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> The issue is very divisive, but I'm glad more and more articles like these are popping up, with some hard numbers that paint a very different picture than "Ge
by glogla 4y ago
> The issue is very divisive, but I'm glad more and more articles like these are popping up, with some hard numbers that paint a very different picture than "Germany replaced nuclear with coal, madness".
The picture is not all that different sadly. Renewables are intermittent, so renewables without storage or low-carbon baseload (= nuclear) will need fossil fuels.
Germany's policy is to remove as much low-carbon baseload as possible both inside and outside its borders (by pushing anti-nuclear policies). They are doing nothing in storage.
It was basically greenwashing Russian natural gas, combined with typical German attitude of "we are the enlightened us, we know better" that makes it impossible for them to learn from this mistake.
- Gasp0de 4y agoTechnically, you can build more renewables than you need to have 100% renewables in almost all circumstances. Then you have something like gas power plants powered by gas generated from excess energy on sunny days to get through the rest of the days.
- glogla 4y agoYou're right. Low-carbon baseload, massive overprovisioning, storage or combination of these are needed to make renewables practical. The problem is, lots of people are working against low-carbon baseload for stupid reasons, storage is not really a scalably solved problem and if you account for overprovisioning, the price isn't great.
- alexvoda 4y agoAdd to that exporting too. Europe has a grid that makes trading electricity between countries possible. There are plenty of opportunities for interconnectivity resulting in better efficiency.
- Manuel_D 4y ago> Then you have something like gas power plants powered by gas generated from excess energy on sunny days to get through the rest of the days. Except this is exceptionally hard to do. There's no effective way to creating methane from atmospheric carbon dioxide. The handful of applications for the Sabatier process is using concentrated CO2 formed as byproducts from the chemical industry