Germany Will Keep Keep Its Coal Power Plants on Standby For Another Winter (euractiv.com) 189
An anonymous reader writes: Amidst a winter marked by scarce gas supplies, the German government has opted to retain its lignite coal power plants on standby for another season. Originally, Germany had planned a phased shutdown of coal plants in exchange for a portion of the government's €40 billion coal phase-out fund. However, last year, disruptions in Russian gas supplies post-Ukraine war prompted an emergency decision to keep coal plants operational. This measure is now extended for the upcoming winter, maintaining 1.9 GWs of lignite capacity alongside the existing 45 GW of coal power plants.
The primary purpose of these lignite plants is to alleviate gas demand during peak times and stabilize prices. Despite the economic benefits, the move raises environmental concerns, given lignite's status as a major climate polluter. The government acknowledges this and plans to assess the additional carbon emissions resulting from keeping coal plants on standby, estimated to be between 2.5 and 5.6 tonnes of CO2.
The German government emphasized the persistence of the goal to ideally complete the coal phase-out by 2030 and meet climate targets.
The primary purpose of these lignite plants is to alleviate gas demand during peak times and stabilize prices. Despite the economic benefits, the move raises environmental concerns, given lignite's status as a major climate polluter. The government acknowledges this and plans to assess the additional carbon emissions resulting from keeping coal plants on standby, estimated to be between 2.5 and 5.6 tonnes of CO2.
The German government emphasized the persistence of the goal to ideally complete the coal phase-out by 2030 and meet climate targets.
'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Reliable (Score:4, Insightful)
For so much education, Germany is stupid.
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For so much education, Germany is stupid.
No, actually there's a reason for this madness. Germany's plan has always been to get the EU to rely on PV/wind, instead of nukes. It's not something they only did for themselves, they pushed the anti-nuke legislation at EU level, with varying success (thankfully, those had a strong opponent in France). And the real reason for that is of course that PV/wind requires backing by gas for its intermittency, so to get the entire Europe addicted to natgas - which they'd be all too happy to resell from their buddy
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It was obvious to everyone, including the Germans, that the energy from the shutdown nukes would be replaced by burning more coal, and much of that coal would be filthy lignite.
Don't make excuses. This was a profoundly stupid decision and was obviously profoundly stupid at the time it was made.
The nukes were shut down, and the coal plants were fired up the same day.
But Merkel was reelected, so that's all that matters.
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It was obvious to everyone, including the Germans, that the energy from the shutdown nukes would be replaced by burning more coal, and much of that coal would be filthy lignite.
Don't make excuses. This was a profoundly stupid decision and was obviously profoundly stupid at the time it was made.
The nukes were shut down, and the coal plants were fired up the same day.
But Merkel was reelected, so that's all that matters.
The use of lignite, pre-Ukraine, didn't increase, though.
That and they are retaining their lignite coal power plants on **standby** for another season [slashdot.org], not running them at full burn 24/7 for the foreseeable future. Buuut ... somebody had to work a nuclear industry sob story into this discussion sooner or later.
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You mean the greens falsehoods about a safe form of baseline energy. There is no sob story, just a 1979 movie with Jane Fonda.
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Some of them got psyopped.
Putin's puppet, Greta, yelled at them.
She said that she rode a sailboat across the ocean so they had to shut down their clean atomic energy plants.
Plus she has a learning disability and dropped out of high school, so they couldn't say no.
All to increase Russian natgas sales, but after the Soviet Greenpeace operation they knew Westerners would fall for it hook, line, and lead sinker.
The blame really lays on those who would give such rubes violent political power. They may freeze th
Re:'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Relia (Score:5, Informative)
Electricity production in Germany in 2010 from lignite 146 TWh, coal 117 TWh, nuclear 141 TWh, gas 89 TWh and renewables 105 TWh.
Electricity production in Germany in 2022 from lignite 116 TWh, coal 64 TWh, nuclear 35 TWh, gas 80 TWh and renewables 254 TWh.
Source: https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/... [ag-energiebilanzen.de]
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Re:'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Relia (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, if only they'd kept their goddamned nuclear power plants running, right now they could be:
- Burning no lignite
- Burning no coal and only half the lignite
- Sending zero cents to the Russian war machine still be burning less coal and lignite
Even if they hadn't built a single new plant, like Finland just did and France and the UK are currently doing.
What is wrong with people?
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Their nuclear plants were at end of life, looking for unsafe extensions with enhanced monitoring so they could shut down with little warning the moment a serious fault was discovered. The reactor vessels were cracked already, they were just hoping they could get a few more years before they failed catastrophically.
