:
| To be honest, English most often sounds way cooler than
| German.
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| I could be wrong, but I thought the point of the GP comment
| was that there are many industrial processes like smelting
| that don't have good electric replacements. For example, it's
| nigh-impossible to maintain the temperatures required to run
| a steel plant with no combustion and only resistive heating
| elements.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| They all have good replacements, but if their competitor is
| allowed to pollute without paying for externalities,
| they'll struggle in the market.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The EU had, as pointless as it was, anti dumping tariffs
| on solar modules. Such tariffs can be used to protect
| domestic non-poluters against their foreign competition.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| They've been talking about exactly that for a while but
| recent events seen to have nudged it along:
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2022/3/15/eu-
| countries-ba...
| lazide wrote:
| Arc blast furnaces are a thing - just more expensive. The
| electrode (typically graphite) is consumed, so technically
| not zero carbon, but the gas could be captured.
| scythe wrote:
| One major category of such processes is calcination, both
| for cement (CaCO3 >> CaO) and alumina (Al(OH)3 >> Al2O3).
| This can be done with concentrated solar heating:
|
| https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2017/gc/c7gc005
| 8...
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0038092X
| 1...
|
| But building enough plants to actually do this at scale
| could take a while. Supposedly there was an anode developed
| for electrolytic iron reduction:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12134
|
| but there have been problems with scaling it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30349905
|
| Between calcination, smelting and heating, you've addressed
| a pretty big chunk of fuel-burning processes. The question
| is whether we can get these kinds of technologies online in
| time without Manhattan-Project levels of government
| support, since that does not seem to be forthcoming.
| adrianN wrote:
| There are steelmaking processes using hydrogen for reducing
| the ore and arc furnaces for heat. They are currently a bit
| more expensive than using coke.
| _ph_ wrote:
| For those, one would use H2 or methane created with the use
| of electricity.
| [deleted]
| sorenbs wrote:
| The year Germany reaches ~100% renewable energy for
| electricity, will also be the year they install the most
| renewable capacity in history. It is very unlikely that the
| year after will see 0 renewable capacity installed. Instead,
| prices will start to fall steadily, dramatically accelerating
| the electrification of remaining sectors.
|
| Remember that both wind and solar follow very predictably cost-
| reduction curves. Starting a few years before 2030, electricity
| consumers will start to see reduced energy bills because of
| this.
| lkbm wrote:
| I've just assumed Germany is working towards electrification
| for heating. From a cursory search, this appears to be both de-
| facto the case[0] and an official policy goal[1].
|
| I agree this should be explicitly mentioned when talking about
| renewable electricity generation targets, but the good news is
| that it is being addressed. (I mostly looked at heating, but
| I'm sure industry is also a huge portion. Presumably that's
| also being worked on.)
|
| [0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/heat-make-german-
| buildi...
|
| [1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-launch-
| emergenc...
| synotna wrote:
| I dunno about de-facto, my anecdata is my heating is in the
| process switching from L-Gas to H-Gas, have not heard any
| mention of replacing gas in the near future for existing
| properties
|
| Wonder what the stats are for new builds being with gas
| heating vs without
|
| Am not optimistic about German electricity handling the
| switching of heating and transport (cars) on top of existing
| usage+growth as long as we're antinuke (:
| bally0241 wrote:
| Yeah, its pretty unrealistic to imagine any zero-Carbon
| approach which excludes nuclear. But the greens would
| rather cover their eye/hears about that, and imagine that
| it can all be done with wind and solar (in northern europe
| of all places).
| lazide wrote:
| It's certainly possible, just very very expensive due to
| capacity factors and storage. Like 'multiples of GDP'
| expensive depending on the napkin math used.
| yonaguska wrote:
| Is the carbon footprint being taken into account
| regarding batteries, windmill blades, and solar panels?
| These are all very expensive consumables, with no good
| way to reuse or recycle. Specifically the windmill blades
| and solar panels.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Electric heating and transport both help introduce
| renewables faster as they are both effectively storage. EVs
| are literally batteries that can charge off peak and
| electric heat pumps can work near continously to store heat
| in the building fabric and pause when demand is high.
|
| Good insulation is another super boring technology that
| really helps too.
| schroeding wrote:
| Additional anecdata, my landlord will replace the old oil-
| based boiler with a gas-powered one in ~ two months. Gas is
| sadly not dead, even in "new" installs. :D
|
| (And jacks the rent up 30 euros per month because of it,
| while the "official" estimated monthly savings on the heating
| bill are 0.1 cent (yes, cent, not euros) per month per m2,
| probably negative now, amazing ^^')
| ido wrote:
| Are we neighbors? My landlord has the same plan.
| breakyerself wrote:
| Ask for a heat pump
| [deleted]
| gklap wrote:
| adrianN wrote:
| Wind and solar is all you need. Power2Gas is a viable
| technology for seasonal storage.
| pydry wrote:
| It's ~50% efficient as compared to ~80% for pumped storage.
|
| Synthetic kerosene for making jet fuel or using syngas to
| make green fertilizer might make sense as a decarbonization
| strategy but as a means of "storing" electricity it's kind of
| pointless.
| chess_buster wrote:
| It's suspicious that you link this together to create a
| narrative. Sorry, don't want to offend. Just pointing this out.
| Only asking questions.
| alex_duf wrote:
| It turns out if you link a large enough area, a local lack of
| wind doesn't really matter.
|
| If you inter-connect the whole of Europe you get a pretty
| stable source of energy with just solar and wind:
| https://twitter.com/ntsafos/status/1480560060044652546
|
| Now add secondary sources like nuclear, hydro and storage and
| nothing's impossible.
|
| It does mean keeping good relations with your neighbours, which
| I think isn't a bad idea anyway.
| sandos wrote:
| Is it summer now? Germany generated more than 15GW from solar
| today at its peak.
| cure wrote:
| > Sun is only present in the summer
|
| Your general point is not controversial (sun/wind are
| unpredictable). By stating that the sun only shines in the
| summer,though, people are not going to take you seriously and
| will miss your point.
|
| The obvious solution to the unpredictability of solar/wind is
| to couple renewable power generation with short/medium term
| energy storage capacity. There are many ways to do this, all
| with their own upsides and downsides. E.g. pumped hydro, grid-
| scale LFP batteries, etc. Also, long-range interconnects to
| places with more sun and/or wind.
| smm11 wrote:
| Germany did some crazy energy re-work during WWII, I recall.
| exabrial wrote:
| Probably shouldn't have closed all those nuclear plants.
| martin_a wrote:
| Germany hasn't build new nuclear plants for ages, even under
| the conservative governments that were ruling before last year.
|
| The plants still running are very old and have become hard to
| maintain as they have reached EOL.
|
| It's not like we are shutting down perfectly good new plants.
|
| See here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
| willis936 wrote:
| Austria did.
|
| https://youtu.be/WUVZbBBHrI4
| recuter wrote:
| You're shutting down perfectly good _old_ plants, ahead of
| schedule for no engineering derived reason.
| InderRealitatbleiben.
| martin_a wrote:
| > Most nuclear power plants have operating life-times of
| between 20 and 40 years.
|
| > The main ageing effects of concern are changes in
| physical properties (e.g., electric conductivity);
| irradiation embrittlement; thermal embrittlement; creep;
| fatigue; corrosion (including erosion and cracking assisted
| by corrosion);
|
| > Ageing is certainly a significant factor in determining
| the limits of nuclear plant lifetime or life extensions. No
| nuclear plant, including those still under construction or
| being mothballed, should be considered immune from its
| effects.
|
| https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/29402043133.pdf
|
| If we have not, by accident, built some super long-lasting
| nuclear power plants, they are at EOL as the remaining
| plants were built in 1982. Which is exactly 40 years ago.
|
| Would you take the responsibility for running those things
| any longer?
| vimy wrote:
| They are still perfectly safe for at least 20, 30 years.
| Nuclear plants last a really long time. Germany is just
| acting very dogmatic.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=19091
| recuter wrote:
| Yes, of course I would. Why throw out the baby with the
| bathwater.
|
| True, nuclear power plants age - whether you can extend
| their life or not is an engineering question for
| engineers. Do an inspection and come up with an answer
| what needs TLC.
|
| Shutting them down because standards demand is one thing.
| Shutting them down early because of a political games is
| another.
|
| Fukashima went boom, some fear mongering occurred, this
| helped the political careers of some people who have no
| idea how any of this works. Harmed some others.
| Consultants made money. And firms won sunset contracts.
|
| Lets not pretend otherwise.
| kmonsen wrote:
| Germany is going to need nuclear weapons soon as well. The U.S.
| is not a long term stable partner, the UK is out of the EU so
| now they can only depend on France for deterrent. That's
| probably not enough with a hostile neighbor in the east.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > the UK is out of the EU
|
| Wouldn't NATO be more relevant in terms of defence?
| kmonsen wrote:
| If the US becomes more isolationist NATO becomes a bit
| meaningless since NATO is basically the US guaranteeing
| everyone. And that is looking to happen even with Biden.
| The next president will almost certainly be an America
| First republican that will be more friendly to Russia than
| to western Europe.
|
| Western Europe from now on needs to defend itself.
| [deleted]
| outside1234 wrote:
| ... and turn the nuclear power plants back on until then?
| BSVogler wrote:
| You cannot simply do that. This was planned for years and there
| is no training for staff, contracts like insurance, a location
| to put the additional waste etc. to prolong the usage of
| nuclear power plants.
| chess_buster wrote:
| The nuclear plants in Germany are not insured, because the
| estimated 10 Trillion Euro a catastrophic failure would cause
| is out of question for any insurer.
