8 ms·

6. If everyone had the same electricity mix than Germany we would have total blackouts everyday

by polote 5y ago

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
      With the current technology, you can't transport electricity more than ~1000 km with acceptable losses. Atmospheric depressions are bigger than than, and the distance for solar are much bigger as well (other than cloudy, there's day and night).
      - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        What do you consider acceptable? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad... puts the loss for HVDC at 3.5% per 1000km. That would imply 4000km with 15% loss, which is pretty good considering that wind and solar are significantly more than 15% cheaper than nuclear. Specifically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE,_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... puts the cost of wind/solar at roughly 1/3rd the cost of nuclear, so it's more (cost) efficient to spend as much on transmission as you do on generation and build a really well connected massive grid than to use nuclear.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
      - midjji 5y ago
        We can transport it a fair bit further than that, but only under ideal circumstances that are rarely met, and its very rare the grid is built for it, its never been needed after all. For instance, regulatory issues usually mean that every country border crossed tends to have a transformer station, which makes minor changes at a 10% or so efficiency loss.
        diordiderot 5y ago
        Europe. Same grid. 8% losses
    - pzo 5y ago
      transmitting energy from other half of the earth (where is daylight when you are sleeping) is probably not best idea (not sure if even economically or technically possible). Also would be wise to turn off nuclear energy once you have this 'big enough grid'.
      - flor1s 5y ago
        Is day and night really the problem here? Because I thought demand usually peaks at certain times of the day (e.g. early in the evening in California: https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-options/time-of-use-base-plan/time-of-use-plan.page#:~:text=Peak%20(highest%20price)%20%E2%80%93%205,on%20weekends%20and%20most%20holidays https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o...), and actually bottoms out during the night. You would mostly use an interconnected grid (and storage) to compensate for this. Also there is wind energy which doesn't care about whether the sun shines or not (actually it generates more energy when the sun isn't shining: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-turbine-storage-electricity-appliances/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-turbin...).
        pzo 5y ago
        In most of the Europe the biggest use of energy for family will be heating except summer. In the future probably also charging electric car. This kind of power demand you need mostly at night when sleeping - during the day you are probsbly in the office. Transmitting power also consumes energy - you cannot have a electric wire across pacific to transmit power from US to EU without transformers - electric power line is not a fiber optic that transmit just signal. I also doubt we have enough rare earth minerals to make all those magnets for wind turbine and and electric car enough for whole planet. Remember also you have to decomission those windturbine after some years which is expensive
        flor1s 5y ago
        At least in The Netherlands we mostly use centralised (gas-powered) heating, so nuclear energy is a tangential factor. Also there seems to be room for improvement in insulation and centralised thermal storage (warmtenet in Dutch). Electric cars seem both like both a problem and an opportunity, because you could charge them while being at the office and partly use their batteries for powering your home at night (in case you don't need a full charge to get to work in the morning). Regarding rare earths, we will need them regardless of using nuclear or renewables for electric cars, so that seems partly tangential. For wind turbines their reliance on rare earths seems troublesome. It's geopolitically ironic that we (Western Europeans) get our gas from Russia and our rare earths from China.
    - midjji 5y ago
      It does not work that way. Long distance extreme high voltage transfer loses about 5% per 1000km, with the transformers adding another 10%, under ideal circumstances. In practice its higher, and thats on land. Sea cables lose 100x per km around 50% per 100km, again under ideal circumstances. In practice double the losses per distance, and if using existing grids, double it again, because most places dont build top end voltage grids. Looking at maps for power prices with large hydropower dams you can easily see how most countries grids dont transfer more than around 1000km, and often quite a bit shorter. In practice this is the point where it becomes more cost effective to build new powerplants, than bigger infrastructure for transfer. We could build grids designed for this, but never across oceans, and we are talking about an absolutely gargantuan investment, and its generally not considered as a solution for the unreliability of solar and wind. Its also why no one ever suggests to use the big empty oceans for truly large scale wind or solar etc, its always places very close to land. Its also worth pointing out that superconductors cannot solve this, even if price and the gargantuan cooling energy requirements are ignored. This is because while superconductors transfer power without loss, they can only do so up to a limited effect, as the power interferes with the superconducting ability after that, essentially breaking it.
