6 ms·

Basically, the entire European green and anti-global warming movement was either delusional or bought off and there was (and still is) not really much of a coun

by makomk 4y ago

Basically, the entire European green and anti-global warming movement was either delusional or bought off and there was (and still is) not really much of a counterbalance to this within the mainstream. They pushed for renewables that required a huge amount of natural gas as backup for when the wind dropped or the sun went behind clouds and for the shutdown of alternatives like coal and nuclear, whilst simultaneously campaigning to block new natural gas exploration and investment in Europe. This made energy supplies completely dependent on imports from totalitarian dictatorships. In addition, Germany chose to make themselves completely dependent on Russia specifically despite attempts by the US and eastern European countries to stop them and somehow arm-twisted the EU into letting them go ahead with this - but even if it wasn't for that, the natural gas capacity just isn't there to cope with Russia refusing to supply and there hasn't been the willingness to invest in building more. I don't think they've stopped this campaign even after it ended in catastrophe either. It's certainly still going on in the UK - for example just yesterday I saw a BBC article telling people that building more natural gas production here is pointless because wind and solar are cheaper, presumably based on the raw per-MWh number with no storage to fill in the gaps when it doesn't produce. That is not a useful replacement for natural gas at all.

Brometheus 4y ago
Germany produced 48% of its electricity via renewables this year so far. The surpluss energy will soon be used to electrolyze hydrogen that will be fed into our vast gas infrastructure.
- vixen99 4y ago
  Is this incorrect information?
  - anovikov 4y ago
    This is absolutely correct. And there is a lot of renewable generation in the winter too because it gets really windy in most of Germany. And sure, having about 3x renewable generation and consuming the excess generation when it's above the demand, into producing green hydrogen, is about what the longer-term plan for electricity production looks like. There will still be times when renewables will be insufficient, on calm winter days, but infrequently, and then electricity can be produced back from that green hydrogen, but overall there will be surplus, resulting in hydrogen replacing the one produced currently from fossil fuels, for steel production and other industrial uses.
  - Brometheus 4y ago
    No, it is correct information.
- rr888 4y ago
  48% of its electricity this summer I'd believe, the whole year is unlikely. The crunch is winter when there is near-zero sunlight. Solar Panels in Northern Europe is waste of money.
  - ljf 4y ago
    The lowest was 41 percent in march 2022. Jan and Feb were over 50%
    - rr888 4y ago
      https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE shows stats. Looks like Dec and Jan were windy, Feb, Mar not so much. Its higher than I expected, but not 50%. Biomass is high is that wood? I've also heard Germany fudges the numbers a lot, its coal stations take a long time to heat up and the emissions dont count if there is no electricity coming out.
      - clarionbell 4y ago
        Yep, that's wood. Some shipped from US even. Can't make this up.
        Brometheus 4y ago
        Incorrect. While would is part of it, there's also grass, leaves, and agricultural waste as well as biomass collected from water treatment plants.
  - Brometheus 4y ago
    Incorrect. Solar panels in Northern Europe provide plenty of energy. Additionally in the winter we have complementary wind production from our windfarms.
    - doikor 4y ago
      > Solar panels in Northern Europe provide plenty of energy. For ~9 months of the year. For winter you need some other form of production that you can turn on at demand. For example a panel in Helsinki produces less than 1% of its nominal output in the darkest months of winter. edit: Just go and look at https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/solar-power/ https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/sol... if you check December of 2021 you can see that the avg output was ~2MWh/h with solar 395MW of capacity installed at the end of 2021.
- ljf 4y ago
  For those doubting/disputing this - it was over 50% in q1 2022 https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-cover-50-german-electricity-consumption-first-quarter-2022 https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-cover-50-ger...
