German rejection of nuclear might go down as one of the most self destructive non war related choice by any government.
Even if you are gone say not to build anything new, just maintaining what they had would have resulted in significantly more energy then all energy they are getting from LNG now.
You clearly have no understanding of German energy consumption. Natgas is being used by the industry and for domestic heating. Nuclear power plants were used for electricity generation. Even if we had 100% in spare nuclear capacity above baseline consumption, we would still be building these LNG terminals. Absolutely nothing would have changed regarding the current gas and oil situation.
> Natgas is being used by the industry and for domestic heating. Nuclear power plants were used for electricity generation.
Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.
Replacing a domestic heating system is significantly more difficult than adding new electricity plants. Domestic heating is a completely decentralized problem. If you wanted to change everyone over to electrical heat, yes it could be done. But not rapidly. And swapping out gas radiator boilers for electric options can be very difficult and costly.
There is no law that says that you must use gas for heat. But once you have that installed base, you can’t just switch from gas to electric heat overnight. It will take decades to make that change. Even if all of the equipment was available (and it’s not), it would take a team of 3-5 workers 2-3 days to convert each home. And that’s assuming a simpler gas -> electric boiler swap without needing to upgrade electrical service panels/etc. This type of change can get complicated quickly for just a single house. Multi unit homes would be more complex. Now factor that over all other homes/buildings and you can see that the number of workers required to do this rapidly don’t exist.
Even in the US, there is a push to phase out gas heat in many locations. But it’s a phased rollout with a plan decades long.
Could this be a longer term plan? Definitely. But with a quick turnaround? Not really.
I don't know what you are talking about. It's literally as easy as buying a $15 electric space heater from the next store and plugging it into an existing wall outlet. The rest is just aesthetics. Electric water heaters are also affordable, small and easy to install yourself.
Are you saying that hot water based central heating systems with radiators should be replaced by throwing an electric heater in every room? You can't be serious.
There are quite a few things wrong with that, first of all the efficiency is terrible (that's why they're banned in Switzerland since 2009), secondly the house installations in a lot of homes would probably not be able to cope with the power required to heat all rooms (in my apartment in Switzerland, the fuse would pop out when I turn on two of those 2000W heaters). Third, it's far less convenient if you need to set the heat in every room separately, instead of turning on/up/down/off the central heating system when the outside weather changes.
These $15 space heaters have thermostats, you set a temperature and they heat the room until that temperature is reached. I'm sure you can get a $50 version that speaks smart home protocols of your choice so you can program schedules if that's what you want. Not sure how turning valves on several water radiators per room is more convenient.
These cheap (seriously a $15 heater can’t produce enough heat to cover a room larger than a small bedroom) heaters also can’t be controlled with a central thermostat. Water radiators (or electric heat pumps, etc) can be controlled for the whole home, or by individual locations (without needing to manually turn valves).
In fact, at least in the US, space heaters aren’t allowed to be automatically turned on by any means. They require a person to start it manually each time you want heat. Because they aren’t permanently installed, it is a potential fire hazard. A pet/kid/etc could run past it and knock it over. If that happened near a blanket or pillow, the fabric could catch fire.
I can’t imagine being able to buy something less safe in Switzerland.
I really don't know what else to tell you. This is $20 on Amazon, has tip over protection and a thermostat. Of course there are inexpensive wall mounted options available that you also plug into a wall outlet. These are super popular in Scandinavia.
Portable Electric Space Heater with Thermostat, 1500W/750W Safe and Quiet Ceramic Heater Fan, Heat Up 200 Square Feet for Office Room Desk Indoor Use https://a.co/d/2uD3YJu
I’ve been waiting a couple weeks for my gas furnace to be repaired (everything’s slow in Canada these days) and ended up buying a couple similar little electric heaters since winter’s pretty much here.
I’ve got no dog in the Euro energy debates, but I can say that anecdotally it’s been fine staying warm with electric heat in the interim. Obviously having a single centrally controlled thermostat is preferable, but it is really a vanishingly negligible task to flip heater a switch on or off.
I said a central thermostat. This is the context I was referring to. As in a remotely controlled heater where the thermostat is on the wall as opposed to on the device. This is what you’d need to use to keep a home heated while you aren’t there. I happen to have a space heater on right now next to me. It has a very nice remote app on my phone. And it is very clear that the heat function only works from the device itself (due to a legal requirement to support UL 1278). If your cheap heater has a built in thermostat that turns itself on, that’s great… while you’re there watching it. But I can’t say that’s something that I’d ever feel comfortable leaving always plugged in. They are only ever supposed to be used while attended - for a reason. The updated version of the product you linked to (2022 digital version) even has an automatic shutdown timer. You have to manually start it again after that shutdown.
I also have a permanently installed electric heater installed in the wall in a different room. It does have a permanent thermostat that can start/stop automatically. It’s quite a different beast from a $20 space heater with its own circuit back to my breaker box. It works pretty well, but portable, it is not. It was also much more than $20.
But, back to your original point — are you really suggesting replacing the entire German heating infrastructure with $20 ceramic heaters from Amazon? How is that a remotely viable solution? These are devices meant for heating a small office. If you want to heat an apartment or house or city, you need different options. And changing those over takes time and more consideration than buying a bunch of $20 space heaters.
My point was that replacing an existing central gas posered water circulation heater with electric heating is easy, cheap and fast (operating it might be more expensive, or cheaper depending on electricity prices). It's not "Replacing a domestic heating system is significantly more difficult than adding new electricity plants.". I have done so myself on a relative's house in a weekend including installing an electrical water heater (solar panels in roof make this very inexpensive to operate). Of course you wouldn't use cheap chinese portable heaters as a permanent solution, but it would totally work, they are 100% efficient in converting electrical to thermal energy.
Your point that you can't have central temperature controls with electric heating is just absurd, I learned how to build this in first semester of electrical engineering.
Replacing a whole country's infrastructure to go from electric heat to depend on community steam boilers or gas heating instead is infeasible due to the logistics involved as those are major infrastructure projects. The reverse does not seem true. Replacing whole house heating with cheaper per-room heating seems like a downgrade because, well, it is. But there's a war going on and sacrifices have to be made. If you don't think shitty electric space heaters is not luxurious winter living I'd largely agree, but the thing is poor Americans are able to survive through harsher winters than, say, Berlin gets with these terrible heaters.
We (specific subsets of humanity) just completed a massive government led undertaking to distribute a brand new vaccine to huge swaths of population, which involved an insane amount of logistics. And then also RAT kits. On the heels of that, you're telling me that distributing a small box that doesn't need to be stored at -20C or else it goes bad, to every household in a country is simply too hard and we shouldn't even bother, and just let people freeze to death? I mean, yeah it seems a bit late to start. The best time to start such a project would have been Friday, February 25th, 2022. The second best time though is now.
> Replacing whole house heating with cheaper per-room heating seems like a downgrade because, well, it is. But there's a war going on and sacrifices have to be made.
This would be pointless in Germany, though, since there isn't enough electricity in the European grid to make a short term switch for this many people. (Also the price for electricity is already still much higher than for NG).
For this year, it's already getting too late to act, apart from trying to make as much LNG as possible available to the public.
For the future, electrification of Eueope will need large investments in stable&affordable power production with incentives for homeowners to make the switch as it comes online. Typically such an incentive would be to gradually introduce a tax on NG that will eventually be high enough to squeeze it out of the market.
> The best time to start such a project would have been Friday, February 25th, 2022.
The best time to start this would have been 20-50 years ago.
I've heard a few people say this, but it's not true - the efficiency of electric heaters is 100%. They're only detrimental when they run off of fossil-fuel based power plants. Instead of making silly laws banning symptoms, our focus should be on removing the pollution at its source.
a) I think many people already have some heaters sitting around somewhere.
b) If a country like Germany can't, within a couple of months, produce something as simple as resistive heaters in significant numbers, something must be seriously wrong. They consist of a cheap case, resistive wire wound into a coil, a fan, and a couple of switches (main power switch, safety switch that turns it off when it tips over). If a design takes 3 minutes to hand-assemble after the easily automatable parts (e.g. stamped sheet metal case, coil) have been made in great numbers, then a single factory with 100 workers will churn out 16000 per 8-hour day, or a million in 3 months.
c) even if Germany can't, China can. Maybe not enough for everyone but enough to make a significant dent in gas consumption, together with the ones people already have
d) everything that uses electricity is an electric heater. Worst case, heat a large pot of water on the stove.
I don't believe your apartment in Switzerland only has one 16A circuit it can draw from, that wouldn't be up to electrical code in most European countries that require one 16A circuit per room. No expert in Switzerland electric code specifically though. The last apartment in Germany I lived in (1 bedroom 1 bathroom) had 4x16A circuits and separate 3x16A for the electric kitchen stove.
What's the efficiency of a 2kW electric heater? It's 100%, which is not terrible. If the electricity production of your country sucks, that should be fixed for other reasons than heating.
No, that isn't a realistic option. My grandparent's place over in Germany is a huge 3 story place heated by a hot water boiler system and plenty of rooms. There's absolutely no way that you can heat that place with electric heaters in every room without blowing fuses constantly, and if you switch over to an electric boiler, there's a good chance the connection to the electrical grid is inadequate as it was installed 70+ years ago when life was very different. Europe is not like north American as older housing stock is not easily retrofitted without significant costs being incurred. Plus there are plenty of high density buildings as land is precious and expensive, so we're not talking about 1 story bungalows being the norm. This is what happens when towns have already existed in place for centuries.
My house is similar to that of your grandparents. The house was built 70 years ago, and originally it had a coal fueld boiler, which was switched to a heating oil boiler (twice, I think) with the one in place when I bought it also having a 6KW electrical backup coil.
