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The Great German Energy Experiment

243 points by pdelgallego 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
macavity23 14y ago
Great article - upvoted. That it's inconceivable that the US or UK government could think about spending such an amount (~5% of GDP!) on a long-term science and engineering project speaks volumes about why the Germans are where they are, and why we're where we are, economically speaking. From an engineering point of view I think it's foolish to turn off the nuke plants, but public opinion is what it is, and this causes the regulatory requirements to prevent nuclear from being economically viable. The article does a good job of covering the risks, but personally I'd bet on the Germans here - even if the 'Energiewende' doesn't pay off per se, the rewards from the science and engineering knowhow will be huge. The only comparable project I can think of is the Apollo Program, though a quick google suggests that was never more than 1% of GDP, and the returns from the science on that were massive and lasted for decades. Likewise, CERN, which was about as blue-sky as things get, gave us the World Wide Web: completely tangential to its stated purpose, but what kind of rate of return did that give us? So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run? (On a side note, I really want to have a stickybeak around a 30MW AC/DC converter!)
- johnchristopher 14y ago
  > So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run? Does the superconducting super collider fulfill your criterias (let's forget for a minute that it is about destroying particles in new and exciting ways) ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
  - macavity23 14y ago
    Interesting, thanks. A reference from that page - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-big-science/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-... - suggests: One thing that killed the SSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending. There was even nonsense in the press about spending on potted plants for the corridors of the administration building. Projected costs did increase, but the main reason was that, year by year, Congress never supplied sufficient funds to keep to the planned rate of spending. This stretched out the time and hence the cost to complete the project. Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier. Leading one to believe that it was actually a good project that was stiffed by a congress in search of tax cuts. Who knows whether that's true, of course.
- simonh 14y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to count incidental benefits from projects, such as the WWW from CERN. The same basic problem of sharing information between scientists would still have existed without CERN, and who's to say it or something even better, with fewer of HTTP/HTML's limitations wouldn't have been developed if TBL had been working on a different project? The space race argument is another old sore, it turns out many of the discoveries ascribed to it were actually developed independently, but then were used by NASA who ended up getting the credit. Teflon is often cited, but was actually discovered in 1938 and patented in 1945. Yes a lot of great technologies were developed for Apollo and used in other areas, but many or perhaps all of them would have been developed eventually anyway.
  - koide 14y ago
    I don't think it's reasonable to discount all the subproducts from such an investment just because many would have been developed eventually anyway. In this vein, it's just as easy to discount the people who did the inventions/discoveries because someone else would have eventually made the discovery/invention anyway. Of course that the main project has to be sound, and cannot be justified only due to the subproducts, but "would have happened anyway" is not a solid argument to discount the subproducts, mainly because you cannot know if it would, nor when it would.
    - WalterBright 14y ago
      Consider the invention of the airplane. The Wrights certainly invented it, but if you take a good look at what the other experimenters were doing, it's a pretty good bet that others would have gotten the pieces together in probably another 5 years. (The Wrights succeeded arguably because they had the first directed research & development program, while the others basically just bumbled about trying things in a seat-of-the-pants manner. None of them, for example, seem to have done any calculation of how much wing area was needed or how much power was required.)
      - koide 14y ago
        On the other hand, consider how vaccination was invented or any other "accidental" discovery/invention. I'm aware that there are inventions that even happen at almost exactly the same time, especially when the research on the subject is ripe enough. But when chance is a factor or the subject is not researched enough (or at all) then the confidence of an hypothesized invention happening in a close timeframe to the actual invention diminishes greatly.
- arethuza 14y ago
  "has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run" Having been on large EU funded projects (all part of the ESPRIT II program), I honestly can't believe that they provided good value for money. Now there might have been a lot of indirect benefits, but I'm not aware of the results of the projects I worked on being directly used by anyone.
  - eru 14y ago
    Also the US Space Shuttle had a cost 1000-fold cost overrun, if measured by cost to orbit per unit of mass.
- loceng 14y ago
  The economics are easy. Money on war 'invests' your resources into other countries (no return, negative return likely), vs. money on innovation and infrastructure in your own country (positive return, long-term; potential for making other things more efficient, more cost-efficient become higher).
  - gaius 14y ago
    Sorry, but that's nonsense, you cannot underestimate the impact of military technologies like jet engines, radar, communications satellites, GPS, the internet, superglue... The whole of the modern world is based on military tech. Plus you gainfully employ lots of people (e.g. teaching trades to people who haven't done well in mainstream education) and as a free bonus you get the defence of the realm.
    - eru 14y ago
      You are comparing the benefits of war to the wrong base. The civilians wouldn't have just burned all the riches (like war literally does to some extent), but would have used it to develop new products, too. Nowadays the military actually uses consumer electronics.
    - loceng 14y ago
      You need to separate contexts of war and innovation. An example, this innovation could come through a budget for space exploration, or other means of transportation. The world is based on science tech. Yes, a lot was discovered in science through military budgets, but it's not exclusive to being put into the military - which I think can easily be argued has huge wastes of resources just by looking at industrial complex structures.
    - hollerith 14y ago
      >jet engines, radar, communications satellites, GPS, the internet, superglue Don't forget computers: Turing's work relies heavily on his experiences working at Bletchley Park, ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, and the calculational needs of the Manhattan Project drove a lot of early computer development.
- larrydag 14y ago
  Some large scale projects that come to mind include Panama Canal, USA Highway system, Alaskan pipeline although you could argue they did destroy some things.
- cturner 14y ago