And all the while those plants would have been taking funding away from renewables. They were very expensive to operate, and getting more expensive as they aged.
Building a new plant wouldn't have
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It is because of political reasons, not technological ones, that latest-generation fission plants cost so much, and take so long to build.
Given sufficient sanity, and will, those political reasons could be set aside.
The fact that they aren't is proof that the powers that be are NOT serious about reducing fossil fuel usage.
(N.B.: I'm not arguing to keep end-of-life earlier generation plants. We have two here in northern Ohio and they are far more trouble then they're worth. I'm talking about replacing the
Re:'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Relia (Score:4, Interesting)
I understand the end-of-life issues. These are caused by chronic underfunding, and France is a perfect example right next door that it isn't a necessary evil with nuclear power. Any infrastructure that is not invested in will age, that is just nature.
However, it's very disingenuous to claim that that's all that happened. Germany shut down those plants before their end-of-life. This was practically like a gift wrapped in a ribbon for Vladimir Putin.
Germany has sent more money to Russia for natural gas payments than it ever sent in weapons aid to Ukraine. But if they had kept those plants online, they could have shut off imports the very day of the invasion.
I suppose it was a good investment on the Soviet Union's part to fund green movements in the 70s. A tactic that Russia still does, given its resounding past success.
https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
https://www.foxnews.com/world/... [foxnews.com]
By the way, here is an article from 2019, well before the current escalation of the invasion, predicting the dangers of shutting down coal and nuclear in Germany because of strengthening Putin's hand. I'm sure there are many others:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/... [washingtonmonthly.com]
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Germany's plan has always been to get the EU to rely on PV/wind, instead of nukes. It's not something they only did for themselves, they pushed the anti-nuke legislation at EU level, with varying success
Please take your dumb conspiracy theorising elsewhere
Re: 'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Reli (Score:2)
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they kept shutting down nuclear reactors and continuing coal. That does not affect gas usage.
Except that if you look at the past 30 years, they:
- increased solar/wind share of electricity
- decreased nuclear share
- increased gas share in the same proportion...
This can all be seen here [cleanenergywire.org] for instance, or any other statistical reporting source.
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Not what the data in your source says though. Gas share increased alright, but if you say that it's in the "same proportion" as increase of solar/wind and decrease of nuclear that is false. The proportions match between increase of solar/wind and decrease of nuclear and coal combined, but not with gas.
Here the graph that can be used to see the proportions and I urge everyone to take a look at it https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]
Also, these are chart
Re:'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Relia (Score:5, Informative)
No, actually there's a reason for this madness. Germany's plan has always been to get the EU to rely on PV/wind, instead of nukes. It's not something they only did for themselves, they pushed the anti-nuke legislation at EU level, with varying success (thankfully, those had a strong opponent in France). And the real reason for that is of course that PV/wind requires backing by gas for its intermittency, so to get the entire Europe addicted to natgas - which they'd be all too happy to resell from their buddy Putin through their Nord Streams (at a errrm... "resonable" provision of course, that they'd absolutely not yank up once everyone was committed, no sir!).
Nice theory. But wrong. Germany's phasing out of nuclear was a knee-jerk reaction by Merkel after the Fukushima disaster. Merkel's Christian Democrats party (CDU), normally very pro-nuclear, was loosing plenty of votes to the Green Party. They just lost the important state of Baden Wuerttemberg, which was normally a safe CDU harbor, to the Greens for the first time in history. Being scared of a Green wave sweeping the country due to rising concerns of climate change and now Fukushima (the Greens have been opposed to nuclear since forever), Merkel and the CDU leadership decided to deny this incident to the Greens by taking ownership of the nuclear phase out, and thereby giving themselves a green profile, which they realized would be increasingly important over the next decades.
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You could at least read the Wikipedia page.
Which one?
Re:'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Relia (Score:5, Interesting)
Although grid storage costs are projected to drop in half in the next ten years... and that's with *current* technology (lithium ion). There are multiple new grid storage technologies that are expected to come to market in the next five years.
This will obviously be a huge benefit to renewable sources -- wind and solar. But cheap grid storage will be an economic boost to both existing nuclear power plants. Even if you can run a nuclear power plant load following, you wouldn't save much money by turning it down, so adding grid storage to existing plants would allow them to sell their power during peak hours. Baseload natural gas plants would also benefit from this ability; the loser would be gas turbine load following plants, which is a good thing. They're staggeringly inefficient.
Re:'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Relia (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: 'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Reli (Score:2)
Germany has a bit of a history with tyrannical socialist dictators.
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Is it possible for a German government to be that diabolical? I guess so. Sad.