In 2020 my country (Norway) made it illegal to use fossil fuels for heating, so I had to upgrade my grid connection and buy a couple of space heaters to account for the days where 6kW is not enough.
At the time (2020), electricity was still very cheap here, due to Norway being self supplied with almost-free hydropower. Now that we're able to export all our surplus electricity (and then some), and we're seeing German electricity prices here, I suppose I need to get a heat pump.
TLDR; Given a couple of decades, it's perfectly possible to move the population away from fossil fuel heating IF you have large amounts of affordable electricity.
As long as you are using fossil fuels to generate electricity using electric space heaters is counterproductive because you actually produce significantly more CO2 than just burning the gas directly (this applies to France as well btw). The space heater comment also let's me to believe that you never lived in a country that requires proper heating.
Now heatpumps are a different issue, however they require to upgrade insulation as well.
The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric.
Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays?
I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
> The efficiency of electricity production has no influence on the amount of work it takes to convert heating from gas to electric.
Sure it does, it directly effects prices. Also the efficiency affects how much CO2 you generate, you don't win anything if the absolute amount of CO2 goes up.
> Why would you want to use fossil fuels to generate electricity anyway nowadays?
Because the system has a big inertia? AFAIK there are no western countries who generate 100% of their electricity fossil free, Norway and New Zealand come quite close but are not 100%. For most countries its still around 30% at least which is fossil.
> I've spent several months above the polar circle and lived in Germany and Minnesota where it gets much colder than in France. Heating a 2 bedroom mountain cabin in winter in Sweden in -36C works fine with 3x2kW electric heaters. It's basic physics, there isn't any advantage to using gas given the same power ends up being transferred to the inside of the building as heat energy.
OK then do the exercise, the price for electricity is ~0.28 kWh, how much would it cost to heat that cabin for the year (and we haven't heated water yet).
For people who think electric heating is the solution, now replace it with 0.98 euro/kWh, which my current rate in the Netherlands since November. Though heating with gas is equally bad at 3.3 euro per me. I'm paying roughly 600 euro a month just to heat our home to 17 deg C
That's because your country chose to make themselves completely reliant on a crazy mass murderer 3 countries over for its electricity production. But hey, it was cheaper (but not that much) than building solar and wind for a few decades!
Ugh. I wish it were that simple. The wiring in my home won’t take more than a single space heater before blowing a fuse (every plug in the house is on the same circuit) and I wouldn’t trust a $15 space heater with my life.
Most electrical codes only require updates (to bring the system into compliance) when there is work being done. So if you don’t need to add a circuit, your home may still be wired as if it were the 1950s (or earlier!).
This is part of the hidden cost and complexity. For someone like the parent, you’d have to rewire an entire home. How long do you think that will take? If you seriously wanted to move an entire country over to electric heating, you’ll have all sorts of these edge cases. There simply isn’t a way to make a switch like that in a rapid manner.
The average home can use a water kettle and a gaming PC at the same time, you are making some super rare edge cases seem like the norm. I've seen lots of old buildings and none was wired so inadequately that you couldn't heat it electrically.
Yes, my home is wired from ancient times. Last year we had monthly blackouts in our home. It took multiple electricians to figure out that our home wasn’t wired to code, and finally to learn that two wires had melted together and were a fire hazard. It was easy to replace them but, impossible to rewire the house to bring it up to code. All the walls would have to be ripped out, which just isn’t feasible on a realistic budget.
The service coming in from the neighborhood is only rated for 25 amps too. They’ll have to lay new cable to get 50 amps and support a heat pump. There’s been some talk on the block about pooling money to pay for it, but nothing serious yet.
Anytime you’re talking about a large population, outliers are going to be found pretty often. Even if only 5% or the homes in Germany are like the parent/sibling post, that’s still 2.1M homes (Google said Germany has 42.5M homes, so that’s what I used).
So, even if the average home could be switched over easily (which, I still think is wrong), that’s still would leave a lot of people without many good, financially feasible, options.
Of course that's more efficient but won't matter (from an environmental perspective, might still make economic sense) in a few years when all electricity comes from carbon free sources. If this won't be the case then heating will be the least of our problems.
I think you're optimistic if you think we'll have zero carbon electricity production in a few years, at a scale that will allow us to replace all NG and oil heating with electrical, especially without heat pumps.
Even if we make it a primary priority, and try to maximally ramp up both wind, solar and nuclear production (+ storage as needed), I don't think we will be able to do it in less than 30 year, 20 at best.
Well, I don't think anyone's suggesting it can be done overnight. So, of course, we will need a stopgap measure (of LNG terminals). For now.
IMHO, what people demand is that Germany should recognize that the current crisis is the fruit of multiple decades of bad energy policy. If we don't, twenty years later, we'll still be saying "Yes, sadly, Germany is still burning gas, but you can't convert it overnight! What do you want?"
France is using the same percentage of gas, why is nobody calling out France for decades of bad energy policy? Even more their nuclear reactors despite massive subsidies are in such a state of disrepair that they had >60% off during the summer, and Germany had to take up the slack.
It's the result of cheap fossil fuels, provided by Russia.
There is no shortage of electricity in Germany, so there was no economic interest to build more nuclear power plants? Germny even exports electricity to France, which has a lot of nuclear power plants (many of which currently don't work).
We don't even know where to safely put the waste for the next million years.
Germany doesn't have the huge inhabited areas like the US - and even they have not solve that problem yet.
Germany export to France is an uninteresting information without context. Due to the energy mix the energy is exported in production peaks when it is cheap (sometimes prices are negative) and imported back when there is shortage for higher prices. Also the whole flow network needs to be taken into account and germany imports also from other countries.
You can’t currently build a reliable electric grid with wind and solar alone so you need either nuclear or fossil fuels.
> So what did Germany do for heat before the wall fell and they got cheap fuels from Russia?
Germany used to be heated by gas created from coal and coal directly till about the 1960ies. Starting with the 1970ies already, the Soviet Union began delivery of natural gas.
> Yes, and people are saying this is exactly the problem. There is no law of physics (or even economy) that demands industry and domestic heating must use gas. It is the result of 30 years of not building enough power plants.
No but there are laws of chemistry.
The point the previous poster was trying to make is, that the industry needs natural gas as a precursor product, mainly for the chemical industry. Obviously, you cannot replace that with electricity easily. Over 12% of Germany's natural gas use is purely for the chemical reactions it provides within the chemical industry. A further 10% is for use in the metal industry where gas also has been notoriously hard to replace as it's not used for its energy value alone but for providing reduction reactions.
What you say basically is, not only Germany should have kept on building nuclear, it should also have developed new hydrogen based industrial flows for all these sectors alone, things that exist nowhere on this world on actual scale.
So LNG terminals would have been necessary in any case. Germany had none due to the over-reliance on Russian gas.
Otherwise I will not comment on the difficulty of replacing domestic heating, which IS a huge block of gas usage, on the scale of a whole country, as others have already done this.
What of the installed base of water heaters, stoves, and home furnaces? These can all be converted to e.g. induction ranges and heat pumps, but the time and expense of doing so needs to be factored in.
No law of economics… are you that sure? France is the poster boy of nuclear energy and has been pushing very hard for electric domestic heating over the years and yet it simply has almost never made any sense for homeowners to opt for electric heating rather than natural gas. Indeed, though French electricity prices have always been probably the lowest in Western Europe, it still always comes up some 50% more expensive than natural gas. The only major reason property owners switch to electric is that it's cheaper to install, so using in it in rentals shifts higher energy prices onto tenants while property owners benefit from lower investment costs. Clearly, not building more power plants isn't really what went wrong here.
Norway banned fossil fuels for domestic heating in 2020. Which it could do due to having built out electricity generation 4-5x the GW/capita compared to most of Europe, 100% which is renewable (+some 10-20% extra available for exports).
Hydro makes this simple. Nuclear makes it possible. No other approaches have been demonstrated that allows this without fossil fuels at scale.
There is a lot of industry that has absolutely no other way than to use gas. There was an article about a copper wires manufacturer in a German magazine a while ago. They need a lot of heat to melt the copper, and currently the only economically feasible way is natural gas. Electricity just can't get you the temperatures and alternatives like hydrogen just don't work yet (they actually have been running tests for years on this).
The issue is if they don't have gas, transitioning other things to electricity becomes difficult, because you need copper.
Not if you use a heat pump, no. Modern ones have very high efficiency (above 300% as they're not actually using energy to make heat, just to "move it around") and work even in very, very cold temperatures. But you don't install tens of millions all over a country in a matter of months - you quickly run into bottlenecks like production, distribution, certified installers, etc.
You're not likely to get 300% efficiency when it really matters, in colder climates. The temperature outside my house is around -10C now, and closer to -20C at night this week. Keeping my house warm requires around 6-10KW constantly atm, which I could perhaps reduce to 5-8KW with a heat pump (some heating will come from other appliances, like computers, fridges, etc).
Or I have used the oil boiler in the basement, if Norway didn't ban that in 2020. That would have freed up enough electricity for several homes in the UK or Germany.
Electrical heating is fine if all electricity produced is from hydro, nuclear or wind/solar, but it makes less sense if the grid relies too much on fossil fuels.
Depends. Better to burn gas for direct heat than burn gas to produce electricity and then use resistive heating.
But you do have to transport the gas or electricity to the heating site, and I don't know how that adds up.
Also, if conditions are right, you can use electricity to run a heat pump and move heat from the outside air to the inside air; depending on the details, you can move a lot more watts of heat then you spend operating the heat pump. This can be more economical than direct heating.
In a sense, but if the worry is carbon and energy security then domestic renewables and nuclear look a lot more attractive.
Heat pumps are great and super cool but if you include the efficiency of generation it's unlikely to be more energetically efficient, yes.