  Theere's a basic role of government that's widely agreed upon - that it keeps us from hurting one another and clarity on the use of roads and telecommunications channels and the like. And I realise that opinions diverge above that, but I'll put mine. Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient, and seems like a bad place to look for inspiration in engineering. When governments set up things like NASA they become political institutions themselves. It's easy for them to grow into organisations that seek self-preservation and always more money to support the glamour of their leadership. When government gets involved in a field, you get a cross-polination between field-experts and government people. Often the government people end up on the side of workers in the field rather than the public that they're meant to be serving. Given all these problems, I don't think we should be attracted to the idea of governments taxing us to spend the money on difficult-to-quantify never-never projects. They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects.
  - eru 14y ago
    > They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects. Or, if you agree that a low-carbon future would be a good thing: Tax carbon usage, and, since you don't like the government spending money, just distribute the proceeds equally among the population. This works out to a net impact, modulo transactions costs, on the average carbon-emitting person of zero, but rewards and punishes the outliers.
    - cheez 14y ago
      A lot of the reason why there is no natural incentive to develop new sources of energy is that the government works hand in hand with energy companies to prevent it for example, via drilling rights, subsidized prices making it uneconomical to research better sources because the companies can guarantee their profits.
    - anamax 14y ago
      What if I don't agree that a low-carbon future would be a good thing? What if I think that the tax is too high? What if I have higher priorities?
- Tichy 14y ago
  Being German and having voted Green most of my life (until the pirate party came along), I still watch those energy subsidies with suspicion. I am just not certain the money is spent in an efficient way here. As for the jobs in the green energy sector, apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells. So much for that investment.
  - CrLf 14y ago
    "apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells" Yeah, but that's because China can violate any worker rights under the Sun, and pollute as much as it wishes in the process (and producing solar cells pollutes quite a bit).
  - excuse-me 14y ago
    What's the problem? You close the nukes so everyone with an "Atomkraft Nein Danke" sticker on their VW votes for you. You give huge feed in tarrif subsidy to anyone who owns a house to put panels on their roof - so the countryside votes for you. You continue to subsidize coal so the Ruhr votes for you. But burn the coal in Poland and ship the power back - so there is no acid rain to worry about. A perfect (if expensive) solution for everyone (unless you live east of Poland)
  - kaybe 14y ago
    Other countries ripping the technology off is part of the plan, as far as I understood it. We can talk them into using less fossil fuels (probably won't work), or use incentives (which would again cost money), or we can create a by then cheap technology for getting Co2-free energy which will be stolen by everyone. Comparing costs from climate change adaption and avoidance shows that avoidance is far cheaper - and in both cases the developed countries will have to carry the majority. (Just imagine the situation if half of Asia and Africa's harvests fail.) The investment here is not just an economic one, it goes much further.
- mbq 14y ago
  The problem is that this money is spent not on how to make usable "green" energy but how to be more efficient in consuming gov's subsidies to "green" technologies.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  You are equating spending towards merely manufacturing PV arrays and wind plants with spending on R&D, that is not the same thing. Apollo isn't even a remotely comparable program because that was the creation of new technologies. The comparable program here would be the interstate highway system, perhaps.
- xxgreg 14y ago
  Not ~5%GDP. "the country will spend somewhere between $125 billion and "$250 billion on infrastructure expansion and subsidies in the next eight years—between 3.5 and 7 percent of Germany's 2011 GDP" The sentence is a bit confusing but I think they mean this: ~5% of 2011 GDP / 8 years = ~0.6% 2011GDP per year.
kfk 14y ago
I don't like this. Instead of heavily subsidizing some technologies, they should tax externalities (i.e. pollution) and let the markets do the rest. It's annoying having to pay 15% more energy bills because somebody has decided that wind and solar are the hot thing of the moment. Bad, really bad. Same way of thinking that brought us to the debt crisi in Europe.
- kfk 14y ago
  Just some quick answers. * It is difficult, no doubt. But it is also difficult to find a way to efficienlty store solar and wind power. It is difficult is not a good excuse not to do it. * It does not help innovation. Not true. It does. Taxes will lower the margins of the businesses with externalities and capital holders will look for more efficient technologies. Less cost and/or more profit are the only way you incentivate innovation. * Energy is cheap. That doesn't mean it couldn't be cheaper. I mean, I prefer to spend my money on what I like, not on energy bills. And again, cheapER, bettER, are the real incentive to innovation. * Politics. Don't know, don't care. If I had to go with politics, I'd say that solar and wind are mainly politics: it helps with votes and reputation, but only that (at least now). * Nuclear. There is research also there. There has been progress for decades. Why that research is not as good as the one for solar and wind power I don't understand.
  - macavity23 14y ago
    Politics. Don't know, don't care. Fair enough - but not caring about this will leave you unable to fix serious problems, and incurably unhappy with the state of the world. Every problem, every issue, every project of non-trivial size is critically dependent upon politics of some stripe or other. History is riddled with excellent ideas that failed because they didn't consider politics (and for that matter, terrible ideas that succeeded because they did). I agree with you that the public revulsion over nuclear power is unwarranted - but that battle is lost. No reasoned argument can hope to win over emotive shots of Chernobyl and Fukushima. We have to look forward. Engineering is about achieving goals within constraints. Good engineering takes political constraints into account as well as technical and budgetary ones. Addendum Whoever is downvoting this guy, STOP. You might disagree with him, but he is promoting a debate in a civilised manner, and that's how we move forward.
adventureful 14y ago
Stephan Reimelt, CEO of GE Energy Germany: "Germany is forcing itself toward innovation. What this generates is a large industrial laboratory at a size which has never been done before. We will have to try a lot of different technologies to get there." It has been done before, at far greater scale. WW1 and WW2. Some of the best innovations or inventions are derived out of a person or a nation having their back to the wall. Hence the famous saying: "necessity, who is the mother of invention" (dating back a mere 2400 years or so, and it's probably older as a known premise). I would anticipate very impressive industrial breakthroughs in renewable energy coming from the German experiment.
- pcrh 14y ago
  I also wonder how much benefit is to be had by not paying other countries for your energy compared to paying yourself...
  - adventureful 14y ago
    In the case of the US, a shockingly massive benefit. We import between $350b and $500b per year worth of petroleum products (depending on the price of oil).