|
| Therfore the German state takes the risk.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Not a feasible option by any means. Fuel supply is not secured
| and takes a long time to prepare (apparently fuel rods a custom
| made for reactors and have a lead time of 2+ years). On many
| plants, demolition has already started to an extent. Also many
| operators apparently skipped certifications that would be
| necessary to operate beyond the timeline that was set 10 years
| ago.
| dathinab wrote:
| The problem is not that they did switch perfectly fine nuclear
| power plants of, the problem is that they didn't build
| replacements for old power plants which have to go out of
| service normally.
|
| Many(all?) of the remaining nuclear power plants are already
| operating well beyond the time they have been designed for.
| lawn wrote:
| Same situation as in Sweden.
| otoburb wrote:
| I applaud such efforts, but the fly in the ointment is that the
| acceleration of renewable energy sources will not only require
| more capital, sooner, but also different energy sources to be
| built more quickly. Accelerated timelines for such capital-
| intensive projects almost always require intense short(er)-term
| demand for energy which will likely need to come from fossil
| fuels.
| zamalek wrote:
| I completely agree that we need to be vastly more aggressive in
| terms of ditching fossil fuels: fossil fuels are just plain
| stupid even when you ignore the climate catastrophe that we are
| causing by using them.
|
| However, At this point, assuming we make no more improvements,
| we have successfully avoided turning Earth into Venus.
|
| > require intense short(er)-term demand for energy which will
| likely need to come from fossil fuels.
|
| We're actually starting to trend away from this[1][2].
|
| [1]:
| https://www.gem.wiki/Category:Proposed_coal_plants_in_the_Un...
| [2]: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/new-coal-plants-dwindle-amid-
| wa...
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Can this be avoided/mitigated at all?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| In general, when politicians promise something will be done by
| the different set of politicians in office 10+ years in the
| future, it mostly means "we're not going to do anything right
| now".
| antattack wrote:
| 2035 target is not that far in the future - given the scale -
| and will require taking immediate steps. We should see if they
| are serious soon.
| chess_buster wrote:
| We already have 50% generation of electricity from renewables
| this year
| lkbm wrote:
| I know it takes forever to do big projects, and diminishing
| returns are very much a thing, but 80% by 2035 feels like a
| really low bar.
|
| Looking through various targets, it's far better than most
| countries[0], and Germany might not have the best geography
| for domestic renewable energy generation other than wind.
| (Not that it needs to be domestic. Being dependent on
| Russia for gas was a mistake. Being dependent on France for
| nuclear or Spain for solar feels a lot safer.)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_renewable_energ
| y_tar...
| nmehner wrote:
| On a sunny march day currently about 18% of all
| electricity is generated from solar.
|
| Also there is a lots of wind in winter and solar works
| better in summer so the combination works quite well.
| nomel wrote:
| > 80% by 2035 feels like a really low bar.
|
| Is this even possible? Doesn't it mean that renewable
| production fluctuates no more than 20%, throughout the
| whole year? Or, are you talking instantaneously, daytime,
| ideal conditions? It seems like grid scale storage that
| could handle these massive fluctuations (like nighttime)
| are pretty far off.
|
| It would be interesting to see the cost analysis of that
| vs nuclear.
| lkbm wrote:
| Oh, I assume it's much more expensive than nuclear.
| Personally, I tend to think of nuclear as renewable,
| though I guess it's not really; just carbon-neutral.
|
| But even without nuclear I'd think it's viable, albeit
| expensive. You have to overbuild, add a lot of storage,
| and interconnect the continent (and maybe northern
| Africa) with high voltage transmission lines.
|
| Domestically, night time isn't the big deal for Germany.
| They're 20% wind and only 8.5% solar[0]. They just need
| to be able to trade their wind output with countries
| whose wind blows at a different time.
|
| Their geography seems like it would be good for pumped
| hydro storage, but they only have ~6GW capacity as of
| 2019[1], so maybe it's not.
|
| [0] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-
| Enterpris...
|
| [1] https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/germany
| chess_buster wrote:
| That's true, but many German's reaaaaaaallly love
| renewable energy.
|
| Just go to any rural area in north-west Germany in google
| maps and look at the solar on the roofs of all the farms.
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/26655+Westerstede/@53.2
| 438...
|
| Took me 3 seconds.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I certainly do, but a lot of people I know don't really
| care.
|
| ... but we used to have a policy that made it profitable
| to install solar power (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz).
| chess_buster wrote:
| Now it's all about the Eigenenergieverbrauch and avoiding
| CO2-tax, my friend. Have you heard of Leben mit der
| Energiewende TV?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Germany has passed a series of laws over the past ~30 years
| under the umbrella of the Renewable Energy Act (EEG), and
| decade by decade, that's resulted in strong renewable energy
| growth in Germany:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
|
| Big energy projects of all kinds generally have at least a
| decade of preparation going into them before they come on-line.
| For solar and wind, this means everything from building more
| factories for solar PV and wind turbines, to devising and
| building better grid distribution systems, to incorporating
| large-scale storage into the system to account for
| intermittency.
| ithkuil wrote:
| It's astonishing how democracies can get anything done at all,
| right?
|
| As if there was an underlying force, something beyond the
| person in charge, signing laws and making speeches.
|
| Something like, you know a society, that can make things happen
| (or not).
|
| A modern democracy is not just the ability to change leaders
| once in a while. It's also the fact that you get a society with
| clear rules, that empower people to make things happen and
| empower other people to back the things they like.
|
| If enough Germans are pissed at the situation they let
| themselves into, they will back attempts to solve this problem,
| whether they come from some hand-wavy politician or by an
| utility company offering a green energy plan (even if it costs
| a bit more)
| chess_buster wrote:
| It's like a regime change, but by the people, if you so will.
| Regime change by vote is called democracy.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| In Germany, post-war there were three chancellors (prime
| ministers) that were over 10 years in office - Adenauer with 14
| years, Kohl and Merkel with 16 years.
| lkbm wrote:
| The question when evaluating long-term claims is whether there
| are shorter-term benchmarks specified. I'm not an expert so I
| don't know what specific short-term benchmarks make sense. "70%
| by 2030"? "Implementation underway by 2025?"
|
| I do think it's best for the law to be a broad "this is the
| target" with the nitty-gritty "how to" being figured out by
| experts. The target should have been established by asking
| those experts, but I want the people tasks with implementing it
| to have flexibility to update the plan if things change.
|
| If a highly-prescriptive law has been passed and suddenly we
| have a major breakthrough in fusion/batteries/etc., or a
| geopolitical event suddenly changes the availability of certain
| resources, the implementation details should be adjusted
| without having to run back to the politicians for an updated
| law.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| This. Kicking the can down the road for the next generation to
| deal with is politics 1-0-1.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Yeah, but this is actually not at all what is happing right
| now in the German government.
|
| Instead of kicking it down the road (and systematically
| destroying renewables) like 16 years of Merkel did, they
| actually started to accellerate and do immediate packages,
| this article talks about one that will be accepted before
| easter.
| swarnie wrote:
| Got to start somewhere.
|
| At least Germany is reasonably stable politically, not quite
| on the level of China but far better then the revolving door
| style governments seen in southern Europe.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Also I only see wind and sun mentioned. How do they plan to
| deal with the volatility of the supply?
| chess_buster wrote:
| storage in hydrogen and allow a 80% devaluation of the energy
| that was used. That doesn't matter because the energy would
| be thown away otherwise like it is today.
| adrianN wrote:
| Electricity->Hydrogen->Electricity loses about 60%, not
| 80%.
| chess_buster wrote:
| even better!
| yodelshady wrote:
| Yeah, hydrogen's the only storage medium that makes sense
| at that scale.
|
| I'd expect some - actually probably quite a lot - of excess
| CAPEX on wind+solar, and some deficit (less CAPEX, but
| buying _some_ electricity at retail) so you don 't have
| electrolysers and thermal plants just lying around.
|
| You're still stuck with the investment issue: either you
| pay (Hinckley-scale!) fees to providers to just lie around,
| or the public sector runs it itself, and the "private more
| efficient" bollocks is exactly that, because the private
| sector _isn 't providing the value_. The people providing
| SLAs are.
| panick21_ wrote:
| As always the much better solution would be to build
| dedicated nuclear plants that operate at really high
| thermal energy and use that to make they hydrogen.
|
| Nuclear neat is totally green, you actually get 100%
| utility out of the plant rather then having constant
| highly inefficient 'start-stop' operations.
|
| And its actually a better less complex process then
| electrolysis.
|
| But I guess its much better to absurdly gigantically
| over-provision renewables so one in a while we can run
| electrolysers and then by inefficent fossil fuels to
| drive inefficent electrolysers the rest of the time.
|
| And its not at all clear that hydrogen as storage is
| actually a good idea, and its also not at all clear its
| the only thing that scales. It very much unproven at the
| kind of production scale AND storage scale you suggest.
| And even in the best case its incredibly inefficient and
| incredibly expensive make/store/produce.
|
| Something like Iron based batteries will likely turn out
| to be a better solution.
| yayachiken wrote:
| The point of hydrogen is not mainly energy storage but
| hydrogen is the only viable way to clean up two of the
| most carbon intensive industrial processes: steel
| smelting and ammonia (fertilizer) synthesis. Smelting
| steel requires coal to reduce the oxygen from raw iron to
| carbon dioxide. The coal can be replaced by hydrogen,
| which will then react to water vapor. Synthesizing
| ammonia needs elemental hydrogen which is as of now
| extracted from methane (natural gas) using steam
| reformation. This leads to CO2 as waste product whereas
| electrolysis crates hydrogen and oxygen directly/cleanly
| from water.
