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Wind farm in Germany is being dismantled to expand coal mine

• themaninthedark 4y ago
  >The decision to demolish Lützerath was made in accordance with the country’s new coal policy to temporarily increase the use of lignitefor electricity production during the energy crisis, Clean Energy Wire reported. If only there was another power source that could be used, perhaps one that didn't rely on burning fossil fuels, if only...
  • iab 4y ago
    I think it’s too expensive to build a dam there
  • gtirloni 4y ago
    This news aside, I think the world still associates Germany with engineering excellence so, to see them abandon nuclear power for political reasons comes as a shock.
    • astrange 4y ago
      They also have a cultural fondness for green party/hippiedom unfortunately.
      • ulfw 4y ago
        Germany as a society tends to be prone to obsessions. The current one is climate. There is no other discussion in the media and politics. Nothing else important to focus on. Kids are glueing themselves onto streets because their obsessions aren't satisfied strongly enough. The brainwashing is real. Unfortunately obsessions lead to lack of wider thinking or logic.
        • cubefox 4y ago
          The irony is that our obsession with disabling nuclear power works contrary to any climate obsession. When the two are played out against each other, the anti-nuclear ambitions win. Disabling nuclear power is apparently more important than disabling coal power plants. And than dealing with soaring energy costs and a potential blackout.
        • kitkat_new 4y ago
          you really have a strange framing here, given climate change is a real threat. And fighting it isn't something that only Germany is tasked with. btw. it's not kids, but grown ups of all ages that are gluing themselves onto streets; in various countries
          • pxmpxm 4y ago
            > climate change is a real threat. I'm rather sure that not being able to afford energy - heat in the winer - is a the real existential threat to a kid in continental Europe. Worrying about sea level going up 10cm in his/her lifetime is a rich person hobby.
            • danielheath 4y ago
              > Worrying about sea level going up 10cm in his/her lifetime is a rich person hobby. Worrying about the future past next year is definitely a rich person hobby, if you define "rich" as "not imminently starving". Sea level rise is the least of the trouble. Look at fisheries decline (yield per inflation-adjusted-dollar spent has been recorded for a long time now - in spite of new tech it's been dropping for over a century), temperature-driven crop failures, increased frequency of severe storms damaging infrastructure.
            • scythe 4y ago
              Sea level is projected to rise 30 centimeters over the next 30 years. The rate is gradually accelerating, so the coming century will see more than a meter. But the primary near-term risks from climate change are heat damaging crops, (wet) heat killing humans, declining soil moisture in some regions, and increased risk of flooding along some rivers. Over two centuries, coastal cities may be inundated, but that is a long time.
      • Zardoz89 4y ago
        Nuclear dissolution is a CDU policy, but good job regurgitiating the rhetoric
        • prottog 4y ago
          The CDU was in power when they proposed the timelines that ended up in the closures we saw recently, but the electoral success of the Green Party in that election cycle was a key factor. Your summary is disingenuous.
        • est31 4y ago
          The original dissolution was passed as a plan during Schröder's first term, aka in the SPD/Green government, in 2002. Later, in 2010, the CDU/FDP government modified the plan and gave the power plant providers more budget. About half a year after this law has passed the Bundestag, the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident happened and a commission was established to study the security of nuclear power. Then, yes, CDU and FDP agreed upon a new plan to exit nuclear power earlier than their original extension planned, and some power plants were turned off right away. You can point your finger at the CDU, but saying that the CDU was the big driving force is disingenous. It seems that Germany's descisions on exiting nuclear power plants are always unhappily timed. First, Fukushima happens, making the extension a few months earlier look really weird. Then, the Ukraine war happens, rendering Germany's original plan moot to replace coal with natural gas from russia, and everyone is shaking their head again as Germany is keeping to the original plan.
