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So now will Germany depend on Russian gas, coal power imported from Poland and nuclear power imported from France? Can an industrial nation depend on imported e

• adrianN 7y ago
  Or, you know, we could build wind turbines and solar panels and reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels.
  • dgellow 7y ago
    Germany already does that quite a lot (>30% of their production in average come from renewable), but there is a distribution issue. The north generates a lot of electricity using a combination of windmills and solar panel, but the south doesn’t for some reasons (I guess the environment isn’t adapted? Not sure why). And there are a lot of problems (not necessarily technical) to bring the electricity from the north to the south. As far as I understood, the government need to get the authorization from each land owner on the way to be able to install new cables and infrastructure, and that takes crazy amount of time. Nobody want to have this going through their property.
    • adrianN 7y ago
      Germany just lost 20000 jobs in wind power last year because they essentially stopped all construction.
      • dgellow 7y ago
        Wow, that’s a massive blow. Do you have a source for this?
        • adrianN 7y ago
          Only in German, http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/19/116/1911619.pdf http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/19/116/1911619.pdf
• bayesian_horse 7y ago
  Well, if you refuse to look at the details, everything looks like a pipe dream. In reality, Germany still exports electricity to "nuclear powered" France. The plan to stop coal plants does not count on higher energy imports, particularly not in the form of electricity.
  • lnsru 7y ago
    So how you will balance the grid? You can export excess energy to whenever you want, but what happens when renewables are inactive? Russian gas?..
    • bayesian_horse 7y ago
      That's a typical objection of people who haven't studied the details. The engineers who are behind such proposals and plans actually now that sun and wind energy isn't constantly available. That's way there is a mix of energy sources and technologies, including, yes, Russian gas. But also American Liquified Natural Gas. Oil. Electricity storage systems. And maybe even new nuclear reactors in the future, once a few nagging problems have been figured out.
      • lnsru 7y ago
        There are great engineers for sure in Germany. Not everybody left for Valley or Switzerland. But having 2nd most expensive electricity in Europe is a crystal clear result of bad engineering.
  • realusername 7y ago
    > In reality, Germany still exports electricity to "nuclear powered" France. France imports very cheap electricity from Germany when wind/solar works very well and exports very expensive electricity when wind/solar works badly. It's a pretty much balanced trade between the two in terms of electricity but it's far from balanced in monetary terms, Germany pays the non-stability of their grid at a high price.
    • 7y ago
• quonn 7y ago
  Germany imports most of its natural resources, because we don’t have them anyway. That‘s why we rely so much on exporting products.