    - pcrh 14y ago
      There is, however, the rule of comparative advantage, which means that it is better to import energy than to produce the same amount domestically, if the import is cheaper. How that is balanced against the benefit for domestic producers, I wouldn't know...
      - adventureful 14y ago
        Only if the calculation includes the vast benefits of domestic energy production, properly sourced, and not just the basic price of energy. Such as keeping First Solar and SunPower in business (FSLR has lost 95% of its value). The jobs created through installation, maintainence, R&D, manufacturing, and so on. For example: let's say your import cost is $250 billion, but your domestic cost is $300 billion. I'd argue that you're radically better off spending the $300 billion domestically, than losing the jobs likely involved and exporting $250 billion off shore to benefit some other nation/s. There's no doubt some inflection point on that benefit, but I think it's a wide margin.
rumcajz 14y ago
> [They] decided to build a polysilicon plant in Tennessee, partly because energy costs in Germany were so high. This makes USA look like a 3rd world country being used as a haven for environmentally harmful industry installations.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  Not really. Undeveloped countries tend not to have cheap abundant electricity and are generally less politically stable than the U.S. (both of those things are part of a desirable context for billion dollar investments). I suppose if you decide that U.S. environmental standards are useless you might have a point.
onli 14y ago
The article has a heavily biased view. Some points it gets wrong: >"If you close eight nuclear plants, which were carbon-free, overnight, you will increase carbon emissions," Nuclear plants are not carbon free. Getting the uranium, transporting the nuclear waste, transporting the people who run the plant costs a lot of carbon emissions. You need to look at the whole picture. >Inevitably, some hot July week will come when a high-pressure system stalls over Europe, stilling turbines just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners The summer in Germany isn't that hot. Middle europe, not california. Accordingly, we don't have air conditioners (in general) Look at who is cited - People from large companies loosing their monopoly and Sinn, a conservative "expert".
- toemetoch 14y ago
  >Inevitably, some hot July week will come when a high-pressure system stalls over Europe, stilling turbines just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners The summer in Germany isn't that hot. Middle europe, not california. Accordingly, we don#t have air conditioners (in general) These scenarios do happen. They're not always as straight-forward as the one suggested (low production/high demand). A few weeks ago there was a sunny/windy holiday in Belgium (May 28th). Due to overproduction and low demand they had to avert a national blackout by paying France to sink the surplus energy. In Belgium, renewables account for 7% of energy. That weekend it was 3 times as much.
  - onli 14y ago
    I don't know about Belgium. Maybe air conditioners there are more common? In Germany, it is said that cold winters are more dangerous for the energy balance, as the cold also increases energy demand and the photovoltaik-cells aren't as useful as in a hot (and sunny) summer.
    - toemetoch 14y ago
      Please read again. Energy demand was lower because it was a holiday, nothing to do with air conditioners.
DasIch 14y ago
I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative. It's better to work on the problem now, developing knowledge that helps our economy and makes us a worldwide leader than holding it off unless we are near collapse due to oil prices or worse have to engage in a war about resources, especially since the latter is something Germany must not engage in.
- lmm 14y ago
  >I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative. There's one obvious alternative: Build and run nuclear power plants. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries, and the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables.
  - skore 14y ago
    > We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries That's incredibly short sighted. And not just the measure of 'centuries' (even if that were true, it's still arguably just postpone the problem). Energy demand is going up, sharply, as more countries join our standard of living. We will, definitely, need technologies that are as clean as possible to meet the demand, eventually. No amount of pollution that is avoidable is acceptable at the scale we are going to witness. Which brings us to > the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables I've stopped buying this argument and I'm sick of seeing it again and again - it's complete and utter Bullshit. The only way we have come up in terms of "dealing" with the highly toxic waste that nuclear energy produces (letting alone the often brushed over but equally horrifying ecological cost of mining the fuel) is to store it away "somewhere". The kicker is: We have not figured out that "somewhere". In Germany, there is exactly one site that is being developed for this. We literally ship the containers there and they sit in a holding facility above the salt mine because we have not even figured out how to get the fuel from the shipment containers into the storage containers. Oh, and the storage containers haven't been fully developed either. This is a catastrophe just waiting to happen. Years and years of politics playing nice with (and pushing money into) the nuclear industry have produced no results that a reasonable person could support. What the government had done was basically doubling down on what is often - in this thread as well - requested: To let the market figure it out. Oh they have figured it out alright. Just not the part about it also being reasonable. Or even sane. And this is only for the waste that was produced so far. The technology and storage capacity for centuries of waste simply doesn't exist. At all. Story time: They actually did have the "solving" of this in mostly private hands for a long time - a semi-government agency (under strong, yet curiously absent oversight) conducted "experiments" on how to store the waste in a different salt mine [1]. They "experimented" with things like whether they roll or "throw down" barrels into caves. When they "noticed" that they had a problem with huge amounts of radioactive water rising up everywhere, they "solved" it by pumping it down into a deeper cavity. That whole agency was abolished and replaced and put under proper (and horrified) oversight when the extent of the disaster came to light in a huge scandal. They have been "working on" trying to clean up this mess since nineteen frigging ninety five. They haven't even figured out how to drill into the closed off cavities to get the improperly stored fuel out of there, for crying out loud! All while cancer rates are going off around the site. So yeah, great environmental impact. Go sell your snake oil somewhere else. Very few things piss me off as much as nuclear defenders selling their technology as reasonable. Zero Carbon Emissions, Woo! Give me a break. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II - the German version is a lot more in-depth: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse - the English version seems to brush over much of the issues.
jorleif 14y ago
One of the things that always surprises me when talking about lulls from wind and solar power, is that the assumption always is that we _have_ to provide continuous power. Would it not be possible to have industrial facilities that run in bursts when the energy is available (or more likely cheap), and then turn off again? Sure, this is not as easy as the old way to do things, but seriously, this is not impossible, nature essentially works in this way. Prime candidates would include extremely energy intensive industrial processes with short runtimes.