|
| You need huge amounts of "base load" hydrogen generation
| capacities for these industries alone. Flexible
| generation, i.e. produce more to soak up excess renewable
| energy which you can then export or turn back into
| electricity (at a huge loss) later, is just the cherry on
| top.
|
| The initial funding will absolutely come from the steel
| and chemical industry (and also government subsidies to
| get the transformation started).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You can purify iron by electrolysis too. You don't need
| hydrogen for that.
|
| But you still must get a way to put carbon in it. This is
| usually done by mixing the steel with CO, and the easiest
| way to get from renewables to CO is by reacting CO2 and
| H2.
| chess_buster wrote:
| The Salzgitter AG certainly thinks hydrogen is the way to
| go.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, hydrogen is _a_ way to go.
|
| I don't think anybody has enough information to know what
| is _the_ way to go. But well, I 'm an outsider with very
| little information.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Hydrogen is not at all required for steel melting. Look
| at Boston Metal. In fact I would argue its the worst
| solution of the two by a big margin.
|
| For ammonia this will eventually be required.
| exfascist wrote:
| Smelting isn't just melting, it chemically reduces Iron
| oxide and needs a reducing agent (hydrogen, CO etc.)
| zardo wrote:
| I mean that's a technology that could be used, but I don't
| see mention of it in the article. Is it in the law?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| - mix of supply sources
|
| - over provisioning
|
| - geographic distribution
|
| - biomethane
|
| - international grid ties
| panick21_ wrote:
| If every country main argument is 'we just use the
| international grid for balance' non of this will scale.
|
| Over provisioning one thing just means its not in another
| place for the first decades.
| solarkraft wrote:
| And batteries. This is only viable for a few days at most
| though, it doesn't work for seasonal differences.
| brugidou wrote:
| A recent study on Germany based upon 35 years of weather
| data [0] shows that we would need about 24 days worth of
| storage to cope with this weather conditions.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/QvistStaffan/status/142762579535534
| 9004?...
| patrickk wrote:
| This excludes connecting further to Germany's neighbours,
| e.g. using Norway's hydro exports as a battery.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid
|
| Ireland and Britain has _massive_ offshore wind potential
| that is only being slowly ramped up, for example. Macron
| has announced a new nuclear reactor building program, so
| potentially more carbon-free electricity to nuclear-
| adverse Germany. The massive Danish offshore wind park
| /energy island has yet to come online but will supply
| northern Germany.
|
| And if you want to go even more exotic, you could get
| 24/7/365 renewable energy by piping geothermal to
| continental Europe from Iceland which has an oversupply.
| Or even building enormous solar parks in the Sahara
| (geopolitical risks notwithstanding).
|
| There are plenty of options enabled by geographic
| distribution of supply without even looking at storage.
| The main problem is the lack of political will until now,
| which is changing with the realisation in Germany that
| Russia isn't a reliable partner.
|
| Edit: none of these rely on any technical breakthroughs
| either, merely ramping up the interconnection of grids
| and renewable sources of electricity.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > we would need about 24 days worth of storage
|
| Couldn't you just burn fossil fuels for those 24 days,
| and then do atmospheric carbon capture for the other 341?
|
| Even if pulling the carbon out of the air takes 10 times
| as much energy as was released during those 24 days, that
| could still be achieved over the course of the year, with
| a reasonable amount of over provisioning.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| It's always interesting to see what ridiculous limitation
| they place on these to make them not work out.
|
| Popular ones are:
|
| Refusing to allow energy to be traded with neighbours.
|
| Refusing to allow demand response.
|
| Refusing to allow over building (so the installed
| capacity exactly matches the yearly required energy and
| storage needs multiply).
|
| Refusing to target efficiency measures.
|
| Refusing to use existing low carbon power sources (hydro,
| biogas).
|
| Often they use low volume prices for a massive rollout
| but at least in this case they're estimating storage
| capacity rather than price so they won't have done that
| one.
|
| edit: reading through it now, they cite other people who
| didn't do the above, and then state that they know some
| of their choices will overstate things:
|
| > the fact that we model Germany as an island may lead to
| an overestimation
|
| Guess that bit didn't fit in the tweet.
|
| I don't fully understand this next one, but their
| headline number is based on running biogas as a constant
| baseload, which seems utterly ridiculous. They also claim
| that allowing that to flex with supply and demand has
| this impact:
|
| > "Adding other sources of flexibility for the example of
| bioenergy, the duration of period that defines storage
| requirements lengthens to more than one year."
|
| That's a very strangely worded sentence, with a very
| counterintuitive plain reading. Are they trying to
| intentionally confuse people? I'm not sure, can't figure
| out anything reasonable from the article. How can adding
| 8GW of flexible biogas generation increase storage
| requirements? Are they counting the storage of biogas?
| cm2187 wrote:
| I am not trying to defend the study, but I don't think
| any of your points actually mitigate the issue of
| volatility.
|
| 1. trades with neighbours: most european countries face
| similar weather conditions at the same time. The french
| will need their own nuclear capacity to make up for their
| own lack of wind.
|
| 2. demand response: switching off factories or heating
| when you need it? That's no solution
|
| 3. over building: the problem is that the volatility of
| wind is massive, if you look at the uk grid website [1],
| it can go to nearly zero for more than a week. If the
| volatility was smaller, over provisioning could be a
| solution (provided the economics work).
|
| 4. efficiency measures: you only make the size of the
| problem slightly smaller, but you still have a volatility
| problem. And with cars going electric and us not relying
| on russian gas for heating, I don't see the demand for
| electricity going down
|
| 5. hydro, biogas: there is only so much hydro you can
| build. And the places where you can build some (Sweden,
| Norway) leave you at the mercy of a russian submarine
| cutting the cable. Biogas: isn't that co2 emitting?
|
| [1] https://gridwatch.co.uk/
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Biogas is carbon negative, since you make it with manure
| and food waste that would otherwise give off methane.
|
| EVs and heat pumps are over 4x the efficiency. 75% of
| your energy just not needed anymore to do the exact same
| work.
|
| The real clincher is that most of the storage they
| predict is hydrogen and at the end they calculate that
| the crazy amount of storage required for Germany as an
| island is in fact, the same size as the existing gas
| storage facilities which can be reused for that purpose.
|
| Which I think really rams home how utterly boring this
| allegedly insurmountable challenge is.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Hum. Over provisioning doesn't help when you have a month
| without wind (or you have to overprovision by like a factor
| of 100), neither does geographic distribution (cf UK
| electricity grid last year, the whole country goes down to
| a small production [1]).
|
| Is biomethane considered as green? Isn't it like natural
| gas?
|
| International grid ties basically means you are using
| coal/nuclear/etc from your neighbours, who will likely have
| shortage at the same time given they also have their own
| share of sun and wind.
|
| [1] https://gridwatch.co.uk/
| lkbm wrote:
| International grid doesn't mean "import whatever is on
| offer". You can contract for renewable energy, and fund
| international production capacity. Depending on Russian
| oil was a geopolitical (and environmental) mistake.
| Depending on French nuclear or Spanish solar seems much
| safer.
|
| International grid ties also means:
|
| * When it's cloudy or calm, you can import from somewhere
| sunny or windy. When it's sunny or windy, export to
| somewhere cloudy and calm. Shortages a thousand miles
| southwest aren't going to correlate strongly with
| shortages where you are, and if you if you have multiple
| sources a thousand miles in each direction you should be
| able to balance demand far better. Weather conditions are
| reasonably local. Demand patterns will also vary a bit.
|
| * You can import solar from somewhere sunnier, or sunny
| at different. You're not going to transmit your
| electricity 12,000 miles east/west, but Madrid has sunset
| an hour later than Berlin, and demand tends to be closer
| to 7pm than 2am.
|
| Yeah, it's a hard engineering problem, and there will be
| downsides, but we can do it if we seriously commit to it.
| cm2187 wrote:
| if you look at my response to a sibling comment, I am not
| convinced there is that much diversification in europe
| [1]. And you can tell annecdoctically, when you have
| heatwave news stories in one european countries, you
| typically get similar stories in other european
| countries. Europe is not that big geographically.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30934588
| lkbm wrote:
| Wow, thanks for putting together that data!
|
| I'm not surprised to see Germany, UK, Norway, Sweden, and
| Netherlands all be similar, since (I assume) they're all
| using the North Sea. I am surprised to see Germany's
| output is so similar to Italy, Portugal, and Greece. It
| does look like there's a decent separation between places
| I expect to use the Mediterranean vs. those I'd expect to
| use the North Sea, but yeah, we likely need _a lot_ of
| excess capacity, _a lot_ of storage, or a lot of not-
| wind-or-solar. (Or I guess a lot of flexibility on energy
| usage.)
| bally0241 wrote:
| It's ok...we're over provisioned on solar generation
| capacity. So it doesn't matter that it is night :P.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Do you work in the factory at night, bally0241?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| There has never been a single hour in the last 30 years
| where the wind has not been blowing somewhere in Europe.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Well, the wind blowing on some hill somewhere in europe
| isn't of much help, it needs to be diverse enough that
| some countries can make up for the entire lack of
| production of other countries.
|
| I am not convinced there is much diversification. I just
| did some back of the enveloppe analysis to convince
| myself. I am using hourly wind electricity production
| data from this source [1] which is referenced on the
| europa website [2] (first source I found, I don't
| necessarily vouch for it). I only looked at 2014-2015
| (the last two years of this time series), took the daily
| production at 2pm (seems to be peak production and peak
| demand), and then calculated a weekly average of the 2pm
| production by country for every day. I took the low
| points for the UK (arbitrarily, that's where I am now),
| and looked at the percentile of each country for those UK
| low points.