        • zsz 4y ago
          It was the Greens who campaigned throughout the 80s and beyond to instill irrational fear in German kids in the 80s, so they would opt for an impulsive solution, instead of a rational one in subsequent decades. It was always the Greens whose very platform stood for ending nuclear power, by any means necessary. The reason why Germany today is so staunchly anti-nuclear is because that's how the Greens ("Die Gruenen") defined itself as a political party in the 80s. In fact, that was a (if not the) principal motivation for its inception. The party may seem more mainstream 30 years later, but around the 80s when they laid all the groundwork for the anti-nuclear stance of present day Germany, they were definitely a party still better known for, and even defined by their more radical members. That the current generation of voters who supported the shutdown of nuclear power production were substantially "encouraged" to adopt such views by said Greens' actions and politics when they were children and teenagers living in the 80s is incontrovertible fact. So, even if Merkel ended up as the one who executed the will of the people as head of the CDU, that will had nothing to do with CDU policy, and certainly not in the 80s and 90s. That was by definition the policy of the Greens, who also laid the groundwork for the irrational fear that Germans in their 40s and 50s have been cultivating for decades. Why can i say this with complete certainty? Because I was one of those kids.
    • bumby 4y ago
      There’s also a history of civic distrust when it comes to nuclear. After Chernobyl there was conflicting information about safe thresholds and later revisions. There’s been some write-ups stating government transparency and trust are as big of an issue as safety.
      • jones6ofMont 4y ago
        [dead]
    • nemo44x 4y ago
      > I think the world still associates Germany with engineering excellence… Do people feel that way? Their automobiles are some of the worst from an engineering perspective and the only software company I can think of is the dinosaur SAP. When I think of Germany I do not think of good engineering but rather automobiles that lose so much value so quickly because the have expensive and frequent maintenance costs and outdated software companies. Germany makes things unnecessarily complex and therefore prone to failure. It’s a cultural thing I believe. In which ways us Germany considered excellent at engineering today?
      • tbrake 4y ago
        Whoa whoa. The "association" OP speaks of is down to effective marketing - creating a common image of German product/industrial design as meticulous and high performing - not some objective engineering ranking.
        • nemo44x 4y ago
          Good point. Germans are good at marketing I guess. But very poor engineers.
          • nikau 4y ago
            It's not the engineers, it's the consumer demand for things other than depreciation and longevity.
            • nemo44x 4y ago
              Other places make performant things that have far more longevity. Japan for instance. It’s a cultural thing in Germany. I’ve spent a good deal of time there and was surprised how good at marketing they are and how bad at building. German exports of many things are of very low quality but high prices.
      • marcosdumay 4y ago
        At the electricity generation, ironically, the two well regarded players are Siemens and GE, only Siemens for its quality (what may or may not reflect the reality of the last decades, no idea).
  • bboygravity 4y ago
    Germany was bought by the Russians. There's no other logical way to explain what's happening IMO. Their decisions are worse than incompetence alone.
    • nailer 4y ago
      What I would do, if I wanted to increase Germany’s reliance on Russia, is use money to ensure the voices of real German people who oppose nuclear power were amplified.
      • bboygravity 3y ago
        In my opinion it's extremely likely that this happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa... All Russia had to do is use their unlimited money (from selling gas to Germany) to buy some influence in German news papers (difficulty level: easy) and maybe pay some people to organize protests. Of course the fact that Russians bought Schroder isn't even speculation (unlike the above). To me the above is extremely likely to have happened (and probably still on-going).
    • legulere 4y ago
      How so? Germany completely got rid of Russian dependence in the energy sector. It’s France that is blocking sanctions on Russian nuclear industry.
      • bboygravity 3y ago
        That's very recent isn't it? Even in the early days of Putin's war Germany was still sponsoring Putin by buying many 100's of millions of EUR of gas from him. They "got rid of Russian dependence in the energy sector" by reopening old German coal mines, firing up coal power plants and shifting gas imports from Russia to the US + importing tons of nuclear energy from France. Germany only stopped buying Russian gas for > 50% of their energy needs AFTER a war started AFTER the pipelines to Russia got bombed and AFTER they had no other choice.
      • 4y ago
  • _cenw 4y ago
    We could've let the existing plants run for a while, but getting a supply chain restarted and plants recertified when the entire country is phrasing them out is not trivial, especially not on short notice. (And also, the fuel rods usually come from Russia). We also would have to get foreign workers. A lot of NPP workers went into early retirement.