It's close though, natural gas combined cycle plants are very efficient for what they are. And if the heater is electric, substitution for other electricity sources is possible... unlike now.
It is, but why would we want to burn gas and invest in gas infrastructure instead of carbon free technology? Electric heating works great for any future technology we end up using.
Why are you still burning fossil fuel to heat houses? If you had stable electricity you could use heat pumps instead. Seems like fossil gas has been too cheap for too long, which have incentivized dependency on it despite the CO2 external cost.
Are there any plans on using waste heat from industry combined with district heating anywhere? Biofuels? Subsidized insulation retrofitting?
Heat pumps have only recently become economically in climates like Germany’s. Most people don’t want to replace their furnace until it breaks or needs expensive repairs.
It’s been economical for 30+ yrs for Germanys climate, they just have older housing that’s never been updated. Every heat pump has backup source of heat too. Which will be electric coils or gas usually, so you don’t even have to give up gas heat for the really frigid days.
I'd say in UK heat pumps are only just down to affordability domestically. If capital is cheap for you then perhaps they've been affordable much longer, but baseline costs are only recently noticeably low enough for me to consider it ... possibly when I look next time it'll be out of reach again given the weak pound and massive cost of living increase.
Thanks for the advice. I was hoping to have time over Christmas to start looking, I've done a little preliminary research. There are, as ever, complications (possible extension?).
It's tricky stuff, best to befriend a local installer so they can help you choose. In the end after doing all the numbers for our house the simplest solution for the next two years (as long as we still have netmetering) was to install ample solar and postpone the heatpump that way by the time we will buy the heatpump the solar installation will already be halfway towards being paid off, with the current electrical rates here the ROI on solar is incredible, and running a heatpump off the solar system in the winter isn't very effective, at a minimum you'll need a battery set up for that. But even in October we managed to be net positive with respect to the grid which helps to offset the cost of the gas.
But in 2025 it will be a completely different story which will likely require yet another investment. I'm kind of wondering how people that can't just do that kind of thing are going to cope, it is a worrying development. Of course it doesn't help that the measures to control the prices of energy here effectively benefit the large producers at the expense of the people that decided to go for heatpumps early on.
But as long as the countermeasures still split by gas and electricity usage it is to our advantage to get as close to the cap as possible on natural gas. Ridiculous, but the difference is too large to ignore.
Yeah there’s no denying that it definitely helps that electricity is a good bit cheaper in the US, making gas v. Heat pump heat pretty much on par in the northeast at least.
It hasn't been, though - not for any particular technical reason, mind you. Yes, they are 3x as efficient, but meanwhile we have heaved so many taxes and other costs on private electricity prices (to keep industry use cheap) while natural gas had stayed dirt cheap that the upfront capex really made no sense.
If they weren't so impractical, everyone should have been buying gas turbines to make their electricity - that's the level of market failure we are talking about.
If the government can subsidize solar installations, can't they just as well subsidize furnace replacements? It's interesting which parts of this problem people are eager to tackle, and which parts they completely let their own side down on.
The incentives and the rhetoric are poorly aligned.
Until fairly recently heat pumps didn't operate at the temperatures regularly seen in the northern US and Canada. Hard to shift a lifetime of the choices being expensive resistance electric heating or (comparatively) cheaper burning fuel.
In rural Canada you'll find plenty of oil furnaces with their own tanks as well. Some of those are 30 to 40 years old and all of them are terribly inefficient.
And they are expensive AF to run. I had family members who had an oil-heated house on the Northeast US, and it was close to $2k a month to hear in the winter months (the house was large, something like 3000-3500 sq ft, but that's still an astronomical cost for heating)
We're getting into similar territory in Europe with the current gas prices. 3 Euro / cubic meter at my supplier. I never thought that the cost of heating our house would become a factor again in my lifetime but here we are.
Plenty of these old houses have much bigger problems than just the windows (which, in Canada at least in all but the very oldest houses always was double glass, even if it came in the form of an inner and an outer window).
Crappy foundations without insulation, roofs and walls with poor insulation, front door directly opening into the house instead of a separate space, almost all of them freestanding (especially rural ones) and relatively large for the number of people living there. Heating in Canada is an interesting problem. -40 Celsius on the other side of a 4" barrier is nothing to take lightly. One elderly couple that I'm aware of had begun to dismantle their house on the inside and they were burning it all up bit-by-bit to stay warm, the two of them sitting around a shitty old pot bellied stove that moved the bulk of the heat generated straight out the chimney. Stuff like that breaks your heart.
My post was a little too quick… one of my good friends was an energy efficiency expert and when I asked him for advice on replacing a boiler in our “new to me” home and he goes “don’t!”.
We did an audit and spent about $4000 on efficiency retrofit - it cut our heating bill about 25%. That was 10 years ago, and we’ll probably start looking at replacement boilers when incentives ramp up for new tech.
That's the right approach though: any Joule you don't need to produce is one saved and even the most efficient furnace can not fix a leaky house. So the priorities are: economize (because it is free, and assuming you still can), insulate, high efficiency heat (depending on the age of the furnace, anything older than a decade is likely not HE+), self generated power in that order.
I had the full energy efficiency report with infrared camera and expert's eyes and blower door test. It was enlightening. I strongly recommend first thing get the expert report and follow the recommendations.
A few years later I got another report and fixed a few more things. House cold spots mostly went away, bills went down, less outside noise, and have the same windows and furnace.
The latest generation (HE+) is a lot better than the ones before it which tended to erode the inner liner of the burner vessel into a nasty aluminum rich sludge that ended up clogging the drain. The newer ones do not have that (much thinner drains too).
Really depends on where you are. Parts of Ontario and BC you could probably get away with just a heat pump, but lots of places in the prairies you could only use a heat pump for maybe 1/2 of the winter months. It's just too cold the rest of the time, so you'd have to augment with electric or gas anyways.
With the amount of flak raised about infrastructure not being able to handle electric vehicles I can't even imagine the chaos if the prairies went electric heat.
I'd really like to see strong baseline energy efficiency standards put in provincially for new builds and a lot of investment in retrofit, but with the current political climate in the prairies that's impossible. Promoting anything that doesn't burn both oil and money is anathema.
Depends on where you are in Canada. In Québec where electricity is cheap, most homes rely on electric heating. Of course, in Alberta where gas is cheap and electric is ~2.5x more expensive it's not surprising gas furnaces are the default choice.
Heat pumps don’t work all that well in Canadian climates. They sort of work now.
Advocates usually don’t mention that the solution for the millions of houses with hydronic systems are usually mini-splits, which are both ugly and noisy.
Lots of people who don’t have heat pumps are rabid advocates of them. In some cases trying to ban gas heat.
Parts of Alaska (eg Fairbanks, Juneau) are not as cold as the Canadian prairies, where it frequently gets well below -20C in the depths of winter. In Winnipeg the average low in January is -21C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_and_climate_of_Winni...
I don't know if downsizing sq ft is part of the energy transition, though I was in a few multi-bedroom houses in Germany which relied on firewood for heating.
Yes, gas has been much cheaper than electricity. Heating your house with an electric boiler was several times more expensive than a gas one. Anyway, you still need fossil fuels for industrial processes and agriculture
In a disturbing chicken and egg problem, the heat pumps industry is not as installed and scaled up yet, which kinda refrain people from making the jump. Stories of heat pumps breaking up in November after less than ten years with no one left to fix them are not making the tech look good, whereas gas boilers routinely last 15/20 years while everyone forget them except once a year for maintenance - and once every couple decades because of geopolitics.
This will definitely change in the next few years, as heat pumps will replace "fioul" (petrol ?) boilers, which are being slowly banned.
Which will make our direct co2 emissions slightly better, and our electricity generation problems MUCH bigger...
(Full disclosure : I bought a house with a 5-year old gas boiler that I haven't had the heart to trash yet, instead investing in insulation, and a good wood furnace. My goal for 2022-2023 winter is to use it half as little as last winter.)
There was recently a NYTimes article about how there aren't enough Heat Pump installation technicians in Germany to meet demand, so some folks are learning how to do it themselves.
That's understandable considering the sudden demand spike that's ultimately because of the war. People aren't extra interested now because they want something more environmentally friendly, it's pure economics. Using fossil fuel wasn't expensive enough before since the external costs aren't factored in, so now when Putler has driven up the price of gas and oil people learn that there are alternatives, and now many of them are cheaper as well.
My question isn't "why aren't you switching now", it's "why haven't you switched during the previous 20 years, when we've all known about climate change"? And on top of that there's the strategic issue with relying on Russia.
That does exist; In my street they are doing construction work for exactly that purpose, but this is one of the largest cities, no idea how widespread that is.
>>Why are you still burning fossil fuel to heat houses? If you had stable electricity you could use heat pumps instead.
You do realize that in many countries - including the US - a very large portion of electricity is still generated from fossil fuels? Until there is enough electricity generated from wind/solar/nuclear, switching to an electric heat pump just switches where those fossil fuels get burned, i.e. it pollutes someone else's neighborhood instead of your own.
Burning fossil fuel isn't primarily about polluting neighborhoods, it's about polluting our shared atmosphere. If 20 000 houses use electricity from one oil burning power plant it's relatively easy to capture the carbon emissions from that one plant, and to replace the plant with other power producers eventually.
Looking at electricity maps: Currently burning 28GW of very dirty coal, 46% of demand, 72% of emissions. 12GW of gas, 19% of demand, 17% of emissions. Wind+Solar combined is only supplying 7% of demand.
They decommissioned ~20GW of clean nuclear power over the past 20 years. Whatever way you cut it that’s a huge mistake for the climate (not to mention economy). That replaces most of the coal in that picture. Or replaces all of the gas and then some in that picture.
Why do you say nuclear is as clean as diesel? That is clearly not true.