|
| So the way you read this is for the week ending 28 June
| 2014, when the UK was at its 1% worst wind production
| across 2014-2015, at that time Norway was at its 15%th
| worst production, Sweden 9%th worst, etc. "15%th worst"
| means that the norwegian production for that week was
| below that level only 15% of the weeks in 2014-2015.
| 2014-06-28 2014-09-09 2014-09-16 United
| Kingdom 1% 1% 2%
| Norway 15% 21% 20%
| Sweden 9% 0% 11%
| Netherlands 1% 19% 18%
| France 2% 9% 15%
| Germany 23% 1% 41%
| Italy 63% 9% 18%
| Portugal 32% 5% 60%
| Greece 55% 5% 8%
|
| so you do get some outliers (Italy and Greece in the
| first column, Portugal in the last), but overall, all the
| major countries are down at the same time, so it's not
| Portgual that will produce the wind energy for all the
| other countries.
|
| [1] https://zenodo.org/record/4803353 [2]
| https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/jrc-emhires-wind-
| gener...
| olau wrote:
| I've looked at studies from researchers running
| simulations on weather data sets, and yes, you need some
| dispatchable sources in Europe. The question is how much
| you need.
|
| Generally, the biggest issue seems to be heating in the
| winter. Heat is actually much cheaper to store than
| electricity. If you have a district heating system, you
| can even store it seasonally (storing solar heat in the
| summer) and be competitive with gas, even before the
| recent price increases.
|
| I think the main reason we don't see a lot of cheapish
| long term electricity storage yet is that it's not
| needed. Once we start producing it, economies of scale
| will kick in. That's at least how it worked for PV, wind
| turbines, li-ion batteries.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Europe is windier in the winter, so if you choose a week
| in the summer, they're all going to be low. This is not
| unknown or unexpected. It's also neatly complemented by
| solar which has the opposite yearly cycle:
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/ntsafos/status/148056006004465
| 254...
| lazide wrote:
| Which is great when everyone likes each other. Which
| traditionally is a dubious bet to place in Europe when
| losing it results in serious things like 'will all the
| old people freeze to death tomorrow because we don't have
| enough electrical capacity'.
| WalterBright wrote:
| One way to deal with volatility is dynamic minute-by-minute
| adjustment of prices, and appliances (like car chargers,
| water heaters, HVAC systems, etc.) that turn themselves on
| and off based on the price.
| sofixa wrote:
| Parliamentarians usually stay in office a long time ( sometimes
| into the decades). Germany being a parliamentary democracy,
| there's no limit on chancellor terms.
|
| Also, for such a thing to happen, actions need to be undertaken
| soon ( invest in building new power plants, ramp up the supply
| chain, etc.). It's not a vague "in ten years we'll do X", it's
| "in 10 years we'll have X".
| DocTomoe wrote:
| > Germany being a parliamentary democracy, there's no limit
| on chancellor terms.
|
| Average CDU (conservative) Chancellor Term: 10.4 years - with
| three of them around the three-term mark.
|
| Average SPD (socialdemocrat, including the current one)
| Chancellor Term: 6.7 years (not including the current one)
|
| Germany is a conservative country, things take time, actions
| take decades, and chances are the next, conservative
| government will gut them (look up what happened to Germany's
| solar panel industry).
| hef19898 wrote:
| Germany solar industry killed itself. It was run by greedy
| subsidy collectors that cried for anti-dumping tariffs once
| they realized they were out produced by Asian manufacturers
| (and out funded by Chinese state backed banks). Germany did
| help to propel the solar manufacturing industry to what it
| is today so.
| dunefox wrote:
| > It's not a vague "in ten years we'll do X", it's "in 10
| years we'll have X".
|
| It absolutely is. Nothing will happen. I know Germany, I live
| here.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Merkel is gone. We're already at 50% renewables.
|
| Just stopping the stopping of renewables will reach the
| target (for electricity).
| lazide wrote:
| For electricity, which is a small fraction of energy
| consumption overall. Most of the other sources are much
| harder to switch economically, and raise serious health
| and safety issues if storage and capacity is not
| increased dramatically.
|
| For instance, for Germany to be self sufficient in the
| winter using electric heating, even if using high
| efficiency heat pumps, will require massive capex. Likely
| on the order of 7x all they've already spent on their
| entire electric grid.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I note you don't mention how much lower is the opex or
| when they'd start making money on that investment? A
| weirdly short term view.
| kansface wrote:
| What percentage of German GDP are we we actually talking
| about to get there?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| What percentage of German GDP are we talking about saving
| every year after that?
| lazide wrote:
| It isn't much better near as I can tell for most
| scenarios, but you're welcome to provide some links to
| analysis if you'd like. I've posted a number of them in
| other threads.
|
| A key attribute of those analysis is the interest rates
| for financing, which used to be near zero - and likely
| will not be for quite awhile, but good luck predicting
| that.
| recuter wrote:
| > As of 2021, German primary energy consumption amounted
| to 12,193 Petajoule, with more than 75% coming from
| fossil sources, 6.2% from nuclear energy and 16.1% from
| renewables.
|
| You might offset that 6% nuclear that is going away with
| renewables if you really put your hearts into it, but
| probably not. Won't be economical.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Most primary energy is wasted as heat when turning it
| into electricity. The German electrification program
| means they'll only need about a third of that power from
| renewables to travel the same distance in cars or heat
| the same homes.
| recuter wrote:
| Waste heat from a power plant in one part of the country
| can't be sent to heat homes in another. That's the very
| heart of the matter.
|
| If you could magically get the angry pixies into all the
| forthcoming electric cars directly with no waste, sure.
|
| It is very nice milestone that the top line numbers are
| there already, but way too early to declare victory.
| yayachiken wrote:
| By definition, the primary energy input and electrical
| energy output are equal for renewable sources that don't
| require fuel.
|
| So the point is that transitioning from thermal
| electricity generation to sources like solar and wind
| already reduces the primary energy use.
|
| Electrifying traffic further reduces the primary energy
| use, as 100% of primary energy from gas turn into
| something like 40% of power which can be used to drive
| the car forward. An electric engine is a lot more
| efficient.
|
| This is just math and doesn't yet include efficiency
| gains through insulation, heat pumps etc.
| V__ wrote:
| There is a lot of interest in the private sector to build
| renewables, which has often been hampered by regulation.
| This reduces those regulations significantly. Why do you
| think nothing will happen then?
|
| Sure, it's a little late and not enough. But it's a start
| for now.
| [deleted]
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The article describes a proposed law that has significant
| concrete effects. That's what you judge.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Yeah but this is not the case here. They speak about the Easter
| Package, which has its name from this easter.
|
| But the title is misleading, the article talks about how the
| libertarians (FDP) plan to water down the target from 100%
| renewables till 2035 to 80%.
| ho_schi wrote:
| Title is wrong. The parliament doesn't have passed anything. And
| the article states that immediately at top!
|
| The administration (Bundeskabinett) formed by SPD, GREEN, and FDP
| has decided they want to follow the draft plans worked out the
| ministry of economy and need to request the parliament to pass
| it. Furthermore _Die Zeit_ is a recognized newspaper but with
| strong bounds into the SPD.
| [deleted]
| martin_a wrote:
| For context: The FDP is a German liberal party, part of the
| ruling coalition, which is traditionally (with the CDU -
| "christian democratic union", now in the opposition) very close
| to the industry with all its lobbyism.
|
| For that reason they _must_ be against some of the industry-
| relating "cuts" but even they have realized that times are
| changing.
|
| ---
|
| translation via DeepL
|
| The FDP parliamentary group demands significant improvements in
| the planned legislative package to accelerate the expansion of
| green electricity in Germany. "With the Easter package, Federal
| Minister of Economics Habeck is taking a first step in the right
| direction. However, due to time constraints, all important reform
| steps could not yet be included in the package," FDP
| parliamentary group leader Christian Durr told the dpa news
| agency in Berlin. FDP parliamentary group vice-president Lukas
| Kohler said: "We have to use the upcoming consultations to
| substantially improve the current draft in line with the joint
| coalition agreement of SPD, Greens and FDP."
|
| Shortly afterwards, the federal cabinet approved the
| comprehensive legislative package for the faster expansion of
| green electricity from wind and sun. According to the plans of
| Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection
| Robert Habeck (Greens), the measures are intended to help Germany
| achieve its climate goals more quickly - but also to make the
| country less dependent on Russian energy supplies as quickly as
| possible. It is called the "Easter Package" because the cabinet
| is expected to adopt the planned legislative changes before
| Easter.
|
| Renewable energy has become a "matter of national security",
| according to the core content of the energy emergency measures.
| Several laws are to be amended. The main point is the amendment
| of the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), in which the expansion
| target for 2030 is raised to 80 percent. The Wind Energy at Sea
| Act is also to be amended and now also provides for higher
| expansion targets.
|
| FDP calls for "a more realistic target".
|
| In general, the electricity supply is to be based almost entirely
| on renewable energies as early as 2035, and industry is to be
| supported in entering climate-neutral production processes.
|
| Even before Durr's official statements, the dpa had reported that
| the FDP only wanted to approve the comprehensive legislative
| package with reservations. There was talk of a "special
| procedure" because important issues had not yet been decided by
| consensus. However, the way should be cleared so that no time is
| lost.