FTFY
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They are a bunch of nutbars if you ask me. Trump warned them about relying on Russia for their energy needs and they just laughed. Guess who laughing now, it's all on video on YouTube and elsewhere if you care to search for it. They seem like a bunch of Luddites to me with their wind mills.
The only real problem with Germany's strategy of ensuring peace through trade with Russia was the assumption that Putin would remain a rational actor and not shoot himself repeatedly in both feet. The Germans weren't the only ones thinking this, right up until the 24th of February 2022 even the USA did not think Putin would do that. Trump didn't warn the Germans about anything. All he did was ape what his advisers were telling him. Trump couldn't tell the rear end of foreign policy from the front even if th
Re: 'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Reli (Score:2)
how is taking east Ukraine where all the resources are and where sea is "shooting themselves in the foot"
Evil? sure but as action will benefit Russia for centuries, and Russia is growing new business into Asia where more than half the human race lives that doesn't care about war in Europe
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Germany was warned by multiple US administrations that sole dependency on russian gas was a very bad idea. The US had always held on to uncertainty in the westernization of the Russia economy as long as the only ones making bank were Putin puppets. Germany was correct in concluding that since the United States has a 200 year surplus of natural gas to sell on the world market this was an economic push in US diplomacy supporting interanion
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And yet, Germany was able to replace Russian gas very quickly. At the same the Rosatom is still not on any embargo list as far as I know.
Re:'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Relia (Score:5, Insightful)
It was not just the US - Lithuania also warned Germany about this and built a LNG terminal. The reason for this was that Russia showed its intentions with us first - before we paid the highest price for the gas in the EU. That nonsense stopped once the terminal was built, since now there is an upper price limit (since if it's cheaper to use the terminal we can do it). Germany called us russophobes for repeatedly warning that Russia is not that much different from the USSR.
Apparently, Merkel thought that if Germany was doing enough business with Russia, then Putin will just take the money and forget his ambitions about land, despite the warnings that Russia does not operate like that.
Re: 'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Reli (Score:4, Informative)
The Germans weren't the only ones thinking this, right up until the 24th of February 2022 even the USA did not think Putin would do that.
That's definitely not true, the US has had moles everywhere in the Kremlin for decades and had been feeding that intel to Ukraine. More importantly, you don't even need to have been privy to that to see where things were going, namely what happened in Georgia and Crimea, in addition to Putin's rhetoric. Simply watching Russian media alone would tell you that their government had long been preparing their populace to regard Ukraine as being part of Russia.
Germany was, quite simply, willfully ignorant on this one. Some things never change with them.
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The Greens never had anything to do with the Communists.
The greens are: The Green Party.
The communists are: DKP, Deutsche Kommunistische Partei.
Stupid idiot.
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>The Greens never had anything to do with the Communists.
I'll add this to the "Germany controls wind" and "Northern Europe no longer gets temperatures below -20C because of global warming" angelospherisms.
And no, I didn't say they're the Communist party. I said they share the roots.
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>And what roots would that be? Lolz ...
Described in initial post. Evidence is widespread and can be accessed with but a single google search, as sources exist ranging from objective data to KGB leaks to statements by relevant figures in the movement to their documented histories.
>When was the last time north Europe had temperatures below thirty degrees?
This year.
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When was the last time north Europe had temperatures below thirty degrees?
May 2022 in France at 2.6 degrees Celsius.
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Jesus, that's a hell of a story. Did you make that up all by yourself little guy or did somebody help you?
More than anything I'd love you to attempt to support any of that drivel with proper citation. You know, actual evidence that some grand coalition of communist meets somewhere and makes big decisions that effect the entire world.
Also, personal question, is this cabal of communists more or less powerful that the Illuminati? How about the Mole Men?
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>You know, actual evidence that some grand coalition of communist meets somewhere
This is the typical rhetorical sleight of hand your types engage in when called out. "You claim a conspiracy, show me the minutes of the meetings!"
Except that I claim no such thing, any more so than I claim that National Socialists and Socialists are in a conspiracy. I claim well documented common roots of the movement, which are in fact well documented by people from the movement itself. That said, low level activists like
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This is the typical rhetorical sleight of hand your types engage in when called out. "You claim a conspiracy, show me the minutes of the meetings!"
Except that I claim no such thing, any more so than I claim that National Socialists and Socialists are in a conspiracy.
So let me get this straight, the reason you cant provide citations or links to proof is that I'm doing a rhetorical sleight of hand? That's something alright.
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Notice how I provided you citations of two authors well recognized and quoted in the modern Communist circles, and you chose to omit them from the quote so you could take a shot at lying that no sources were provided.
