17 ms·

I am afraid this thread is going to be heavy on strongly held opinions and very light on facts and figures. In a futile attempt to compensate, here is the histo

• marvinblum 5y ago
  It's worth noting that we pay for both, import and export of electricity in Germany. This is due to the failed* energy transition ("Energiewende") into renewable production. We pay for our overproduction on sunny and windy days, because the electricity _has_ to be bought by network providers. * inefficient and too expensive
• _Microft 5y ago
  Interactive live charts can be found at https://energy-charts.info/?l=en https://energy-charts.info/?l=en Direct link to charts: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&stacking=stacked_absolute_area https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&...
• Luc 5y ago
  One wonders how much better those charts would have looked with a rational investment into a climate-neutral, self-reliant form of electricity production, i.e. dozens of new nuclear reactors. I think the merit of this idea will become clear among the public when the price of electricity becomes an election issue.
• progbits 5y ago
  While we are adding charts: [1] shows carbon intensity (g CO2e / kWH) per country for EU. [1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-intensity-9/#tab-googlechartid_googlechartid_googlechartid_chart_1111 https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...
• scotty79 5y ago
  What happened to their hydro after 2002?
• cmarschner 5y ago
  So, to summarize, 1. Germany is a net exporter 2. Germany has reduced the production from fossil fuels from about 70% to about 37% within 30 years. 3. At the same time it cut nuclear power from around 28% to about 10. 4. It looks like without reducing nuclear power it could have replaced the equivalent amount of fossil fuels (achieving less than 20% fossil fuels by 2020). However, energy consumption has also gone up since 1990, so it would have required building more reactors. 5. Renewables have replaced about 25% of energy production in the last 10 years.
  • polote 5y ago
    6. If everyone had the same electricity mix than Germany we would have total blackouts everyday
    • octodog 5y ago
      How do you reach that conclusion?
      • polote 5y ago
        You can't decide when the wind blow and when the sun shines. And you can't either decide when people turn on their washing machine. So it is obvious there is a problem
        • adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
          So the thing about the earth is that it's big. If you have a big enough grid, it will be sunny and windy over a fairly consistent portion of that area.
          • HPsquared 5y ago
            We don't have a planetary grid (yet, at least). If there's a high pressure system across Europe, the whole continent can have low wind. This usually comes with either very high temperatures (in summer) or very low temperatures (in winter) which further stresses the system.
• BenoitP 5y ago
  Germany's wind and solar is only possible because neighbouring countries compensate for when there's no wind and sun; which happen a lot of the time. On top of that wind and solar production must be bought first on the EU market, effectively ruining CO2-free capital that was there beforehand (read: nuclear). So these charts that you show only demonstrate that Germany was first to jump on wind and solar production. Great for them, but now wind and solar in neighbouring countries are much less profitable when they'd be less correlated to Germany's huge wind and solar capacity. Perfect play in a game-theoretic setting, but damaging to the neighbours and the actual goal of CO2 reduction. Now, let's review some live data: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
  • Dunedan 5y ago
    Do you have sources to back these claims? I'd imagine that somewhere there is always enough wind and sun in Europe.
    • inglor_cz 5y ago
      I'd imagine that somewhere there is always enough wind and sun in Europe. The problem with this approach is that you need to overbuild the total installed capacity massively, so that every "somewhere" could, in need, play the role of an energy producing and exporting center for all the other regions. If 70 % of Europe is calm and dark at one point, the remaining 30 % would need to produce enough energy for the entire continent. (This also means having very high capacity cross-continent links to move that energy around from anywhere to anywhere else. Not easy to build or maintain.)
      • Ericson2314 5y ago
        It would be great to have that infrastructure of course, but if we're going to say "OK we need to do mammoth projects which require lots of up front capex and ongoing administrative competence", that same argument applies to old-school nuclear reactors too. The most grating thing about the renewable fad is that "herp durp churn out more wind and solar at the margins decentralized" and "massive coordinated grids and/or huge batteries" are utterly different modes of infrastructure production. There is no sense in which getting really good at the former makes one any better at the latter.
• narrator 5y ago
  When shaping public policy, narratives are more important than data.[1] From my observation, it seems that the procedure is to set the narrative up, make it simple, broadcast it from as many channels as possible and censor, threaten and insult people who present data that contradicts the narrative. Works really well. "A good narrative soundly beats even the best data." [1]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/01/how-narratives-influence-human-behaviour/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/01/how-narratives-influe...
• bsza 5y ago
  So it's fair to say that Germany's reliance on lignite could be nonexistent by now if they didn't keep decommissioning their reactors?