- simiones 4y ago
  What surplus? 48% is less than half, isn't it? So, another way of looking at it is - Germany is still producing most of its electricity from non-renewable sources. Adding nuclear, it's still ~40% from coal and gas [0]. So again, what surplus? In contrast, France is producing ~70% of its electricity just from nuclear, with another ~19% from renewables. Note that either way, the major energy expenditure that ties all of these countries to Russian gas is not electricity, it is heating. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/romania?country=DEU~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/romania?country=DE...
  - Brometheus 4y ago
    The surplus will be available soon. If you look at the trajectories of the installed capacity, it's obvious. Germany is in the process to switch over to electricity for heating, too. There are a lot of incentitives to install new heatpumps for example.
    - simiones 4y ago
      Let's first have that surplus, and then we can discuss how to use it. Edit: Having a mostly renewable grid with backup coal/gas/nuclear is much much easier than having an entirely renewable grid.
      - Brometheus 4y ago
        A surplus is already generated on specific days. At the moment the extra energy is thrown away, in case you didn't know.
  - the_duke 4y ago
    There often is a renewable energy surplus at night (wind /hydro) and more recently even around noon, thanks to solar. And renewables are constantly expanding. The whole problem with renewables is the temporal variation and lack of large scale storage. Producing hydrogen (and potentially converting that into more traditional gasses) is a perfectly viable solution, but of course such infrastructure can only be stood up over years and decades. It's not relevant for this winter.
- danuker 4y ago
  Doesn't hydrogen leak more through typical petroleum gas infrastructure? It has a much smaller molecule.
- finikytou 4y ago
  let's stop calling renewables the solar panels made from polysilicon using gas and creating toxic silicon tetrachloride
  - Brometheus 4y ago
    Let's not.
    - finikytou 4y ago
      what is renewable exactly? cheap early chinese panels had 10year shelf life. it is now 20-30.
pydry 4y ago
>They pushed for renewables that required a huge amount of natural gas as backup for when the wind dropped or the sun went behind clouds and for the shutdown of alternatives like coal and nuclear Except in France where they went all in on nuclear and ended up exactly as screwed as they are in Germany.
- doikor 4y ago
  France has been into nuclear for a long time but hasn't actually built a single new reactor in over 2 decades. The newest reactor running at the moment they have went online in 2002. (Yes I know they have the fancy new EPR reactor under construction in Flamanville but that is not ready yet) If France had kept the rate up of getting a new reactor up and running every 1 to 3 years like they did during the peak I don't think they would have this issue now. Also both France and Germany are at this moment heavily being propped up by Swedish nuclear power (and hydro).
  - pydry 4y ago
    Yeah, but they looked at the cost and decided not to do that. Just like germany looked at the cost of maintaining/building plants and also thought "well f**k this it isnt worth it". Even now France are spending a fortune on new reactors and it still will not be enough to make up for the ones that will age out. They're officially hoping wind and solar will make up the difference. Im pretty sure the green lobby in Germany is due an apology from the nuke fans. This all-in on nuclear approach wouldnt have worked any better for Germany than it did for France it would just have soaked up cash.
    - doikor 4y ago
      In France the nuclear is state owned (EDF owns all nuclear plants and the government owns 85% of it) and how it is actually priced is just weird/can not really be compared directly. For actual costs what you should look at are actual commercial operations like what Sweden or Finland has. > They're officially hoping wind and solar will make up the difference. You better if you don't build anything else. If I was only building X I for sure would hope that would be the solution. Hoping that the solution would be Y would be kind of self defeating. edit: Looking into this more looks like most Swedish nuclear plants are also owned by the state (though Vattenfall). Is Finland the only country with actual privately owned nuclear power plants in EU?