CO2 emissions equivalent to wind and solar (actually slightly better). Safety (deaths per kWh) also equivalent to wind and solar. And land use much much better. Waste is tiny for the energy produced and easily contained unlike other industries, which is why no one has died from waste.
So basically you're rejecting the safest power source with the least environmental impact, and the only source along with hydro that has actually empirically (in the real world) accomplished deep decarbonization of an electricity grid (e.g. Ontario, France, Sweden).
Nuclear waste has a lifecycle of 1000s of years. The heat surplus kills river life. If things go southwards, whole regions are no longer livable for us humans.
Nuclear energy is climate change wise, surely a good deal but environment wise and human population wise, the thing is not that easy.
And nuclear waste is only easy contained if you are the US, Russia, Canada or Australia. Because otherwise you do not have a significant sized land area where you can burry that waste without creating massive problems.
exactly, it might not have a big CO2 footprint, but that's not the whole picture, we just don't have any container that doesn't start leaking radioactive shit after some years, so is it really an alternative
The first geological repository goes online next year in Finland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re... . It's not in the sparsely populated north of the country either. There are no problems to speak of when you bury something under 500m of bedrock in thick copper and even thicker bentonite clay. There just aren't.
I think mercantile is the more appropriate adjective.
It was cynical politicians and industrialists who sold the population on a clean energy revolution, all while banking on cheap Russian gas to actually deliver the energy required.
The clean energy revolution was promoted by the Green party in 1998-2005 (including turning off the first nuclear power plants).
It was the string of conservative governments that followed it that neglected (and, at times, actively sabotaged) the build out of renewable power sources.
SPD (center-left leaning party) has been junior partners in every one but one of those conservative governments.
German politics are also very collaborative/compromise driven, so it's a mistake to think the outcome would have been drastically different, had we had a SPD/Green coalition rather than a CDU/SPD coalition the last 16 years.
This is especially the case, given that parts of the SPD were and continue to be on Russian payroll.
Ultimately, renewables are very challenging from a technical perspective for a densely populated country with energy intensive industries and limited offshore wind options.
I would say it is a long term game to become clean energy wise. There was no secret here in Germany about that we used coal, oil and gas for many more years. Renewables are still ramping up.
If you ignore the long term waste. There is no way to place a cost on storing that waste. So people hand wave it away. Hoping a way to deal with it is found.
The alternative is pumping radioactive, polluting waste into the atmosphere, which is exactly what Germany is doing right now with its coal-burning plants.
gas plants are used for short term electricity generation. If there is more demand than production can sustain the transmission operator will buy the extremely expensive electricity from gas sources. This price will be shared by everyone.. https://clouglobal.com/european-merit-order-energy-trading-o...
Energy use in the form of Natural gas for heating and industrial use dwarfs all electrical energy consumption in Germany - something like 8-10x at least if you measure it in joules.
It’s not an uncommon situation in northern climates. Natural gas has a LOT of thermal energy, is pretty cheap per BTU/joule, and thermal energy is very useful.
Interesting - at least for Finland, biomass (aka wood), and oil are common for folks out in the sticks, and district heating and electric resistive or heat pumps are more common in settlements or cities.
My guess is the difference is due to infrastructure? Finland is widely dispersed, and it’s expensive to run pipelines for natural gas in frozen ground.
So something naturally present (wood), tankable/drivable (oil), or centralized in a settlement (district heat) wins? Similar with Norway and Sweden?
Russia is a bit different because it has a lot of oil and natural gas, but even then outside of a major city, probably wood wins?
Germany has a much milder climate, and is much denser, but not all centralized, and especially after the wars, centralized heating probably seems like a dangerous idea.
Compared to freezing to death, still pretty cheap. It’s worth noting, that 10x current electrical consumption is assuming a conversion (with electric) using very efficient heat pumps to produce the heat when using electricity.
If doing resistive heat, it’s more like 30x.
Even if everyone somehow had enough heat pumps, installers, and capital to switch the entire country to heat pumps, the electrical transmission grid would collapse long before it could work, even if generation (historically an issue) wasn’t a problem during these coldest days. Which it tends to be, and has gotten worse with the switch to renewables.
This was a known issue that could have been addressed with several decades of prior notice, but at great expense.
Agreed, this was entirely preventable. The grid is under significant stress already due to the electrification of transport (and likely to become much more stressed on account of that in the near future) so all this is beginning to add up to a perfect storm.
Big European cities have pretty crummy infrastructure and upgrading that is both costly and time consuming. The next years will give a massive boost to energy independence though, which in many ways is a good thing, it's just that we are no longer in control of the timetable and given the fact that until not all that long ago at least my country was selling their gas for wholesale prices that were pretty much a giveaway I really wonder why nobody seems to be doing much in terms of long term planning. Frustrating.
For the heating BHKWs (Blockheizkrafwerke) of many cities in Germany it's still cheaper to run on gas than switch to burning oil. Since the communal industry are legally structured as companies, the mayors aren't allowed by law to switch to oil if it is more expensive, even though it could ease the shortage.
In Poland, coal prices absolutely skyrocketed because Russian coal isn't available anymore & consumers directly interfer with the market.
Relatively, Gas is still cheap. If people all would switch to electric heating quickly, electrity prices would go up proportionally because we would need to buy more form neighbouring countries in close-border regions to keep the network stable.
In the EU the electricity price is pegged to the price of natural gas. This results in a lot of weirdness, such as the price of solar and wind power energy being the result of what natural gas costs, even though they have nothing to do with each other.
No (at least in Germany, can't speak for whole Europe) the price is settled by the most expensive electricity producer currently serving. Gas power plants are used regularly to stabilize the network, but they didn't drive the electrity price that high because Germany has way more gas power plants than usually necessary. Only the modern ones were used.
This year though, since France struggles so hard with their nuclear power plants, gas power plants are running 24/7, even older, less efficient ones.
This led to the price of electricity determined by gas power plant operation costs all day.
The price set is the marginal price for the last MW of capacity required (which is the most expensive one). No other way to do it I guess: if you give the cheaper producers less than the most expensive ones, they have the economic incentive not to supply until they get the higher price.
I highly doubt that would fly in the EU. Privatization always was 'at arms length', piss off enough bureaucrats and I'm pretty sure you'd find yourself nationalized pdq. Telcos have had the sharp end of the stick pointed at them a couple of times now and have each and every time folded rather than to see how sharp it really was, I don't think energy companies would fare any different, especially not because energy is more or less a first level need and telco services a second or even lower level one.
They figured out Enron too, after tens of billions worth of damage. Didn’t stop them.
I do agree that the EU isn’t likely to be hands off enough to ever let it get to that point though. It was a particularly dumb set of regulatory decisions that let/encouraged Enron to do what they did.
France (which built out nuclear power like no other country) is a big importer of this electricity because their nuclear power plants are largely shut down due to urgent maintenance work. Paris is in the process of doing exercises to prepare for blackouts in the coming months.
Heating could have been switched to heat pumps (and will need to anyway at some point), had they not bathed in natgas for tens of years (thanks Schröder!).
> had they not bathed in natgas for tens of years (thanks Schröder!).
Schröder wasn't around in 1969 when the first contracts for russian gas have been closed.
> Heating could have been switched to heat pumps
We have 12 million gas boilers. Last year, we had an install capacity of 165k heat pumps. The government is trying to up that to 500k per year. Even in this (somewhat optimistic) scenario, that would be 24 years of work.
So yes, we need to start doing that. But until last year, we had 16 years of governments that did fuck-all for renewables.
Imagine if that was started on 2002 when Energiewende was voted, it'd be 4 years to go.
That it takes a long time is never a good excuse not to do something, rather the opposite.
Running an electrical space heater would maybe not cost more than a flight to a warm country if we had any kind of (long term) cheap electricity generation like nuclear. I'm German and I visited Russia recently, and their energy is dirt cheap due to it all being nuclear—it's crazy how you can just run a space heater and now worry about being bankrupted by it.
nuclear energy generation is "cheap"? Are you sure? According to e.g. [1], it's the most expensive power source and getting more expensive each year. It's probably "cheap" due to all the subsidies and the conditions on the subsidies setting certain prices.
Sure, it didn't help shutting down nuclear reactors prematurely but building new ones certainly is not the cheapest strategy.
That's a great graph, thanks. But there is a whole lot factored in to those numbers. Check out this paragraph in the next page:
>The running of aging nuclear power plants generally leads to higher operating and maintenance costs. Only in the U.S., the nuclear industry has claimed a cost reduction of 35 percent since 2012 to US$29.4/MWh in 2020—the lowest since the collection of industry-wide data in 2002—in particular due to a 57 percent drop in capital expenditures over the period.
So, what's the difference? Nuclear is different because it costs the same to run per hour no matter how much power is generated. So, when demand is down, costs remain the same - while coal and gas can just use less fuel, which is their major cost. The risk that nuclear won't be able to run at higher loads increases costs overall. If market forces could guarantee usage, then costs would lower.
There's definitely a lot to explore here... power pricing is complicated!
"Market forces" by definition do not guarantee usage, as they would use the cheapest form of electricity.
As it turns out, the industry is willing to build new nuclear if and only if 1) the government guarantees 100% usage of the offered capacity 2) the government is willing to pay for the difference between the market price of electricity and a (higher) fixed fee.
The fixed pricing of nuclear is often way higher than the market price - even with 100% capacity usage. It is simply not able to compete with dirt-cheap solar and wind energy. The free market is aware of this, so they are unwilling to take the risk without guaranteed government subsidies.
