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> Recent events in the Ukraine are cutting off cheap Russian supply of both coal and gas This is not the impression I have gotten from recent events. The reas

> Recent events in the Ukraine are cutting off cheap Russian supply of both coal and gas This is not the impression I have gotten from recent events. The reason Germany hasn’t experienced blackouts is because they are funding the Russian Federation’s war in Ukraine in exchange for energy. Germany has advocated for the continued purchase of Russian gas and has pushed back against the EU admitting Ukraine to the union. It’s obvious that the decarbonization had not succeeded in solving their need for base load power, in fact you could argue that their denuclearization is the very reason Russia has so much leverage in the situation. So while they may be saving the planet, this is a great example of a government missing the forest for the trees.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Germany can't wave a magic wand and switch off Russian imports overnight. But they did just commit a few hundred billion to accelerate their plans to get rid of coal and gas based generation. That's a direct consequence of the Ukrainian situation. Like the US, Germany was overly depending on cheap gas until recently. Now that it has to import the gas in liquid form from the US (and a few other places), it's going to be a lot more expensive. Hence hundreds of billions to cut their dependence on the stuff entirely. Regarding nuclear in Germany, I think you are a bit short on the facts. Nuclear in Germany was always pretty minor. What little they had is now nearly gone. During the same time, they cut coal generation from 47% to about 25%. Gas grew a bit during that time but is still smaller than their remaining coal generation and even the amount of coal capacity they got rid off. Coal is going to be gone by 2030 according to the latest plans. Indeed cheap Russian gas was part of this plan until recently. But those plans are shifting rapidly now for obvious reasons.
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  Germany could have cancelled their nuclear shutdown process. But saving face is more important than Ukrainian lives.
  - jhgb 4y ago
    As I pointed out above, this would not have changed anything with respect to the need to import gas from Russia. Nuclear generation is not a substitute for gas imports. Even worse, they can't "cancel their nuclear shutdown process" even if they wanted. First of all, the shutdown deadline had been firmly set in law twenty years ago, so it would require a major legislative effort to make another law. Second, even if they somehow managed to instantly change the law, the shutdown was "baked into" the operation and maintenance schedule for the nuclear plants. They were simply not expecting to have to run them beyond early 2020-ish so a lot of money was almost certainly saved by delaying maintenance. Hence, if they suddenly changed their minds about shutting the plants down, they'd almost certainly have to invest massive amounts of money to fix them first.
    - chrischen 4y ago
      According to Wikipedia the denuclearization process was canceled until Fukushima happened. “ On 14 March 2011, in response to the renewed concern about the use of nuclear energy the Fukushima incident raised in the German public and in light of upcoming elections in three German states, Merkel declared a 3-month moratorium on the reactor lifespan extension passed in 2010.[29] On 15 March, the German government announced that it would temporarily shut down 8 of its 17 reactors, i.e. all reactors that went online before 1981.” And this was described as “The decision to phase-out nuclear power has been called the swiftest change of political course since unification.” So if a disaster was all it took for a swift change in politics then the current situation is certainly a disaster. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
      - lispm 4y ago
        This was just going back to the earlier phase-out decision by the red/green government. The Merkel decision to slow down the phase-out was highly controversial and would have seen mass protests. Then the Fukushima-accident (where a single earthquake was enough to take out the whole nuclear industry of an advanced industrial country) happened and the decision was reversed, again.
- holoduke 4y ago
  And those plans will be reconsidered in 5 years from now. Cheap Russian gas will likely flow again. And don't forget Ukrainian recent found giant gas reserves. One of the reasons for this conflict.
  - Krasnol 4y ago
    Do you have some magic uranium ball which tells you the future or where do you get those useless claims?