      - diordiderot 5y ago
        So you keep 70% of electricity piped from Morocco to the UK. That sounds bloody swell. I'd pay for that in a heart beat.
        midjji 5y ago
        The oceans kill it completely, remember two oceans of 100km reduce transfer by 0.75, and thats ignoring all the other problems with the grids on the way.
        adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        this is not true with hvdc http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1187920/FULLTEXT01.pdf http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1187920/FULLTEXT0... has an analysis showing single digit percent loss for 500km.
  - com2kid 5y ago
    > And you can't either decide when people turn on their washing machine. Not completely, but you can make electricity almost free at certain times of day to encourage shifting usage. Although there is a natural limit to this, since people have to be home to do laundry! (Also electric driers are the real culprit, they use an obscene amount of electricity! I am not sure if Germany is big on electric dryers or not though, that is something which is very culture dependent)
    - midjji 5y ago
      Power is far to abstract and far to cheap for people to make even the slightest adjustment to their habits. After all, lets say you knew that making your morning coffe between 07-08 cost 10 cents more than doing so an hour earlier or later, would you get up earlier, or go to work latter? And in 1 cent is more realistic.
      - com2kid 5y ago
        Sure, but again the example was washing clothes, and clothes dryers use a LOT of energy. Holy crap, doing the math a US style dryer would cost ~1.50 in electricity in Germany to dry one load of clothing. Sources: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_prices/ https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_price... https://www.thespruce.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-an-electric-dryer-1387954 https://www.thespruce.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-an-el... So, like, you know, yeah. My dryer has a delay start function on it, if late night prices are 1/2 peak, then I'd save 75 cents a load. Let's say 3 days a week of laundry, $9 a month in savings. Again, my dryer already does this, it isn't new tech, it is just nudging me to make use of the existing button that is already there! US electricity prices are so low, eh, not really worth it for the state I live in.
        patall 5y ago
        Most people in Germany do not have an electric dryer. Also, electricity prices are not the same everywhere. My parents for example pay only 20 ct/kwh (I have no idea how they got that contract, especially since they moved only last year. They have low overall usage though (2,000 kWh/a, with fixed cost being like 30% of the total bill)
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    Well, it is obvious, that the renewable production needs to be paired with some on-demand sources. Short term, gas is great for that, as gas power plants can be switched on and off quickly, long-term the necessary storage options are needed (some of that can be power2gas, which can be burnt in the gas power plants).
    - BenoitP 5y ago
      > Short term, gas is great for that Still an unacceptable CO2 emission in my book. Natural gas is at 55,82 [kg CO2 / GJ], when coal is at 94,6 [kg CO2 / GJ]. [1] So that's only 40% less pollution, and there are still huge quantities of coal that has yet to be replaced in Germany. What's missing from your view is how you provide for baseload. Right now, what is baseload in Germany? It is coal: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE [1] https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/index_e.php https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/index_e.ph...
      - coryrc 5y ago
        Going to chime in with my usual statement, "baseload" as a concept only applies if you have energy sources which are cheap to run but can't scale up and down quickly. That is no longer the case. What you mean to say is "we need to provide power all the time".
      - Panzer04 5y ago
        Gas is better than coal in a strict sense, and a combo of gas and renewables will vastly reduce emissions, and in a way most people can deal with. Over time battery prices will fall and renewable install base will rise so that gas peaked eventually become unnecessary.
  - ggm 5y ago
    This is a syllogism and masks a complete mismatch of both demand and risks of windless days. There is no insurmountable problem if you accept a market in electricity in Europe, demand management (which already exists in the market in air-conditioning, freezing and thermal mass industries) and overbuild of supply. Not to mention storage. It's not just a syllogism, it's a really weak one. You actually can decide when people "turn on their washing machine". It's called controlled supply, it's existed since the 1950s. Mainly for water heating but in principle any function.
- BenoitP 5y ago
  1. There is very little energy storage 2. Sun and wind only produce a fraction of the time (40% [1] and 25% [2] respectively, and 7.5% (= 8.94/(63.2+56)) of installed capacity this very second [3]) 3. Production capacity without sun and wind < peak demand Germany's mix only work because of neighbouring countries. And their humongous amounts of still existing coal and gas. [1] https://assets.greentechmedia.com/assets/content/cache/made/assets/content/cache/remote/https_dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/Massachusetts_duck_curve_shoulder_month_XL_1598_1170_80.jpg https://assets.greentechmedia.com/assets/content/cache/made/... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555654/wind-electricity-load-factor-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/555654/wind-electricity-... [3] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
  - lambdasquirrel 5y ago
    Sure but carbon is carbon. If they are able to get that much more of their overall power output from renewable, that's carbon not going into the air. The problem with the current generation of nuclear is that it's expensive to build, and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. If it's possible to get the same emissions reduction by building out lots and lots of renewable, instead of spending that money on nuclear, that's understandable for a country that can't just print money. There will eventually be some limit to that strategy (i.e. how do you meet supply at night) and we'll have to see how the next-gen energy storage and nuclear pan out.
