5 ms·

It's very popular to criticize the Energiewende as a failure because it apparently failed to reduce CO2 emmissions of the whole country. And of course, it's tru

• y0ghur7_xxx 8y ago
  I agree with you. Germany did not accomplish it's goal of CO2 emissions reduction, but in the process of trying it did a whole lot of other great things. And I hope we will all learn from the experience Germany made and it will contribute to all of our next efforts.
• hef19898 8y ago
  The biggest issue, unintended I assume, is that CO2 certificates are not rare enough (or expensive enough). The result is that coal is actually cheaper than the most modern gas plants. That is based on variable costs, so. In that regard the renewables are basically "free". Which means that renewables are fed in first followed by coal. Which leaves not enough demand for the cleaner and more flexible gas plants. Obviously CO2 emissions go through the roof.
  • atupis 8y ago
    Also I don't get why German does have very limited transfer capacity between Norway,Denmark and Sweden. Those countries have lot cheap renewable energy.
    • hef19898 8y ago
      I believe I remember from my masters that there are plans (underway? to be? already in place?) to actually connect the countries. Would be great if that worked out.
      • sgift 8y ago
        You probably think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORD.LINK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORD.LINK ? Building is in progress.
        • hef19898 8y ago
          Yep, that one!
        • nielsole 8y ago
          IIRC one issue of NorGer(a similar cable) was that German energy law prefers domestic plants over imported electricity. This of course is a huge risk to investors of submarine cables and was an obstacle in getting it built.
      • semi-extrinsic 8y ago
        While there are some pretty huge electrical links in place already, there is a large political and public resistance towards expanding this. For the public, they know that the endgame is more expensive electricity. No good. For local industry, it basically amounts to taking the increasingly large competitive advantage they have of cheap, low emission electricity and just giving it away to Europe.
        • petre 8y ago
• realusername 8y ago
  > But the Energiewende actually changed Germany. Suddenly everywhere you go you have solar panel farms and many houses have them on their roofs and there are wind turbines. It was a cool time to live in germany to see these projects realized everywhere Does it really matter to see all those solar panel farms if the end result is they were not much helpful? The money which went into this is absolutely massive and could have been used in a better way to fight climate change.
  • hef19898 8y ago
    At least you can say that Germany kickstarted mass manufacturing of PV modules. So even if Germany itself didn't benefit, everybody else did. Including Chinese manufacturers. So I'd argue that the money was well invested.
    • sisu2019 8y ago
      and how are these PV users going to cover their baseload?
      • hef19898 8y ago
        Long term? Some kind of storage solution in combination with hydro power and, my preference, natural gas as it burns much cleaner than coal. Short to mid term? Same as above, only that storage will have to be replaced with something else. Since coal is clearly favoured by the system in Germany coal has to replaced by itself. Coal is just the worst alternative. Unfortunately nuclear is no option in Germany, until storage tech is sufficient it could nicely close the gap.
        • vkou 8y ago
          Natural gas is not a sustainable long-term solution. World emissions need to be brought to zero, in the next five years, in order for us to avoid a climate castrophe. If we are still positive at the five-year mark, that means zero at, say, the ten-year mark, and negative emissions for many decades. Natural gas has no place in this long-term.
• sisu2019 8y ago
  billions and billions down the drain for symbolism. Mostly private individuals like me payed that via crass energy taxes. It's nice that you get enjoyment out of seeing solar and wind farms but in the end they'll do nothing but serve as testament of the hubris and stupididty of politians.
  • hef19898 8y ago
    The initial pre-Fukushima plan to exit nuclear was solid. What ruined it was the blind actionism post-Fukushima. Also, despite all the fear mongering that renewables will collapse the grid it proofed to be pretty stable and robust. Even high energy industries like the chemical and processing industry adapted pretty well. Some even actively participate in the energy market now. And in case processes can be slowed down or stopped they buffer energy generation peaks practically serving as some kind of storage. So, Germany has the opportunity to learn a lot about smart grids in highly industrialized environments. It's just that Germany's track record in these kind of things is, well, bad.
