5 ms·

The German "Energiewende" is probably the most significant contributor. Shutting off and destroying CO₂-free energy production that was already paid for and re

The German "Energiewende" is probably the most significant contributor. Shutting off and destroying CO₂-free energy production that was already paid for and replacing it with intermittent renewables and coal is utter madness.

coffeebeqn 2y ago
You’re forgetting the cornerstone of their idiotic energy policy which recently came crashing down after their benefactor started a large scale invasion
- croes 2y ago
  I doubt it was idiotic but simple corruption. The coal power plants are the reason for high prices and huge profits for the energy companies. The „botched“ exit from the exit from the nuclear exit brought them additional billions in compensation. People like Söder, who now want nuclear energy back, threatened to resign if the shutdown is delayed. Of course, they don't want nuclear waste anywhere near them, nor do they want wind turbines or power lines. And they were in power for 16 years. They then left the problems to their successors, who are now being blamed for it. It's at least partly true of the SPD
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > People like Söder, who now want nuclear energy back, threatened to resign if the shutdown is delayed. Hardly anybody would have considered Söder's resignment to be a threat. :-D Many Germans rather would have been happy if he had resigned.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      Söder is a silly populist. Take him seriously at your own risk. :-D
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    > I doubt it was idiotic but simple corruption. Why not both? Certainly Schröder, or Gazprom-Gerd as I call him, got his. For the Greens it's more idiotic ideology.
    - croes 2y ago
      The debt brake fetish of FDP is much more of a ideology than the plans of the Green Party. Especially Habeck is more driven by necessity, Baerbock not so much.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        The FDP has ~5%. The Schuldenbremse was added to the constitution in 2009, which requires a 2/3 majority in the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, and so had to be passed with broad agreement from both the ruling parties and the opposition.
        mpweiher 2y ago
        Oh, and the EEG fee (guaranteed price for producers of renewable electricity regardless of demand) that is now funded through the federal budget exploded to > €20 billion. Which is pretty much the amount that caused the government to collapse in the budget row.
croes 2y ago
Nuclear energy isn’t CO2 free and there is still no solution for the nuclear waste. And don’t forget that the plant operating companies themselves didn’t want to keep the plants.
- casenmgreen 2y ago
  Nuclear waste in one sense is not a big problem, because it's so compact. If you think of wind, you need to cover vast areas of a country to generate meaningful amounts of energy.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    The material consumption for either wind or solar is around an order of magnitude more than for nuclear.
  - tharmas 2y ago
    >Nuclear waste in one sense is not a big problem, because it's so compact. Neither was the exhaust from the first cars.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      But the energy density of nuclear fuels is so fantastic that it remains compact. See https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1162:_Log_Scale https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1162:_Log_Scale
  - croes 2y ago
    In other ways it’s a big problem. They still don’t have a final repository for it and you don’t need much to endanger many people. Not to mention that nuclear energy leads to centralization what makes it a valuable target for sabotage.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      Not true. Finland just built a repository. The US one was finished and then shut down for purely political reasons. Wherever it's a problem it is politics. Technically it's a non-problem. And of course temporary storage is also a non-problem, which is why politicians can play stupid games with the final repositories. Oh, and of course we shouldn't be throwing it away in the first place, as it still contains >95% of the energy when we do. We should be recycling the fuel, preferably with reactors that can burn it directly.
oezi 2y ago
Energy costs are now back to levels seen before the Russian war against Ukraine, so it is unclear why the Energiewende should be at fault. The German malaise is more likely tied to the shift to EV, the weakness of Germany's car industry and a general slump in China which are all hitting at the same time. An aging population and an increase in social benefits are likely also part of the issue.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  > Energy costs are now back to levels seen before the Russian war They are not. Electricity is around 30% more expensive. More like 50% if you add back the EEG subsidy that is now paid via taxes rather than via your electricity bill. (Exercise for the reader: form the intersection between "Tax payer" and "Electricity consumer") https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreise/ https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreise/ And we haven't turned off the coal power plants yet (meaning very little has been accomplished for the climate). There is no real plan of how that should work, and all the inklings of a plan come at huge expense.
  - oezi 2y ago
    The chart you posted from Verivox shows exactely what I said. Prices are down below pre-war levels. The EEG tax subsidy is getting less and less. We are paying primarily for very old solar installations.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      No it doesn't. You need to scroll to "Durchschnittliche Strompreise", which is what we are talking about. Just below that graph it says "Die Preisdynamik bei Strom ist stark. Innerhalb von 15 Jahren hat sich der durchschnittliche kWh-Preis fast verdoppelt. " So the price of electricity has nearly doubled in the last 15 years, which is roughly the timeframe of the Atomausstieg. The EEG tax subsidy is not getting "less and less". The government always predicts it will be less next year, really really really!, and then act super surprised when it is much more than they predicted. "Die staatliche Förderung für Erneuerbare Energien erreicht in diesem Jahr laut den Wirtschaftsforschern vom RWI mit 23 Milliarden Euro einen neuen Höchstwert. Dieser liegt deutlich über den Prognosen der Bundesregierung." https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/energie/erneuerbare-energien-staatliche-foerderung-100.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/energie/erneuerbare-ene... https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1014724 https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1014724 It turns out that the current amount was pretty much the amount that the government split up over, because they couldn't agree on the budget. So per definition not trivial.
usr1106 2y ago