There are a lot of hidden costs with nuclear energy. For example, I don't know of any country where the insurance costs for nuclear power plants are not capped. This means that in the event of a disaster, the costs have to be borne by the taxpayer. The same applies to the costs of final storage. No one knows how much this will cost over the next million years or so. If all these costs were included in the calculation, it would become clear that nuclear energy is extraordinarily expensive. Of course, this is not in the interest of the nuclear companies (the same ones that run fossil power plants, by the way), because the lower the more optimistic their believers are, the more money the companies make.
Not sure where you got this - nuclear gives only about 20% of electricity in Russia.
60% of electricity is produced from natural gas, and the rest 20% is from hydro stations.
So why is electricity cheap in France and expensive in Denmark? Denmark has the most expensive electricity in Europe and they are mostly wind and they often have to import from Sweden and Norway (which is also why electricity is expensive in southern Sweden). If we look at countries nuclear does not seem very expensive. Not the cheapest (that is probably Russian gas followed by hydro) but certainly less expensive than wind power.
Nope, there never was that much nuclear in Germany and most of that is gone now. Maintaining what is there was never going to matter a whole lot. And building new nuclear plants takes way too long for that to be relevant as well. The problem is now, not in a decade from now. Nuclear power is just not very useful when you need it in a hurry. And there are plenty of cheaper alternatives if you have a few decades to spare. All of which are being considered right now.
The issue with gas in Germany is not generating electricity but using it for heating and industry. Nuclear cannot really help with that. There were a only a few GW of nuclear left at the beginning of the year. I believe some of that is being kept online a bit longer. Or they are considering to. But it's just a few GW. All little bits help of course but accelerating the tens of GW of wind coming online in the next few years is much more productive to obsess about keeping the few GW of nuclear power. Not actually against that but it's just not enough to matter much at all.
This is untrue. 20GW of nuclear shut down over the past 20 years. That is almost as much as the coal that is being burned at the moment. Coal and gas are currently providing 66% of demand (40GW). Wind+solar only 7%. If that 20GW of nuclear were still available it would replace half of the coal and gas currently burning at this very moment. You can follow along at electricity maps anytime you’re curious to see just how dirty and broken the German grid is in reality.
As far as I can tell, in 2020 over 50% of German electricity came from renewable sources. The market share of fossil fuel has also been rapidly dropping over the last few years.
His data might have been wrong but 20GW of nuclear extra nuclear would still be incredibly useful.
Let alone simply building more of it and solving the problem.
Because its of course easy to say that 50% is coming from X but this is bought with under capacity in the rest. If you have a long time period where you have low wind and solar utilization you need backup that you can ramp up.
Most of that 20GW is long gone and decommissioned. Only three plants (8GW) remained at the beginning of the year. It's not nothing. But also not that much. Only two plants remain now.
Nuclear is very bad at ramping up. It's very expensive to shut down and restart nuclear plants. One of the headaches with the remaining plants is that they would have been due (over due actually) for a lengthy shutdown for maintenance and inspection reasons. The two remaining plants will be kept online until April 2023 now; a few months past their original closing date. By then, most of the French plants that have been offline for maintenance should be back online. As others have noted, France has been leaning on German energy exports a bit more than usual for this reason.
Yes that's the point right. It's gone and decommissioned for really bad reasons. A political deal that satisfied those who were more anti-nuclear than anti-pollution. In an alliance with those who were more pro-fossil-gas than pro-climate. And now Germany pollutes many times more than it otherwise would. We should absolutely take a lesson from this.
So when you said "currently" you actually meant "right at this moment". Because currently (as is "this year") about 50% of Germany's electricity generation comes from renewables.
Right. But if you want to look at 12 months (fair enough) then 50% being dirty electricity generation is nothing to be proud of is it? It's still one of the dirtiest grids in the planet with an average >500gCO2/kWh. And it's average coal production over that time appears to be 21.2GW. So if over a 12 month period then if Germany had retained it's nuclear it would replace MORE than half of it's fossil fuel produced electricity. Even better.
This is now; often wind+solar is closer to 100%. Snapshots don't make sense. One of the reasons why Germany currently has to burn that much coal and gas, btw, is that France needs it due to the number of reactors in maintenance mode.
Generally speaking, I somewhat agree with you - wind+solar isn't going to work without mid-term storage or extensive inter-european grid connections.
Who called Trump an idiot for his criticism of German energy policy? He's not even the first US president to criticize German reliance on Russian gas--both Obama and Bush before him were critics of it. And there's been a lot of criticism even within Europe about the policy. By the time you get to Nord Stream 2, basically even not named Germany or Russia was screaming at the top of their lungs "this is a bad idea" (and Poland, not the US, being the loudest of all).
I will grant you that Trump did get this right... but it was by no means a policy that he was an architect of, and the degree to which he was invested in this policy was questionable (US sanctions were driven largely by Congress, not the president).
The problem was also, that everyone had secondary motives in that conversation. Poland and Ukraine earned money by passing gas through from Russia, the US and UK sell LNG and oil and would benefit from it.
And do not forget, Germany is historically twice in the situation to keep the balance between east and west. Once after WWII and once in 1990 after the reunification. pumping money into Russia was also part of a global appeasement politics. That geopolitical game is well understood.
As a German, that is what I remember of that screaming. And now, some months in, we still have no clear statement who blew up the pipelines.
This whole pipeline game is far more complex than just "bad reliance of Germany from Russia"
> Who called Trump an idiot for his criticism of German energy policy?
You're right that this was a pretty easy call made by tons of people for a very long time before & after Trump. Also, GP is a little off, they didn't actually call him an 'idiot', they just smirked and said that they knew better:
> German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas could be seen smirking alongside his colleagues.
...
> Trump’s attacks haven’t changed that calculus. After his July remarks, Merkel responded that she may be in a better position to judge her country’s dependence than the current U.S. president.
> “I’ve experienced myself a part of Germany controlled by the Soviet Union, and I’m very happy today that we are united in freedom,” she said at the time.
Sadly, many people don't understand that. Either because the refuse everything said & done by him or because they don't see the actual motivation he had to act in that way.
What was the “wrong reason” he got it right here for?
The reasoning is dead-simple obvious - becoming reliant on a nation-state which does not share your values and shared-future is a foolish idea.
Further even, “the haters” for lack of a better term - spent his term calling him a Putin-Puppet so why would he be suggesting folks decouple from Russia? The only thing coming to mind on that note would be a they-do-the-opposite level 33rd Dimension Chess move a la the Obama-Republican skit from Key & Peele.
Uncharitably, this just reads like cope. A grade school inability to admit your rival has the ability to be intelligent and correct with their own legitimate belief system. Again, like the K&P skit.
Eh, we have to look at what rationale was behind a call, not just that they got the result right. And in Trump's case, I doubt there was much consideration of it beyond it being a good rhetorical jab in line with his general contrarian antics.
His speech also came after Europe already realized that in 2014 when the Crimea was annexed [0], and countries didn't want to go too hard with sanctions cause of the dependency. The obvious motive for the speech was a desire to sell US gas to Europe.
This isn't really a German thing although Germany has some peculiar domestic reasons for its nuclear distaste that go back many decades. The nuclear energy industry collapsing is a secular trend globally with share of energy production steadily falling. The one country somewhat buckling that trend is China, but only due to heavy state intervention and even in China the industry is in slow decline. The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
""Nuclear energy's share of global gross electricity generation continues its slow but steady decline from a peak of 17.5% in 1996 with a share of 10.1% in 2020," states the report.
The comparatively cheap cost of renewables is at the heart of the problem. The WNISR confirms that new renewable electricity investment was above $300 billion (€256 billion) in 2020, which is 17 times higher than the reported global investment commitments to nuclear power."
> This isn't really a German thing although Germany has some peculiar domestic reasons for its nuclear distaste that go back many decades.
Believe me, I know. Having lived in Berlin the amount of anti-nuclear propaganda there is just mind blowing.
> but only due to heavy state intervention
And no state intervention was used in any of the other sectors of energy. Solar for example was just this totally market driving thing where no state intervention was needed.
To talk about the energy market in Europe and Asia as 'heavy state intervention' is ridiculous, its simply totally driven by states. Its states that decide what they want to build, its states that lay out their long term strategy.
> The biggest contributor to this is not politics but simply the extremely fast falling share price of renewables.
Nuclear declined because governments decided they didn't want nuclear, solar and wind were successful because governments bet all out on solar and wind even before they made financial sense. They had good arguments like, yes its more expensive now but prices will come down once we produce more and it will make our grid green. And this was correct, but its just as correct for nuclear. Its not difficult to understand.
Had Europe spend the last 20 years collectively embracing nuclear and deployed a few 100GW hours of nuclear building 100s of plants, investing 300 billion $ in it, with a well trained workforce for and the same few models over and over again it would also very also be very cheap.
To act like this has anything to do with markets is silly.
And this is without even mentioning all the 100s of nuclear research projects that were killed up, all the nuclear plants that were scheduled to build that were prevented by protestors. In France an insane Swiss politician from the Green party literally crossed the border to shot the nuclear reactor with an RPG. All the nuclear research and education that was removed from universities as well.
There is no reason, non what so ever that we could be deploying 10 new GenIV nuclear reactors every year in Europe, had this been our policy for the last 20 years.
"The most destructive non war related choice by any government"(in the history of human civilization, presumably).
I am genuinely baffled when I read such histrionic statements.
Can you explain what has been destroyed?
Nuclear was never a big part of power generation and the shutdown has been compensated by renewable. LNG is compensating for the shutdown of Russian pipelines.
Prices for energy have gone up in Germany, but they are going up everywhere. There have been no power blackouts or bankruptcy of major industries. And I don't believe for minute that Russia somehow would not have invaded if Germany had more nuclear.
Nuclear was 30% of the electricity generation back in 2000.
The Nordstream projects were conceived to allow Russia to exert force on Eastern European countries without endangering supply of gas to Germany.
Our energy policy has been incredibly short-sighted, focused on maximizing certain sector's economic interests at the expense of national security and EU security.