|
| After the cabinet's decision, the FDP parliamentary group called
| the new EEG an "important building block" to accelerate
| renewables and make Germany less dependent on Russian energy
| supplies. However, the draft was still "far from finding a
| majority in the Bundestag", it said. Central aspects still had to
| be clarified in the parliamentary procedure, said parliamentary
| group deputy Lukas Kohler. Earlier, he had said that the cabinet
| would decide this Wednesday on an "initial basis for discussion"
| in order to move forward quickly. "A climate-neutral electricity
| system by 2035 is desirable, but practically impossible to
| achieve in Germany."
|
| Environmental organisations are also calling for improvements -
| albeit towards an even faster and broader expansion. Greenpeace,
| for example, called for citizens to be more involved in the
| expansion of renewables. For Deutsche Umwelthilfe, the lack of
| land available for the expansion of wind energy remains a
| shortcoming. At least two percent of the state's land "must be
| reserved for the expansion of wind energy alone", the
| organisation demanded.
|
| Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
| solarkraft wrote:
| > The FDP is a German liberal party
|
| "Liberal" in this case means _economically liberal_ , going in
| a _libertarian_ direction (though they 're more moderate about
| it).
| throw93232 wrote:
| EU has common energy market. In reality it means Germany can be
| VERY grean, while importing atomic energy from France and coal
| from Poland and Balkans.
|
| Who will loose in this are poor EU nations, 10x higher energy
| cost compared to local production cost. Germany is basically
| outsourcing negative impacts of its energy policy to its
| neighbors.
| chess_buster wrote:
| We also export our Energy to the other countries when we have a
| surplus and France Nuclear plants cannot run because the
| river's are to warm again.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| No one sees the obvious solution here.
|
| Nuclear energy and Crimea gas and more fierce support for Ukraine
| in the east.
|
| Pipelines are existent and building LNG terminals probably take
| longer. Renewables won't cut it. Reverse the halvening of
| domestic energy production from the last 10 years (
| https://www.acer.europa.eu/gas-factsheet )
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| nixass wrote:
| Germany becoming laughing stock with ignoring and shutting down
| nuclear plants
| solarkraft wrote:
| This has sadly been decided about a decade ago. Reversing
| course would (apparently) be more expensive and take longer
| than building out renewables, especially considering that
| nuclear power arguably presents more problems than it's worth
| longer term.
| [deleted]
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| I don't think so. Here in France, we have our share of
| troubles. 27 of our 56 nuclear plants are offline and we were
| asked to reduce heating and electric consumption earlier this
| week to avoid power cut and keep the grid on.
|
| We have lots of difficulties keeping our plants on, due to
| badly designed and/or maintained plants, and this won't improve
| with global warming (e.g warmer river and sea in hot summer
| will make reactors more difficult to cool). Our failure to
| build our EPR in time and within budget is not reassuring
| either (from EUR 3.3 to 19.1 billion! https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...)
|
| I'd much prefer than we switch to solar and wind as fast as
| possible and as nuclear energy becomes less needed, we retire
| the big, old plant as safely and cheaply as possible (mmh). Of
| course, we'd better focus on retiring the most polluting plants
| first (coal ones in Central / East Europe) but the faster the
| transition, the better.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| martin_a wrote:
| @dang: Could you fix the link, please? Should be:
| https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2022-04/habeck-geset...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Here's a more accessible link on the same story:
|
| https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-boosts-renewabl...
|
| > "By 2030, installed onshore wind capacity should reach 115
| gigawatts (GW), the government says. Annual capacity additions
| therefore have to reach 10 GW as of 2025. Solar PV installations
| will amount to 22 GW per year as of 2026 to achieve a total
| capacity of 215 GW by the end of the decade. Offshore wind
| additions are increased as well to reach a minimum of 30 GW per
| 2030 and 40 GW by 2035, and 70 GW by 2045. While the government
| wants to incentivise the production and use of biomethane in
| highly flexible plants by increasing tender volumes, the use of
| biomass for power production will be superseded by its use in
| transport and industry."
|
| In particular there's an anti-NIMBYism provision in there that
| makes a lot of sense. This has been a huge problem for rolling
| out renewables in the USA from California to New York:
|
| > "To ensure that these ambitious growth scenarios are not
| hampered by lengthy planning procedures, local opposition and
| contradictions with other protected goals, the government
| establishes the principle that the use of renewable energies is
| of overriding public interest and will be given priority over
| other concerns until greenhouse gas neutrality is achieved."
|
| The benefits are obvious: Germany will be able to escape the need
| to import Russian gas and oil - although the American fracked LNG
| exporters who hoped to simply seize that market from Russia are
| doubtless disappointed.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| > American fracked LNG exporters who hoped to simply seize that
| market from Russia are doubtless disappointed.
|
| Germany has a huge industry which won't be able to switch away
| from gas that easily so I'm sure that the LNG suppliers will
| have a market for the next 20 years.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I've read that short and mid term the renewables boost will
| increase demand for gas in Germany. This is because gas power
| plants can be ramped up and down very quickly. Coal and
| nuclear power is not very dynamic.
|
| The flexibility is needed to compensate for spikes and
| especially the variable output of renewables.
|
| In addition to that: My rough back of a napkin calculation[1]
| shows that we'd need almost tanker per day. Is this even
| realistic at all?
|
| [1] 80E6 m3 / 250E3 m3 = 320. Please correct me if I made a
| mistake here.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Something to keep in mind: No one has done anything like
| this at such a scale yet and Germany has formidable
| resources, not just a lot of money but also a big and
| capable engineering base. Perhaps it's going to go like
| some predict and innovation isn't going to be able to solve
| the issues along the way and everything will effectively
| run on overpriced gas and coal, but it might as well become
| a big success story. As a species, we are in pretty dire
| need of such a success story, so I'm pretty stoked to see
| this play out. Besides, it's really nice to see Germany do
| something visionary and daring once in a long while. The
| Merkel governments have been dire in this regard.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| They used 142 BCM in 2021. That's 339 million cubic meters
| per day. The biggest LNG carriers can handle 200,000+ per
| shipment. That's 1695 per day... there's only 170 ships
| active per world wide out of the 439 currently operating.
|
| I think these numbers are correct but maybe I am wildly
| off...
| cinntaile wrote:
| To continue the napkin math and assuming your calculations
| check out... Lets say the distance is 7000km and the avg.
| speed is 12 knots. You'd need less than 30 tankers to have
| a daily delivery of gas.
| lampenrad wrote:
| In 2021, Germany got 55% of its gas from Russia (the rest
| from other European countries). Depending on how much overall
| consumption can be reduced, European suppliers might be able
| to cover most/all of it.
| nmehner wrote:
| There has already been some progress
| (https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-made-
| progres... ):
|
| "Habeck said imports of Russian oil now accounted for 25%
| of German imports, down from 35% before the invasion, and
| gas imports have been cut to 40% from 55%. Russian hard
| coal imports were down to 25% from 50% before the
| invasion."
| freeflight wrote:
| European suppliers will also be busy covering all the other
| increased demand inside from Europe [0], the demand that
| most people tend to forget when they act like Germany is
| the only country dependent on Russian energy, and
| resources, imports.
|
| It's also not as easily replacable as _" Just go to the
| other gas supermarket down the street"_, infrastructure
| needs to exist and support such supply chains.
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201743/russian-
| gas-depe...
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| Somebody commented that German fertilizer is a large
| consumer. I doubt it will make sense to turn gas into LNG
| into fertilizer.
| adrianN wrote:
| A much smaller market than expected if Germany manages to
| reduce demand for gas for electricity and heating.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| Wind energy is nice and stuff but the moment there's no wind
| you have no electricity, it's not a good energy source if you
| want to actually remove gas from your grid.
| atoav wrote:
| Isn't it a bit naive to assume the planers of these
| expansions didn't at one point or another had that exact
| thought themselves? I mean it is certainly not the most far
| out there idea when it comes to wind power..
| kodah wrote:
| No, because that's exactly what happened in Texas during
| their winter storm crisis.
| dpierce9 wrote:
| That was only part of the Texas issue. Many Nat Gas
| plants were also offline. For nearly the whole time Nat
| Gas outages were 2x wind outages according to ERCOT.
|
| Here is their own report: https://www.ercot.com/files/doc
| s/2021/04/28/ERCOT_Winter_Sto...
| kodah wrote:
| Correct, they were, which reinforces the point.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Buuuut... the problem is that they didn't weather proof
| their system even though they were informend about the
| problems this could cause in winter storm scenarios.
|
| The weatherproofed windpower plants as well als gas
| plants function very well in Germany, Norway, etc. even
| though it is often a lot colder.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Do weatherproofed wind turbines consume electricity? A
| common complaint around here is that they need to keep
| the blades heated to avoid frost and ice buildup, even
| when the wind is not blowing (we do have a lot of still
| days in winter).
|
| In bad conditions, if that is still the case, having wind
| turbines connected to the grid might be worse than having
| none.
| sorenbs wrote:
| This is factually incorrect. The winter issue in Texas
| was almost exclusively lack of winterization of thermal
| plants as well as a market setup that was unable to
| predict and react to the weather. Wind generated more
| electricity during the event than what was committed in
| the market, and as such had no negative influence.
| kodah wrote:
| This is factually incorrect. Winterization is about half
| of the issues faced. Page 4 highlights the causes pretty
| well.
|
| https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/04/28/ERCOT_Winter_
| Sto...
| dpierce9 wrote:
| Page 16 is quite clear: the vast majority of missing
| generation capacity was natural gas. The lost wind
| capacity was comparable to lost coal capacity. Whether
| the cause is categorized as equipment failure, weather,
| or fuel availability, the most affected generation
| category was natural gas.