    • sgift 8y ago
      > The initial pre-Fukushima plan to exit nuclear was solid. What ruined it was the blind actionism post-Fukushima. I have a feeling even with the pre-Fukushima plan we would have the same situation now. The thing was that the CDU never committed themselves to the plan. And the energy industry always hoped that one day there will be a CDU-led government that just kills the plan. So, since the government didn't force them to, they never prepared for the case of the nuclear shutdown actually happening. And when the CDU-led government killed the exit plan it seemed for a short time that their calculations were right. And then Fukushima happened and for the most part we were back to where we were before. Yes, there was some blind action, but despite stories about all the changes the post-Fukushima plan didn't diverge markedly from the pre-Fukushima plan. Only difference was that the energy companies couldn't hope that a new government will save them since all parties agreed that the exit should happen.
      • hef19898 8y ago
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• 99_00 8y ago
  The goal is reducing CO2. Renewables are technology that may help achieve that. Adopting renewables isn't the goal.
  • atemerev 8y ago
    Germany famously counts biodiesel among renewables (technically correct), which certainly doesn't help in reducing CO2.
• jwr 8y ago
  I also get a warm fuzzy feeling from solar panels and wind farms. But we are losing our planet to climate change, and warm fuzzy feelings do not help. Lowering CO2 emissions does. Germany could have had zero CO2 emissions by now, if money were invested into nuclear instead of the current efforts. The declaration to move away from nuclear power was misguided and will be regarded as a huge error in the future.
  • semi-extrinsic 8y ago
    I like to say that the environmental NGOs, politicians etc. have been given the choice between pneumonia (nuclear power) and cancer (CO2 emissions), and they answer "oh no, my grandma died of pneumonia when she was young, so I'll have the cancer".
  • est31 8y ago
    Feelings and impressions are more important than you think. Stock markets for example are not perfect but instead also reflect human perception: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reflexivity.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reflexivity.asp This deal requires investment at the start but will pay off in the end by lower costs caused by climate change. So what is holding people back? Their perception. They feel like they will die before the impacts will happen. They feel like nobody is doing anything about it so why should they be the first? Humans are built in a way that joining an existing movement is easy but starting one is hard. Germany helped getting the start of the s-curve going.
  • imtringued 8y ago
    The renewable subsidies don't cover the cost of a modern nuclear power plant. The 25 billion € per year spent on renewables is just barely enough to construct a single nuclear plant. Other than warm fuzzy feelings that nuclear is superior it wouldn't actually solve the problems Germany is currently facing. Merkel doesn't want to threaten the jobs of coal workers and their communities. Therefore coal plants don't get turned off.
• ars 8y ago
  And this is why environmentalism is a failure. It values appearance over results. So basically it looks good to have lots of Solar and Wind, never mind if it actually does anything useful? It's called Greenwashing, and if people don't stop doing it this planet is going to get worse and worse. You realize you've basically said that they only success of this project was reducing the price of PV Panels? If that was your goal there are WAY WAY better methods to do that. > demonstrating that an industrialized nation actually can start a gradual transition towards renewables That's not what it demonstrated though. It demonstrated than even a highly motivated industrialized nation failed in transitioning to clean energy sources.