France had clean energy for 40 years but somehow nobody cares about that. In reality CO2 saved then is far more valuable then saved now.
So people over and over bring up this one year where France has some maintenance problem but somehow 40 years of brown coal in Germany is just considers unimportant, not to mention the still extensive use of coal now in Germany.
So how about instead of constantly shitting on France and Nuclear we look at the basic facts of what was actually good for humanity and what was a disaster.
Also, most nuclear plants should be back by then, some already, they are 'bracing' themselves in case of emergency and because anti-nuclear people have hyped this issue to a frenzy on social media.
And the French problems with nuclear now are 95% related to the last 20 years of anti-nuclear politics and specially the outright attack on nuclear by the Holland government where critical maintenance was ignored because they lived in a fantasy world where renwables were just gone do everything. This has been well documented.
Even before that France just stopped building new plants and started to use more and more LNG because of the opposition to nuclear and now they are eating the fruits of that.
Not to mention canceling amazing projects like the Superphénix reactor.
France is still living of the glory days of nuclear from the 70/80s. Its ridiculous, 20 years of sensible energy policy with 1960s tech is all that is required and yet most governments can't figure it out.
The ship has sailed on nuclear for Germany no matter where you stand on the topic and there’s not a lot of valuable discussion left to warrant trotting this point out at every opportunity.
Just check how good France, the nuclear power country in Europe, is doing and how much they have to import energy from e.g., Germany and also nuclear fissile material from Russia (rosatom). Nuclear power needs a massive amount of water and constant maintenance, iow., not really climate-change proof and once neglected - and most HN users will know that infrastructure might sooner or later get neglected if its running anyway ("why should I pay for you if everything works" mentality isn't only a thing in IT), and getting those plants then up and repaired again is a huge work and may reduce power production on some sites close to zero for months to years.
So, no, it's not worth pointing something out that isn't as black as white as a lot of armchair energy experts would like it to make, especially done in such a gloating manner it rather seems just for fishing for upvotes or confirmation, but really adds nothing to the discussion.
France is in the same boat because of the same calls to bring down our nuclear fleet. Every government for the past 10 years has been anti-nuclear. Our current president told the industry to shut down 15 nuclear reactors like two years ago.
So nuclear in France is a failure in the sense that it's made us the greenest country in Europe (along with hydro-rich Sweden) for the past 40 years, one of the largest exporters of energy, and that despite calls to bring it down we're basically in the same state as Germany right now except we don't produce 50% of our energy from coal and gas.
I don’t see how we can talk about nuclear power in Germany without first going into great detail about what a mistake it was for primates to come down from trees.
Ships aren't autonomous vehicles; they don't passively "sail". A ship has a captain who makes an active decision to depart from port. It is non-serious to use the passive form here.
Also, more importantly: if we can agree that nuclear shutdown was a bad decision, then we can work backwards from that and conclude that the people responsible for it shouldn't be trusted with anything more complex than digging ditches.
Whatever the merits, the most salient point on the issue is that nuclear power, by and large, doesn't matter. It's below 5 % of total now and was at about 15 % at its highest.
Well yes, Germany maintained the reactors they had until they reached the end of their useful lifetime (the three reactors that are still in use have been built in the late 1980s, so are currently a bit more than 30 years old), and now they're shutting them down. It's not like you can use a nuclear power plant considerably past its designed lifespan, so even with an extension, we would be talking about a few years max.
> Well yes, Germany maintained the reactors they had until they reached the end of their useful lifetime
Except that is simply a lie that anti-nuclear people spread.
Nuclear plants can reach 80 or 100 years and we honestly don't even know the max lifespan. Almost the German plants could have continued to run. 30 year is nothing for a nuclear plant.
Yes, it requires maintenance and partial replacement of subsystems, but that's just the reality. We are talking about replacing fucking coal, I just don't understand why people don't care about that.
and how does frances choice of going all in on nuclear but having higher electricity prices than germany go down?
It really doesn't make much sense of speaking is superlatives, sure Germany did a mistake here with relying on russian gas and so did most of europe. Problem is, you have to rely on someone, is russia better than saudi-arabia? Irak? You have to rely on something and europe sees now the consequences
I'm so fucking sick of this argument. Read my other comments where I already explain that.
France had clean energy for 40 years so how are they doing, fantastic compared to all the coal the Germans have been breathing.
They had a few maintenance issue because in the last 10 years anti-nuclear energy ministers deferred maintenance. Most of these issues however should be fixed before winter.
We are seriously comparing one year of a few maintenance issue with 50 years of clean energy production. How can anybody be critical of that?
> It really doesn't make much sense of speaking is superlatives
I think 40 years of breathing incredibly dirty coal smoke is kind of big deal.
> Problem is, you have to rely on someone
You can source uranium from Australia or a number of other countries. Or mine it in Europe if you want to. You can actually have a number of suppliers, so there really isn't a problem.
In fact, a really clever policy for Europe would have been to invest in nuclear for electricity. Then go a step further and invest in high-temperature reactors for the next generation and also use them to produce methanol and mix that into fuel supply and eventually mostly replacing it.
This is likely no longer necessary because we are switching to electric cars now, but still, would have been a good policy back then.
That was the logical next step for the DeGaul policy in France but they gave up on it and sadly by the time the EU happened France had largely turned its back on nuclear.
france can probably fix their maintenance issues with their nuclear power plants, but I don't think they're able to fill the rivers with enough cool water to keep running their plants and that's not the only problem. We didn't even start talking about nuclear waste. Germany tried to find a good place for that for decades without luck and most containers start to leak after a couple of years already.
The river thing is a problem in the summer when there is less overall demand, in the winter it should be fine.
If this is really a long term issue more air cooling could be installed.
> We didn't even start talking about nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste is basically a non issue anti-nuclear people bring up when they don't have any serious arguments.
Anybody that seriously looks into it understand that this isn't really that big of a problem.
> Germany tried to find a good place for that for decades without luck and most containers start to leak after a couple of years already.
This is another one of these basically fake issue that anti-nuclear people use to spread panic. But of course the reality is zero people have died or been hurt because of this. Even under worst case condition, like delusional fantasy of anti-nuclear people the idea that in the next 1000 years anybody gets hurt because of this is very low.
Germany were idiots in the 70s and instead of just storing low-level waste in a easy to manage placed they threw it in a unstable mine. Not very smart but also not really that big a deal or that dangerous.
So yeah if that the worst thing you can bring up against nuclear I'm not impressed. And again this is an issue because people did dumb shit in the 70s with all kinds of waste from the 50/60s. It has nothing to do with modern nuclear power.
> If this is really a long term issue more air cooling could be installed.
if this is actually possible, nobody knows. I never heard anyone suggesting it
> nuclear waste is basically a non issue anti-nuclear people bring up when they don't have any serious arguments.
so what about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation leakage, Chernobyl, Fukushima. In fukushima they just put their waste water back into the ocean, it will just diluted right?
> This is another one of these basically fake issue that anti-nuclear people use to spread panic.
how is it spreading panic when there're actual concerns and evidence about the problems caused by nuclear. We can use nuclear power plants but everyone should be aware of the issues that come with it and not argue based on ideaology. Calling it a none-issue and delusional fantasies of anti-nuclear people without giving arguments doesn't give much confidence in the claims you make.
Sorry, I don't agree. Nuclear is not the magic solution. Look at France. A big part of Germanys problems are the nuclear power plants there - they simply don't work and France needs to import terawatts of power. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
In fact:
"Germany was the second largest net exporter at 15.4 TWh, double the levels recorded halfway through 2021, as power generation in the country responded to the import demand from France, the data showed."
And no, building new powerplants is not the solution. None of these plants were constructed on time or within the budget. They need room, they need to be connected, they need trained workers, they need massive oversight (because the owners will do just enough around security to fulfill the letters of the law, never the spirit of the law).
Nuclear reactors are also not fit for the coming climate change, especially not the ones now being turned off. Almost all of them needed to be shut down in the last summers, because the water intake from rivers was either to warm or there was simply not enough water available.
In addition, nuclear is only viable, because it gets supported by tax money. Nobody will ensure these things against accidents, the companies are not responsible for transport/storage of the waste and get price guarantees. '
And despite all of that, the price for nuclear power rises - while the prices for all others forms of energy drop. From a market standpoint, it makes no sense to invest billions (face it, it will be billions, even if companies responsible tell you it will "only be millions") into a technology that is more expensive than others, harder to control, and not flexible enough. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...)
Investing these billions into decentralization of the power grid and renewable energies (Wind, Solar, Hydro, Storage capacities) will yield a way better return with less complications and more stability.
But, what I will agree with you is that exit plan for nuclear by Merkel and her CDU/CSU was shitty done. They did not have a strategy and, in parallel, they destroyed the German solar industry (which could have been a powerhouse now but was basically sold do China by the CDU). And yes, it would have made more sense to first bring down coal and then nuclear. Or that the grid needed to be meshed more to support distributed energy generation. But nuclear was never a (good) option in a country so densely populated.
You mean the nation that in 15 years decaronized most of the grid? Yeah how horrible to have 40 years of clean power.
The reason France has problems and has to import, is because since the early 1990s France has stopped building new nuclear reactors.
Even worse, since then leftist governments, specially after 2014 when they basically wanted to copy Germany and get ride of all nuclear. They essentially stopped with vital maintenance.
Unfortunately, they built so many plants in the same period, and those are getting in to their mid years and need maintenance. Because they have largely stopped building new plants, some of the knowlage is now lacking.
Overall, the issue in France is not enough nuclear, not nuclear itself.
France even had really awesome advanced nuclear projects, that were all killed off often by Green/Left governments.