- DasIch 14y ago
  It is not possible because those industries that consume massive amounts of energy are typically those that operate under the assumption that machines are never and in some cases cannot be turned of.
- adam-a 14y ago
  It seems inevitable that we will have to change some of our fundamental ways of working if we want to get rid of our reliance on fossil fuels. Before the industrial revolution the world didn't have 24/7 assembly lines, it's only since coal/oil/gas that we've been able to work in this way. I guess that's the point, it is a large paradigm shift, comparable to the introduction of the steam engine. We can't expect the world to remain unchanged. The unfortunate thing with solar panels means that we'd all be at work when the sun shines and get our days off when it's cloudy :)
- Xylakant 14y ago
  The problem with many large industrial processes is that they cannot be run that way. Think a steamcracker for example: Shutdown takes days, starting up as well. It's so (energy) hungry that its cost-efficient to leave all parts in the chain running if one fails and just burn the resulting light oil. (Makes for a spectacular flame on the skyline). Aluminum processing falls in the same category. There are other processes where this is possible (steel smelting via electric power for example) and where this is already done. Those plants usually run at night and consume large amounts of the base load. The issue with solar/wind-energy is that the availability may fluctuate within very short time frames - sometimes minutes - so that you cannot use this. In a smaller scale this works the other way round. There are some small-scale fuel-powered plants that can be used to heat/cool a house or a block as well as produce electricity and those power up when electrical power is needed and store the heat for when it's needed (it's somewhat easier to store heat). This can be used to cut off some of the load spikes.
pkteison 14y ago
Can somebody explain to me the part of the article where it says you have to convert AC to DC to travel long distances (for far offshore wind power)? I understood it to be the exact opposite, that AC could go long distances without major loss and DC needed a new station every few blocks.
- eigenvector 14y ago
  You don't 'need' to convert it, but HVDC transmission is emerging as more efficient and cost-effective than conventional HVAC transmission. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
  - rmccue 14y ago
    From what I gather from the Wikipedia page, it's due to the transmission cables being underwater and hence having a much larger capacitance, which is a larger loss than normal DC loss. (Correct me if I'm wrong on that.) So, while AC is still more beneficial for transmission via cables in air/ground, DC appears to have less overall loss for underwater transmission.
    - excuse-me 14y ago
      DC is always more efficent to transfer. But it was difficult to efficiently convert to high voltage and back so you only did it when necessary. The reason underwater links (eg France-UK) were commonly DC is that they linked countries whose grid wasn't synchronised - the same reason long distance grids in the US are DC
    - vitaminj 14y ago
      By virtue of their tight bundling, all composite multi-core cables have high capacitances. However, onshore AC transmission is typically run on overhead lines, with large line spacings and thus capacitance isn't as much of a problem.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
wakoumel 14y ago
I liked the article but think that it's missing the point: very soon there will be no other choice of what direction to take. We are saying "It's risky! Let's just sit back and watch." as if the status quo can go on as our energy consumption and populations both continue to grow. There will be mistakes made along the way, but mark my words, the Germans are going to be eating our lunch faster than you can say Energiewende.
tokenadult 14y ago
I guess the problem with a long article, even an interesting long article like the one submitted here, is that it is hard to read to the end. Near the end of the submitted article is this paragraph: "A second problem is that even when it comes to alternative energy sources, Germany doesn't reward carbon dioxide reduction. Rather, its policy establishes well-defined subsidies for specific technologies: a kilowatt-hour of solar power is rewarded more than power from offshore wind, which in turn earns more than power from onshore wind. Even though solar subsidies have been reduced to rates far lower than the ones Leurs locked in, solar power still pays the highest rates. If reducing emissions were the focus, however, more money would be directed toward reducing energy use. 'If you could choose the optimal instruments, focusing on those areas first where you can achieve your goals most inexpensively, you would focus not so much on renewables but much more on efficiency,' says Pittel, the energy economist from Munich." This ignores the advice of Amory Lovins http://www.rmi.org/Amory+B.+Lovins http://www.rmi.org/Amory+B.+Lovins (Amory Lovins profile page at Rocky Mountain Institute website) http://www.ted.com/speakers/amory_lovins.html http://www.ted.com/speakers/amory_lovins.html (TED profile) http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_a_50_year_plan_for_energy.html http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_a_50_year_plan_for_ene... (TED Talk video "A 40-year plan for energy") and generally the advice of any thoughtful scholar on how to improve worldwide energy efficiency. The German Energiewende plan is a remarkable example of intentionally wrong policy choices that waste the money of German taxpayers and utility rate-payers and delay innovation. It's a good thing that other countries have differing policies that better encourage innovation, especially innovation to reduce energy consumption. AFTER EDIT: Another subthread here talks about the economics of importing energy versus producing it domestically. An astute HN participant mentioned the principle of comparative advantage. For onlookers who may not have seen a good reference on comparative advantage, I suggest "Ricardo's Difficult Idea," http://www.pkarchive.org/trade/ricardo.html http://www.pkarchive.org/trade/ricardo.html by an economist who has been awarded the Nobel memorial prize in economics, an essay that explains why trading for resources is generally much, much better than trying to produce all resources within national borders. There are some other good explanations of the principle of comparative advantage easily found via an online search: http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadvantage.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadv... http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/cadv_e.htm http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/cadv_e.htm http://iang.org/free_banking/david.html http://iang.org/free_banking/david.html
mohawk 14y ago
This is not an 'experiment'. But please go on telling us that it is impossible, we'll get it done it even quicker. For an engineer, there is no better motivation.
justwrote 14y ago
I'm living in Germany and to support this 'Energiewende', I'm only buying green electricity. It is more expensive but I'm happy to pay more if I can boost the industry around it and also help our environment. Many young people think like this.
soc88 14y ago
"just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners" I hope the rest of the article wasn't researched as "good" as this.