• Gondolin 8y ago
  I agree that Energiewende is important and that reducing the cost of renewable was sorely needed, but at the same time the decision to close the nuclear plants (rather than coal) was a gigantic mistake. 1) Because it costs a lot of lives. Coal + Lignite in Germany cost 8000 lives per year (funnily everybody also seems to forget that coal release more radiation in the air than nuclear plants). https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)61253-7/abstract https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)61253-7/abst... By contrast Chernobyl was 4000 deaths https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/ By not closing 10GW of nuclear production, Germany could have prevented 2000 deaths by year, so in total 20000 deaths over ten years. 2) Because it gave the impression that a carbon free electricity could be achieved by wind and solar alone. This is not the case: first Germany will only close coal in 2038 (in 20 years!!), and plan to use gas to replace coal at least up to 2050. Gas is way better than goal for air health, but it still release a lot of CO2. 2050 is way too late to be carbon free. The problem with wind and solar is the intermittence: if you look at the data from https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... you will see that on average wind is at 20% capacity and solar at 10% capacity. So even with batteries to smooth things out (which don't exist at the huge scale we are speaking with), Germany would need a lot more solar and wind that it does. For a peak consumption of around 70GW, this mean it would need 350GW of renewable energy. It is so far only at around 100GW, having added 50GW the last ten years. So at this speed it would still need around 50 years. This is without counting the fact that: - the energy stockage problem is at least as hard to solve - solar panel and wind turbines have a lifetime of 20 years, so this does not take into account replacing existing ones - it is getting harder and harder to find place to put them. In 2018 the rate of installation of new renewables slowed down a lot because of this problem. 3) By contrast nuclear cost less, when taking into account this intermittence problem and the cost of interconnection (which is not counted by the figures usually given); it is a lot easier to interconnect a huge centrale than a lot of small ones. But cost is not an argument anyway when we are talking about climate change (if there was a proper carbon tax at least Germany would have closed coal before nuclear). It is friendlier to the environment (wind turbine kills a lot of birds, and solar panel take a lot of room from wildlife). It is as safe as solar and wind, and way safer than hydroelectric and coal. Banqiao Dam collapse was 230000 deaths. Yet nobody is calling for stopping hydroelectricity. Again, Chernobyl was "only" 4000 deaths (high range estimate using a linear model rather than a threshold model are at 10000-20000 deaths), Fukushima was 0 deaths (but 1500 due to the evacuation, including zones where the radiation was the same order of magnitude of the natural one). Chernobyl cannot happen with modern reactors; a Fukushima style incident could, but the nuclear operators increased the security of the points of failures that Fukushima revealed. Again, living near a dam is probably less secure than living near a nuclear plant. And building and installing solar panels and wind turbines cost lives too (as do building dam and nuclear plants, and so on); on average as much as nuclear killed. Yet there is a lot of hysteria about nuclear plants, because an accident is so much more spectacular and visible. And yes an accident would leave an exclusion zone, but it would actually be smaller than this stretch of no man land (a coal mine in Germany): https://twitter.com/LejeuneXa/status/1124749045996634118 https://twitter.com/LejeuneXa/status/1124749045996634118 4) I am not saying nuclear fission is a miracle energy (fusion would be). It is as safe as it is in developed countries because of all the regulations, this model would not be applicable in developing countries. For these countries, wind and solar is the way to go, and in this respect Energiewende which paved the way is a success. There is the problem of nuclear waste, but this frankly this is a (small) problem at the scale of 100s of years, this should not at all be our priority given the very small time frame we have to reduce climate change (the ship has unfortunately sailed for preventing it from being too impactful [aka more than a few million deaths], the real question is whether we limit it to be really impactful or a total catastrophe). This is like worrying about a leak in the sink when the whole house is on fire: bad priorities! 5) But, by making the illusion that 100% carbon free electricity could be achievable without nuclear, Germany set a dangerous precedent. It is not currently possible (as proved by Germany not really reducing its CO2 emissions), it may be possible in 30 years (current prevision is only a cut of 65% in 30 years, the 95% cut is from a very optimistic plan by Greenpeace) but this is way too late. By refusing to use nuclear for purely ideological# reasons, Germany is depriving itself from a vital tool against global warming. And by vindicating some green movements to call for the closing of nuclear plants along the development of renewable (whereas the sane thing to do would be developing nuclear along renewable: solar panel in sunny places like desert, offshore wind turbines and nuclear plants), it may indeed have done a whole lot of harm. And when we are speaking about the future of human civilisation, this may prove to have been indeed a very costly mistake indeed. [#] And yes, when you take into account that coal each year kill more in Germany than Chernobyl did globally (and way more than Fukushima); and that even if there was a Chernobyl every 10 years (which cannot happen with the nuclear reactors we have) anyway it would still be a drop of water compared to what climate change is going to bring us, closing nuclear plants can only be ideological.
• wbl 8y ago
  What matters for climate change: CO2 emissions. What doesn't matter: solar panels on roofs.