6 ms·

Germany starts dismantling wind farm to make room for coal mine

43 points by g42gregory 3y ago

wavesounds 3y ago
[flagged]
- rekado 3y ago
  It's a common problem with decisions made by one administration affecting some point in the future when a different administration would be in charge. I don't think they ever thought it was a good idea --- it was, however, the politically opportune thing to announce at the time. You'd think that an administration that decides to phase out nuclear power would have alternatives in place, but it's much easier to kick the can down the road to make it a problem that will be dealt with in the future.
- fabifabulous 3y ago
  It still is a very good idea. How we implemented it however, is the problem. Nuclear energy is more expensive than any other mean of energy production. That is, when subsidies and disposal of nuclear waste (for a long, long time) are part of the equation instead of privatizing earnings and collectivizing costs. Moreover, nuclear energy produces waste for generations and generations to deal with. In all those decades of nuclear energy production we haven‘t been able to find a good solution for a secure disposal of nuclear waste. Because nobody wants it nearby. Similar to the ExxonMobil CEO quickly becoming a NIMBY regarding fracking when it was supposed to take place near where he lived. The shift to renewables was slowed down because of cheap gas from Russia and „alternatives“ such as nuclear energy production. Both massive mistakes. What we had needed was massive investments and partnerships within the EU and with nearby countries such as Norway and Switzerland e.g. for pumped hydro storage, green hydrogen and massive European energy networks (e.g. for solar energy from southern Europe). That will be our tasks for the next years and statistics show that we have massive investments into solar energy and heat pumps to tackle future challenges.
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    The cost of nuclear is in planning and construction. There only scenario in which shutting down a nuclear plant within the next, say, 50 years makes sense is if it has physically deteriorated to the point of it's stability being unknown. Once there is a surplus of entirely green energy, you can consider removing nuclear idle capacity, but even then you'd have to ask "why?". Yes, nuclear produces (manageable) waste. But coal throws its waste into the air, actively killing people of lung cancer and harming cognitive ability, while slowly boiling the planet. And that's before we look at mining. Solar and wind would be nicer, but there's no discussion to be had about removing nuclear while coal and oil power is still out there killing us and the planet. Heck, if you're looking at lives saved, nuclear wins - the total direct and indirect deaths per power unit of nuclear is lower than wind, as the large number of windmills needed to be constructed bump the worksite accident numbers.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  The gas shortage is for heating and industrial use, not electric generation. Their industry is ramping up to production levels higher than pre-war which isn't helping. Also, they delayed shutdown of some nuclear plants due to the energy crisis. But guess where the fuel for their nuclear power plants was coming from? Hint: starts with an R. In the US we're replacing nuclear reactors with wind and solar at 2x the rate we're losing nuclear generation capacity. Germany has also seen incredible solar growth: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/germany-goes-all-energy-transition-with-nuclear-shutdowns-2023-04-19/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/germany-goes-all... They're still planning to eliminate coal from the grid, and not only that, they're dropping the plan to do so from 2038 to 2030: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/geared-germany-enters-second-winter-without-russian-gas#three https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/geared-germany-en...
- Dolototo 3y ago
  Only because you have no clue about our history. East Germany nuclear power plants were shut down due to security risks. Chernobyl was a fucked up crazy event here too. Even now you need to test meat from animals when they are shot I a certain area due to unhealthy levels. And while France build 56 plants we never build that many in the first place. And countries still struggle to build them. Olkiluoto 3 was planned to be done after 4 years, it took them overall 18 years! And yes we are a democracy and a lot of people in Germany don't like to live next to a nuclear power plant. France has the double of density btw. Stop writing simple comments for complex issues
Symbiote 3y ago
Is this the wind farm, in which case it's only 8 years old? https://www.rwe.com/en/the-group/countries-and-locations/koenigshovener-hoehe-onshore-wind-farm/ https://www.rwe.com/en/the-group/countries-and-locations/koe...
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  Vestas claims their turbines are carbon-neutral within 4-6 months. Even if you double that (present day claim and for offshore turbines; these turbines are older and land based), that means that for 7 years those turbines have been reducing our carbon footprint. They're almost certainly be sold and reinstalled somewhere else. HN's obsession with trying to "GOTCHA!" non-nuclear green power is so tiresome.
  - Geisterde 3y ago
    Theyre mining for coal, not openning a nature preserve.
  - Geisterde 3y ago
    Like, even if you could make the case that these have paid themselves off carbon wise, the implicit conclusion is that the wind farm was wasting space that they could use for mining coal, something they were getting rid of not long ago when they had nuclear instead. Any way you chop this, the german energy and environmental policies are strangling the economy there and represent a net regression in actual environmental conservation.
    - _ph_ 3y ago