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    Don't underestimate the Germans. They'll get this done. They'll be pretty far done executing those plans in five years and probably will raise the ambition level rather than lowering it. I also predict they will trigger a pretty big economic boom doing so. All that money flowing into the economy will do a lot of good. They've actually been criticized for holding back too much in the last few decades. This looks like it might be the trigger that fixes that in a hurry. Cheap Russian gas might make a brief comeback depending on if Russia is able to fix its leadership issues that are causing the current crisis. Right now it is looking pretty bad. But nothing that a Russian revolution wouldn't be able to fix. If that fails to happen, I doubt the Russians are going to get a lot of gas business from Europe with Putin remaining in power. Basically right now they are dealing with the stick part of this stick/carrot strategy. But even if that does happen, the message that they can't be trusted was received loud and clear. Business as usual is not going to be a thing any time soon. Whatever they currently still receive in terms of gas revenues will start drying up either way. Oil is going to stop flowing pretty soon. And either the Russians close of the gas or the Germans will diversify their supply to the point where it won't matter if they do because the threat of the Russians cutting them off is now both very credible and completely unacceptable as a status quo. That will make gas a lot more expensive permanently for the Germans and will only increase their ambition level with respect to reducing their dependence on it. If heating prices double or triple permanently, people are going to be pretty eager and creative getting into more cheaper ways to heat their houses. That's already happening in a lot of places.
    - 4y ago
- eukgoekoko 4y ago
  > Nuclear in Germany was always pretty minor. This is simply not true. According to https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage/anteil-der-atomenergie-an-der-stromerzeugung-in-deutschland/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage... nuclear's share in Hermany's total power generation was 30,6% in 2000, staying around 30% until 2009.
  - RingoStar 4y ago
    No. Its not total power generatian its only nuclear energy's share of electricity generation in Germany from 2000 to 2020. From 2000 to 2009, 6 years were below 30%, 5 years below 28% and 2 years below 27%, with a low of 25.9% and a high of 32.1%. If you take the 32.1% as the maximum value with 100%, that is a little over 20% fluctuation with a clear, negative trend.
- _0w8t 4y ago
  In fact there is a magic wand. Germany should just drastically reduce meat consumption or at least stop growing pigs. Animal agriculture is huge energy sink. I cannot find exact numbers, but CO2 emissions from animal agriculture in Europe is bigger than emissions from all cars. And very little of it comes from animals breathing, it is energy usage that is responsible for most of it. Pigs are especially bad since they eat basically what humans can eat. So stopping producing pigs will solve both energy and food crisis. And if Denmark managed to stop pigs production in 1917 almost instantly when facing a war crisis [1], then surely modern Germany can do the same. [1] - https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2012nl/jul/hindhede.pdf https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2012nl/jul/hindhede.pdf
croes 4y ago
Gas has more use cases than just electricity. These can't easily be replaced by nuclear power.
- dsnr 4y ago
  Actually, gas heating can _easily_ be replaced with heat pumps assuming cheap electricity is provided.
  - cschwarm 4y ago
    You can't convert about 40 million households [1] in a year or two. Also, in the German climate and with its many 'old' buildings, merely switching the heat source won't do. One also needs additional isolation, and new radiators. [1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/heating-40-million-homes-hurdles-phasing-out-fossil-fuels-german-basements https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/heating-40-millio...
    - dsnr 4y ago
      > You can't convert about 40 million households [1] in a year or two. Who's talking about a year or two? Germany has been pushing for russian gas since the 90's, against all logic.
      - vrfvr 4y ago
        > in fact you could argue that their denuclearization is the very reason Russia has so much leverage in the situation If we had more nuclear power, this wouldn't change much, if anything
        dsnr 4y ago
        I think you replied to the wrong person.
      - dirkt 4y ago
        The logic was "if we depend on each other, Russia isn't going to pull crazy stuff". Which works with rational people (and after Gorbachev and the German reunion, the perception was that Russia is rational), but not with Putin. And you may have noticed that Russia is not cutting off delivery of Russian gas to Germany. Which they would if the damage was unilateral. Also, electrical heating is one of most wasteful and damaging ways to do heating, and Germany has been moving away from electrical heating for this reason for decades now.