    - sgift 5y ago
      > and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. People say this as if reactors get build once and then stay the same way. These reactors get upgraded all the time. Here's an example: Isar 1 was one of the oldest reactors in Germany. When a German reactor gets new fuel rods it has to be certified again according to current regulations. Isar 1 needed new fuel rods in 2011, so it got upgraded and certified again. After that new fuel rods were introduced into the reactor. A few month later as consequence of the Fukushima disaster it got "shut down"[1], because it was now "not safe". Which is obviously bullshit, cause the rules on reactor safety for German nuclear reactor didn't change due to Fukushima, opinions did and politicians needed to show that they do something. [1] It didn't really get shut down in 2011. It got removed from the power grid. So, Isar 1 continued to produce power, which was then promptly discharged into the environment as heat. Only after the fuel rods were burned down it really got shut down.
jhgb 5y ago
Germany has the same electricity mix as Germany and it has extremely good SAIDI index compared to all other countries (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-electricity-grid-stable-amid-energy-transition https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-electric...). I guess those Germans are just insanely competent, then.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Check precision energy import charts, especially at night in winter. Germany uses other countries as a battery.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    Winter nights in Germany are the domain of coastal wind turbines. Off to build more wind farms, then!
  - neuronic 5y ago
    Why is this always spread? Right now is a winter night (-6 celsius), this is the live electricity map for Europe: https://app.electricitymap.org/map https://app.electricitymap.org/map Right this second, Germany is EXPORTING to most of their neighbors. Are they charging the other batteries now or how am I supposed to follow your logic?
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      "Why is this always spread?" Because this debate is more about ideology, than anything else.
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      Turn off 10% of your generation and you'll be importing.
  - Haemm0r 5y ago
    Can confirm this as an Austrian ;-)
- 5y ago

6. If everyone had the same electricity mix than Germany we would have total blackouts everyday

by 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
    With the current technology, you can't transport electricity more than ~1000 km with acceptable losses. Atmospheric depressions are bigger than than, and the distance for solar are much bigger as well (other than cloudy, there's day and night).
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      What do you consider acceptable? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad... puts the loss for HVDC at 3.5% per 1000km. That would imply 4000km with 15% loss, which is pretty good considering that wind and solar are significantly more than 15% cheaper than nuclear. Specifically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE,_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... puts the cost of wind/solar at roughly 1/3rd the cost of nuclear, so it's more (cost) efficient to spend as much on transmission as you do on generation and build a really well connected massive grid than to use nuclear.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
    - midjji 5y ago
      We can transport it a fair bit further than that, but only under ideal circumstances that are rarely met, and its very rare the grid is built for it, its never been needed after all. For instance, regulatory issues usually mean that every country border crossed tends to have a transformer station, which makes minor changes at a 10% or so efficiency loss.
      - diordiderot 5y ago
        Europe. Same grid. 8% losses
  - pzo 5y ago
    transmitting energy from other half of the earth (where is daylight when you are sleeping) is probably not best idea (not sure if even economically or technically possible). Also would be wise to turn off nuclear energy once you have this 'big enough grid'.
    - flor1s 5y ago
      Is day and night really the problem here? Because I thought demand usually peaks at certain times of the day (e.g. early in the evening in California: https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-options/time-of-use-base-plan/time-of-use-plan.page#:~:text=Peak%20(highest%20price)%20%E2%80%93%205,on%20weekends%20and%20most%20holidays https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o...), and actually bottoms out during the night. You would mostly use an interconnected grid (and storage) to compensate for this. Also there is wind energy which doesn't care about whether the sun shines or not (actually it generates more energy when the sun isn't shining: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-turbine-storage-electricity-appliances/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-turbin...).