Just like in the first post, you tried to lie that I alleged a conspiracy. That's two direct prima facie lies in two concequtive posts.
The stage after that is usually to claim that yes, those authors are indeed real and they are indeed Communists, and if you're even borderline half decently rea
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Notice how I provided you citations of two authors well recognized and quoted in the modern Communist circles, and you chose to omit them from the quote so you could take a shot at lying that no sources were provided.
Hahaha, what? No, see, I meant citations that actually support your point. I can find political philosophers espousing any number of points or beliefs that arent reflected in our world today. By your standards here I could easily prove that there are anarchists threatening to overthrow everything just by citing two of the many political thinkers who have explored anarchy as an alternative to our current world order.
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Both write on the topic of how to change Communism to allow it to adapt and infiltrate liberal societies. Stop dodging and lying, and if you actually want to know, read the two.
And if you need to find out specific ways in which it's applied, that's really simple.
scholar.google.com and look for papers that reference the two. You'll drown in source material, there's more there to read than one could manage in a lifetime, as these are some of the most cited people in the Critical Theory adjacent fields of soci
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You're not connecting any of this with reality.
What you've told me is that there is some sort of undercover movement within environmentalism that is just communists trying to tare down capitalism. If that's the case that would take a shit ton of people acting toward said goal which drops the likelihood of keeping such a thing a secret pretty to much nil. In other words, if enough people were acting to poor faith in the context of the environmental movement to actually overthrow capitalism they would need to
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Because half of France's unprofitable, oh-so-reliable nuke plants were down. IIRC France was even shipping fossils to Germany for burning to get electricity back.
Also, where do people think Europe's nuclear plants currently get a lot of their fuel from and why might this be a problem?
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Know why Germany burnt so much more gas and coal last year, despite the shortages? Because half of France's unprofitable, oh-so-reliable nuke plants were down. IIRC France was even shipping fossils to Germany for burning to get electricity back.
Because you don't know how the Uranium market works? You can buy LEU futures on the open market and is plenty of it stored up. There just isn't much used in a 1GW NPP. Its roughly 10 tonnes / 18 months. There are multiple mines in the world that produce 100 times that much each year.
What do the workings of the Uranium market have to do with the reliability of French nuclear powers plants? If there is a glut of Uranium that obviously cannot be the reason for the French problems with their nuclear plants. So what could the issue be? Turns out half the EDF nuclear power plant fleet was shut down because of 'corrosion problems, maintenance and technical issues' [cnbc.com]. If France is admitting that their reactors are corroded and have stress cracks [neimagazine.com] which is bad enough, I'm now wondering what kind o
Re: 'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Reli (Score:2)
France is shutting down the nukes under environmental and regulatory pressures. Time and again the so-called cracks and corrosion has proved to be normal, below any measure of concern, but the socialist government keeps trying to find fault. Deregulated nuclear is cheap and safe.
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France is shutting down the nukes under environmental and regulatory pressures. Time and again the so-called cracks and corrosion has proved to be normal, below any measure of concern, but the socialist government keeps trying to find fault. Deregulated nuclear is cheap and safe.
No, France is shutting down their nuclear power plants because they have stress cracks and suffer from equipment failures. Even the Nuclear Industry press is admitting it, but do free to hit me again with with another batch of your 'imaginary facts'.
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Yeah, I've been around since the early 90s, the government of France does this every few years ...
- Politicians: The cracks, they are there
- Millions of dollars on research: it's safe - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-en... [bbc.com]
- Politicians: But the cracks, they are there
- Millions of dollars on research: no, it's safe, been there forever, concrete cracks a bit, that's normal - https://guernseypress.com/news... [guernseypress.com]
- Politicians: Yes I know, you said that before, but it has a crack, how is that safe
You can literally go
Re: 'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Reli (Score:2)
Yet USA is still buying nuclear fuel from Russia, even as it tells poor countires not to buy natural gas or oil.
You seem confused, uranium from a mine can't be stuffed into a nuclear plant, guess again.
Re:'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Relia (Score:4, Informative)
This is just a blatant lie, that exists only to make you feel good.
Here is an actual source about what happened [euractiv.com]:
- France had to import ~16TWh of electricity in 2022, which amounts to ~3% of its whole electricity consumption
- These imports were concentrated during the June/July/September period, and not the whole year (despite the coal plants in Germany running all year-long... what's your excuse for the other 9 months?)
- These imports were partly from Germany, but also UK, and most importantly Spain (which actually relies more heavily on solar during summer time)
Because half of France's unprofitable, oh-so-reliable nuke plants were down.