jhgb 4y ago
You're confusing German gas consumption and German electricity consumption. It couldn't escape my attention that many people especially from the US make this fatal mistake (presumably because of the prevalence of natural gas electricity generation in the US - almost 40% in the US, compared to ~15% in Germany). In Germany, the vast majority of gas is being used for heating or for industrial purposes (chemistry etc.). This is not (yet) substitutable by other electricity sources. Even if the denuclearization hadn't taken place, they'd still be dependent on Russian gas for at least a significant part of their gas supply. They can always substitute basically any gas shortfalls in the electricity sector simply by increasing coal generation, since there's a lot of unused capacity now that renewables leaped massively, and even replacing all the gas currently being used for electricity generation (because there's so little of it!) with coal would not even reach the levels of coal generation that Germany had as recently as just five years ago, so the coal plants can simply somewhat increase their output for a while. What Germans currently don't have is any way to not freeze to death and keep the industry running without Russian gas.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  The other aspect of the Ukraine war used for advocating for nuclear, which the nuclear proponents like to omit is that 25% of European uranium comes from Russia, so Europe's dependence on Russia is even stronger for Uranium than for gas. It's simply dishonest to use the current situation as an argument for nuclear. If anything it shows that we should have invested into renewables much more strongly, but nuclear proponents were strongly arguing against it because it would have made nuclear even less financially viable.
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    > so Europe's dependence on Russia is even stronger for Uranium than for gas I’d argue that it’s not about % coming from Russia that reflects dependence, it’s how easy you could switch to another supplier. How difficult would it be to find a different provider for that Uranium?
    - cycomanic 4y ago
natmaka 4y ago
Nuclear isn't better on this account: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-utilities-push-white-house-not-sanction-russian-uranium-2022-03-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-utiliti... This is even true for France, as most of its uranium comes from Kazakhstan.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  Kazakhstan is not Russia, and in fact they're rather alarmed by recent Russian sabre-rattlijg about reclaiming land in northern KZ to protect Russian speakers etc (heard this one before?). The current leadership is very much indebted to Putin though for saving them during a recent near-revolution, so they're walking a tightrope.
  - drunkpotato 4y ago
    I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia had encouraged the very unrest that made them worried and indebted. Not because Putin is a Bond villain super genius but just because encouraging chaos and unrest and then playing all sides of a conflict is a standard technique of Russian foreign relations. Edit: and also used in Russian domestic affairs, didn’t mean to leave that out!
  - natmaka 4y ago
    Indebted, indeed... If you really think Kazakhstan can disobey to Russia then let's agree on not living on the same planet.
anovikov 4y ago
But now Germany is committed to stopping Russian coal imports in 3 months and oil, by the year's end, and a (less format and obligatory) statement of intent to quit Russian gas too, in the next two years.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Germany can't wave a magic wand and switch off Russian imports overnight. But they did just commit a few hundred billion to accelerate their plans to get rid of coal and gas based generation. That's a direct consequence of the Ukrainian situation. Like the US, Germany was overly depending on cheap gas until recently. Now that it has to import the gas in liquid form from the US (and a few other places), it's going to be a lot more expensive. Hence hundreds of billions to cut their dependence on the stuff entirely. Regarding nuclear in Germany, I think you are a bit short on the facts. Nuclear in Germany was always pretty minor. What little they had is now nearly gone. During the same time, they cut coal generation from 47% to about 25%. Gas grew a bit during that time but is still smaller than their remaining coal generation and even the amount of coal capacity they got rid off. Coal is going to be gone by 2030 according to the latest plans. Indeed cheap Russian gas was part of this plan until recently. But those plans are shifting rapidly now for obvious reasons.

