[HN Gopher] Greece passes first climate law, vows to cut depende...
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Greece passes first climate law, vows to cut dependence on fossil
fuels
Author : ddtaylor
Score : 78 points
Date : 2022-05-28 16:45 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (uk.news.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (uk.news.yahoo.com)
| tsoukase wrote:
| Cool down please. You talk about Greece, where a government
| change can undo in record time what the previous has made. We
| passed the same laws over and over many times about health,
| education etc since the last decade. Anything that lasts more
| than a couple of years is in jeopardy.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Let's hope Greece starts to focus on lots of small modular
| nuclear reactors!
| rglullis wrote:
| They have lots of seismic activity and are in the middle of the
| Mediterranean. Any reactor leakage would mean disaster for all
| of Europe and Africa.
| akomtu wrote:
| Law 6: Court Attention at all Cost (The 48 Laws of Power). Greece
| is trying to stay relevant.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Greece is trying to stay relevant_
|
| Curious what you mean?
|
| Beyond the cultural heritage, they're a NATO member in a semi-
| hostile state with Turkey and, as of today, Iran.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Quite a tangent, but Turkey is also a core member of NATO.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Only because they control the Bosporus. It's an alliance of
| convenience.
| uxp100 wrote:
| Is that good? Bad?
|
| I think culturally Greece will be relevant for a long time to
| come because of the construction of Ancient Greece as a sort of
| origin for "western society."
|
| Economically, well, you have to try something, right? I may
| agree in the sense that I don't think Greece would be doing
| this if they were an economic powerhouse, doing great thanks to
| oil. But, is it bad to do something not completely
| altruistically?
| akomtu wrote:
| The legacy of Ancient Greece is relevant, not the nation that
| happens to live there today.
|
| Greece is bankrupt. It made this cute announcement because it
| costs the country nothing, and should anything go wrong, it
| would be rescued by the EU.
| xaedes wrote:
| > Greece is bankrupt
|
| From 4 Apr 2022:
|
| Greece has received three international bailouts from the
| euro zone and the IMF worth 280 billion euros ($307.19
| billion) since 2010. It emerged from its latest bailout in
| 2018 and has relied on the debt markets to cover its
| borrowing needs since.
|
| "Greece concluded today the repayment of its debts to the
| IMF," Finance Minister Christos Staikouras said in a
| statement. After previous early repayments to the IMF,
| Greece owed 1.9 billion euros in loans due by 2024, the
| last batch of a total of 28 billion euros the Fund provided
| between 2010 and 2014.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/greece-economy-imf-
| idUSKCN2L...
| s5300 wrote:
| It may be bankrupt but it's still an amazing place to live.
| I'm sure they'll start catering to digital nomads or
| whatever & make good revenue off it.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They'll have to get their citizens to pay their taxes first.
| sn0w_crash wrote:
| ncmncm wrote:
| Greece will soon have the cheapest power in Europe if they run
| the program intelligently.
|
| Greece has immediate access to deep ocean for cheap storage, and
| plenty of sunshine and wind year-round. Transmission lines out to
| the rest of Europe could make them a major exporter.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Deep sea pumped storage? Where they use energy to pump water
| out of underwater concrete spheres and allow the water to rush
| back in to turn generators?
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Nothing seems to be happening with that in the last few years
| https://hackaday.com/2022/02/02/underwater-tanks-turn-
| energy...
| ncmncm wrote:
| That is one alternative. Another is to pump air down a hose
| to force water out of a deep cavity. A third is to winch a
| float down toward a seafloor-mounted pulley. Methods that put
| the electrical equipment on shore are generally cheaper than
| the ones that put it at the sea floor.
|
| Energy storage is mostly freshman-level physics (E = Fx, E =
| mgh), chemical schemes excepted. Undersea methods can often
| be adapted to an under-groundwater form.
|
| The winning energy storage methods will be the cheapest ones,
| even at the expense of round-trip efficiency. But forms that
| are shippable, such as liquified ammonia synthesis, have an
| advantage than can overcome both higher cost and lower
| efficiency.
|
| Most places will rely on a mix.
| FunnyBadger wrote:
| How long before that gets banned also just like Desal was
| banned California beause of environmental impacts (both saline
| and temperature).