Well, France did export cheap nuclear energy to its neighbors for the last 50 years, except for 3 months in 2022. That's a pretty good track record. In the first half of 2023, Germany is importing the equivalent of 2 nuclear plants output every day, mainly between 7pm and 9am of the other day. Just yesterday, the peak of exports from France to Germany was 7 TWh [rte-france.com].
Now, you could imagine a world where Germany didn't bet all its economy on cheap russian gas, and had built nuclear plants like France (and maintained them). Then statistically, their nuclear plants wouldn't have been down for maintenance at the same time as the French ones, and they could have also sent cheap and low-CO2 emitting to their neighbors too.
Of course, that didn't happen, because they have coal and lignite, and would rather burn it than do something good for the climate.
IIRC France was even shipping fossils to Germany for burning to get electricity back.
Lol. Any source for that? Or are you just spreading lies again?
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Plus their desire to grow their economy on cheap Russian gas at all costs is why we have the current situation. Germany's response to the Crimea annexation was more or less "lol sux 2 b u now how about another pipeline, let's give Putin more money this works for us". The supposedly "unprofitable" nukes didn't contribute nearly so much to Putin's war machine, nor embolden him with strong energy dependence.
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I thought the main down time of French reactors was due to a drought, and low river levels. They didn't have enough cool water to run efficiently.
Re:'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Relia (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the main down time of French reactors was due to a drought, and low river levels. They didn't have enough cool water to run efficiently.
Which is why you shouldn't try to "imagine" how things work, but actually research how they actually do.
The main reason for the downtime of French reactors was due to stress corrosion cracking [wikipedia.org] that was found on some pipes used in the emergency system (the one that is used when you want to do an emergency shutdown). It is interesting to note that in french nuclear plants, emergency systems have a redundancy factor of 4, which means there are 4 different emergency systems, each capable of cooling down the reactor on its own... However, because nuclear safety is always paramount (if it was so for any other industry, you would have trains running 1 day out of 10 for instance), they decided it was preferable to shut down those plants and fix the issue. In the report provided by EDF, it was also shown that the electricity deficit from those shutdowns (not all plants were impacted, mainly recent designs actually) would be negligible. And indeed it was: France had to buy only ~3% of its annual electricity needs.
If a country in the EU can't rely on its neighbors for that kind of stuff, after having itself provided so much cheap electricity to such neighbors for the past 50 years, what is the point of the EU electricity market?
For the plants located near the sea, drought was never an issue. For the plants located near rivers, it wasn't an issue too, because you don't actually need a lot of water to cool those nuclear plants. Plants in open loop cooling need ~50m3/s per reactor, and they put back all water they use into the river. So for a plant with 4-5 reactors, you need ~200m3/s. The average throughput of the Rhone, where 3 of those plants are located, is 1000m3/s in summer. Plants using closed loop cooling (with those big refrigerant towers) need a lot less water: 2m3/s, which is ridiculous compared to actual water flowing through a river.
The issue with water is elsewhere: in order to preserve biodiversity, nuclear plants can't put back water into a river if it is too hot (as in: 29C instead of 28C, we are not talking about "burning hot" here). This issue occurs only during summer, when they can actually buy solar energy from Spain, so that makes a lot of sense to preserve biodiversity when possible. It is interesting to note that when they really needed that electricity, they issued temporary allowances for those plants so that they could put hotter than usual water in the river. As you can see, it is not a security or capability issue. It is just being sensible.
Also, during summer time, France actually needs less electricity (their peak usage is in winter, turns out they don't use as much AC as in the US). So they use the summer for maintenance, and thus can shutdown some plants if needed.
That's a lot explanation, sorry about that. And I made some shortcuts to keep it not too long, but you get the idea, and hopefully you can use it as a starting point if you are really interested about the topic. But anyway, it is not quite so as "they don't have enough cool water to run efficiently".
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Lol. Any source for that? Or are you just spreading lies again?
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/09/05/france-says-ready-to-boost-gas-supplies-to-germany-urges-consumers-to-save-energy_5995921_4.html
Bless your vile heart, dear.
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Let's set the record straight. Contrary to your misleading interpretation, Germany actually asked France for natural gas, as they didn't want to buy it from Russia anymore. Macron simply mentioned that they would enhance gas connections to supply Germany. The rest was speculation from the reporter, saying that as France and Germany regularly import/export electricity from each other (with Germany being a net importer for the last 50 years, except in 2022), this gas could later be used to generate that elect
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France's nuclear fleet is in dire straits. It's reaching end of life and needs to be replaced, or have costly repairs done on it. Extending life means new regulation and enhanced checks, all costing money. The need for maintenance is what is dragging down the capacity factor, the ratio of nameplate energy output to actual energy output.