| kodah wrote:
| The point of my comment was that the supply chain issue
| was significant, sorenbs is saying winterization is the
| exclusive cause. The ERCOT report doesn't support what
| they had to say. Winterization accounts for ~12-15 GW
| while supply chain is responsible for ~5-8 GW. (Page
| 23-25)
|
| The comment I originally responded to said:
|
| > Isn't it a bit naive to assume the planers of these
| expansions didn't at one point or another had that exact
| thought themselves?
|
| The answer is _no_ , it is not naive to assume that they
| didn't think about these things, because even in a state
| like Texas where energy is king it was not fully thought
| out.
|
| Edit:
|
| Also to be clear, I'm not ragging on Texas. I love the
| people of Texas and I miss being there, but I think the
| state has some important lessons to pay attention to and
| learn from.
| dpierce9 wrote:
| What isn't fully thought out?
|
| The categories in the report are weather related,
| equipment failure, and fuel supply issues. These are
| considered in the report mutually exclusive. But they
| aren't, it is just a useful categorization.
|
| You are simply wrong to think that they don't consider
| intermittent resources as part of their planning. Wind
| stops blowing all the time, this is known. The fact that
| many natural gas generators iced over, fuel was too
| expensive, fuel wasn't available, or they couldn't
| maintain their equipment when needed was the principal
| source of lost capacity.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| ERCOT sets the price of electricity. There is no 'market'
| in the traditional sense, unless you count a government
| price fixing scheme as a market.
|
| In this case the price was set at the absolute maximum as
| allowed by the system. If the 'market' couldn't react to
| that absolute maximum price then the market cannot be the
| problem at hand.
| phatfish wrote:
| Most of western Europe has an electricity grid to distribute
| power. When the wind is blowing it covers domestic needs or
| exports, when it's not blowing it imports nuclear power, or
| Solar etc.
| epgui wrote:
| That's why energy storage is important.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| ... and batteries are not the solution at scale to that
| problem. The current global installed capacity of batteries
| can barely deliver a handful of gigawatt hours of energy. a
| medium scale grid like the Netherlands will use that amount
| in a handful of minutes.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Therefore they will use stored hydrogen in the gas
| plants. The hydrogen will be electrolyzed using renewable
| energy when it's too much.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Lakes make for good batteries. Geography provided.
| epgui wrote:
| "current capacity" is indeed insufficient, but we're
| talking about what ought to be in the future, not about
| what is in the present.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| The technology to do that at reasonable cost does not
| exist and likely won't be developed in the near future.
| epgui wrote:
| The technology does exist. The bottleneck is how fast we
| can ramp up mining and production of key metals.
|
| Extraction of key metals from batteries (ie.: recycling)
| does need to be developed further, but in terms of total
| capacity, that is a bigger future concern than a present
| one.
| Ourgon wrote:
| Grid-scale batteries are not the solution. Residential
| solar combined with residential storage either through
| dedicated batteries (which can be repurposed old EV
| battery packs or tailor-made residential storage
| batteries) or electric cars which can feed power back
| into the home can help more here by limiting peak
| consumption when people come home from work/school and -
| given large enough batteries - when they get up and
| prepare to go to work/school. In the more northern
| regions the effect will be limited in the winter months
| due to the limited amount of daylight, the opposite is
| true in the summer months.
| epgui wrote:
| First sentence: I don't think these things are mutually
| exclusive. Agreed on the rest though!
|
| One of the main advantages of battery storage, apart from
| decoupling production and consumption, is that it enables
| delocalization (and portability) of energy sources.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > In particular there's an anti-NIMBYism provision
|
| The best anti-NIMBYism rule is (for example of the building of
| new houses): "While the number of new dwellings built is below
| the target X for the region, all privately-funded plans that
| involve the building of a new house shall be automatically
| approved and all relevant permits automatically granted without
| review".
|
| Obviously no city state or local government wants any plans to
| be unconditionally approved. So they'll go to massive lengths
| to meet the target.
|
| Allow the targets to be transferable, so that some really NIMBY
| place can pay someone else to to do the deed they don't want to
| do.
| pasabagi wrote:
| I think the problem is generally legal, not administrative.
| Development in germany would typically be held up by people
| suing the developers to stop it from going ahead, so the city
| or state itself wouldn't be in a position to speed things
| along in a majority of cases.
|
| > the principle that the use of renewable energies is of
| overriding public interest and will be given priority over
| other concerns until greenhouse gas neutrality is achieved.
|
| would probably be something like a silver bullet, though,
| because if it is as strong as it sounds, any judge would
| basically have to agree to any reasonable planning proposal
| that was intended to increase renewables capacity.
| zbrozek wrote:
| We desperately need property rights in the US if we want to
| build our way out of the housing crisis.
| pydry wrote:
| This is how you get 15,000 new 15% profit margin luxury
| housing units sold to Chinese investors and left empty and 0
| new affordable housing units.
|
| We just need higher property taxes. This will mean that these
| store-of-wealth investments eat losses & stop consuming all
| the good land while city coffers start to fill up with money
| that can build public housing.
|
| If you want lessons on how to solve an urban housing crisis
| look to 1950s Singapore not the building developers
| salivating over 15% margins on newbuild luxury apartments
| whining about NIMBYs getting in their way.
| lobochrome wrote:
| > "To ensure that these ambitious growth scenarios are not
| hampered by lengthy planning procedures, local opposition and
| contradictions with other protected goals, the government
| establishes the principle that the use of renewable energies is
| of overriding public interest and will be given priority over
| other concerns until greenhouse gas neutrality is achieved."
|
| Not exactly as clean as it sounds. They merely want to take
| away the burden of the developer to get comments and approval
| from people before they proceed with planning.
|
| Individuals can still sue and block projects.
|
| This is just talk in my opinion. Like when the government
| declared in 2010 that they want to have 1 million EV on the
| road in 2020.
|
| Or when they decided to shut off nuclear and replace it with
| renewables and instead built out coal and gas.
|
| Or when they decided to phase out coal by 2035...
| freeflight wrote:
| _> Or when they decided to shut off nuclear and replace it
| with renewables and instead built out coal and gas._
|
| The nuclear phase out was signed and ratified in 2002, since
| then nuclear has mostly replaced with solar and wind [0],
| while the share of electricity from coal has has actually
| gone slightly down.
|
| Germany's 40%+ renewables are an testament to Germany
| pioneering the sector [1], one that too often gets belittled
| with straight up misinformation.
|
| [0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-
| energy-c...
|
| [1] https://www.trade.gov/energy-resource-guide-germany-
| renewabl...
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >while the share of electricity from coal has has actually
| gone slightly down
|
| But the electricity generation in general has gone up since
| then. While total coal has gone down, gas has gone up, and
| therefore the total amount of electricity generated from
| fossil fuel sources has only changed slightly. It's clear
| on this chart[0]. So actual progress in reducing fossil
| fuel dependency in the last 20 years has been small (the
| chart is not properly labeled for this, but it looks like
| something around 50TWh less than in 2002) -- and that's not
| even counting non-electric heating.
|
| [0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/sty
| les/g...
| _ph_ wrote:
| If only those LNG exporters could offer enough LNG quickly to
| replace the current need of Russian gas in Germany.
| freeflight wrote:
| They can't, and even if they could; In terms of climate
| change it's absolutely counterproductive to ship LNG across
| the Atlantic.
|
| The amount of extra energy that needs, the extra emission it
| creates, its a complete enviornmental disaster.
|
| One that's mostly ignored, as it gets into the way of certain
| foreign policy narratives, where neither "climate change" nor
| the "enviornment" are even recognized concepts of any kind of
| priority.
| klausjensen wrote:
| Switching to LNG requires special infrastructure (harbours
| attached to the gas-network) - and there is not nearly enough
| of that in Germany right now, and it takes a long time to
| build.
|
| So even if Russian gas COULD be replaced by LNG tomorrow, in
| terms of pure volume, it would still not possible to Germany
| to consume it.
|
| Germany really screwed the pooch on their energy policy for
| the past 15 years...
| [deleted]
| hef19898 wrote:
| >> Germany really screwed the pooch on their energy policy
| for the past 15 years...
|
| Why? Russia, and the USSR through the entirity of the Cold
| War, delivered reliably all the gas ordered. If you have a
| stable relationship with suppliers stretching decades and
| through all kinds of conflicts you have zero incentive to
| change. The infrastructure is there. And being in business
| with your "enemy" keeps channels open and results in intet
| dependencies.
|
| Putin, in a bout of insanity, through all that out of the
| window. Once it was clear that's gonna happen, and no that
| was NOT clear a year ago, it was too late to switch
| (infrastructure).
| vimy wrote:
| Ten years ago only 30 % of European gas came from Russia.
| In the 90s it was even less. It was a deliberate German
| strategy to increase their dependence on Russia.
|
| > Once it was clear that's gonna happen, and no that was
| NOT clear a year ago,
|
| It was clear. He threatened Europe with shutting down gas
| supplies in the past, more than once. He actually did it
| with Ukraine in 2014. In response Germany (& Europe)
| became more dependent on Russia.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYaa5Zp7qBI This was
| 2018. Germany mocked him instead of listening.
| endymi0n wrote:
| True, who could possibly know they were dealing with an
| incredibly malicious, manipulative and unreliable
| dictator before Bucha? /s
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_war_crimes
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the
| _20...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the
| _20...
| hef19898 wrote:
| History. Germany dealt woth every Sowjet leader since
| Stalin. Arguably that helped preserve peace in Europe.
| Everybody continues to deal with China, not to mention
| raw earths and dimonds from various African dictators.
| And the Wests standards were never that high anyway.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> Putin, in a bout of insanity, through all that out of
| the window._
|
| How exactly? You just explained it yourself very well;
| These trade relations even held trough the worst of the
| Cold War.
