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It's going to be a cold winter for sure, but I'm hoping this will force Europe to get really, really serious about renewables.
by Mizza 4y ago
It's going to be a cold winter for sure, but I'm hoping this will force Europe to get really, really serious about renewables.
- miguelazo 4y agoAs much as I support renewables, this is a very naive statement. Germany has been especially good at investing in renewables. They're not enough, especially not in the short or even medium term.
- mistrial9 4y agowhy is efficiency never discussed in public? ref: Nega-Watts
- _ph_ 4y agoYes and no. Germany was on a great track until the early 10s. There solar and wind installations peaked and then steeply declined, as a consequence of the actions of the same government which had hastened the exit from nuclear. So yes, on the one side, Germany has a quite high quota in renewables in electricity production (>50%), but we fell quite behind what would have been possible and at the same time became more dependent on Russian gas. But there is hope for things to speed up again and make good progress in the next years.
- bildung 4y ago> There solar and wind installations peaked and then steeply declined, as a consequence of the actions of the same government which had hastened the exit from nuclear. The decline hasn't much to do with nuclear, but instead with the conservative government shafting the previous infrastructure projects and subsidies for wind and pv. It was so clearly visible in the stats that it got named after the politian responsible ("Altmaier-Knick"). https://www.spektrum.de/news/erneuerbare-energien-der-energiewandel-ist-moeglich/1556660 https://www.spektrum.de/news/erneuerbare-energien-der-energi...
- _ph_ 4y agoYes, I didn't want to say it had something to do with nuclear, you are right about the Altmaier-Knick :). I just found it especially odd that the same government which had set the final end date for nuclear would slow down the one real replacement for it.
- seren 4y agoIt is hard to get any new project online in three months, but surely Europe will be really really serious about energy saving this winter, it might be a good idea to buy a few more pullovers..
- Ekaros 4y agoI don't think renewables are a solution... So might be time just to give up on climate goals and start burning lot more goal.
- unixhero 4y agoSerious about NUCLEAR
- bryanlarsen 4y agoWhich would solve the problem in about 20 years.
- beberlei 4y agonuclear energy is so expensive, take the new plants in the US and france that are being built. 10-20 years in construction, 10x over costs. You can't really build a new nuclear plant in 1-2 years
- sp332 4y agoGermany is in a unique position here, having recently shut down over a dozen nuclear plants. Three months is probably not enough to refuel, restaff and cut through the red tape, but it doesn't have to be decades.
- closedloop129 4y agoYou could take the serially produced reactors that are used in ships. If you pay enough you should get the next batch. If you push it like China pushed its emergency Covid hospital, it should be a matter of months to have some reactors going.
- ch4s3 4y agoThat doesn't replace oil/gas boilers. You can have all of the solar and wind you want, and you'd still guzzle gas in the winter using oil boilers in most of the country.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoIt ain't gonna happen in three months, but if you have all of the solar and wind you want you can stockpile synthetic methane in the summer and burn it in the winter.
- ch4s3 4y agoYou need hydrogen to produce synthetic methane, and plants to produce it. The larges source of H2 globally is from you guessed it, natural gas. To get if from electrolysis, you need an electrolysis plant near your synthetic methane plant and both need to be near water because it's difficult and dangerous to store H2. All of that would take more than months. You could probably replace a large number of boilers in 3 months. Not enough to solve the problem, but enough to make a dent. Electric boilers, while less efficient than heat pumps, only cost around $700 each and are basically a 1 for 1 replacement for a gas boiler.
- fiftyfifty 4y agoThe could use excess wind and solar electricity to power coal gasification plants to generate natural gas that they can then use in the winter, without having to retrofit any boilers. They can even make heating oil from coal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gasification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gasification
- ch4s3 4y agoThey sure could, and may end up doing that but I'd bet it's going to be politically unpalatable. Both retrofitting and coal gasification could probably be done in parallel.
- ekianjo 4y ago> really serious about renewables. I thought Germany was already really serious about renewables for the last 20 years, look where it brought them.
- beberlei 4y agoThey claimed to be really serious, but the conservative government of the last 16 years put in roadblock after roadblock, for example: * wind energy deployment decreased massively in the last 3-4 years due to bureaucracy. * Solar was always complicated, if you had it on the roof of your own house you would need to register a small business regardless and declare extra taxes every 3 month.
- mort96 4y agoIt brought them to a place which is less dependent on Russia than they otherwise would have been? And had they been yet more serious about renewables, they would have been even less dependent on Russia. If you want to criticise them, criticise them for not going with nuclear, not for trying to build out alternatives to gas. That makes no sense.
- perf1 4y agoRenewables make things much worse because they need loots of Gas as Backup if the sun isn't shining or there is no wind. Which happens very often in Germany especially in the Winter.