No. German wealth has come decades from exporting German cars and machinery. Nowadays you can get those cheaper from China in not much worse quality. Additionally all internet profits go to tax avoiding companies originated in the US (Germany is not alone on that, it's the same all over Europe). None of them has to do anything with electricity.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  The effects of BYD have BARELY been felt by Germany. It will cause huge problems, but it has barely scratched the surface. Everything else has been going on for decades - aside from the electricity prices which have sky-rocketed, mostly due to Germany's harebrained idea to shut down all of its perfectly working nuclear reactors for no reason other than politics. What comes around goes around, and that decision will kill the party that made it, thankfully. It is an insult to German ingenuity for those idiot politicians to have shut down reactors that generated almost $12B of CLEAN electricity per year.
  - illiac786 2y ago
    Can I ask which party made this decision? I’m curious.
    - usr1106 2y ago
      It was backed by a vast majority of the population after the Fukushima desaster. Originally only the Greens were against nuclear power. Later even the conservatives under Merkel changed sides and finalized the decision. Not doing so would have been political suicide. Nuclear power is only (relatively) clean until something goes wrong. Edit: The party that has finalized the decision is widely predicted to win the upcoming election. The GP is wrong that it would kill them. The Green party might end up with poor a result, but they were not in power when the decision was made.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        Yes, Merkel flip-flopped. No, nuclear power is still comparatively safe and clean, even when you include the few times that something did go wrong. See: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
mediumsmart 2y ago
Utter madness is ok in the age of idiots and monsters.
seertaak 2y ago
This is true. In addition, the "good German bureaucracy" is a farce, run by paper (and fax!), with opaque, antiquated rules, expressed in impenetrable _Beamtendeutsch_ -- which expats need to hire professional help to navigate. Add to this that the house rental market in Berlin is now worse than London, and that German universities continue their decades-long slide towards oblivion. The UK is certainly not free of problems, but I count my lucky stars that I applied for the EU settlement scheme back in 2019 -- I'm now back in the UK, because better jobs, better healthcare, better social services, better restaurants, better transport system, better airports, better _everything_. And I say this as a transgender woman living in what trans people call "TERF island". I'm at pains to remind my English sisters that TERFs abound in Germany, too.
- bbkingkrimson 2y ago
  That hasn’t been my experience at all: Yes, bureaucracy is more prevalent, but it's manageable—at least as a German citizen. Better jobs? Overwork, fewer holidays, less social security, and after years in the workforce, you’re left with a paltry state pension of £800–900 per month at best. Better healthcare? Only if you compare private healthcare in the UK to public healthcare in Germany. My NHS experience involved endless waiting times, no personal doctor, no choice in doctors, and mostly brief 10-minute telephone appointments. Better social services? Don't rely on them but childcare is prohibitively expensive. Out of work? You get 70% of your last salary in Germany for 1-2 years and after that the gov is paying your electricity, water bill and rent + a couple of hundred € to sweeten the deal. Better restaurants? I agree. Better transport services? Slightly more punctual, but the trains are in terrible condition, as is public transport in London. Strikes are frequent, and the costs are outrageous compared to Germany. Traffic? Ever took a bus through London. You might as well walk. Better airports? They’re all the same to me. At the end of the day, you’re just passing through to another country. I fly regularly (1–2 flights a month), but I only spend 2–4 hours per month in an airport, so I’m not sure why this is considered a major factor. And on a more personal note: Crime in London is out of control. I’ve seen multiple people have their phones snatched—there’s not much you can do when the thieves are armed with hammers. Just outside my flat, three people were recently stabbed, one fatally. Where I play tennis, people have been robbed at "knifepoint". Nearby, drug use is rampant in a park — in the summer laughing gas canisters litter the ground right next to a playground... I’ve never experienced any of these issues in Germany. Admittedly, We all have different life experiences and priorities, but claiming that life in the UK is better than in Germany—and justifying it with these points—seems wild to me. Especially since I already live in London and not in the "North" were some things are even rougher.
jonp888 2y ago
Why is Hacker News OBSESSED with Germany no longer getting 13% of it's power from nuclear? Of course you can disagree with it, but the way people frame it as as some sort of doomsday decision is just utterly, totally, ludicrous. If this were a regular german language news site this would not be the top comment, nor would there would be a discussion about nuclear power in literally any post about Germany. I'm quite sure I could make a post about some German film director and someone would claim his films would have been better if only it wasn't for the cataclysmic decision to not have 13% nuclear power. I mean seriously, WTF? You think all the problems of the economy(global demand trends, phase out of ICE cars, red tape, lack of skilled staff), and all the problems of politics(immigration, healthcare, social cohesion, taxation, budget balancing, social system) could be solved by having a different type of power station? Posts like this are what is utter madness.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  1. Germany got over 30% of its power from reliable, CO₂-free and cheap nuclear, not 13% 2. It has now spent €400-600 billion to replace that reliable, CO₂-free, cheap energy with unreliable expensive CO₂-free energy. That's a lot of cash for getting a worse product. 3. That first part was the easy part, because up to now Germany has retained base-load capacity, in the form of coal power stations. There is no precedent for an industrial country powered by 100% intermittent renewables, and the models are clear that there is a good reason for this: "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544222018035 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... So from here on it will get worse. Much worse. 4. Electricity prices in Germany have soared since 2002 (the year the Atomausstieg was enacted). Heavy industry is leaving the country. They say energy prices are to blame. Not wholly to blame, but to blame. 5. Inflation in Germany is high, largely due to energy prices. Now this is difficult to disentangle from the global energy crisis, but it is pretty clear that Germany was hit worse by this than other countries. 6. "You think all the problems of the economy...". Nobody made the claim that it was "all" the problems, except you. So calm down.