shmel 4y ago
Don't forget that Merkel's coalition surrounded wind energy with huge amount of red tape and regulations that basically resulted in almost zero new wind turbines built in last few years.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Compared with Portugal, it still surprises how easy it is for anyone in Germany to block wind turbines in Germany. Spoils the landscape image view is apparently a valid argument to block their construction, so you just need enough signatures every time a new construction site gets announced.
- tomp 4y ago
  When I drive around Europe (Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy) or fly above (also NETHERLANDS, Belgium, UK) Germany has *by far the most land-based wind turbines. So I think we can 100% blame “renewables”.
- pydry 4y ago
  And yet still #3 in the world by capacity.
BurningFrog 4y ago
This sounds like a Putin wishlist. Which doesn't prove Putin was influencing these policy directions, but it sure makes you wonder.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Never assume treason when ideological idiocy is enough. These are people who don't know the difference between a watt and a joule.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  Putin has had many speeches addressed at both the US and the European public denouncing precisely this behaviour by European and western politicians. The very fact that you somehow manage to spin it in the opposite direction puts you more in cahoots with these MEP nutcases than him. Here's an article from 2021 but there have been many more before and after[1] [1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/putin-blames-eu-green-policies-for-the-energy-price-spike/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/putin-bl...
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    I thought at first you were pointing out that Putin attacked these policies, as proof that they aren't pro-Russian policies, but surprisingly it looks like you're actually defending Putin and taking his side against the people advocating rolling out renewables, because you don't want his good name besmirched by being associated with Green MEPs. You genuinely think Putin tried to save the EU from this "mistake" of replacing fossil fuels with renewables?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
When we have the next gas price crisis, we can look back at this kind of comment: > I don't think they've stopped this campaign even after it ended in catastrophe either. It's certainly still going on in the UK - for example just yesterday I saw a BBC article telling people that building more natural gas production here is pointless because wind and solar are cheaper, presumably based on the raw per-MWh number with no storage to fill in the gaps when it doesn't produce. That is not a useful replacement for natural gas at all. To find out why we didn't roll out cheaper renewables, insulate our homes better and use less imported fossil fuels after the last gas price crisis. And you can go back in time, to the first Ukraine gas crisis, and back through all the other crisis and find the same kind of response from certain people, who basically had their opinions created for them with fossil fuel dollars. 2014 : "Germany’s energy policy is expensive, harmful and short-sighted" > 2014-03-17 Germany is a showcase for how-not-to in green energy. It is pumping hundreds of billions of euros into subsidies for ineffective and unreliable solar panels and wind turbines that leave poor people struggling to pay their electricity bills and do almost nothing for the climate. President Carter told people they'd need to insulate their homes and drive more efficient cars in 1977 for example, which was a poor political move in a country run by fossil fuel interests. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/19/archives/transcript-of-carters-address-to-the-nation-about-energy-problems.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/19/archives/transcript-of-ca... > One choice, of course, is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years. > Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three‐quarters of them would continue to carry only one person—the driver—while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our homes, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste. > We can continue using scarce oil and natural gas to generate electricity, and continue wasting two‐thirds of their fuel value in the process.