      - pzo 5y ago
        In most of the Europe the biggest use of energy for family will be heating except summer. In the future probably also charging electric car. This kind of power demand you need mostly at night when sleeping - during the day you are probsbly in the office. Transmitting power also consumes energy - you cannot have a electric wire across pacific to transmit power from US to EU without transformers - electric power line is not a fiber optic that transmit just signal. I also doubt we have enough rare earth minerals to make all those magnets for wind turbine and and electric car enough for whole planet. Remember also you have to decomission those windturbine after some years which is expensive
        flor1s 5y ago
        At least in The Netherlands we mostly use centralised (gas-powered) heating, so nuclear energy is a tangential factor. Also there seems to be room for improvement in insulation and centralised thermal storage (warmtenet in Dutch). Electric cars seem both like both a problem and an opportunity, because you could charge them while being at the office and partly use their batteries for powering your home at night (in case you don't need a full charge to get to work in the morning). Regarding rare earths, we will need them regardless of using nuclear or renewables for electric cars, so that seems partly tangential. For wind turbines their reliance on rare earths seems troublesome. It's geopolitically ironic that we (Western Europeans) get our gas from Russia and our rare earths from China.
  - midjji 5y ago
    It does not work that way. Long distance extreme high voltage transfer loses about 5% per 1000km, with the transformers adding another 10%, under ideal circumstances. In practice its higher, and thats on land. Sea cables lose 100x per km around 50% per 100km, again under ideal circumstances. In practice double the losses per distance, and if using existing grids, double it again, because most places dont build top end voltage grids. Looking at maps for power prices with large hydropower dams you can easily see how most countries grids dont transfer more than around 1000km, and often quite a bit shorter. In practice this is the point where it becomes more cost effective to build new powerplants, than bigger infrastructure for transfer. We could build grids designed for this, but never across oceans, and we are talking about an absolutely gargantuan investment, and its generally not considered as a solution for the unreliability of solar and wind. Its also why no one ever suggests to use the big empty oceans for truly large scale wind or solar etc, its always places very close to land. Its also worth pointing out that superconductors cannot solve this, even if price and the gargantuan cooling energy requirements are ignored. This is because while superconductors transfer power without loss, they can only do so up to a limited effect, as the power interferes with the superconducting ability after that, essentially breaking it.
    - diordiderot 5y ago
      So you keep 70% of electricity piped from Morocco to the UK. That sounds bloody swell. I'd pay for that in a heart beat.
      - midjji 5y ago
        The oceans kill it completely, remember two oceans of 100km reduce transfer by 0.75, and thats ignoring all the other problems with the grids on the way.
        adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
        this is not true with hvdc http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1187920/FULLTEXT01.pdf http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1187920/FULLTEXT0... has an analysis showing single digit percent loss for 500km.
- com2kid 5y ago
  > And you can't either decide when people turn on their washing machine. Not completely, but you can make electricity almost free at certain times of day to encourage shifting usage. Although there is a natural limit to this, since people have to be home to do laundry! (Also electric driers are the real culprit, they use an obscene amount of electricity! I am not sure if Germany is big on electric dryers or not though, that is something which is very culture dependent)
  - midjji 5y ago
    Power is far to abstract and far to cheap for people to make even the slightest adjustment to their habits. After all, lets say you knew that making your morning coffe between 07-08 cost 10 cents more than doing so an hour earlier or later, would you get up earlier, or go to work latter? And in 1 cent is more realistic.
    - com2kid 5y ago
      Sure, but again the example was washing clothes, and clothes dryers use a LOT of energy. Holy crap, doing the math a US style dryer would cost ~1.50 in electricity in Germany to dry one load of clothing. Sources: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_prices/ https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_price... https://www.thespruce.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-an-electric-dryer-1387954 https://www.thespruce.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-an-el... So, like, you know, yeah. My dryer has a delay start function on it, if late night prices are 1/2 peak, then I'd save 75 cents a load. Let's say 3 days a week of laundry, $9 a month in savings. Again, my dryer already does this, it isn't new tech, it is just nudging me to make use of the existing button that is already there! US electricity prices are so low, eh, not really worth it for the state I live in.
      - patall 5y ago
        Most people in Germany do not have an electric dryer. Also, electricity prices are not the same everywhere. My parents for example pay only 20 ct/kwh (I have no idea how they got that contract, especially since they moved only last year. They have low overall usage though (2,000 kWh/a, with fixed cost being like 30% of the total bill)
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Well, it is obvious, that the renewable production needs to be paired with some on-demand sources. Short term, gas is great for that, as gas power plants can be switched on and off quickly, long-term the necessary storage options are needed (some of that can be power2gas, which can be burnt in the gas power plants).