243 points by pdelgallego 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Great article - upvoted. That it's inconceivable that the US or UK government could think about spending such an amount (~5% of GDP!) on a long-term science and engineering project speaks volumes about why the Germans are where they are, and why we're where we are, economically speaking. From an engineering point of view I think it's foolish to turn off the nuke plants, but public opinion is what it is, and this causes the regulatory requirements to prevent nuclear from being economically viable. The article does a good job of covering the risks, but personally I'd bet on the Germans here - even if the 'Energiewende' doesn't pay off per se, the rewards from the science and engineering knowhow will be huge. The only comparable project I can think of is the Apollo Program, though a quick google suggests that was never more than 1% of GDP, and the returns from the science on that were massive and lasted for decades. Likewise, CERN, which was about as blue-sky as things get, gave us the World Wide Web: completely tangential to its stated purpose, but what kind of rate of return did that give us? So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run? (On a side note, I really want to have a stickybeak around a 30MW AC/DC converter!)

johnchristopher 14y ago
> So here's a question for the peanut gallery: has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run? Does the superconducting super collider fulfill your criterias (let's forget for a minute that it is about destroying particles in new and exciting ways) ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
- macavity23 14y ago
  Interesting, thanks. A reference from that page - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-big-science/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/crisis-... - suggests: One thing that killed the SSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending. There was even nonsense in the press about spending on potted plants for the corridors of the administration building. Projected costs did increase, but the main reason was that, year by year, Congress never supplied sufficient funds to keep to the planned rate of spending. This stretched out the time and hence the cost to complete the project. Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier. Leading one to believe that it was actually a good project that was stiffed by a congress in search of tax cuts. Who knows whether that's true, of course.
simonh 14y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to count incidental benefits from projects, such as the WWW from CERN. The same basic problem of sharing information between scientists would still have existed without CERN, and who's to say it or something even better, with fewer of HTTP/HTML's limitations wouldn't have been developed if TBL had been working on a different project? The space race argument is another old sore, it turns out many of the discoveries ascribed to it were actually developed independently, but then were used by NASA who ended up getting the credit. Teflon is often cited, but was actually discovered in 1938 and patented in 1945. Yes a lot of great technologies were developed for Apollo and used in other areas, but many or perhaps all of them would have been developed eventually anyway.
- koide 14y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to discount all the subproducts from such an investment just because many would have been developed eventually anyway. In this vein, it's just as easy to discount the people who did the inventions/discoveries because someone else would have eventually made the discovery/invention anyway. Of course that the main project has to be sound, and cannot be justified only due to the subproducts, but "would have happened anyway" is not a solid argument to discount the subproducts, mainly because you cannot know if it would, nor when it would.
  - WalterBright 14y ago
    Consider the invention of the airplane. The Wrights certainly invented it, but if you take a good look at what the other experimenters were doing, it's a pretty good bet that others would have gotten the pieces together in probably another 5 years. (The Wrights succeeded arguably because they had the first directed research & development program, while the others basically just bumbled about trying things in a seat-of-the-pants manner. None of them, for example, seem to have done any calculation of how much wing area was needed or how much power was required.)
    - koide 14y ago
      On the other hand, consider how vaccination was invented or any other "accidental" discovery/invention. I'm aware that there are inventions that even happen at almost exactly the same time, especially when the research on the subject is ripe enough. But when chance is a factor or the subject is not researched enough (or at all) then the confidence of an hypothesized invention happening in a close timeframe to the actual invention diminishes greatly.
arethuza 14y ago
"has there ever been a large-scale public investment program into science and engineering (that ISN'T based on destroying things in new and exciting ways) that has not proved to be a good investment in the long run" Having been on large EU funded projects (all part of the ESPRIT II program), I honestly can't believe that they provided good value for money. Now there might have been a lot of indirect benefits, but I'm not aware of the results of the projects I worked on being directly used by anyone.
- eru 14y ago
  Also the US Space Shuttle had a cost 1000-fold cost overrun, if measured by cost to orbit per unit of mass.
loceng 14y ago
The economics are easy. Money on war 'invests' your resources into other countries (no return, negative return likely), vs. money on innovation and infrastructure in your own country (positive return, long-term; potential for making other things more efficient, more cost-efficient become higher).
- gaius 14y ago
  Sorry, but that's nonsense, you cannot underestimate the impact of military technologies like jet engines, radar, communications satellites, GPS, the internet, superglue... The whole of the modern world is based on military tech. Plus you gainfully employ lots of people (e.g. teaching trades to people who haven't done well in mainstream education) and as a free bonus you get the defence of the realm.
  - eru 14y ago
    You are comparing the benefits of war to the wrong base. The civilians wouldn't have just burned all the riches (like war literally does to some extent), but would have used it to develop new products, too. Nowadays the military actually uses consumer electronics.
  - loceng 14y ago
    You need to separate contexts of war and innovation. An example, this innovation could come through a budget for space exploration, or other means of transportation. The world is based on science tech. Yes, a lot was discovered in science through military budgets, but it's not exclusive to being put into the military - which I think can easily be argued has huge wastes of resources just by looking at industrial complex structures.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    >jet engines, radar, communications satellites, GPS, the internet, superglue Don't forget computers: Turing's work relies heavily on his experiences working at Bletchley Park, ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, and the calculational needs of the Manhattan Project drove a lot of early computer development.
larrydag 14y ago
Some large scale projects that come to mind include Panama Canal, USA Highway system, Alaskan pipeline although you could argue they did destroy some things.
cturner 14y ago
Theere's a basic role of government that's widely agreed upon - that it keeps us from hurting one another and clarity on the use of roads and telecommunications channels and the like. And I realise that opinions diverge above that, but I'll put mine. Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient, and seems like a bad place to look for inspiration in engineering. When governments set up things like NASA they become political institutions themselves. It's easy for them to grow into organisations that seek self-preservation and always more money to support the glamour of their leadership. When government gets involved in a field, you get a cross-polination between field-experts and government people. Often the government people end up on the side of workers in the field rather than the public that they're meant to be serving. Given all these problems, I don't think we should be attracted to the idea of governments taxing us to spend the money on difficult-to-quantify never-never projects. They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects.
- eru 14y ago
  > They could just not tax us, and then we could pursue our own projects. Or, if you agree that a low-carbon future would be a good thing: Tax carbon usage, and, since you don't like the government spending money, just distribute the proceeds equally among the population. This works out to a net impact, modulo transactions costs, on the average carbon-emitting person of zero, but rewards and punishes the outliers.
  - cheez 14y ago
    A lot of the reason why there is no natural incentive to develop new sources of energy is that the government works hand in hand with energy companies to prevent it for example, via drilling rights, subsidized prices making it uneconomical to research better sources because the companies can guarantee their profits.
  - anamax 14y ago
    What if I don't agree that a low-carbon future would be a good thing? What if I think that the tax is too high? What if I have higher priorities?
Tichy 14y ago
Being German and having voted Green most of my life (until the pirate party came along), I still watch those energy subsidies with suspicion. I am just not certain the money is spent in an efficient way here. As for the jobs in the green energy sector, apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells. So much for that investment.
- CrLf 14y ago
  "apparently China already (or still) is cheaper than Germany in producing solar power cells" Yeah, but that's because China can violate any worker rights under the Sun, and pollute as much as it wishes in the process (and producing solar cells pollutes quite a bit).
- excuse-me 14y ago
  What's the problem? You close the nukes so everyone with an "Atomkraft Nein Danke" sticker on their VW votes for you. You give huge feed in tarrif subsidy to anyone who owns a house to put panels on their roof - so the countryside votes for you. You continue to subsidize coal so the Ruhr votes for you. But burn the coal in Poland and ship the power back - so there is no acid rain to worry about. A perfect (if expensive) solution for everyone (unless you live east of Poland)
- kaybe 14y ago
  Other countries ripping the technology off is part of the plan, as far as I understood it. We can talk them into using less fossil fuels (probably won't work), or use incentives (which would again cost money), or we can create a by then cheap technology for getting Co2-free energy which will be stolen by everyone. Comparing costs from climate change adaption and avoidance shows that avoidance is far cheaper - and in both cases the developed countries will have to carry the majority. (Just imagine the situation if half of Asia and Africa's harvests fail.) The investment here is not just an economic one, it goes much further.
mbq 14y ago
The problem is that this money is spent not on how to make usable "green" energy but how to be more efficient in consuming gov's subsidies to "green" technologies.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
You are equating spending towards merely manufacturing PV arrays and wind plants with spending on R&D, that is not the same thing. Apollo isn't even a remotely comparable program because that was the creation of new technologies. The comparable program here would be the interstate highway system, perhaps.
xxgreg 14y ago
Not ~5%GDP. "the country will spend somewhere between $125 billion and "$250 billion on infrastructure expansion and subsidies in the next eight years—between 3.5 and 7 percent of Germany's 2011 GDP" The sentence is a bit confusing but I think they mean this: ~5% of 2011 GDP / 8 years = ~0.6% 2011GDP per year.