Don't you think its kind of funny to point at the only large industrial nation with a green grid and say 'look at the issues those people have'. If I was German I wish we had those kinds of problems.
> And no, building new powerplants is not the solution. None of these plants were constructed on time or within the budget. They need room, they need to be connected, they need trained workers, they need massive oversight (because the owners will do just enough around security to fulfill the letters of the law, never the spirit of the law).
Actually new plants is the solution. Yes, they need time, that's why building shouldn't have been stopped.
Nuclear plants don't need that much room, and there are already train lines most places, adding a branch line isn't that hard.
Yes, training workers for those jobs is actually good.
Energy is mostly government driven anyway, and so it is in France.
> Nuclear reactors are also not fit for the coming climate change, especially not the ones now being turned off. Almost all of them needed to be shut down in the last summers, because the water intake from rivers was either to warm or there was simply not enough water available.
Saying all of them need to shut down because of water is just wrong. Most nuclear reactors continued to operate in most places in Europe.
The hardest energy problems are in winter, all you need to make sure is that you build new plants in places where you can cool them even under worst case assumptions for future climate and it will be fine.
> In addition, nuclear is only viable, because it gets supported by tax money. Nobody will ensure these things against accidents, the companies are not responsible for transport/storage of the waste and get price guarantees. '
In the European context saying only because tax money is nonsense. The 'markets' are so strongly regulated and often lots of it is state owned. Wind and Solar were only made viable by tax money. Massive government projects to push these drove the economics of scale.
The same could have been done for nuclear for the same price. Had Europe built 100 new nuclear reactors in the last 30 years, the economics of nuclear would be way better. Had Europe not invested massively in wind and solar, the economics there wouldn't be as good.
Even going back to 1970, Jimmy Carter killed nuclear project and focused research on solar. And many of the same trends were happening in Europe. If you prioritize one group of technologies and demonize another you can't then act supersized decades later with the results you get.
And even those project just use the grid as balance, if base load and intermittency were correctly priced, a lot of those economics aren't as good. But governments didn't want to do that, because they wanted more solar/wind even at the cost of later dealing with intermittency.
> And despite all of that, the price for nuclear power rises - while the prices for all others forms of energy drop. From a market standpoint, it makes no sense to invest billions (face it, it will be billions, even if companies responsible tell you it will "only be millions") into a technology that is more expensive than others, harder to control, and not flexible enough. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...) Investing these billions into decentralization of the power grid and renewable energies (Wind, Solar, Hydro, Storage capacities) will yield a way better return with less complications and more stability.
The economics are not nearly as clear as you make it out to be.
If you build large nuclear project with many of the same reactors multiple times it look pretty good. It also requires far less investment in terms of updating the grid, because usually you can just locate reactors where coal plants were before.
Nuclear build cost are dominated by learning cost, if you build many then they get massively cheaper and you can built them far faster. Look at France in the 70/80s as a good example.
You also solve the intermittency issue because nuclear don't have that. So had we just invested in nuclear, rather then wind and solar, we wouldn't have to do all those investments into intermittency mitigation a problem that still remains unsolved.
Even worse, because intermittency was not price correctly, the base load had to suffer and that made their economics worse. Often nuclear also didn't receive the same subsidies as solar and wind. There are many examples of that.
And this is before we even talk about GenIV reactors. Because all research and development was stopped and often made borderline impossible, we have not progressed. Newer reactor designs have massive amount of potential to be cheaper. They can also solve problem such as heat production for industrial heat. But over the last 30 years there was comically little investment in that.
So what you see as 'economics' and 'market' I see as governments 30 years ago deciding that solar/wind were the future and simply going with it. Had the EU fixed on a single reactor design, even Gen3 design, and had said we will de-carbonize by nuclear it would have been far cheaper and we would be further along by now.
In fact, such a standard nuclear plant would have been an amazing thing to export to other nations as well.
And then have a GenIV reactor in the pipeline after that.
Nuclear isn't the future because 'we' didn't want it to be the future. But it could have been, and it would have been far better future then what we have now.
P.S: Let me give you an example. France had the GenIV Superphénix. They had finally worked out all the issues (including somebody shooting an RPG at it) and could have started to seriously think about building then in larger numbers but by that point they had little interest in building new reactors and the left/green govenrment wanted to kill as soon as possible.
Had France simply started building 5-10 of a next generation of these in the 2000s they would now be a net energy exporter with reactor that had super low fuel cost (because of breeder) and the per plant cost would likely be a fraction of the PWR designs they are currently planning.
You can see how small this reactor is compared to PWRs. So the overall cost when in production at scale would be amazing.
"In March, the German government asked energy companies to weigh a seemingly impossible engineering task. Could a new liquefied natural gas import terminal, which normally takes at least five years to build, be erected in this port town by year’s end?"
Germany didn’t build a complete LNG terminal. Instead, they built docks for floating LNG terminals which itself are going to be rented from other countries.
They solved the problem still. Germany doesn't care about having a LNG terminal per se, they care about being able to import enough LNG without relying on russian pipelines.
Not really. As I understand it, the floating LNG terminal is much more expensive to operate and has much less capacity than the fixed LNG terminals which Germany still needs. It's basically a pricy partial stopgap.
Pricey partial stopgap is still better than the alternative. In software engineering and digital product development, there's this idea of "give them what they want, not what they are asking for". A professional, knowing that what they are asking for is totally impossible by the necessary deadline, comes up with a pricey partial stopgap and everyone is still grateful for their expertise.
They "solved" the problem by throwing money at it, making it harder for everyone else. Germany frantically overbid for all possible gas sources making the price skyrocket, then they threw 200B euro at domestic market to subsidize energy, sustaining >400€/MWh prices (today price was 430 in Germany).
Its easy to solve problems this way when you are the wealthiest country on the continent, all because you waged two huge wars of aggression and got rewarded with Marshall plan, while victims ended up under russian occupation.
Unfortunately, Germany's currently problems are self-inflicted and were entirely predictable. They were encouraged to build LNG terminals and reduce their reliance on Russian gas back in 2014:
Following the 2014 February coup in Ukraine and Crimea's reunification with Russia, the administration of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, called upon the EU member states to cut their reliance on Russian gas, citing "security" reasons.
Speaking at the March 2014 EU-US Summit in Brussels, Obama urged the US' European allies to hurry up with the conclusion of the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), offering US liquefied natural gas (LNG) in exchange.
https://sputniknews.com/20180331/obama-trump-lng-europe-china-1063093406.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-eu-summit-idUSBREA2P0W220140326
As a German i agree with your point, but also agree with the point of the grandparent. It was predictable and the people responsible for Germany's heavy reliance on Russian gas unsurprisingly are getting paid through intermediaries by Russia.
There have been an abundance of coverage on it, even from state media... but nothing ever changes. Heck, the current head of the government was/is involved in the biggest financially scandal of Germany's history and got away with it by "forgetting" everything.
> The Revolution of dignity has absolutely no signs of a coup. It resulted in presidential and parlimentary elections.
This is a non-sequitur; the transfer of power was extra-constitutional, so it can't be ruled out by this fact alone.
> Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia.
This is a circular argument. It was illegal insofar as it violated Ukrainian law, sure, but whether Ukrainian law should apply in Crimea in the first place is literally the whole point of contention!
1. The revolution of diginity was a series of protests. No-one took over the airwaves and killed the existing government.
"On 21 February an agreement was signed between Yanukovych and leaders of the parliamentary opposition, witnessed by representatives from European Union and Russia. which promised return to the 2004 constitution, early elections and withdrawal of security forces from the center of the capital."[0].
2. Crimea was assigned to Ukraine in 1991. It's part of Ukraine's internationally recognised borders. It's illegal according to international law.
It was taken by force[1] without the will of the people. Any referendums under occupation are illegal and invalid (also according to international law)[2]. You can't vote with a gun to your head.
1. That's not the definition of a coup or a revolution. What happened was an extra-constitutional transition of power, which is a technical term of art, and this is the case regardless of whether its final ends were good or evil.
2. This is a circular argument. It's contrary to domestic law insofar as Crimea is Ukrainian, it's contrary to international law insofar as Crimea is occupied, which it is insofar as the people don't want to be Russian, which they don't insofar as the referendum was illegitimate, which it is insofar as Crimea is Ukrainian.
You don't get anywhere with this, it's just sophistry no matter what side you're on. You have to make different arguments. What can we really say about Crimeans' wishes?
In particular: why do you mention "the will of the people", if your political position is that it should not be up to the people of Crimea? Do you believe in the general idea of referenda? If not, why?
Indeed - but that's also an example of how someone who has destroyed their credibility can't be effective. Nobody in the world is going to take Trump seriously for good reason, because he doesn't have any integrity even if you parse down a lot of what he is saying and remove the chicanery much of it is reasonable, it's not going to go anywhere. That said, it likely didn't matter the Euros were not going to listen anyhow.
LNG is pretty fascinating technology. A real product of our times. Have you ever seen the inside of an LNG tanker pressure vessel? Allow me to show you!
Don't downvote that - it's correct: the Celsius scale is an "interval scale" while the Kelvin scale is a "ratio scale". One must not take ratios of Celsius values as ratios are not even defined for that.
This whole thread is very funny this morning, I was posting at 3AM and not thinking much. I am happy to be corrected, the more I learn to know here the more I learn I don't know or can't immediately recall. I damn this fickle lump of head thinkmeat, but praise the enlightened hive mind of internet commenters!
That's rather tangential to my point, which is the phrase "twice as cold" as used here is tricky to interpret.
What does "twice as cold" mean? In the US, is -2°F twice as cold as -1°F?
Yet that's only -18.33°F to -18.89°F, so only 0.3% colder if you change temperature scale.
Is 16°F twice as cold as 32°F? Or half as warm?
Is -10C infinitely colder than 0C?