Meanwhile the owner-operator EDF ran out of money and had to be bailed out by the French government, which now owns the majority stake. The reason they ran out of money is th
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Lying through your teeth as always angelosphere :)
You can see the same numbers everywhere (hint: you can find official sources from the previous article): France has been net exporter for the last 50 years (yearly timespan, which IS what everyone uses as référence).
You are the one nitpicking about thé 3 months of 2022 France had to import électricity. Stop cherry picking, and start being honest if you can.
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Are you so butthurt that you have to spread nonsense and lies to justify the decisions of your government ?
You can use EDF own numbers too, that I also already linked... they say the same thing: France was a net exporter of electricity, and actually one of the main one in Europe, since 50 years.
Your ability to deny simple facts is astonishing.
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Because half of France's unprofitable
That's only true if you don't acconut for externalities. More French people have died from German power coal pollution then they have from French power pollution. The nuclear powerplants are only unprofitable if the cost of those deaths and the people with permanent lung problems is rated as zero.
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Because half of France's unprofitable, oh-so-reliable nuke plants were down. IIRC France was even shipping fossils to Germany for burning to get electricity back.
Frances nuclear plants were shutdown for planned maintenance. There was no nefarious reason that you seem to be implying. The real reason Germany burnt so much gas and coal was because of poor planning on the German governments part. Now if that was because they decided to shut down nuclear plants or rely on gas supplied from a hostile power, I'll leave that up to you to decide for yourself.
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For so much education, Germany is stupid.
Dwelling on a decision that made sense for them in 2011 doesn't achieve anything. There's no going back. You can't trivially startup the nuclear plants which have been shutdown. A similar thing applies to coal plants mind you. There's a reason the term "standby" is used here.
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Re:'Cause Nuclear Power's Just Too Green and Relia (Score:5, Interesting)
Germany is still a net exporter of electricity.
During the first half of 2023 Germany exported 32.6 TW and imported 30.6 TW.
That is less than the first half 2022 though, when the export was 30.9 TW and import 23.4 TW, so the surplus has certainly fallen. But at the same time coal power has decreased significantly and wind power has become the largest supplier of electricity (27%).
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For 2023 is could change. At the moment Germany is a net importer. Of course, in winter there is more wind, so this could change, but I am not sure. On the other hand, this is no problem and in contrast what many people believe here, Germany did not import from France (or rather this is pretty balanced with slightly more export to France than back) or Poland (in general neglectable trade). Instead, Germany imported a lot from Denmark (80% renewable production) and reduced coal production at the same time. T
Not really. Germans are just capable ... (Score:4, Informative)
... of basic math. Nuclear Fission isn't cost effective when pricing in overall costs and reactor runtimes. I remember the Brockdorf Reactor being built back in the 80ies, under huge protests. Brockdorf has reached official EOL regardless of overall nuke policies and is being decommissioned. It has accumulated a net negative and leaves the usual waste problem that will be with us for the next 50 000 years minimum.
Nuclear Fission isn't cost effective. It's that simple. It would've been cheaper and more effective to use the obscene amount of money of Brockdorf, Wackersdorf and Klakar to build out solar and wind and be ahead of the rest of the world by 3+ decades. Lucky Wackersdorf and Kalkar were shut down before going into service. We lost like 15 billion or so on those pipedream projects but at least some backroom government clerks were smart enough to take some sheets of paper, a calculator and a pencil and notice that there is no way we can make this work.
We Germans actually know a thing or two about engineering, believe it or not.
Glad I could catch you up on things.
Radioactivity of Waste [Re: Not really. German...] (Score:2)
Nuclear waste isnt a problem. It came out of the ground, it can go back into the ground at the same or less radioactive level.
Not quite true. Nuclear waste includes fission products, some of which have short half-llves and decay quickly, but some of which have intermediate half lives, which keeps them dangerous for thousands of years. This long compared to a human lifespan but very short compared to the very slow radioactivity of natural uranium. Nuclear waste also includes neutron-activated byproduct nuclei, with a variety of half lives, but mostly all more active than the original un-enriched uranium.
In short, though, no, nuclea
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It came out of the ground, it can go back into the ground at the same or less radioactive level.
It comes out of the ground extremely dispersed, and then we intensely concentrate it. Vitrifaction is a physically possible way to solve this problem, but it is a very hazardous process and thus so expensive to do that it is infeasible.
Guess what, this planet has a 1000 mile wide fission reactor at its core.