by makomk 4y ago

Brometheus 4y ago

Germany produced 48% of its electricity via renewables this year so far. The surpluss energy will soon be used to electrolyze hydrogen that will be fed into our vast gas infrastructure.

vixen99 4y ago
Is this incorrect information?
- anovikov 4y ago
  This is absolutely correct. And there is a lot of renewable generation in the winter too because it gets really windy in most of Germany. And sure, having about 3x renewable generation and consuming the excess generation when it's above the demand, into producing green hydrogen, is about what the longer-term plan for electricity production looks like. There will still be times when renewables will be insufficient, on calm winter days, but infrequently, and then electricity can be produced back from that green hydrogen, but overall there will be surplus, resulting in hydrogen replacing the one produced currently from fossil fuels, for steel production and other industrial uses.
- Brometheus 4y ago
  No, it is correct information.
rr888 4y ago
48% of its electricity this summer I'd believe, the whole year is unlikely. The crunch is winter when there is near-zero sunlight. Solar Panels in Northern Europe is waste of money.
- ljf 4y ago
  The lowest was 41 percent in march 2022. Jan and Feb were over 50%
  - rr888 4y ago
    https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE shows stats. Looks like Dec and Jan were windy, Feb, Mar not so much. Its higher than I expected, but not 50%. Biomass is high is that wood? I've also heard Germany fudges the numbers a lot, its coal stations take a long time to heat up and the emissions dont count if there is no electricity coming out.
    - clarionbell 4y ago
      Yep, that's wood. Some shipped from US even. Can't make this up.
      - Brometheus 4y ago
        Incorrect. While would is part of it, there's also grass, leaves, and agricultural waste as well as biomass collected from water treatment plants.
- Brometheus 4y ago
  Incorrect. Solar panels in Northern Europe provide plenty of energy. Additionally in the winter we have complementary wind production from our windfarms.
  - doikor 4y ago
    > Solar panels in Northern Europe provide plenty of energy. For ~9 months of the year. For winter you need some other form of production that you can turn on at demand. For example a panel in Helsinki produces less than 1% of its nominal output in the darkest months of winter. edit: Just go and look at https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/solar-power/ https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/sol... if you check December of 2021 you can see that the avg output was ~2MWh/h with solar 395MW of capacity installed at the end of 2021.
ljf 4y ago
For those doubting/disputing this - it was over 50% in q1 2022 https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-cover-50-german-electricity-consumption-first-quarter-2022 https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-cover-50-ger...
simiones 4y ago
What surplus? 48% is less than half, isn't it? So, another way of looking at it is - Germany is still producing most of its electricity from non-renewable sources. Adding nuclear, it's still ~40% from coal and gas [0]. So again, what surplus? In contrast, France is producing ~70% of its electricity just from nuclear, with another ~19% from renewables. Note that either way, the major energy expenditure that ties all of these countries to Russian gas is not electricity, it is heating. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/romania?country=DEU~FRA https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/romania?country=DE...
- Brometheus 4y ago
  The surplus will be available soon. If you look at the trajectories of the installed capacity, it's obvious. Germany is in the process to switch over to electricity for heating, too. There are a lot of incentitives to install new heatpumps for example.
  - simiones 4y ago
    Let's first have that surplus, and then we can discuss how to use it. Edit: Having a mostly renewable grid with backup coal/gas/nuclear is much much easier than having an entirely renewable grid.
    - Brometheus 4y ago
      A surplus is already generated on specific days. At the moment the extra energy is thrown away, in case you didn't know.
- the_duke 4y ago
  There often is a renewable energy surplus at night (wind /hydro) and more recently even around noon, thanks to solar. And renewables are constantly expanding. The whole problem with renewables is the temporal variation and lack of large scale storage. Producing hydrogen (and potentially converting that into more traditional gasses) is a perfectly viable solution, but of course such infrastructure can only be stood up over years and decades. It's not relevant for this winter.
danuker 4y ago
Doesn't hydrogen leak more through typical petroleum gas infrastructure? It has a much smaller molecule.
finikytou 4y ago
let's stop calling renewables the solar panels made from polysilicon using gas and creating toxic silicon tetrachloride
- Brometheus 4y ago
  Let's not.
  - finikytou 4y ago
    what is renewable exactly? cheap early chinese panels had 10year shelf life. it is now 20-30.

pydry 4y ago

>They pushed for renewables that required a huge amount of natural gas as backup for when the wind dropped or the sun went behind clouds and for the shutdown of alternatives like coal and nuclear Except in France where they went all in on nuclear and ended up exactly as screwed as they are in Germany.

doikor 4y ago
France has been into nuclear for a long time but hasn't actually built a single new reactor in over 2 decades. The newest reactor running at the moment they have went online in 2002. (Yes I know they have the fancy new EPR reactor under construction in Flamanville but that is not ready yet) If France had kept the rate up of getting a new reactor up and running every 1 to 3 years like they did during the peak I don't think they would have this issue now. Also both France and Germany are at this moment heavily being propped up by Swedish nuclear power (and hydro).
- pydry 4y ago
  Yeah, but they looked at the cost and decided not to do that. Just like germany looked at the cost of maintaining/building plants and also thought "well f**k this it isnt worth it". Even now France are spending a fortune on new reactors and it still will not be enough to make up for the ones that will age out. They're officially hoping wind and solar will make up the difference. Im pretty sure the green lobby in Germany is due an apology from the nuke fans. This all-in on nuclear approach wouldnt have worked any better for Germany than it did for France it would just have soaked up cash.
  - doikor 4y ago
    In France the nuclear is state owned (EDF owns all nuclear plants and the government owns 85% of it) and how it is actually priced is just weird/can not really be compared directly. For actual costs what you should look at are actual commercial operations like what Sweden or Finland has. > They're officially hoping wind and solar will make up the difference. You better if you don't build anything else. If I was only building X I for sure would hope that would be the solution. Hoping that the solution would be Y would be kind of self defeating. edit: Looking into this more looks like most Swedish nuclear plants are also owned by the state (though Vattenfall). Is Finland the only country with actual privately owned nuclear power plants in EU?