coffeebeqn 2y ago

You’re forgetting the cornerstone of their idiotic energy policy which recently came crashing down after their benefactor started a large scale invasion

croes 2y ago
I doubt it was idiotic but simple corruption. The coal power plants are the reason for high prices and huge profits for the energy companies. The „botched“ exit from the exit from the nuclear exit brought them additional billions in compensation. People like Söder, who now want nuclear energy back, threatened to resign if the shutdown is delayed. Of course, they don't want nuclear waste anywhere near them, nor do they want wind turbines or power lines. And they were in power for 16 years. They then left the problems to their successors, who are now being blamed for it. It's at least partly true of the SPD
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > People like Söder, who now want nuclear energy back, threatened to resign if the shutdown is delayed. Hardly anybody would have considered Söder's resignment to be a threat. :-D Many Germans rather would have been happy if he had resigned.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    Söder is a silly populist. Take him seriously at your own risk. :-D
- mpweiher 2y ago
  > I doubt it was idiotic but simple corruption. Why not both? Certainly Schröder, or Gazprom-Gerd as I call him, got his. For the Greens it's more idiotic ideology.
  - croes 2y ago
    The debt brake fetish of FDP is much more of a ideology than the plans of the Green Party. Especially Habeck is more driven by necessity, Baerbock not so much.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      The FDP has ~5%. The Schuldenbremse was added to the constitution in 2009, which requires a 2/3 majority in the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, and so had to be passed with broad agreement from both the ruling parties and the opposition.
      - mpweiher 2y ago
        Oh, and the EEG fee (guaranteed price for producers of renewable electricity regardless of demand) that is now funded through the federal budget exploded to > €20 billion. Which is pretty much the amount that caused the government to collapse in the budget row.

croes 2y ago

Nuclear energy isn’t CO2 free and there is still no solution for the nuclear waste. And don’t forget that the plant operating companies themselves didn’t want to keep the plants.