If you could magic the waste into the core that might be a neato solution, but we don't have a means of doing that, so the waste is still a problem. Save nuclear power for submarines and space travel, and use simpler forms of generation here on the land.
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A main problem of the current situation was that the former German chancellor and Kremlin puppet Gerhard Schroeder started Germany down the path of natural gas dependence some two decades ago.
And while today natural gas only makes up about 10% of electricity production, making it less of an issue there, it's widely used for domestic and industrial heating. Like water boilers
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One should point out that only a small percentage of gas is used for electricity production in Germany. That Germany depends on gas has not much to do with the electricity market (although gas plants play an import role for balancing, overall production is not that high and also did not increase over time)
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There's statistical data that anyone who's interested can look up with more details:
https://www.energy-charts.info... [energy-charts.info] though a word of warning, the "year" charts are fairly laggy as they contain hourly data. Not a good example of "German Engineering".
Since natural gas use is something that can be ramped up and down rather quickly, the numbers fluctuate a lot between lower single digit percentages to about 20% from what I've seen taking a look at the monthly (a bit easier to na
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First off, in order to get the data for Germany only, you have to select the country to be Germany at the top right of the page, which the link I provided in the other post does not do, possibly leading to confusion (given that there's a good portion of nuclear in there still, while Germany stopped that in April).
I downloaded the data for 2023 as a CSV and calculated everages from the 27023 (at this point in time) data points.
Can't burn Euros for fuel (Score:4, Insightful)
Physical reality still matters. Gas (or coal) in the boiler now can't be traded for wind and sunshine an hour from now, nor for wind and sunshine on the other side of the world right now.
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Thermal energy storage works for any electricity source, at least that's true for the thermal energy storage being described in the link given. What would also work is using heat directly off a coolant loop from a coal or nuclear fission power plant, no conversion to electricity is required in the middle. Using thermal energy storage in this manner means a thermal power plant does not have to attempt any load following, any extra heat at the moment raises the temperature of the sand and any shortfall lowe
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Yeah, why would we want to switch to cleaner, cheaper wind & solar when we can keep things just as they are?
How cheap is that wind and solar power during a dunkelflaute?
The reason why Germany is keeping their coal power plants on standby this winter is because they know that in the winter energy demand goes up while production of energy from wind and solar goes down. Maybe someday Germany will have enough wind and solar power to not need coal power but that isn't going to happen before the snow flies this winter. Given analyses done by numerous government and private entities it is likely impossible for Germany
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They're probably clear & direct on many points but also hedge a lot around contentious or controversial issues that may put off some countries, e.g. the USA. They're a scientific organisation but produce reports for a political audience. If you don't get that, don't bother reading the reports - You won't be able to read between the lines.
Although I doubt my comments will have much effect & you'll continue to in
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While this is true, I think it is wrong to see this as a fundamental problem. At the moment Germany still has all the fossil plants and simply put them on stand by, So if there is no wind or sun it can scale up all the fossil plants. This then consumes fossil fuels but only for some limited time. Overall you still reduce use of fossil fuels a lot by using the renewables for the other times where it is available and filling the gaps with fossil fuel. Numbers show that until now this works very well (~ 50% p
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I think cost is not the problem. Cost was dropping dramatically over the years. It may have gone up recently, but this happened for everything else too. Fossil plants you already have do not have major capital cost. And for those thinking we have an alternative: capital cost will hit nuclear much more (which did not see cost reductions the past). People who do simulation studies usually find that going all renewables comes along with cost savings. For example:
https://gspp.berkeley.edu/rese... [berkeley.edu]
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If a thermal energy storage system is put between the heat source
Due to the 50% efficiency of each transfer, you lose 75% on the round trip. That's why we don't do things like described by the GP. Storage is hard, batteries don't scale well and other storage methods all require this 75% energy loss even before you start. On the other hand, the heat pumps and 5 nuclear reactors that the Finns actually use works just fine.
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Due to the 50% efficiency of each transfer, you lose 75% on the round trip.
If that's what you believe then you are doing it wrong.
If thermal energy storage loses 75% of the energy from a thermal power plant, such as coal or uranium, then it loses 75% of the energy produced by wind and/or solar also. If thermal energy storage is viable for wind and/or solar then it is viable for thermal power plants also. If your claim holds that 75% of the energy is lost in each transfer then that is a really bad idea for energy storage for wind and/or solar. Since this is claimed to be a viabl
Thermal storage efficiency [Re:Can't burn Euros... (Score:2)
If a thermal energy storage system is put between the heat source
Due to the 50% efficiency of each transfer, you lose 75% on the round trip.