Gravityloss 4y ago
Germany could have cancelled their nuclear shutdown process. But saving face is more important than Ukrainian lives.
- jhgb 4y ago
  As I pointed out above, this would not have changed anything with respect to the need to import gas from Russia. Nuclear generation is not a substitute for gas imports. Even worse, they can't "cancel their nuclear shutdown process" even if they wanted. First of all, the shutdown deadline had been firmly set in law twenty years ago, so it would require a major legislative effort to make another law. Second, even if they somehow managed to instantly change the law, the shutdown was "baked into" the operation and maintenance schedule for the nuclear plants. They were simply not expecting to have to run them beyond early 2020-ish so a lot of money was almost certainly saved by delaying maintenance. Hence, if they suddenly changed their minds about shutting the plants down, they'd almost certainly have to invest massive amounts of money to fix them first.
  - chrischen 4y ago
    According to Wikipedia the denuclearization process was canceled until Fukushima happened. “ On 14 March 2011, in response to the renewed concern about the use of nuclear energy the Fukushima incident raised in the German public and in light of upcoming elections in three German states, Merkel declared a 3-month moratorium on the reactor lifespan extension passed in 2010.[29] On 15 March, the German government announced that it would temporarily shut down 8 of its 17 reactors, i.e. all reactors that went online before 1981.” And this was described as “The decision to phase-out nuclear power has been called the swiftest change of political course since unification.” So if a disaster was all it took for a swift change in politics then the current situation is certainly a disaster. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany
    - lispm 4y ago
      This was just going back to the earlier phase-out decision by the red/green government. The Merkel decision to slow down the phase-out was highly controversial and would have seen mass protests. Then the Fukushima-accident (where a single earthquake was enough to take out the whole nuclear industry of an advanced industrial country) happened and the decision was reversed, again.
holoduke 4y ago
And those plans will be reconsidered in 5 years from now. Cheap Russian gas will likely flow again. And don't forget Ukrainian recent found giant gas reserves. One of the reasons for this conflict.
- Krasnol 4y ago
  Do you have some magic uranium ball which tells you the future or where do you get those useless claims?
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Don't underestimate the Germans. They'll get this done. They'll be pretty far done executing those plans in five years and probably will raise the ambition level rather than lowering it. I also predict they will trigger a pretty big economic boom doing so. All that money flowing into the economy will do a lot of good. They've actually been criticized for holding back too much in the last few decades. This looks like it might be the trigger that fixes that in a hurry. Cheap Russian gas might make a brief comeback depending on if Russia is able to fix its leadership issues that are causing the current crisis. Right now it is looking pretty bad. But nothing that a Russian revolution wouldn't be able to fix. If that fails to happen, I doubt the Russians are going to get a lot of gas business from Europe with Putin remaining in power. Basically right now they are dealing with the stick part of this stick/carrot strategy. But even if that does happen, the message that they can't be trusted was received loud and clear. Business as usual is not going to be a thing any time soon. Whatever they currently still receive in terms of gas revenues will start drying up either way. Oil is going to stop flowing pretty soon. And either the Russians close of the gas or the Germans will diversify their supply to the point where it won't matter if they do because the threat of the Russians cutting them off is now both very credible and completely unacceptable as a status quo. That will make gas a lot more expensive permanently for the Germans and will only increase their ambition level with respect to reducing their dependence on it. If heating prices double or triple permanently, people are going to be pretty eager and creative getting into more cheaper ways to heat their houses. That's already happening in a lot of places.
  - 4y ago
eukgoekoko 4y ago
> Nuclear in Germany was always pretty minor. This is simply not true. According to https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage/anteil-der-atomenergie-an-der-stromerzeugung-in-deutschland/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage... nuclear's share in Hermany's total power generation was 30,6% in 2000, staying around 30% until 2009.
- RingoStar 4y ago
  No. Its not total power generatian its only nuclear energy's share of electricity generation in Germany from 2000 to 2020. From 2000 to 2009, 6 years were below 30%, 5 years below 28% and 2 years below 27%, with a low of 25.9% and a high of 32.1%. If you take the 32.1% as the maximum value with 100%, that is a little over 20% fluctuation with a clear, negative trend.
_0w8t 4y ago
In fact there is a magic wand. Germany should just drastically reduce meat consumption or at least stop growing pigs. Animal agriculture is huge energy sink. I cannot find exact numbers, but CO2 emissions from animal agriculture in Europe is bigger than emissions from all cars. And very little of it comes from animals breathing, it is energy usage that is responsible for most of it. Pigs are especially bad since they eat basically what humans can eat. So stopping producing pigs will solve both energy and food crisis. And if Denmark managed to stop pigs production in 1917 almost instantly when facing a war crisis [1], then surely modern Germany can do the same. [1] - https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2012nl/jul/hindhede.pdf https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2012nl/jul/hindhede.pdf