casenmgreen 2y ago
Nuclear waste in one sense is not a big problem, because it's so compact. If you think of wind, you need to cover vast areas of a country to generate meaningful amounts of energy.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  The material consumption for either wind or solar is around an order of magnitude more than for nuclear.
- tharmas 2y ago
  >Nuclear waste in one sense is not a big problem, because it's so compact. Neither was the exhaust from the first cars.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    But the energy density of nuclear fuels is so fantastic that it remains compact. See https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1162:_Log_Scale https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1162:_Log_Scale
- croes 2y ago
  In other ways it’s a big problem. They still don’t have a final repository for it and you don’t need much to endanger many people. Not to mention that nuclear energy leads to centralization what makes it a valuable target for sabotage.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    Not true. Finland just built a repository. The US one was finished and then shut down for purely political reasons. Wherever it's a problem it is politics. Technically it's a non-problem. And of course temporary storage is also a non-problem, which is why politicians can play stupid games with the final repositories. Oh, and of course we shouldn't be throwing it away in the first place, as it still contains >95% of the energy when we do. We should be recycling the fuel, preferably with reactors that can burn it directly.

oezi 2y ago

Energy costs are now back to levels seen before the Russian war against Ukraine, so it is unclear why the Energiewende should be at fault. The German malaise is more likely tied to the shift to EV, the weakness of Germany's car industry and a general slump in China which are all hitting at the same time. An aging population and an increase in social benefits are likely also part of the issue.

mpweiher 2y ago
> Energy costs are now back to levels seen before the Russian war They are not. Electricity is around 30% more expensive. More like 50% if you add back the EEG subsidy that is now paid via taxes rather than via your electricity bill. (Exercise for the reader: form the intersection between "Tax payer" and "Electricity consumer") https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreise/ https://www.verivox.de/strom/strompreise/ And we haven't turned off the coal power plants yet (meaning very little has been accomplished for the climate). There is no real plan of how that should work, and all the inklings of a plan come at huge expense.
- oezi 2y ago
  The chart you posted from Verivox shows exactely what I said. Prices are down below pre-war levels. The EEG tax subsidy is getting less and less. We are paying primarily for very old solar installations.
  - mpweiher 2y ago
    No it doesn't. You need to scroll to "Durchschnittliche Strompreise", which is what we are talking about. Just below that graph it says "Die Preisdynamik bei Strom ist stark. Innerhalb von 15 Jahren hat sich der durchschnittliche kWh-Preis fast verdoppelt. " So the price of electricity has nearly doubled in the last 15 years, which is roughly the timeframe of the Atomausstieg. The EEG tax subsidy is not getting "less and less". The government always predicts it will be less next year, really really really!, and then act super surprised when it is much more than they predicted. "Die staatliche Förderung für Erneuerbare Energien erreicht in diesem Jahr laut den Wirtschaftsforschern vom RWI mit 23 Milliarden Euro einen neuen Höchstwert. Dieser liegt deutlich über den Prognosen der Bundesregierung." https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/energie/erneuerbare-energien-staatliche-foerderung-100.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/energie/erneuerbare-ene... https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1014724 https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1014724 It turns out that the current amount was pretty much the amount that the government split up over, because they couldn't agree on the budget. So per definition not trivial.

usr1106 2y ago

No. German wealth has come decades from exporting German cars and machinery. Nowadays you can get those cheaper from China in not much worse quality. Additionally all internet profits go to tax avoiding companies originated in the US (Germany is not alone on that, it's the same all over Europe). None of them has to do anything with electricity.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
The effects of BYD have BARELY been felt by Germany. It will cause huge problems, but it has barely scratched the surface. Everything else has been going on for decades - aside from the electricity prices which have sky-rocketed, mostly due to Germany's harebrained idea to shut down all of its perfectly working nuclear reactors for no reason other than politics. What comes around goes around, and that decision will kill the party that made it, thankfully. It is an insult to German ingenuity for those idiot politicians to have shut down reactors that generated almost $12B of CLEAN electricity per year.
- illiac786 2y ago
  Can I ask which party made this decision? I’m curious.
  - usr1106 2y ago
    It was backed by a vast majority of the population after the Fukushima desaster. Originally only the Greens were against nuclear power. Later even the conservatives under Merkel changed sides and finalized the decision. Not doing so would have been political suicide. Nuclear power is only (relatively) clean until something goes wrong. Edit: The party that has finalized the decision is widely predicted to win the upcoming election. The GP is wrong that it would kill them. The Green party might end up with poor a result, but they were not in power when the decision was made.
    - mpweiher 2y ago
      Yes, Merkel flip-flopped. No, nuclear power is still comparatively safe and clean, even when you include the few times that something did go wrong. See: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

mediumsmart 2y ago

Utter madness is ok in the age of idiots and monsters.