|
| Just like Germany kept its trade relations with the US
| going while that invaded and bombed half the Middle East.
|
| The only side that switched behavior here, throwing all
| established rules out of the window, is Germany and the
| US, by making Ukraine this "ultimate lynchpin" everybody
| shall pick a side over, and those who don't pick the
| "right" one shall be considered with the enemy.
|
| These are very much 1:1 the same overtones the US bullied
| the international community with, thus tolerating
| American imperialist ambitions, on the other side of the
| planet, even those have resulted in some of the worst
| global damage since WWII.
| infamia wrote:
| It's not like this is out of the blue. NATO has been
| training the Ukrainians for eight years because of the
| risks. The Europeans should have been hedging their bets
| against Russian gas as well.
| yonaguska wrote:
| > NATO has been training the Ukrainians for eight years
| because of the risks.
|
| Feels a bit like a chicken or egg question. I'm still
| undecided though, as Russia was funding the green anti
| nuclear movements in Germany way back when Fukushima
| happened.
|
| Fwiw, I don't think that renewables plus batteries are a
| safe hedge anyways. We're simply offshoring the
| environmental externalities to places far away in terms
| of energy storage, and China holds all the cards in this
| instance.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The Green party was funded as, partially, an anti nuclear
| party. Pushing that after Fukushima was just natural.
| Russia did support the AfD so, as they did with other far
| right movements across Europe.
|
| That said, 8 years is a very short time to switch from
| existing gas pipelines to LNG terminals.
| lorenzfx wrote:
| This.
|
| As I commented recently on another thread:
|
| This was done on purpose. There was the hope, that strong
| economic ties would make war between Germany and Russia
| impossible. While it now looks really stupid, it worked
| really well between Germany and France after World War II
| (first with European Coal and Steel Community and then
| later with the European Union).
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| There's also climate change though. Building a new gas
| pipeline while exiting nuclear at the same time seems an
| odd way to achieve zero carbon.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Why? Cheap renewables and gas is a perfectly good route
| to zero carbon being used around the world.
|
| I could think of ways to further minimize gas but there's
| politics involved too.
|
| It also is a big carrot for Putin (or somebody who takes
| his place) to rejoin the peaceful world.
|
| Build a golden bridge for your enemies to retreat over --
| Sun Tzu
| krisoft wrote:
| Exactly as you say.
|
| > there is not nearly enough of that in Germany right now
|
| To elaborate on that: Germany has no LNG terminals. Zero.
| They signed the first contracts to build one this year
| March [1]. If I were a German citizen I would feel very
| cross with my own government. It's a good idea to have such
| an infra just in case. Just to hedge the bets.
|
| There is a very real reason why the Floating Storage
| Regasification Unit serving as the LNG import terminal for
| Latvia is called "FSRU Independence". [2] These facilities
| literally provide independence.
|
| 1: https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/germany-
| speeds-pl... 2:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSRU_Independence
| [deleted]
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Spain has. But youll need pipes.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| There exists LNG terminals in Holland, Belgium and
| Poland: Rotterdam, Zeebrugge, Swinoujscie etc.
|
| They are connected to German pipelines.
|
| This map is excellent:
| https://www.gie.eu/publications/maps/gie-lng-map/
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I know, but I've been told that Spain has the most
| underused installed capacity.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Does Spain export a lot of electricity? It could produce
| a lot of solar power. Even some in the winter, a lot in
| the summer when it's needed for air conditioning. One can
| think of it this way, if a solar panel is manufactured in
| or imported to EU, maybe it should be installed in the
| more sunny regions for maximum benefit.
|
| Spain is also a wind power giant.
|
| As comparison, Germany is not a great location for either
| wind or solar power.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| I heard that France refused several projects to connect
| the iberian system to central europe properly, not only
| electricity but also gas.
|
| It isn't that spanish companies can get much help from
| the government's diplomacy (long topic), so someone else
| interested in that connection would have to partner with
| such companies, or a foreign diplomatic body go and do
| the legwork for the spanish companies, which wouldn't be
| the first time.
| lnsru wrote:
| Lithuania has Independence, not Latvia. Kremlin troll
| factory was screaming about money waste for years. Today
| it looks like a smart investment without a doubt.
| krisoft wrote:
| Oh you are right. Sorry about that. Even my source
| correctly says Lithuania. Need to learn to read.
| freeflight wrote:
| Even with the terminal, Lithuania still has a 40% Russian
| gas dependence [0], barely 10% lower than Germany, while
| Latvia is over 90% dependent on Russian gas.
|
| The matter of fact is that only very few countries in
| Europe can "afford" to get by without Russian gas or
| other resources. After all it is the home to the
| continents largest concentration of natural resources.
|
| There is only so much global production capacity, so much
| bandwith in terms of logistics, that can compensate for
| that. It's not like we can suddenly tap a new continent
| full of resources to replace Russia, reality ain't
| working like that.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201743/russian-gas-
| depe...
| nagisa wrote:
| All three Baltic countries stopped all imports of Russian
| gas for its own use this week, a move largely enabled by
| the FSRU Independence. The only remaining movement of gas
| across the pipeline through Lithuania from Russia is in
| transit to the Kaliningrad oblast.
|
| FSRU Independence has sufficient capacity to deliver
| enough gas to serve 70~100% of the yearly needs of the
| three Baltic countries, depending on how you count. Of
| course it remains a question of who supplies the LNG, but
| it gives the countries a backup, an ability to pick the
| suppliers and an ability to make politically important
| decisions, even if it means paying a little more.
| manholio wrote:
| A LNG import pier is essentially a pipe where ships dock,
| connected to storage tanks and from which, in response to
| demand, liquid gas is reheated by simply letting it
| exchange heat with air or the sea water.
|
| It's a straightforward piece of technology that can be
| built quickly by any country, unlike, say, a liquefaction
| plant or a LNG tanker.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| The gas port in Poland [1] took 4 years from start of
| construction to first delivery. From project start it was
| 9 years.
|
| I'm not putting Poland as some kind of benchmark for
| speedy construction, but I think 1-2 years is a minimum
| even in a hurry.
| krisoft wrote:
| Fundamentally on the physics level you are right. LNG
| regasification is not hard tech. It doesn't require
| unobtanium, probably any technologically advanced country
| can develop the necessary know how if they need it. Heck,
| at small scale you just pour the LNG out in a puddle and
| it will turn back to gas. :)
|
| But building any kind of infrastructure takes time. There
| are some factors which make it more complicated
| engineering wise: cryogenic fluids, handling large
| quantities of flamable and explosive liquids and gasses,
| being built on the waterfront etc etc. None of these are
| insurmountable mind you! They just complicate it a bit.
|
| One way we can look at is by comparing how long such
| plants took to get constructed elsewhere. I looked up a
| few European examples. From the first announcement to the
| first ship docking: UK/South Hook ~6
| years UK/Dragon ~4 years UK/Grain ~6.2 years
| Belgium/Zeebrugge ~10 years Netherlands/Gate ~4
| years Poland/Swinoujscie ~9 years
|
| (I have collected my sources on a spreadsheet here: https
| ://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1md_XfmrpIYhWj72Mu3BJ..
| . )
|
| Probably I made some mistakes in the above, and there are
| some inconsistencies (do we count until the first
| commercial ship, or the first ship trialing the
| facilities?) Also I assume that all of these things can
| be done a bit faster in case of a dire emergency. But it
| seems even in that best case it might take multiple
| winters until a regassification plant is up and running.
| Which is a bit cold and scary.
| trhway wrote:
| >So even if Russian gas COULD be replaced by LNG tomorrow,
| in terms of pure volume, it would still not possible to
| Germany to consume it
|
| Why? Given that Germany has unused North Stream 2
| connection to Germany infra they should just build an LNG
| terminal right where NS2 beaches. An LNG receiving terminal
| is pretty easy and fast to build.
| weinzierl wrote:
| It is not only the missing LNG terminals. In the last 15
| years gas heating has been been pushed to a degree that
| roughly half of all buildings are heated that way.
|
| I'm willing to believe that we can build an LNG terminal in
| a year or two, but replacing the heating systems of our
| buildings will take decades.
| nemetroid wrote:
| Isn't the point of an LNG terminal to supply a gas
| heating system with gas?
| huijzer wrote:
| > Germany really screwed the pooch on their energy policy
| for the past 15 years...
|
| If they would have pushed "this overrides all public
| interests" clause last year, they could have triggered a
| huge backslash especially among the German climate change
| deniers and car fans. This in turn could have hindered them
| from introducing the clause today. So, maybe they did a
| great job on the energy policy. Who knows
| [deleted]
| croes wrote:
| Others sources have either similar totalitarian governments
| or human rights violations like russia or damage the
| environment like transporting the LNG with ships to
| germany.
|
| Germany could have diversified it's suppliers if the Iran
| deals weren't killed by Trump, but even then not a good
| solution.
| starkd wrote:
| >> Germany could have diversified it's suppliers if the
| Iran deals weren't killed by Trump, but even then not a
| good solution.
|
| How does diversifying away from one totalitarian
| government only to depend on another totalitarian
| government solve anything?
| jsnodlin wrote:
| mrep wrote:
| Well for one thing, that other totalitarian government
| doesn't have nukes to threaten you if you intervene with
| them.
| croes wrote:
| Less power for each of such governments.
| klausjensen wrote:
| Hindsight is 20-20, I know, but Russia was the worst
| choice there was as supplier.
|
| It was not nearly as obvious 15 years ago, as it is
| today, but all the signs were there. We (I include myself
| here) were just not listening closely enough to the
| countries that knew Russia the best: Estonia, Latvia,
| Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine.