shmel 4y ago

Don't forget that Merkel's coalition surrounded wind energy with huge amount of red tape and regulations that basically resulted in almost zero new wind turbines built in last few years.

pjmlp 4y ago
Compared with Portugal, it still surprises how easy it is for anyone in Germany to block wind turbines in Germany. Spoils the landscape image view is apparently a valid argument to block their construction, so you just need enough signatures every time a new construction site gets announced.
tomp 4y ago
When I drive around Europe (Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy) or fly above (also NETHERLANDS, Belgium, UK) Germany has *by far the most land-based wind turbines. So I think we can 100% blame “renewables”.
pydry 4y ago
And yet still #3 in the world by capacity.

BurningFrog 4y ago

This sounds like a Putin wishlist. Which doesn't prove Putin was influencing these policy directions, but it sure makes you wonder.

thrown_22 4y ago
Never assume treason when ideological idiocy is enough. These are people who don't know the difference between a watt and a joule.
rjzzleep 4y ago
Putin has had many speeches addressed at both the US and the European public denouncing precisely this behaviour by European and western politicians. The very fact that you somehow manage to spin it in the opposite direction puts you more in cahoots with these MEP nutcases than him. Here's an article from 2021 but there have been many more before and after[1] [1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/putin-blames-eu-green-policies-for-the-energy-price-spike/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/putin-bl...
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I thought at first you were pointing out that Putin attacked these policies, as proof that they aren't pro-Russian policies, but surprisingly it looks like you're actually defending Putin and taking his side against the people advocating rolling out renewables, because you don't want his good name besmirched by being associated with Green MEPs. You genuinely think Putin tried to save the EU from this "mistake" of replacing fossil fuels with renewables?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

When we have the next gas price crisis, we can look back at this kind of comment: > I don't think they've stopped this campaign even after it ended in catastrophe either. It's certainly still going on in the UK - for example just yesterday I saw a BBC article telling people that building more natural gas production here is pointless because wind and solar are cheaper, presumably based on the raw per-MWh number with no storage to fill in the gaps when it doesn't produce. That is not a useful replacement for natural gas at all. To find out why we didn't roll out cheaper renewables, insulate our homes better and use less imported fossil fuels after the last gas price crisis. And you can go back in time, to the first Ukraine gas crisis, and back through all the other crisis and find the same kind of response from certain people, who basically had their opinions created for them with fossil fuel dollars. 2014 : "Germany’s energy policy is expensive, harmful and short-sighted" > 2014-03-17 Germany is a showcase for how-not-to in green energy. It is pumping hundreds of billions of euros into subsidies for ineffective and unreliable solar panels and wind turbines that leave poor people struggling to pay their electricity bills and do almost nothing for the climate. President Carter told people they'd need to insulate their homes and drive more efficient cars in 1977 for example, which was a poor political move in a country run by fossil fuel interests. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/19/archives/transcript-of-carters-address-to-the-nation-about-energy-problems.html https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/19/archives/transcript-of-ca... > One choice, of course, is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years. > Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three‐quarters of them would continue to carry only one person—the driver—while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our homes, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste. > We can continue using scarce oil and natural gas to generate electricity, and continue wasting two‐thirds of their fuel value in the process.