      Nope. The wind farm wasn't wasting space. However, the coal companies had gotten mining rights for that area long ago and now exercise them for profit. Coal power generation is on an all-time low in Germany. There is also no energy shortage in Germany. When Russia started the war and cut off gas deliveries, of course the energy markets spiked, but prices are down again to pre-war levels. They are - beyond that spike - not strangling the economy. But it certainly wouldn't have hurt, if the previous government had not slowed down the ramping up of renewables.
readthenotes1 3y ago
[flagged]
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64312400 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64312400 > Germany no longer depends on Russian imports for its energy supply, the country's finance minister has told the BBC. Christian Lindner said Germany had completely diversified its energy infrastructure since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year. The need for coal is temporary. They're dropping their estimate for when they'll be coal-free from 2038 to 2030 because of the record pace of solar installation. They've been adding around 1GW a month of solar. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/08/21/germany-records-1-2-gw-of-new-solar-in-july/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/08/21/germany-records-1-2-g...
- wewxjfq 3y ago
  The only "anti-nuke" movement the Soviet Union was interested in and funded was the one against nuclear weapons being stationed in Europe, which had little to do with the Greens. Protests against nuclear power were almost always local NIMB kind of things, not bound to an ideology. Case in point: The party in Germany that now wants nuclear energy back is the party that rules out a permanent disposal site in their home state. The Greens were a tiny fringe movement that had no influence on public opinion at all. It was Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima that turned the public against nuclear energy. Russia has a much tighter grip on nuclear energy than on gas. Germany stopped using Russian gas within a year, countries are still figuring out where to get their enriched uranium from. Not to mention that many uranium suppliers are closer to the Russian sphere of influence than to the Western one, e.g. see the Nigerien coup d'état. Coal is the only fossil fuel source Germany has. Therefore, the two big parties in Germany that won every federal election in German post-war history have been friends of coal. Germany's coal addiction, just like China's, has never had anything to do with the Greens. The Greens are the most anti-Russian party in Germany, so far that Russia turned hippies into war hawks. Before the war, they were the only party opposing Nord Stream 2 and they were the only party that wanted to stop the import of Russian fossil fuels altogether, which was not a popular position to have. Conservatives painted them as hypocrites for wanting "dirty" LNG.
leobg 3y ago
Somebody please build an AI app that tracks the mentioning of countries in HN stories, and maps them to sentiments. I would be so interested in learning which country will rank number one in being laughable.
bamboozled 3y ago
Idiots
atoav 3y ago
Certainly a singular instance Germany in 2023 installed 1GW (correction: this figure was for solar, not wind) of wind power per month. Coincidentally that is roughly the yield a single nuclear powerplant would give, only that the construction of these typically take a decade, not a month. And they cost more to build and operate. And before someone says: "But what about storage, they won't give you power when you need it!" — this is a problem that can be solved with engineering, unlike the peoblem of the 10.000 year storage of decaying nuclear waste, which becomes a problem of epochal societal scale. When was the last time you had one society last for that long? How would you even calculate the cost of that? Proponents of nuclear power never price this into the energy production (somehow this is something the state has to pay for some reason? But who knows whether a state exists in 5000 years?) and always handwave away the practical problems involved with storing this in densely populated areas for a time span so long it would put us back to the dawn of humankind. Reprocessing exists, sure, but that is only a fraction of the waste.
- Geisterde 3y ago
  So, france is able to store it all in a single warehouse despite being a majority nuclear grid, so volume isnt a concern. Environmentalist policy effectively shut down a plan for long term storage where its stored underground with signs designed to be understood by future civilizations. No, instead we will do this the hard way, where we have to build out 1000x++ the worlds battery capacity because there are no environmental concerns there, makes total sense.
  - atoav 3y ago
    Sure, but there they can't get electricity in the summer when it gets to hot because they don't have enough water to cool the plants.
- yorwba 3y ago
  > Germany in 2023 installed 1GW of wind power per month I think you're confusing wind and solar. So far this year, 2.8 GW of wind power and 13.3 GW of solar have been installed. https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gaspreis-erneuerbare-energien-ausbau https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gas...
_ph_ 3y ago
Most Germans are horrified by this. But this has neither to do with the phase-out of nuclear reactors nor by the state of the energy supply in Germany in 2023. When Russia cut off the gas supply to Germany, there were of course a few concerns, but fortunately, Germany quickly managed to replace the Russian gas via the international markets. On top of that, since the change of the government in late 21, the ramp up of renewables has greatly accellerated again. As a consequence, despite taking the last 4 nuclear plants off the grid, coal usage in Germany is down considerably. The current plan is to ramp down coal till 2030 which also puts an end to mining. Still, mining some more coal is profitable for the power companies and they are pushing to mine most of the coal which was approved for mining earlier on. But there is still considerable pressure to limit mining more.
28304283409234 3y ago
> A wind farm in Germany is being dismantled to make room for the expansion of a lignite coal mine, angering climate activists. I am not an activist but it angers me. What is this for weird framing? It is infuriating, regardless of wether one is an activist.