• king_phil 5y ago
  One important thing to notice is that uranium is a finite non-renewable resource. The Red Book says there are about 3.3 million tons that are extractable for a price of 130 USD/ton. In 2017 the total uranium production was 60.000 tons. Thats about 55 years of uranium left at the current production rate. The Red Book assumes there are another 2.1 million tons likely to exist from geological data, but not found yet and another 4.8 million tons assumed to exist but yet to be discovered. Now imagine that nuclear power production would be greatly increased. How many years of uranium supply would we have left? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium
  • Robotbeat 5y ago
    We have basically unlimited uranium. There’s no risk of shortage. The average cubic meter of crust has more breedable fuel energy in it than a cubic meter of coal. Fission is effectively as unlimited as renewable energy is, about a billion years’ worth of crust. Even if we stick with typical U235 reactors, sufficient uranium ore exists for hundreds of years, although no one will bother to formally “prove” the reserves for a constraint 100 years in the future. What’s limited is the atmosphere’s capacity for CO2. Not much else matters in the mid/near-term, except perhaps for ensuring we have enough energy for civilization to function.
  • polote 5y ago
    > One important thing to notice is that uranium is a finite non-renewable resource. One important thing to notice is that place on earth to put wind turbines and solar panels is limited. Now imagine that electricity needs greatly increased ... At the end of the day, everything is finite
    • jhgb 5y ago
      That place is much larger than you'll ever need at the very least in this century (maybe in a thousand years we'll be in trouble, but I imagine that in that era, we'll have completely different issues anyway).
    • 5y ago
• Invictus0 5y ago
  In my opinion, these charts are quite out of context. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29654571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29654571
• elcapitan 5y ago
  Primary energy consumption looks quite a bit different though: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig10-germany-energy-mix-energy-sources-share-primary-energy-consumption-2021.png?itok=XmYkdZD_ https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g... Also worth noting that "biomass" often gets hidden in the "clean energy" part, but that just means burning something other than oil/coal/gas.
  • animal_spirits 5y ago
    In my opinion I think biomass can be considered cleaner since the burning of it releases only recently stored carbon as opposed to taking huge carbon reserves from fossil fuels that might not have ever seen the atmosphere again. In my mind biomass is "carbon neutral" where fossil fuels are "carbon positive"
    • AstralStorm 5y ago
      It is not neutral, it takes tens of years for standard sources of biomass to accumulate to useful amounts. Fast biomass would use something like hemp or other grass but it's still problematic. And it does increase CO2 and NOx levels when burned, not to mention soot - it's dirtier than quality coal. The growth itself does not capture nearly enough to cover for it.
      • fsh 5y ago
        Biomass is mostly wood. If the forest is in steady-state (as is the case in Germany), this is carbon neutral. The main issue is that plants are much less efficient at light harvesting than solar cells. This means that there is probably not much scaling potential left.
  • jhgb 5y ago
    There's a reason why electrification of transportation and low-energy buildings are major topics in Europe. You see them on the top and on the left of your chart, respectively.
  • 5y ago
• cbmuser 5y ago
  • modriano 5y ago
    > excessive export means more wasted electricity. I'm not an expert so please forgive me if this is a stupid question, but how is exported electricity wasted electricity? My intuition is that (assuming the exported energy is used) it would both prevent the generation of electricity by other (less environmentally friendly) means, and it would generate income. What is wasted here?
    • JAlexoid 5y ago
      You should understand the source of that exported electricity. Electricity is exported from the capacity that is inflexible, as you cannot scale it up/down. Common low flexibility electricity sources - coal, nuclear, hydro.
      • modriano 5y ago
        I was under the understanding that coal and hydro were more flexible and hydro even being pretty responsive (just reduce the flow rate and build up the water level in the reservoir). But in any case, wouldn't the surplus just cause the price to drop, causing other power sources to just dial down production thereby stabilizing the price?
• arnaudsm 5y ago
  These graphs are misleading. Intermittent and non-pilotable sources are a nightmare during shortages. Which is the biggest threat Germany faces right now.
• downrightmike 5y ago
  [1] more than half of their power comes from burning something and releasing carbon. It would be better to keep nuclear and remove carbon sources, especially any gas from russia.
• BenoitP 5y ago
  More data, for right now: https://app.electricitymap.org/map https://app.electricitymap.org/map Germany is not doing that well.
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  The carbon intensity of economy as a whole is an interesting stat that doesn't get enough attention. There's no noticeable affect on Germany's path to net zero, compared with neighbouring countries. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?contextual=default&locations=EU-FR-DE-GR-DK-ES-SE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?conte... Sweden seems the long term success story, despite the more northern location presumbly needing more energy for heating. They have the highest carbon fees in the world, and like Germany seem to have been a bit stop'n'go when it comes to nuclear, changing the date when they intend to phase them out a few times, but generally closing them being the trend.