Yow. 50% loss each way would be terrible thermal engineering. I don't think any real-world thermal system is anywhere near that bad.
The main problem with thermal storage is that you lose heat with storage time. The problem is not moving heat from here to there, it's the heat conducted convected radiated away while it's just sitting there. An hour of storage loses a little, a day's storage loses a lot, a week's storage loses a heck of a lot.
Something to note, though, is that thermal storage had great economy
I thought the problem was a natural gas shortage (Score:2, Informative)
In the fine article they point out that Germany is keeping the coal power plants on standby because of a natural gas shortage. How does burning coal help with a natural gas shortage?
I'm old enough to remember (because I'm more than two years old) that Germany allowed their nuclear power plants to close because keeping them open won't help with the natural gas shortage. But keeping coal power plants open somehow helps with the natural gas shortage.
How does burning coal, or keeping nuclear power plants oper
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But keeping coal power plants open somehow helps with the natural gas shortage.
It helps with cutting ties to Russia if you can get your fuel from Poland or Germany instead of from Rosatom/Russia/*-stan.
if Germany can't get electricity by other means then they have to burn natural gas for electricity. By using coal or uranium for electricity production there's more natural gas to go around for heating.
As someone in Germany whose home gets its electricity and heat from the same CHP plant via district heating: burning more natural gas for electricity doesn't necessarily mean there's less heat.
The claim was that Germany was going to use wind and solar power for heat.
Who claimed this?
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The claim was that Germany was going to use wind and solar power for heat.
Who claimed this?
If energiewende doesn't get heating from wind and/or solar then where else is this heat coming from? Does energiewende specify that their heat was going to continue coming from burning natural gas? That doesn't seem like much of an energy turnabout to me.
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How does burning coal help with a natural gas shortage?
Are you serious? Your post is quite long for someone who doesn't seem to understand that when you have two different power plants running from two difference sources next to each other you can make a choice of which to use.
I'm old enough to remember (because I'm more than two years old) that Germany allowed their nuclear power plants to close because keeping them open won't help with the natural gas shortage.
No you're old enough to have forgotten why they shutdown nuclear plants. It had nothing to do with natural gas shortages. In fact they massively expanded natural gas power while they shut down nuclear plants. Germany didn't have a natural gas shortage at the time and that wasn't a factor
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Are you serious?
Are you unfamiliar with the use of a rhetorical question?
News from 2031 (Score:2)
The German government emphasized the persistence of the goal to ideally complete the coal phase-out by 2030 and meet climate targets.
I can already see the news in 2031, communication by the German government, after failing to phase-out coal/gas and still being the 2nd biggest CO2 emitter in the EU:
"We are fully committed to complete coal phase-out by 2030. We have now switched our efforts to building a time-machine to achieve that."
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The government may switch though. Like if AfD comes into power or something like that. A lot can, and can't, happen in 7 years.
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keep keep (Score:2)
"Keep keep." Is that the sound of a canary in a coal mine?
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Let's face it, The Greens are not the brightest bulbs in the lot.
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We should be _aggressively_ pursuing new forms of fission nuclear power based on the use of plentiful thorium-232 instead of expensive uranium-235 as the nuclear fuel.
While it's not perfect, Alvin Weinberg's successful experiment with the molten-salt reactor in the late 1960's to middle 1970's should have been pursued further technologically by the late 1970's, overcoming issues like the corrosive nature of molten fluoride salts dissolved with actinides like thorium-232, some isotopes of uranium, and pluton
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I have seen those turbines and I consider them scenic.
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In Australia they are blanketing productive farming land in PV cells
Might want to get with the times there mate - in the last few years agrisolar has started to be approved rather than straight solar plants.
https://www.cleanenergycouncil... [cleanenerg...cil.org.au]
For example, the Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that New South Wales will need approximately 20,000 MW of large-scale solar generation to replace coal-fired power stations by 2050. This would require approximately 40,000 ha of land or only 0.06 per cent of rural land in NSW. Even in the highly unlikely scenario that all of NSW’s solar generation was located on important agricultural land (which covers 13.8 per cent of the state) only 0.4 per cent of this important agricultural land would be required
Are you really worried about 0.06 to 0.4% of agricultural land being converted to solar?
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A minute on the internet shows that you're just regurgitating unevidenced anti-windmill propaganda. When an actual cause can be determined it's most often ship hits, followed by entanglement in nets and stuff. Also, some of the species that are suffering most aren't even echolocators.
"When an actual cause can be determined" - oh, perfect study then. No sampling bias here at all, nooo siiirrah!