43 points by g42gregory 3y ago

wavesounds 3y ago

[flagged]

rekado 3y ago
It's a common problem with decisions made by one administration affecting some point in the future when a different administration would be in charge. I don't think they ever thought it was a good idea --- it was, however, the politically opportune thing to announce at the time. You'd think that an administration that decides to phase out nuclear power would have alternatives in place, but it's much easier to kick the can down the road to make it a problem that will be dealt with in the future.
fabifabulous 3y ago
It still is a very good idea. How we implemented it however, is the problem. Nuclear energy is more expensive than any other mean of energy production. That is, when subsidies and disposal of nuclear waste (for a long, long time) are part of the equation instead of privatizing earnings and collectivizing costs. Moreover, nuclear energy produces waste for generations and generations to deal with. In all those decades of nuclear energy production we haven‘t been able to find a good solution for a secure disposal of nuclear waste. Because nobody wants it nearby. Similar to the ExxonMobil CEO quickly becoming a NIMBY regarding fracking when it was supposed to take place near where he lived. The shift to renewables was slowed down because of cheap gas from Russia and „alternatives“ such as nuclear energy production. Both massive mistakes. What we had needed was massive investments and partnerships within the EU and with nearby countries such as Norway and Switzerland e.g. for pumped hydro storage, green hydrogen and massive European energy networks (e.g. for solar energy from southern Europe). That will be our tasks for the next years and statistics show that we have massive investments into solar energy and heat pumps to tackle future challenges.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  The cost of nuclear is in planning and construction. There only scenario in which shutting down a nuclear plant within the next, say, 50 years makes sense is if it has physically deteriorated to the point of it's stability being unknown. Once there is a surplus of entirely green energy, you can consider removing nuclear idle capacity, but even then you'd have to ask "why?". Yes, nuclear produces (manageable) waste. But coal throws its waste into the air, actively killing people of lung cancer and harming cognitive ability, while slowly boiling the planet. And that's before we look at mining. Solar and wind would be nicer, but there's no discussion to be had about removing nuclear while coal and oil power is still out there killing us and the planet. Heck, if you're looking at lives saved, nuclear wins - the total direct and indirect deaths per power unit of nuclear is lower than wind, as the large number of windmills needed to be constructed bump the worksite accident numbers.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
The gas shortage is for heating and industrial use, not electric generation. Their industry is ramping up to production levels higher than pre-war which isn't helping. Also, they delayed shutdown of some nuclear plants due to the energy crisis. But guess where the fuel for their nuclear power plants was coming from? Hint: starts with an R. In the US we're replacing nuclear reactors with wind and solar at 2x the rate we're losing nuclear generation capacity. Germany has also seen incredible solar growth: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/germany-goes-all-energy-transition-with-nuclear-shutdowns-2023-04-19/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/germany-goes-all... They're still planning to eliminate coal from the grid, and not only that, they're dropping the plan to do so from 2038 to 2030: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/geared-germany-enters-second-winter-without-russian-gas#three https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/geared-germany-en...
Dolototo 3y ago
Only because you have no clue about our history. East Germany nuclear power plants were shut down due to security risks. Chernobyl was a fucked up crazy event here too. Even now you need to test meat from animals when they are shot I a certain area due to unhealthy levels. And while France build 56 plants we never build that many in the first place. And countries still struggle to build them. Olkiluoto 3 was planned to be done after 4 years, it took them overall 18 years! And yes we are a democracy and a lot of people in Germany don't like to live next to a nuclear power plant. France has the double of density btw. Stop writing simple comments for complex issues