  - BenoitP 5y ago
    > Short term, gas is great for that Still an unacceptable CO2 emission in my book. Natural gas is at 55,82 [kg CO2 / GJ], when coal is at 94,6 [kg CO2 / GJ]. [1] So that's only 40% less pollution, and there are still huge quantities of coal that has yet to be replaced in Germany. What's missing from your view is how you provide for baseload. Right now, what is baseload in Germany? It is coal: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE [1] https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/index_e.php https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/index_e.ph...
    - coryrc 5y ago
      Going to chime in with my usual statement, "baseload" as a concept only applies if you have energy sources which are cheap to run but can't scale up and down quickly. That is no longer the case. What you mean to say is "we need to provide power all the time".
    - Panzer04 5y ago
      Gas is better than coal in a strict sense, and a combo of gas and renewables will vastly reduce emissions, and in a way most people can deal with. Over time battery prices will fall and renewable install base will rise so that gas peaked eventually become unnecessary.
- ggm 5y ago
  This is a syllogism and masks a complete mismatch of both demand and risks of windless days. There is no insurmountable problem if you accept a market in electricity in Europe, demand management (which already exists in the market in air-conditioning, freezing and thermal mass industries) and overbuild of supply. Not to mention storage. It's not just a syllogism, it's a really weak one. You actually can decide when people "turn on their washing machine". It's called controlled supply, it's existed since the 1950s. Mainly for water heating but in principle any function.
BenoitP 5y ago
1. There is very little energy storage 2. Sun and wind only produce a fraction of the time (40% [1] and 25% [2] respectively, and 7.5% (= 8.94/(63.2+56)) of installed capacity this very second [3]) 3. Production capacity without sun and wind < peak demand Germany's mix only work because of neighbouring countries. And their humongous amounts of still existing coal and gas. [1] https://assets.greentechmedia.com/assets/content/cache/made/assets/content/cache/remote/https_dqbasmyouzti2.cloudfront.net/content/images/articles/Massachusetts_duck_curve_shoulder_month_XL_1598_1170_80.jpg https://assets.greentechmedia.com/assets/content/cache/made/... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555654/wind-electricity-load-factor-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/555654/wind-electricity-... [3] https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
- lambdasquirrel 5y ago
  Sure but carbon is carbon. If they are able to get that much more of their overall power output from renewable, that's carbon not going into the air. The problem with the current generation of nuclear is that it's expensive to build, and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. If it's possible to get the same emissions reduction by building out lots and lots of renewable, instead of spending that money on nuclear, that's understandable for a country that can't just print money. There will eventually be some limit to that strategy (i.e. how do you meet supply at night) and we'll have to see how the next-gen energy storage and nuclear pan out.
  - sgift 5y ago
    > and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. People say this as if reactors get build once and then stay the same way. These reactors get upgraded all the time. Here's an example: Isar 1 was one of the oldest reactors in Germany. When a German reactor gets new fuel rods it has to be certified again according to current regulations. Isar 1 needed new fuel rods in 2011, so it got upgraded and certified again. After that new fuel rods were introduced into the reactor. A few month later as consequence of the Fukushima disaster it got "shut down"[1], because it was now "not safe". Which is obviously bullshit, cause the rules on reactor safety for German nuclear reactor didn't change due to Fukushima, opinions did and politicians needed to show that they do something. [1] It didn't really get shut down in 2011. It got removed from the power grid. So, Isar 1 continued to produce power, which was then promptly discharged into the environment as heat. Only after the fuel rods were burned down it really got shut down.

jhgb 5y ago

Germany has the same electricity mix as Germany and it has extremely good SAIDI index compared to all other countries (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-electricity-grid-stable-amid-energy-transition https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-electric...). I guess those Germans are just insanely competent, then.

AstralStorm 5y ago
Check precision energy import charts, especially at night in winter. Germany uses other countries as a battery.
- jhgb 5y ago
  Winter nights in Germany are the domain of coastal wind turbines. Off to build more wind farms, then!
- neuronic 5y ago
  Why is this always spread? Right now is a winter night (-6 celsius), this is the live electricity map for Europe: https://app.electricitymap.org/map https://app.electricitymap.org/map Right this second, Germany is EXPORTING to most of their neighbors. Are they charging the other batteries now or how am I supposed to follow your logic?
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "Why is this always spread?" Because this debate is more about ideology, than anything else.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    Turn off 10% of your generation and you'll be importing.
- Haemm0r 5y ago
  Can confirm this as an Austrian ;-)
5y ago