croes 4y ago

Gas has more use cases than just electricity. These can't easily be replaced by nuclear power.

dsnr 4y ago
Actually, gas heating can _easily_ be replaced with heat pumps assuming cheap electricity is provided.
- cschwarm 4y ago
  You can't convert about 40 million households [1] in a year or two. Also, in the German climate and with its many 'old' buildings, merely switching the heat source won't do. One also needs additional isolation, and new radiators. [1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/heating-40-million-homes-hurdles-phasing-out-fossil-fuels-german-basements https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/heating-40-millio...
  - dsnr 4y ago
    > You can't convert about 40 million households [1] in a year or two. Who's talking about a year or two? Germany has been pushing for russian gas since the 90's, against all logic.
    - vrfvr 4y ago
      > in fact you could argue that their denuclearization is the very reason Russia has so much leverage in the situation If we had more nuclear power, this wouldn't change much, if anything
      - dsnr 4y ago
        I think you replied to the wrong person.
    - dirkt 4y ago
      The logic was "if we depend on each other, Russia isn't going to pull crazy stuff". Which works with rational people (and after Gorbachev and the German reunion, the perception was that Russia is rational), but not with Putin. And you may have noticed that Russia is not cutting off delivery of Russian gas to Germany. Which they would if the damage was unilateral. Also, electrical heating is one of most wasteful and damaging ways to do heating, and Germany has been moving away from electrical heating for this reason for decades now.

jhgb 4y ago

You're confusing German gas consumption and German electricity consumption. It couldn't escape my attention that many people especially from the US make this fatal mistake (presumably because of the prevalence of natural gas electricity generation in the US - almost 40% in the US, compared to ~15% in Germany). In Germany, the vast majority of gas is being used for heating or for industrial purposes (chemistry etc.). This is not (yet) substitutable by other electricity sources. Even if the denuclearization hadn't taken place, they'd still be dependent on Russian gas for at least a significant part of their gas supply. They can always substitute basically any gas shortfalls in the electricity sector simply by increasing coal generation, since there's a lot of unused capacity now that renewables leaped massively, and even replacing all the gas currently being used for electricity generation (because there's so little of it!) with coal would not even reach the levels of coal generation that Germany had as recently as just five years ago, so the coal plants can simply somewhat increase their output for a while. What Germans currently don't have is any way to not freeze to death and keep the industry running without Russian gas.

cycomanic 4y ago
The other aspect of the Ukraine war used for advocating for nuclear, which the nuclear proponents like to omit is that 25% of European uranium comes from Russia, so Europe's dependence on Russia is even stronger for Uranium than for gas. It's simply dishonest to use the current situation as an argument for nuclear. If anything it shows that we should have invested into renewables much more strongly, but nuclear proponents were strongly arguing against it because it would have made nuclear even less financially viable.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  > so Europe's dependence on Russia is even stronger for Uranium than for gas I’d argue that it’s not about % coming from Russia that reflects dependence, it’s how easy you could switch to another supplier. How difficult would it be to find a different provider for that Uranium?
  - cycomanic 4y ago

natmaka 4y ago

Nuclear isn't better on this account: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-utilities-push-white-house-not-sanction-russian-uranium-2022-03-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-utiliti... This is even true for France, as most of its uranium comes from Kazakhstan.

thematrixturtle 4y ago
Kazakhstan is not Russia, and in fact they're rather alarmed by recent Russian sabre-rattlijg about reclaiming land in northern KZ to protect Russian speakers etc (heard this one before?). The current leadership is very much indebted to Putin though for saving them during a recent near-revolution, so they're walking a tightrope.
- drunkpotato 4y ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia had encouraged the very unrest that made them worried and indebted. Not because Putin is a Bond villain super genius but just because encouraging chaos and unrest and then playing all sides of a conflict is a standard technique of Russian foreign relations. Edit: and also used in Russian domestic affairs, didn’t mean to leave that out!
- natmaka 4y ago
  Indebted, indeed... If you really think Kazakhstan can disobey to Russia then let's agree on not living on the same planet.

anovikov 4y ago

But now Germany is committed to stopping Russian coal imports in 3 months and oil, by the year's end, and a (less format and obligatory) statement of intent to quit Russian gas too, in the next two years.