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The only one provoking a war in Europe is Putin. And the Germans destroyed their energy sector themselves.

• pfdietz 2y ago
  Are you under the illusion that nuclear would have helped, or are you complaining they didn't keep burning coal?
  • kbelder 2y ago
    >Are you under the illusion that nuclear would have helped I am.
    • simoncion 2y ago
      Yeah, there's no illusion here at all. Look at France, its electricity cost per KWh, and its carbon intensity per KWh generated. In recent years, all are much, much better than Germany's. (And their carbon intensity numbers have probably been consistently better since like the 1990s.) It's almost as if making your economy that requires a lot of electricity dependent on electricity generation methods that require fuels supplied by potentially-hostile foreign countries is a bad, bad idea.
      • kazen44 2y ago
        to be fair, this energy dependence was created in a time when the soviet block collapsed, and has worked for many many countries that where part of that block except for russia and belarus. Economic integration has finally put the lid on the enourmous destruction of nationalism for the past 60 years. The mistake which was made by (mostly) american and european economists was convincing everyone that applying shock therapy to the socialist economy and liberalising it in that way was the best way forward. This resulted in the rise of putin and the aversion of the russian goverment to the "west".
        • Gud 2y ago
          This energy dependency was happening during a time when Russia was invading both Georgia(2008) and Ukraine(2014), right after murdering countless Chechens.
          • simoncion 2y ago
            Yep. In my personal experience, the general sentiment of Germans has been shockingly anti fission-power. Fukushima stoked the fears that power that sentiment, and helped lead them to their current totally predictable economic plummet. What happens when you shut down all your fission power plants, but don't have solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal power ready, and have no way of building enough storage to handle the intermittency of solar and wind? Well, you import petrochemicals from potentially-hostile foreign countries and burn them.
  • Gud 2y ago
    I am under no “illusion” that prematurely phasing out a large percentage of a nations power generation , will reduce the amount of power generation available…
    • pfdietz 2y ago
      The big issue was German governments who decided to replace nuclear with imported Russian gas rather than more renewables.
      • Gud 2y ago
        So you do agree with me that if Germany hadn’t dismantled their nuclear industry, Germany wouldn’t be in this mess?
        • simoncion 2y ago
          And to forestall the "No, I believe that Germany's failure was to not build enough renewables" reply... It's my understanding that even if one were to direct the entire world's energy storage production capacity solely to producing energy storage for the nation of Germany, it would be insufficient to produce enough energy storage to meet the needs of Germany's energy requirements, given any even vaguely-plausible buildout of "renewable" power generation facilities. Germany doesn't have enough of the geology and geography required to have much "always on" "renewable" power, so it MUST primarily rely on intermittent sources... which means that they in order to make up the shortfalls, they need to have enough storage (which I understand to be currently impossible), reliable rampable power (like nuclear or petrochemical), or some combination of the two. There's just no real alternative. Well, I guess there IS something of an alternative. Industry that requires reasonably-priced electricity can flee the country, reducing Germany's overall energy requirements. (Though, surely nowhere near enough to make much of a dent in the electricity costs.)
          • pfdietz 2y ago
            No, the claim about energy storage is not true. Today's global battery production capacity is something like 2.6 TWh/year. Germany uses an average of 58 GW of electricity (averaged over a year). So this capacity would be enough to store 45 hours of their electricity use. This would not, by itself, be enough to level Germany's demand. But using batteries alone would be foolish. They are not suited for long term storage. The better solution would be electrolysis to make hydrogen to complement the batteries. In that case, this amount of batteries would be more than enough to get to 100% renewables for their grid. Germany has huge salt formations that can store hydrogen extremely cheaply. Electrolyser production would have had to have been stepped up, I will admit. But 100% is overkill, since even sticking with their existing nuclear plants would not have gotten them off fossil fuels -- nowhere close. Nor would any plausible nuclear buildout. Judging by how that went elsewhere in Europe it would have been an utter fiasco. The alternative to compare against would have been a continued buildout of renewables at a higher rate. Fossil fuels would still have been used, but at a lower rate, and the shock from Russia would have been proportionally less.
  • mrighele 2y ago
    The issue is not only the nuclear, but that Germany made "all-in" on cheap Russian gas despite all the signals that it was a move with several risks: you shouldn't voluntarily put yourself at the mercy of an autocratic nation militarly stronger than you. The fact that the politicians responsible for this are now in a way or another on the payroll of Russia tells me that this was the plan all along.