kfk 14y ago

I don't like this. Instead of heavily subsidizing some technologies, they should tax externalities (i.e. pollution) and let the markets do the rest. It's annoying having to pay 15% more energy bills because somebody has decided that wind and solar are the hot thing of the moment. Bad, really bad. Same way of thinking that brought us to the debt crisi in Europe.

kfk 14y ago
Just some quick answers. * It is difficult, no doubt. But it is also difficult to find a way to efficienlty store solar and wind power. It is difficult is not a good excuse not to do it. * It does not help innovation. Not true. It does. Taxes will lower the margins of the businesses with externalities and capital holders will look for more efficient technologies. Less cost and/or more profit are the only way you incentivate innovation. * Energy is cheap. That doesn't mean it couldn't be cheaper. I mean, I prefer to spend my money on what I like, not on energy bills. And again, cheapER, bettER, are the real incentive to innovation. * Politics. Don't know, don't care. If I had to go with politics, I'd say that solar and wind are mainly politics: it helps with votes and reputation, but only that (at least now). * Nuclear. There is research also there. There has been progress for decades. Why that research is not as good as the one for solar and wind power I don't understand.
- macavity23 14y ago
  Politics. Don't know, don't care. Fair enough - but not caring about this will leave you unable to fix serious problems, and incurably unhappy with the state of the world. Every problem, every issue, every project of non-trivial size is critically dependent upon politics of some stripe or other. History is riddled with excellent ideas that failed because they didn't consider politics (and for that matter, terrible ideas that succeeded because they did). I agree with you that the public revulsion over nuclear power is unwarranted - but that battle is lost. No reasoned argument can hope to win over emotive shots of Chernobyl and Fukushima. We have to look forward. Engineering is about achieving goals within constraints. Good engineering takes political constraints into account as well as technical and budgetary ones. Addendum Whoever is downvoting this guy, STOP. You might disagree with him, but he is promoting a debate in a civilised manner, and that's how we move forward.

adventureful 14y ago

Stephan Reimelt, CEO of GE Energy Germany: "Germany is forcing itself toward innovation. What this generates is a large industrial laboratory at a size which has never been done before. We will have to try a lot of different technologies to get there." It has been done before, at far greater scale. WW1 and WW2. Some of the best innovations or inventions are derived out of a person or a nation having their back to the wall. Hence the famous saying: "necessity, who is the mother of invention" (dating back a mere 2400 years or so, and it's probably older as a known premise). I would anticipate very impressive industrial breakthroughs in renewable energy coming from the German experiment.