seertaak 2y ago

This is true. In addition, the "good German bureaucracy" is a farce, run by paper (and fax!), with opaque, antiquated rules, expressed in impenetrable _Beamtendeutsch_ -- which expats need to hire professional help to navigate. Add to this that the house rental market in Berlin is now worse than London, and that German universities continue their decades-long slide towards oblivion. The UK is certainly not free of problems, but I count my lucky stars that I applied for the EU settlement scheme back in 2019 -- I'm now back in the UK, because better jobs, better healthcare, better social services, better restaurants, better transport system, better airports, better _everything_. And I say this as a transgender woman living in what trans people call "TERF island". I'm at pains to remind my English sisters that TERFs abound in Germany, too.

bbkingkrimson 2y ago
That hasn’t been my experience at all: Yes, bureaucracy is more prevalent, but it's manageable—at least as a German citizen. Better jobs? Overwork, fewer holidays, less social security, and after years in the workforce, you’re left with a paltry state pension of £800–900 per month at best. Better healthcare? Only if you compare private healthcare in the UK to public healthcare in Germany. My NHS experience involved endless waiting times, no personal doctor, no choice in doctors, and mostly brief 10-minute telephone appointments. Better social services? Don't rely on them but childcare is prohibitively expensive. Out of work? You get 70% of your last salary in Germany for 1-2 years and after that the gov is paying your electricity, water bill and rent + a couple of hundred € to sweeten the deal. Better restaurants? I agree. Better transport services? Slightly more punctual, but the trains are in terrible condition, as is public transport in London. Strikes are frequent, and the costs are outrageous compared to Germany. Traffic? Ever took a bus through London. You might as well walk. Better airports? They’re all the same to me. At the end of the day, you’re just passing through to another country. I fly regularly (1–2 flights a month), but I only spend 2–4 hours per month in an airport, so I’m not sure why this is considered a major factor. And on a more personal note: Crime in London is out of control. I’ve seen multiple people have their phones snatched—there’s not much you can do when the thieves are armed with hammers. Just outside my flat, three people were recently stabbed, one fatally. Where I play tennis, people have been robbed at "knifepoint". Nearby, drug use is rampant in a park — in the summer laughing gas canisters litter the ground right next to a playground... I’ve never experienced any of these issues in Germany. Admittedly, We all have different life experiences and priorities, but claiming that life in the UK is better than in Germany—and justifying it with these points—seems wild to me. Especially since I already live in London and not in the "North" were some things are even rougher.

jonp888 2y ago

Why is Hacker News OBSESSED with Germany no longer getting 13% of it's power from nuclear? Of course you can disagree with it, but the way people frame it as as some sort of doomsday decision is just utterly, totally, ludicrous. If this were a regular german language news site this would not be the top comment, nor would there would be a discussion about nuclear power in literally any post about Germany. I'm quite sure I could make a post about some German film director and someone would claim his films would have been better if only it wasn't for the cataclysmic decision to not have 13% nuclear power. I mean seriously, WTF? You think all the problems of the economy(global demand trends, phase out of ICE cars, red tape, lack of skilled staff), and all the problems of politics(immigration, healthcare, social cohesion, taxation, budget balancing, social system) could be solved by having a different type of power station? Posts like this are what is utter madness.

mpweiher 2y ago
1. Germany got over 30% of its power from reliable, CO₂-free and cheap nuclear, not 13% 2. It has now spent €400-600 billion to replace that reliable, CO₂-free, cheap energy with unreliable expensive CO₂-free energy. That's a lot of cash for getting a worse product. 3. That first part was the easy part, because up to now Germany has retained base-load capacity, in the form of coal power stations. There is no precedent for an industrial country powered by 100% intermittent renewables, and the models are clear that there is a good reason for this: "...which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544222018035 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... So from here on it will get worse. Much worse. 4. Electricity prices in Germany have soared since 2002 (the year the Atomausstieg was enacted). Heavy industry is leaving the country. They say energy prices are to blame. Not wholly to blame, but to blame. 5. Inflation in Germany is high, largely due to energy prices. Now this is difficult to disentangle from the global energy crisis, but it is pretty clear that Germany was hit worse by this than other countries. 6. "You think all the problems of the economy...". Nobody made the claim that it was "all" the problems, except you. So calm down.