  • legulere 4y ago
    There is with renewables which are massively being built out. So far they completely replaced nuclear while also reducing coal power production from 45% in 2013 to 24% in 2020. By law there will be no more coal power in 2038, although 2030 or earlier is a more realistic date because of rising costs.
    • toomuchtodo 4y ago
      Germany is actually ideal for maximizing renewables because of the 12 interconnects to other electrical grids, along with their ~10GW hydro storage and ~5GW hydro. It should only take another few tens of GW to phase coal out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
  • niemandhier 4y ago
    Storage of nuclear wast turned out to be a hard to solve problem. As of now Germany has no “Endlagerstätte”, all current wast storage sides are intermediate. The last attempt to establish a permanent storage side failed horribly and the nuclear wast that was interned there will be extracted under high costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
    • aeternum 4y ago
      No one seems to care about the nuclear radiation release from coal-fired plants.
      • midoridensha 4y ago
        Unlike nuclear waste which takes up space in barrels, coal-fired radiation and pollution isn't a problem, because it goes into the air where everyone can breathe it. This is clearly better for the environment and also human health: just ask any German environmentalist.
        • Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
          most radioactive waste created by coal power is filtered and ends up in barrels as well, and nuclear power also release radioactive waste into the atmosphere for everyone to breath, especially when looking at the whole cycle, including mining, milling and reprocessing.
          • midoridensha 4y ago
            Citation needed.
            • Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
              United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation - 2016 Report to the General Assembly - Scientific Annex B
• obblekk 4y ago
  Is it possible the German Green Party ends up destroying more of the environment than every other party would have?
  • proudeu 4y ago
    Speaking as someone who voted for them: I have never been more let down by anyone as much as the Green Party in my life. They act like neocons nowadays basically.
    • nforgerit 4y ago
      Same here. It all feels like Jürgen Trittin's lifework, deciding end of nuclear in early 2000s, was prioritized higher than climate change. Everyday I'm looking at the energy mix, I'm getting very angry that they decided to bet everything on being able to grow renewables in never-before-manner; that in a situation of an almost recession, a lack of workers, government paralysis due to over-bureaucratic processes, et al. It's so stupid, it makes me wanna leave the country. Edit: And though I'm pro delivering weapons to Ukraine, I was deeply disgusted by their socialmedia marketing ("free the leopards").
      • legulere 4y ago
        Isn’t recession and lack of workers contradictory?
        • fileeditview 4y ago
          I don't think so. Lack of workers means you cannot e.g. produce all the goods you want to produce. This will result in less goods being sold -> recession. So basically the lack of workers could be understood as a potential to grow but if you cannot satisfy the demand for workers it will have the opposite effect. I am not an economist so it might be totally wrong but that is my understanding. edit: fixed typos
          • Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
• xenospn 4y ago
  I’m so confused. I always thought Germany was at the forefront of green technology and sustainable resource management. Was I mistaken all this time?
  • MattGaiser 4y ago
    Kind of, but nobody is that far with green technology unless they have hydro and they have a lot fewer resources than other countries.
    • proudeu 4y ago
      I think we used to be at the forefront but since 2-3 years China gained a lot of ground in terms of high tech Green energy products. They might as well have surpassed us in few fields.
      • robocat 4y ago
        They might be building some green energy, however meanwhile “China has six times as much [coal powered] plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined.” (March 2023) https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
  • anonporridge 4y ago
    Germany has one of the most carbon heavy electric grids in western Europe, https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE Compare them to nuclear heavy, clean France. Your perception has been deceived by marketing. Stop following the news. Follow the data instead.
    • legulere 4y ago
      Electricitymaps is not a reliable source. For instance they calculate PV being produced with 100% coal
    • 4y ago
• stall84 4y ago
  Dude they just (apparently) gave up on nuclear ..