pcrh 14y ago
I also wonder how much benefit is to be had by not paying other countries for your energy compared to paying yourself...
- adventureful 14y ago
  In the case of the US, a shockingly massive benefit. We import between $350b and $500b per year worth of petroleum products (depending on the price of oil).
  - pcrh 14y ago
    There is, however, the rule of comparative advantage, which means that it is better to import energy than to produce the same amount domestically, if the import is cheaper. How that is balanced against the benefit for domestic producers, I wouldn't know...
    - adventureful 14y ago
      Only if the calculation includes the vast benefits of domestic energy production, properly sourced, and not just the basic price of energy. Such as keeping First Solar and SunPower in business (FSLR has lost 95% of its value). The jobs created through installation, maintainence, R&D, manufacturing, and so on. For example: let's say your import cost is $250 billion, but your domestic cost is $300 billion. I'd argue that you're radically better off spending the $300 billion domestically, than losing the jobs likely involved and exporting $250 billion off shore to benefit some other nation/s. There's no doubt some inflection point on that benefit, but I think it's a wide margin.

rumcajz 14y ago

> [They] decided to build a polysilicon plant in Tennessee, partly because energy costs in Germany were so high. This makes USA look like a 3rd world country being used as a haven for environmentally harmful industry installations.

maxerickson 14y ago
Not really. Undeveloped countries tend not to have cheap abundant electricity and are generally less politically stable than the U.S. (both of those things are part of a desirable context for billion dollar investments). I suppose if you decide that U.S. environmental standards are useless you might have a point.

onli 14y ago

The article has a heavily biased view. Some points it gets wrong: >"If you close eight nuclear plants, which were carbon-free, overnight, you will increase carbon emissions," Nuclear plants are not carbon free. Getting the uranium, transporting the nuclear waste, transporting the people who run the plant costs a lot of carbon emissions. You need to look at the whole picture. >Inevitably, some hot July week will come when a high-pressure system stalls over Europe, stilling turbines just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners The summer in Germany isn't that hot. Middle europe, not california. Accordingly, we don't have air conditioners (in general) Look at who is cited - People from large companies loosing their monopoly and Sinn, a conservative "expert".

toemetoch 14y ago
>Inevitably, some hot July week will come when a high-pressure system stalls over Europe, stilling turbines just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners The summer in Germany isn't that hot. Middle europe, not california. Accordingly, we don#t have air conditioners (in general) These scenarios do happen. They're not always as straight-forward as the one suggested (low production/high demand). A few weeks ago there was a sunny/windy holiday in Belgium (May 28th). Due to overproduction and low demand they had to avert a national blackout by paying France to sink the surplus energy. In Belgium, renewables account for 7% of energy. That weekend it was 3 times as much.
- onli 14y ago
  I don't know about Belgium. Maybe air conditioners there are more common? In Germany, it is said that cold winters are more dangerous for the energy balance, as the cold also increases energy demand and the photovoltaik-cells aren't as useful as in a hot (and sunny) summer.
  - toemetoch 14y ago
    Please read again. Energy demand was lower because it was a holiday, nothing to do with air conditioners.

DasIch 14y ago

I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative. It's better to work on the problem now, developing knowledge that helps our economy and makes us a worldwide leader than holding it off unless we are near collapse due to oil prices or worse have to engage in a war about resources, especially since the latter is something Germany must not engage in.

lmm 14y ago
>I find the criticism torwards the Energiewende quite hard to understand, sure it is a very difficult problem but unless we find a fundamentally new energy source or nuclear fusion becomes viable the path Germany is on is without alternative. There's one obvious alternative: Build and run nuclear power plants. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries, and the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables.
- skore 14y ago
  > We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for centuries That's incredibly short sighted. And not just the measure of 'centuries' (even if that were true, it's still arguably just postpone the problem). Energy demand is going up, sharply, as more countries join our standard of living. We will, definitely, need technologies that are as clean as possible to meet the demand, eventually. No amount of pollution that is avoidable is acceptable at the scale we are going to witness. Which brings us to > the overall environmental impact is better than that of renewables I've stopped buying this argument and I'm sick of seeing it again and again - it's complete and utter Bullshit. The only way we have come up in terms of "dealing" with the highly toxic waste that nuclear energy produces (letting alone the often brushed over but equally horrifying ecological cost of mining the fuel) is to store it away "somewhere". The kicker is: We have not figured out that "somewhere". In Germany, there is exactly one site that is being developed for this. We literally ship the containers there and they sit in a holding facility above the salt mine because we have not even figured out how to get the fuel from the shipment containers into the storage containers. Oh, and the storage containers haven't been fully developed either. This is a catastrophe just waiting to happen. Years and years of politics playing nice with (and pushing money into) the nuclear industry have produced no results that a reasonable person could support. What the government had done was basically doubling down on what is often - in this thread as well - requested: To let the market figure it out. Oh they have figured it out alright. Just not the part about it also being reasonable. Or even sane. And this is only for the waste that was produced so far. The technology and storage capacity for centuries of waste simply doesn't exist. At all. Story time: They actually did have the "solving" of this in mostly private hands for a long time - a semi-government agency (under strong, yet curiously absent oversight) conducted "experiments" on how to store the waste in a different salt mine [1]. They "experimented" with things like whether they roll or "throw down" barrels into caves. When they "noticed" that they had a problem with huge amounts of radioactive water rising up everywhere, they "solved" it by pumping it down into a deeper cavity. That whole agency was abolished and replaced and put under proper (and horrified) oversight when the extent of the disaster came to light in a huge scandal. They have been "working on" trying to clean up this mess since nineteen frigging ninety five. They haven't even figured out how to drill into the closed off cavities to get the improperly stored fuel out of there, for crying out loud! All while cancer rates are going off around the site. So yeah, great environmental impact. Go sell your snake oil somewhere else. Very few things piss me off as much as nuclear defenders selling their technology as reasonable. Zero Carbon Emissions, Woo! Give me a break. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II - the German version is a lot more in-depth: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schachtanlage_Asse - the English version seems to brush over much of the issues.

jorleif 14y ago

One of the things that always surprises me when talking about lulls from wind and solar power, is that the assumption always is that we _have_ to provide continuous power. Would it not be possible to have industrial facilities that run in bursts when the energy is available (or more likely cheap), and then turn off again? Sure, this is not as easy as the old way to do things, but seriously, this is not impossible, nature essentially works in this way. Prime candidates would include extremely energy intensive industrial processes with short runtimes.