| Proven wrote:
| krasin wrote:
| >Greece has immediate access to deep ocean for cheap storage
|
| I am curious about what you mean, can you please elaborate?
| ncmncm wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31543516
| amelius wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/german-institute-
| suc...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| This is a lab test. HN gets almost daily 'lab test'
| breakthroughs in batteries and energy tech and yet, turning
| those breakthroughs into practical, engineered services
| remains quite elusive.
| FunnyBadger wrote:
| It takes a MINIMUM of 20 years to go from "lab to fab" or
| "science experiment in a lab to productively useful in real
| life". Maybe this indicates that clock has started but the
| requirement for that 20 years is 20 years of fully funded
| R&D (small R, big D) - otherwise bump the 20 years up to
| infinity without continuous funding.
| ncmncm wrote:
| That's fine, we don't have enough renewable generating
| capacity to charge up storage from yet. After we get
| there will be the right time to build storage.
|
| But pumping water and air, driving winches, and building
| pressure vessels are all mature tech.
| tintor wrote:
| Cheap storage of what in deep ocean?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Energy.
| spapas82 wrote:
| I am Greek and I'd like to express a different opinion. Let me
| first explain the situatin here: Greece has a very large amount
| of coal on its mountains; because of that, the Greek Public Power
| Corporation used to use its own thermoelectric power plants (i.e
| power factories that burn coal) to power almost all of Greece.
| The only parts of Greece that were not powered by these coal
| plants were most islands because they were not connected with the
| main network and used diesel engines to generate power.
|
| In any case, the thig is that this made Greece be self-sufficient
| on power _and_ allowed us to pay a very small price on electrical
| bills (because coal is very cheap and we don 't need to import
| it; actually the Greek Public Power Corporation owns the coal
| mines so it doesn't even pay for it, it only mines it).
|
| Unfortuanately, over the last 5-10 years this has changed
| greatly: The EU has passed some laws that force all members to
| have a minimum amount of "green" power (i.e wind / sun etc). This
| may seem like a good thing on first sight (Greece has a lot of
| sun and wind) but it is very, very problematic: The "green" power
| is much more expensive than traditional power (needs a lot of
| investments in new power plants which also are much more
| expensive than coal) and also it is much less reliable than good
| old coal (you also need power at night or when there's no wind,
| power _cannot_ be saved to be used later).
|
| On top of that, the EU has also passed some CO2 laws that more or
| less forbid us to use our coal plants because if we keep using
| them we'll need to pay a very big fine for every ton of CO2 these
| plants produce. This resulted in a need for Greece to use
| imported natural gas to cover its power needs. The end result
| because of these two fine EU laws is that is we greeks pay the
| most expensive power in the EU, despite being one of the poorest
| countries!
|
| So, no matter what the article says or what laws have been
| passed, the truth is that: Greece _cannot_ use its own coal nor
| its thermoelectric power plants because the EU will not allow
| Greece to use it. Greece is forced to import solar panels and
| wind turbines from abroad (while thermoelectric power plants that
| have been built a few years ago have been left to rot). Greece is
| also forced to use imported natural gas to cover its needs (while
| our mountains are full of coal).
| TheSoftwareGuy wrote:
| Well, yeah. Coal is one of the worst power sources, in terms of
| greenhouse gas emissions. Of course it needs to be phased out.
| This is nothing new
| AddingValue wrote:
| Yeah there is enough energy from sun & wind, all it takes is
| mobilize the investments.
|
| Greece can do it!
|
| Scotland also plans big wind park.
|
| There are houses that already run on 100% renewables (summer
| solar generated hydrogen)
| Proven wrote:
| "Let's experiment with the most dependent provinces first..."
|
| That is what happens when globalists and climatists from Brussels
| grab you by your... budgets.
|
| Things haven't been going great for Greece since Varoufakis
| betrayed his voters and local politicians became agents of the
| EU. Sad!
| rglullis wrote:
| I am vouching this comment as an attempt to get you out of the
| soapbox. Speaking as an EU skeptic and as someone who daydreams
| of convincing the wife to get some land in Crete and enjoy a
| meraklis life, please reconsider the tone of your posts. They
| are only inflammatory and do not help any kind of healthy
| debate.
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