  • gmerc 4y ago
    No they bet on cheap russian power due to a combination of compromised politicians and the lure of extra cheap and low friction power. Make no mistake, people didn’t like nuclear in Germany for historic reasons fusing cold war armageddon fears, Chernobyl Trauma and anti-americanism. The majority did not like it. Every nuclear fuel transport was a fight. Every power plant was fought by a combination of NIMBY and groundswell opposition. We are tightly settled and no place could be found to dispose of nuclear fuel that didn’t have the entire local population rise up. They voted for it to be abandoned. And then the russians came along offering basically out of sight, NIMBY proof power cheap, an unreasonable package for politicians. (Germany’s are the greatest NIMBY nation in the world. We fight power lines (it makes children sick), wind power (it kills birds), prisons (they create crime), internet lines (they destroy nature), wifi (makes children sick). We, especially our intellectuals, are a bunch of crazy ass people with centuries deep insane obsession about homeopathy, Kneipp. Ideological blinders so large they blot out the sun about misunderstood peaceful russians. The last 15 years of German prosperity was not, as people would love to delude themselves, engineering ingenuity- it as powered by cheap Russian power, out of sight, and Chinese Manufacturing. The entire economy got addicted to it and the party stopped last year and the cost of it has become apparent. The Nuclear decision has to be seen in that context, a ruinously stupid short term focused energy policy influenced by well placed Russian corruption and passed by the largest parties in the country because their constituents, large industries, donors and yes, unions, wanted it. It was a devils bargain but it allowed them to pretend progress. Now the green party, who yes always wanted this but never ever had the power to force any of it, is a convenient scapegoats for ‘you made the population do it’, but that entirely flies in the face of how decisions are made and laws are passed in Germany.
• camdenlock 4y ago
  Has anyone managed to figure out why Germany is behaving so irrationally with respect to nuclear power?
  • stainablesteel 4y ago
    its not specific to germany, they just happen to be doing it on this specific issue the current times have made the optics even crisper
  • legulere 4y ago
    It’s not irrational. Nuclear isn’t that compatible with renewables because it is bad at load following (technical and economically even worse). Further nuclear likely comes with catastrophes like Fukushima every few decades and the problem of nuclear waste (just calculate what posting a single person to watch it for a million years costs). Germany suffers from Chernobyl to this day with mushrooms and game being contaminated with radionuclides above legal limits. Germany has managed to reduce both fossil fuel use in total as well as coal use for electricity while shutting down nuclear (https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschland.svg https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutsch...). Nuclear now being shut down we can expect faster shutdown of coal plants.
• largepeepee 4y ago
  It makes sense in a cynical capitalistic way. Energy company builds green energy farms to milk govt credits/funding and getting good PR to cover their "dirtier" energy sources. Govt credit period eventually expired, and price of coal exploded so company decides to exploit some of the many coal mines they were sitting on. Not sure why other commentators run off-topic about something like this when it comes to Germany.
  • cubefox 4y ago
    That's all caused by bad politics, not by capitalism.
    • largepeepee 4y ago
      Politics in Germany is heavily sentiment driven and shorter term populous focused. So you are effectively blaming the public. Besides these decisions were mostly driven by the company seeking profits not politics. So you are wrong.
      • cubefox 4y ago
        Yes, politics and people, those two are interlinked in a democracy. Blaming capitalism is a convenient scapegoat, since this shifts the blame from both politicians and voters.
• Thaxll 4y ago
  Angela Merkel legacy.