|
| The decision is also amplified by the meaningless end to
| the German nuclear program.
| pell wrote:
| >It was not nearly as obvious 15 years ago, as it is
| today, but all the signs were there. We (I include myself
| here) were just not listening closely enough to the
| countries that knew Russia the best: Estonia, Latvia,
| Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine.
|
| A big part of Germany's geopolitical strategy was (and
| partly still is) to act as a communication channel
| between West and East. Similarly to the EU which brought
| long-lasting peace in Europe through economical ties, the
| idea was to establish economical relationships with
| Russia to advance the relationship for a beneficial win-
| win situation both sides could live with. This, of
| course, was shortsighted in many ways.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| German dependency on Russian gas is a lot older than
| that. Ostpolitik dates back to the '60s.
| tmerse wrote:
| Jein (Yes and no). Helmut Schmidt even advocated for
| diversification in 1988 (no importer should account for
| more than 30% - of course more with oil in mind but the
| principle stands).
|
| https://www.zeit.de/1988/08/sieben-prinzipien-
| vernuenftiger-...
|
| Contrary to this, Russian gas imports to Germany used to
| account for 40% of total consumption in 2012 vs 52% as of
| today.
| croes wrote:
| Who would have been a better choice?
| hef19898 wrote:
| In the pre-Ukraine war world there were none. Gas was
| comparatively cheap, pipelines and ibfrastructure was
| there. So Russia was a natural choice. Now that changed
| and the world will adapt.
| gsserge wrote:
| At the very least Germany could have said no to Nord
| Stream 1 & 2.
| gsserge wrote:
| > It was not nearly as obvious 15 years ago, as it is
| today, but all the signs were there. We (I include myself
| here) were just not listening closely enough to the
| countries that knew Russia the best: Estonia, Latvia,
| Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine.
|
| After living in Western Europe for almost a decade it's
| still shocking to me how much people here do not
| understand Russia.
| creato wrote:
| In my experience, right here on HN the dominant narrative
| was that opposing Russian gas infrastructure was just
| American protectionism for frackers.
|
| Similarly, opposing Chinese built telecom infrastructure
| is just seen as an attempt at American protectionism.
| Hopefully that continues to be a viable position, unlike
| depending on Russian gas.
| Mlller wrote:
| Contrary to the narrative common now, many European
| states and particularly a majority of Eastern European
| states seem to have been _more_ dependent on Russian gas
| than Germany: - Hungary: 110.4 percent
| - Latvia: 100.1 percent - Finland: 92.4 percent
| - Estonia: 86.5 percent - Czechia: 86.0 percent
| - Slovenia: 81.0 percent - Slovakia: 75.2 percent
| - Bulgaria: 72.8 percent - Germany: 58.9 percent
|
| "Some of the countries have a figure above 100 because
| they import more than required for domestic consumption
| and export other energy products." per
| https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-
| sustainability/326055...
| pell wrote:
| While that is true, Germany is the economical powerhouse
| of the EU (and the fourth largest economy in the world).
| I think, these countries' GDPs combined are probably
| still smaller than Germany's. This gives Germany a
| special position here which is mainly why they're the
| center of attention here.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Those all are small countries, with combined population
| less than Germany.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Current LNG facilities are already saturated as I understand
| it. It's an energetically expensive process: gas from
| production in the USA has to be piped to an export terminal,
| and then has to be liquified (large energy investment),
| shipped across the ocean, then gasified (another large energy
| investment) and fed into the European pipeline system.
| Suddenly expanding all that would require, well, a decade of
| investment and planning.
| croes wrote:
| Not to mention the environmental damage because of the
| transport by ship. Climate change seems to be forgotten.
| jsnodlin wrote:
| meatsauce wrote:
| detaro wrote:
| Headline here doesn't match the article headline and is
| contradicted by the article. There is no passed law.
| martin_a wrote:
| While it does not match the article headline, that's the core
| aspect of the passed law.
|
| The FDP will surely want some (more) help for the industry but
| the point made by the parliament stands.
| detaro wrote:
| There is no _passed law_. There is a proposal for a new law
| that has not been presented to parliament yet, so "German
| parliament passes law" is just flat out wrong.
|
| The only mention of parliament in the article is _one of the
| government parties_ stating that it in its current shape won
| 't be able to pass parliament.
|
| Flagging this, you can't distort content like that,
| especially if the majority of readers has to rely on machine
| translation. But congrats, you now have a clear falsehood top
| of the front page, well done.
| _3u10 wrote:
| The important thing is that it says something HN users
| agree with therefore it's true.
| capableweb wrote:
| Not to mention that the title here on HN is in English while
| the article itself is in German, so you're right, not matching
| at all.
| detaro wrote:
| That too, but I'm not 100% sure if there is an explicit rule
| about foreign language content or not. But especially if most
| readers need to rely on machine translation it has to be
| precise.
|
| EDIT: per dang 23 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30663877
|
| > _We have deep respect for languages, but HN is an English-
| language site, so posts here need to be in English._
|
| > _That may require waiting until a good English-language
| article appears, but the more significant the topic is, the
| more (and sooner) this is likely to happen._
| coryrc wrote:
| Additionally it appears to only be about electricity and now
| addressing the bigger users of energy, transportation and
| heating.
| nmehner wrote:
| Transportation and heating will be electrified. Electric car
| share in new cars is 15% and climbing fast. New gas/oil
| heating installations will be (almost) forbidden from 2024 on
| (65% of heating energy must come from renewable energies).
|
| So electric energy is what is relevant for the future.
| jeffbee wrote:
| How far in the future, though? The majority of cars on the
| road will still be non-electric for years even after EVs
| take over 100% of the market, because cars are so long-
| lived.
| nmehner wrote:
| By 2025 probably the majority of new cars in Europe will
| be electric and by 2027 >80%. After that the share of
| electric cars in the fleet will increase by about 4-6%
| every year. Almost complete electrification will probably
| take until 2040.
|
| If robotic cars take off and people stop owning cars in
| larger numbers, things might be faster. Also old
| combustion cars might still exist, but these are often
| cars that are not moving a lot.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Electric miles driven is the more important metric.
|
| People who only drive once a week can probably cope with
| high fuel prices for their second hand car, and their CO2
| output is minimal.
|
| People running a business e.g. deliveries, taxis or
| otherwise high mileage uses will be passing up a lot of
| money if they don't switch to EVs with low fuel and
| maintenance cost. They're already competitive in TCO for
| these users and only going to get cheaper.
| sandos wrote:
| That is huge, heating with gas seems to be very very common,
| on the order of 50% of all households use it, or about 460TWh
| per year. The electricity production is 580 TWh per year, so
| its a sizeable proportion of that. Now heatpumps are efficent
| so not sure how much electricity will be needed, but it will
| be a lot.
| aadvark69 wrote:
| sitic wrote:
| Why? Renewal energy production was at 42.7% in Q1 2021.
| https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/presse-und-medien/news/2021...
| chess_buster wrote:
| 50% renewables for electricity in Germany this year.
|
| So doable.
| chess_buster wrote:
| chess_buster wrote:
| j00 wrote:
| If one assumes the current trend [1] of the last 13 years,
| Germany should be at 84% in 2035 by simply not slowing down the
| transition. So honestly not overly ambitious
|
| [1] https://energy-
| charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...
| chess_buster wrote:
| The target as mentioned in the article is 100%, which the FDP
| (libertarians) want to water down to 80%.
|
| Given your projection, I don't wonder why
| allendoerfer wrote:
| The FDP is not libertarian by any measure. Much like the CDU
| they claim the social market economy of Germany as one of
| their achievements, which would be called outright socialist
| in some American circles. From an American perspective they
| can be compared with the Democrats in the US. Of course the
| whole political spectrum of America is further right than
| that of Germany.
| bally0241 wrote:
| I would hardly call the FDP libertarian.
| chess_buster wrote:
| So neither liberals nor libertarian. What are they then?
| it_citizen wrote:
| Contrary to popular belief and assumptions in many papers,
| adoption of a technology doesn't follow an exponential curve
| but often follows an s curve and we can reasonably assume that
| Germany is in the spot where growth accelerates at the
| strongest. Massive efforts might be needed to not see the
| growth rate of the transition to slow down.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00863-0.epdf?shar...
| Sol- wrote:
| I think the last 2-3 years it has somewhat stagnated (for
| example [1]), driven by conservative politicians fishing for
| votes with NIMBY policies (while at the same time increasing
| dependence on Russian imports). Hopefully the new government
| can pick it back up, though.
|
| [1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-build-no-new-
| of...
| Wohlf wrote:
| Even without politics it would have slowed in the last 2
| years due to shortages.
| locallost wrote:
| I don't know of it was NIMBYism, but a few years ago the
| relatively simple feed in tariff system was replaced by a
| kind of a bidding system designed to allow new capacity
| addition to the most efficient producer. But by design they
| tried to limit the amount of new capacity added. Honestly I
| don't know all the details, but it's not very far fetched
| that there was a fair bit of politics involved, and
| protection of interests of a lot of non renewable energy
| producers.
|
| Some details here https://m.dw.com/en/german-cabinet-puts-
| brakes-on-clean-ener...
| fbarkerx wrote:
| irrational wrote:
| Conspiracy theory - the Russian attack on Ukraine is actually a
| ploy to help combat climate change by moving people off of Oil
| faster.
| mlindner wrote:
| Or they could start fracking the tremendous amounts of oil and
| gas reserves that exist in Europe that they just refuse to use as
| a holdover until all this green tech actually finishes becoming
| available. Do both.
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