Symbiote 3y ago

Is this the wind farm, in which case it's only 8 years old? https://www.rwe.com/en/the-group/countries-and-locations/koenigshovener-hoehe-onshore-wind-farm/ https://www.rwe.com/en/the-group/countries-and-locations/koe...

KennyBlanken 3y ago
Vestas claims their turbines are carbon-neutral within 4-6 months. Even if you double that (present day claim and for offshore turbines; these turbines are older and land based), that means that for 7 years those turbines have been reducing our carbon footprint. They're almost certainly be sold and reinstalled somewhere else. HN's obsession with trying to "GOTCHA!" non-nuclear green power is so tiresome.
- Geisterde 3y ago
  Theyre mining for coal, not openning a nature preserve.
- Geisterde 3y ago
  Like, even if you could make the case that these have paid themselves off carbon wise, the implicit conclusion is that the wind farm was wasting space that they could use for mining coal, something they were getting rid of not long ago when they had nuclear instead. Any way you chop this, the german energy and environmental policies are strangling the economy there and represent a net regression in actual environmental conservation.
  - _ph_ 3y ago
    Nope. The wind farm wasn't wasting space. However, the coal companies had gotten mining rights for that area long ago and now exercise them for profit. Coal power generation is on an all-time low in Germany. There is also no energy shortage in Germany. When Russia started the war and cut off gas deliveries, of course the energy markets spiked, but prices are down again to pre-war levels. They are - beyond that spike - not strangling the economy. But it certainly wouldn't have hurt, if the previous government had not slowed down the ramping up of renewables.

readthenotes1 3y ago

[flagged]