• nforgerit 4y ago
  German here. To be fair, Germany has a bit of a history concerning energy. I'm not blindly supporting those actions (and am actually deeply concerned) but a bit of context might be valuable: 1) In early 2000s the then government (coalition of Social Democrats and Green party) decided to end nuclear and to fully transform the country to renewable energy; the Greens are heavily influenced by 1980s anti-nuclear movement. I still think that this decision was mindblowingly progressive and valuable at that time. As a "bridge technology" they wanted to use natural gas (hence the good friendship between ex-chancellor Schröder and Putin). 2) The Merkel-led gov't in 2010 (coalition of Conservatives and Liberals) decided to prolong nuclear (no real reason, imho more of a "we know better"). 3) Fukushima happened in 2011. Germans were concerned in surveys and Merkel (imho stupidly) decided to make nuclear's deadline even earlier (end of 2022) causing huge fees the gov't had to pay to energy companies (afair 1-2 billion EUR). Running plants were shutdown between 2011 and 2022. Meanwhile Germany's dependence on cheap natural gas imports from Russia went up. Chemical Industry, electrification and warming were the main uses. I think they doubled or so at that time. 4) Putin invaded Ukraine. Sanctions on gas exports (imho rightly) happened and gas prices skyrocketed. Putin completely turned off the gas. The current gov't (Social Democrats, Liberals and Green party) had to decide on what to do. So they decided to build LNG ports and continue phasing out nuclear which at that time only contributed around 6% to electrical power because all the other plants were already shutdown. 5) They still needed to find a way to produce electric energy in case renewable energy is not available (due to cheap Russian gas there was zero incentive to create waus to save energy) so they're now burning coal and heavily need to buy CO2 certificates and bet on that it will get so expensive that energy companies will invest heavily into renewables. The signal though is horrifying. I hate everything of this typical German kind of stupid compromises.
  • cubefox 4y ago
    > I still think that this decision was mindblowingly progressive and valuable at that time. But that's not rational. Disabling nuclear power more than negates the effects of investing in wind and solar. Actually wind and solar are worse than nuclear, since the former are highly volatile and can't act as a stable baseline energy source.
• 0dayz 4y ago
  I could forgive any blunder Germany did/does if it at least had: * A radical plan to expand green energy more than any other country * Or was one of the leading countries behind fusion or had grand plans for being the first to open up experimental fusion power plants / research as soon as it's available. Especially after the Russian gas fiasco, I just can't wrap my head around Germany with their plan. It feels almost like there is none, just how does Germany expect to fulfill any green transition if they aren't investing like crazy in one or the other?
  • ed25519FUUU 4y ago
    It looks like after the Russian gas fiasco they’re prioritizing energy independence, not necessarily clean energy. Through the lens of energy independence this move makes a lot of sense.
    • nforgerit 4y ago
      Plus, if the CO2 certificates get horribly expensive in the upcoming years and there's only renewables left, then energy companies will invest all their money in renewables and developing ways to make it a stable energy source.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • legulere 4y ago
      The plan for German energy independence is renewables. There’s a lot of coal that was now decided to stay in the ground. Also the coal mine of the article was decided to be closed later. The only fossil infrastructure being expanded is for liquid gas import to replace Russian gas imports.
• elif 4y ago
  This reminds me of the introduction to Walden where Thoreau is sitting on his porch one day, and he sees men laboring intensely to move logs one way down the street in front of his house, and then later that day, sees a different set of men laboring intensely to move the same logs back the other direction. Only under a blind self interest system like capitalism can this kind of wasted effort be rationalized.
• narrator 4y ago
  I made the argument earlier[1] that if climate change was a global institution friendly way to talk about oil production failing to grow any more and possibly falling causing catastrophic effects on human civilization that all sectors of society would need to prepare for, that carbon capture efforts would be token only and coal would be the big mega winner. Now we see that India and China seem to be increasing their coal production as fast as they can [2] and now Germany is doing likewise. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35702201&p=2#35703919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35702201&p=2#35703919 [2]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-country https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-countr...
  • legulere 4y ago
    Germany isn’t advancing coal production but reducing it. This mine in particular recently was decided to be shut down earlier. India and China are building coal power plants as they have a rising electricity use and don’t manage to build enough renewables and nuclear
• Brybry 4y ago
  The article says the wind farm consists of 8 turbines. A quick google suggests Germany has ~28,440 on-shore turbines.
• natmaka 4y ago
  In 2010 Germany delayed its nuclear phase-out (by 12 years), then the Fukushima accident led the opinion to demand a much quicker phase-out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Closures_and_phase-out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Closu... Before 2013 and the current crisis Germany uses less and less coal, and gas (methane...) is stable: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source?country=~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
• nummerfuenf 4y ago
  That's news from last year. Also the operator RWE has built replacement windmills somewhere else.