DasIch 14y ago
It is not possible because those industries that consume massive amounts of energy are typically those that operate under the assumption that machines are never and in some cases cannot be turned of.
adam-a 14y ago
It seems inevitable that we will have to change some of our fundamental ways of working if we want to get rid of our reliance on fossil fuels. Before the industrial revolution the world didn't have 24/7 assembly lines, it's only since coal/oil/gas that we've been able to work in this way. I guess that's the point, it is a large paradigm shift, comparable to the introduction of the steam engine. We can't expect the world to remain unchanged. The unfortunate thing with solar panels means that we'd all be at work when the sun shines and get our days off when it's cloudy :)
Xylakant 14y ago
The problem with many large industrial processes is that they cannot be run that way. Think a steamcracker for example: Shutdown takes days, starting up as well. It's so (energy) hungry that its cost-efficient to leave all parts in the chain running if one fails and just burn the resulting light oil. (Makes for a spectacular flame on the skyline). Aluminum processing falls in the same category. There are other processes where this is possible (steel smelting via electric power for example) and where this is already done. Those plants usually run at night and consume large amounts of the base load. The issue with solar/wind-energy is that the availability may fluctuate within very short time frames - sometimes minutes - so that you cannot use this. In a smaller scale this works the other way round. There are some small-scale fuel-powered plants that can be used to heat/cool a house or a block as well as produce electricity and those power up when electrical power is needed and store the heat for when it's needed (it's somewhat easier to store heat). This can be used to cut off some of the load spikes.

pkteison 14y ago

Can somebody explain to me the part of the article where it says you have to convert AC to DC to travel long distances (for far offshore wind power)? I understood it to be the exact opposite, that AC could go long distances without major loss and DC needed a new station every few blocks.

eigenvector 14y ago
You don't 'need' to convert it, but HVDC transmission is emerging as more efficient and cost-effective than conventional HVAC transmission. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
- rmccue 14y ago
  From what I gather from the Wikipedia page, it's due to the transmission cables being underwater and hence having a much larger capacitance, which is a larger loss than normal DC loss. (Correct me if I'm wrong on that.) So, while AC is still more beneficial for transmission via cables in air/ground, DC appears to have less overall loss for underwater transmission.
  - excuse-me 14y ago
    DC is always more efficent to transfer. But it was difficult to efficiently convert to high voltage and back so you only did it when necessary. The reason underwater links (eg France-UK) were commonly DC is that they linked countries whose grid wasn't synchronised - the same reason long distance grids in the US are DC
  - vitaminj 14y ago
    By virtue of their tight bundling, all composite multi-core cables have high capacitances. However, onshore AC transmission is typically run on overhead lines, with large line spacings and thus capacitance isn't as much of a problem.
deleted 14y ago
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wakoumel 14y ago

I liked the article but think that it's missing the point: very soon there will be no other choice of what direction to take. We are saying "It's risky! Let's just sit back and watch." as if the status quo can go on as our energy consumption and populations both continue to grow. There will be mistakes made along the way, but mark my words, the Germans are going to be eating our lunch faster than you can say Energiewende.

tokenadult 14y ago

I guess the problem with a long article, even an interesting long article like the one submitted here, is that it is hard to read to the end. Near the end of the submitted article is this paragraph: "A second problem is that even when it comes to alternative energy sources, Germany doesn't reward carbon dioxide reduction. Rather, its policy establishes well-defined subsidies for specific technologies: a kilowatt-hour of solar power is rewarded more than power from offshore wind, which in turn earns more than power from onshore wind. Even though solar subsidies have been reduced to rates far lower than the ones Leurs locked in, solar power still pays the highest rates. If reducing emissions were the focus, however, more money would be directed toward reducing energy use. 'If you could choose the optimal instruments, focusing on those areas first where you can achieve your goals most inexpensively, you would focus not so much on renewables but much more on efficiency,' says Pittel, the energy economist from Munich." This ignores the advice of Amory Lovins http://www.rmi.org/Amory+B.+Lovins http://www.rmi.org/Amory+B.+Lovins (Amory Lovins profile page at Rocky Mountain Institute website) http://www.ted.com/speakers/amory_lovins.html http://www.ted.com/speakers/amory_lovins.html (TED profile) http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_a_50_year_plan_for_energy.html http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_a_50_year_plan_for_ene... (TED Talk video "A 40-year plan for energy") and generally the advice of any thoughtful scholar on how to improve worldwide energy efficiency. The German Energiewende plan is a remarkable example of intentionally wrong policy choices that waste the money of German taxpayers and utility rate-payers and delay innovation. It's a good thing that other countries have differing policies that better encourage innovation, especially innovation to reduce energy consumption. AFTER EDIT: Another subthread here talks about the economics of importing energy versus producing it domestically. An astute HN participant mentioned the principle of comparative advantage. For onlookers who may not have seen a good reference on comparative advantage, I suggest "Ricardo's Difficult Idea," http://www.pkarchive.org/trade/ricardo.html http://www.pkarchive.org/trade/ricardo.html by an economist who has been awarded the Nobel memorial prize in economics, an essay that explains why trading for resources is generally much, much better than trying to produce all resources within national borders. There are some other good explanations of the principle of comparative advantage easily found via an online search: http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadvantage.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadv... http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/cadv_e.htm http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/reser_e/cadv_e.htm http://iang.org/free_banking/david.html http://iang.org/free_banking/david.html

mohawk 14y ago

This is not an 'experiment'. But please go on telling us that it is impossible, we'll get it done it even quicker. For an engineer, there is no better motivation.

justwrote 14y ago

I'm living in Germany and to support this 'Energiewende', I'm only buying green electricity. It is more expensive but I'm happy to pay more if I can boost the industry around it and also help our environment. Many young people think like this.

soc88 14y ago

"just when sunburned Germans reach for their air conditioners" I hope the rest of the article wasn't researched as "good" as this.