KennyBlanken 3y ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64312400 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64312400 > Germany no longer depends on Russian imports for its energy supply, the country's finance minister has told the BBC. Christian Lindner said Germany had completely diversified its energy infrastructure since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year. The need for coal is temporary. They're dropping their estimate for when they'll be coal-free from 2038 to 2030 because of the record pace of solar installation. They've been adding around 1GW a month of solar. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/08/21/germany-records-1-2-gw-of-new-solar-in-july/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/08/21/germany-records-1-2-g...
wewxjfq 3y ago
The only "anti-nuke" movement the Soviet Union was interested in and funded was the one against nuclear weapons being stationed in Europe, which had little to do with the Greens. Protests against nuclear power were almost always local NIMB kind of things, not bound to an ideology. Case in point: The party in Germany that now wants nuclear energy back is the party that rules out a permanent disposal site in their home state. The Greens were a tiny fringe movement that had no influence on public opinion at all. It was Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima that turned the public against nuclear energy. Russia has a much tighter grip on nuclear energy than on gas. Germany stopped using Russian gas within a year, countries are still figuring out where to get their enriched uranium from. Not to mention that many uranium suppliers are closer to the Russian sphere of influence than to the Western one, e.g. see the Nigerien coup d'état. Coal is the only fossil fuel source Germany has. Therefore, the two big parties in Germany that won every federal election in German post-war history have been friends of coal. Germany's coal addiction, just like China's, has never had anything to do with the Greens. The Greens are the most anti-Russian party in Germany, so far that Russia turned hippies into war hawks. Before the war, they were the only party opposing Nord Stream 2 and they were the only party that wanted to stop the import of Russian fossil fuels altogether, which was not a popular position to have. Conservatives painted them as hypocrites for wanting "dirty" LNG.

leobg 3y ago

Somebody please build an AI app that tracks the mentioning of countries in HN stories, and maps them to sentiments. I would be so interested in learning which country will rank number one in being laughable.

bamboozled 3y ago

Idiots

atoav 3y ago

Certainly a singular instance Germany in 2023 installed 1GW (correction: this figure was for solar, not wind) of wind power per month. Coincidentally that is roughly the yield a single nuclear powerplant would give, only that the construction of these typically take a decade, not a month. And they cost more to build and operate. And before someone says: "But what about storage, they won't give you power when you need it!" — this is a problem that can be solved with engineering, unlike the peoblem of the 10.000 year storage of decaying nuclear waste, which becomes a problem of epochal societal scale. When was the last time you had one society last for that long? How would you even calculate the cost of that? Proponents of nuclear power never price this into the energy production (somehow this is something the state has to pay for some reason? But who knows whether a state exists in 5000 years?) and always handwave away the practical problems involved with storing this in densely populated areas for a time span so long it would put us back to the dawn of humankind. Reprocessing exists, sure, but that is only a fraction of the waste.

Geisterde 3y ago
So, france is able to store it all in a single warehouse despite being a majority nuclear grid, so volume isnt a concern. Environmentalist policy effectively shut down a plan for long term storage where its stored underground with signs designed to be understood by future civilizations. No, instead we will do this the hard way, where we have to build out 1000x++ the worlds battery capacity because there are no environmental concerns there, makes total sense.
- atoav 3y ago
  Sure, but there they can't get electricity in the summer when it gets to hot because they don't have enough water to cool the plants.
yorwba 3y ago
> Germany in 2023 installed 1GW of wind power per month I think you're confusing wind and solar. So far this year, 2.8 GW of wind power and 13.3 GW of solar have been installed. https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gaspreis-erneuerbare-energien-ausbau https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gas...

_ph_ 3y ago

Most Germans are horrified by this. But this has neither to do with the phase-out of nuclear reactors nor by the state of the energy supply in Germany in 2023. When Russia cut off the gas supply to Germany, there were of course a few concerns, but fortunately, Germany quickly managed to replace the Russian gas via the international markets. On top of that, since the change of the government in late 21, the ramp up of renewables has greatly accellerated again. As a consequence, despite taking the last 4 nuclear plants off the grid, coal usage in Germany is down considerably. The current plan is to ramp down coal till 2030 which also puts an end to mining. Still, mining some more coal is profitable for the power companies and they are pushing to mine most of the coal which was approved for mining earlier on. But there is still considerable pressure to limit mining more.

28304283409234 3y ago

> A wind farm in Germany is being dismantled to make room for the expansion of a lignite coal mine, angering climate activists. I am not an activist but it angers me. What is this for weird framing? It is infuriating, regardless of wether one is an activist.