I used Kelvin as an example of how the ratio depends on the scale chosen, not because it's popular.
Note that Rankin (Rankin is to Fahrenheit as Kelvin is to Celsius) would give the same answer as Kelvin - both Rankin and Kelvin are absolute scales of temperature, and would better candidates for defining what "twice as cold" means.
(Though even better would be to say "half has hot".)
However, I was not saying that we should all use Kelvin, only that the phrase is tricky to interpret.
> Everyone who cares about precision or thermodynamics?
So like 3 people...
My point is talking about Kelvin is meaningless to the vast majority of people on HN, including myself. Everyone (Except the US) knows Celsius, and it's easy to gague how cold something is looking at it in Celsius. In Kelvin its just 'ok that's a number...'
You’re underestimating the HN crowd. I’d expect everyone halfway scientifically literate to have an understanding of the Kelvin scale. It’s also quite an intuitive scale, physically, especially if you’re coming from Celsius.
I think you're wrong. I suspect most people on HN have an above average interest in physics and would therefore have a reasonable understanding of the Kelvin temperature scale.
I learned kelvin in high school chemistry and I'm not sure why you wouldn't use kelvin when talking about liquids that far negative in celsius/fahrenheit and that close to absolute zero.
Propane is much easier to use than LNG (which is mostly methane) as it remains liquid at ordinary outdoor temperatures with relatively moderate pressure.
Propane is a refined, and somewhat synthesized molecule. LNG is rather raw, and contains a lot of free hydrogen, methane, and sometimes other contaminants like sulphur (though that is mostly lower grades).
Think of the difference between 91 octane gas at a pump vs slightly filtered crude oil.
Propane is a completely different molecule from LNG which is mostly methane. Methane is not liquid at normal surface temperatures even at high pressure; propane is.
Congrats to Germany for this one, I wish we could do the same in the UK.
It has seemed to me that the planning system in its current state is actually badly damaging our economy and posperity. We don't build enough houses, and when we do, the infrastructure that's needed to support them takes decades to build. I've been hearing about another heathrow runway, and new trainline, etc for years and yet it seems we're no closer to having these built. Now we're stuck paying most of our income into a 30 year mortgage rather than anything useful/productive. That money could have gone into the productive economy.
Ireland is similar, though notably better or worse on various specifics. Unsurprising to most, probably. I feel it's important to recall that these are not new tendencies. Both countries (and many of our neighbors) have a history of being suck at this particular general thing.
Housing prices is, perhaps, a separate question. I think we could probably do infrastructure really well and still have increasing house prices. The way to test that theory is to do infrastructure well, so I suppose my point is moot. Availability in either case, is undeniably bottlenecked by infrastructure.
The question why our authorities aren't better at building runways, train lines or hospitals. Nominal costs, as well as execution times and other overt signs point to serious underperformance. I think that one of the big problems is that any answer to this question is inevitably high politics. Any big success case represents a loss to a relevant political side, a major political interest or whatever. Emergencies tend to give one interest dominion, while also limiting options due to time constraints. That is a recipe for getting things done. It is an excellent lesson in true feasibility. Emergency isn't a solution though.
While a lot of the focus tends to be on corruption, bad faith, and such... I think much of the reasons discussed in "Sucking at Infrastructure: Visionary subtitle about societal stuff" should be focused on innocent enough reasons. For example, I think environmental interest interest groups, parties & institutions are essential. Without this lobby, the environment gets systematically short sticked to devastating cumulative effect. Infrastructure is also a vital interest. So is housing. Monetary stability, economic prosperity etc. These are at tension with each other. Tension is inevitable. How tension is routed isn't. I think that as these tensions mature, pathways stiffen. New pathways become impossible to pave.
It's both. Look up council complaints and demands for the HS2, they're full of unreasonable NIMBY stuff like asking for the line to be put in a tunnel because it comes closer than 100m to an industrial estate. They didn't get it of course, but as a "compromise" they got high berms after a lengthy consultation/bargaining, both of which inflate the cost.
The main point here was to remove certain blocking rights of environmentalists, that normally block such projects for years. They still can go to court but this is not blocking anything anymore. If someone brings real issues up, they now can be handled while building, nit in the planning phase as before.
That honestly completely insane that the legal process makes up for the vast majority of time in infrastructure projects like this. I'm all for environmental concerns, taking in complaint from future neighbors, all that stuff, but allowing it to drag out important projects years is problematic.
Sometimes I feel like listing to possible complains from people living around affected areas is a waste of time. Denmark pretty much can't build windmills anymore, because they will: "Ruin my view". Seriously, the city I live in wants to close a coal fired power plant, and replace it with a number of windmills, on the same plot of land, but no, that will ruin someones view (which is currently a power plant). You also can't do cell phone towers, because they are ugly (fair enough), yet you still allow yourself to complain about poor coverage in the same area.
On the one hand: I agree that years of delay are pretty wasteful, considering a lot of projects are really needed to solve urgent problems. With windmills, the same thing happened in my village, which was all up in arms against them. On the other hand, democracy is inherently slow and wasteful, if you want to protect also the rights of the minority, that will have a cost.
What if it isn't something like windmills that clearly are a net improvement for society over coal, and the objections aren't merely 'not a nice view'? For example, suppose some big corp wants to frack the environment to pieces for big bucks, leaving a poisoned, nearly unlivable habitat for the nearby village.
How can we safeguard against this, in a way that the village inhabitants can protest against such threats with real teeth, without grinding everything to a halt that is a mere nuisance but offers real benefits to society?
First point, things should first be regulated by actual laws - not random complaints voiced after said action is taking place. If fracking is legal, it's legal. If it isn't then it isn't.
Second it's very simple. For any kind of property right people care about, allow it to be bought and sold. In most places, the property owner owns the air space up to a certain height. This should mean that "views" are irrelevant since they were never owned.
If a place is so wealthy that they are more concerned about aesthetics over functional improvements; energy from fracking, housing for workers, etc. then let them buy them but the rights to compensate everyone else.
Law is already very complex, and the permitting/approval process extends that to specific sites, cases, situations, and necessarily involves a lot of regional and local executive branch politics. (Which can be good and bad. Eg. an industrial region has a lot more expertise, real knowledge, folks who know the subtleties, companies that can do the site survey, the impact assessments, the planning, etc. And a different region might be a big national park, where they focus on that. Both legal. Great.)
It's impossible for statutes to optimally declare priorities for everything upfront.
And a war is the unfortunate vis maior that can lead to having to build a pipe through the park.
The US code is far bigger then what any single person can fully comprehend. This likely holds true for Denmark and the EU if you add up all laws in force.
So it's likely impossible to determine if a complex activity, like fracking in a specific location, is fully legal without years of ground work.
No "single person" is trying to determine if fracking in a specific location is legal, right? That's the domain of large companies with large staffs who are well familiarized with all of the regulations, isn't it?
Democracy is not inherently slow and wasteful, as you see here Germany created this large project in short order. They did not abandon democracy to achieve it.
The key is that the "environmentalists", politicians, judiciary, activists, and people who would block the process were threatened with feeling the pain of the missing infrastructure. Amazing how quickly they abandon their high horses when it looks like it will cost them something, then it's full throttle with construction and fossil fuels. They like to be "all in this together" when they're inflicting this kind of pain on others though, so what seems to be inherent is people's desire to wield power and authority over others.
You're building a narrative out of thin air. The German government has removed consultation periods that go very slowly compared to pouring concrete. They haven't threatened anyone with anything. No one is prevented, through an economic threat, from testifying against the project.
No one can testify at this point. The necessary steps are skipped.
What is the narrative you believe I am building out of thin air?
The thin-air narrative I destroyed was that democracy is inherently slow and wasteful. It's not, unless you are going to argue that democracy was somehow suspended, or that this project is still slow and wasteful due to democracy.
Classic. People not wanting multinationals fracking their land or building new gas and oil plants is "snooty environmentalists on their high horses on a power trip"
Small, committed groups are often highly influential in democracies on certain topics - whether median people want something or not can be a bit different.
Those people are quite snooty when they block reasonable exploration, production, and transport in their own countries, while still driving cars, using A/C, and expecting affordable energy, which inevitably comes from buying petroleum products from Venezuela, Russia, and the Middle East.
They cripple their own nation’s energy independence for virtue points. None of these people make real sacrifices.
People living in unimaginable wealth and comfort on the back of environmental exploitation including in large part petroleum extraction and burning, want to pull the ladder up after them to prevent others having those same advantages, to keep their position in the status quo. Yep.
I'm not talking about actual environmentalists who practice what they preach and I am in awe of and have great respect for. Those people are few and far between though, you almost can't find one these days since their noble movement has been absolutely swamped and taken over by grifters, limousine liberals, politicians, the wealthy, and the ruling class. Hence why I put "environmentalists" in quotes.
One simple solution is to allow anything, with no delay, but then do the same legal process as before, and if the environmentalist wins, then the builders have to pay compensation.
Builders would make a loss on projects that caused lots of environmental harm, so wouldn't build in the first place.
Effectively, instead of having a judge slowly make the decision, the company tries to guess what decision the judge will make, and if they guess wrong then they're gonna lose out financially.
That would just mean you can't build because the risk is too high. "Okay, so you've built infrastructure that enabled tens of thousands of households to have electricity and heat. On the other hand, you've destroyed the habitat of some bird that had to move 400m to the east. Sorry, you shouldn't have built it, please pay 300mn euros to this NGO."
This is how it's done in the third world. They do this in Turkiey a lot. First they build, then they pay a fine. Sometimes they have to knock down the entire building, or take 3-4 floors off, if they don't' offer to pay a fine big enough to the taste of the judge. Really, almost everywhere in the Balkans/Trayka/Middle-East runs this way.
Of course, real estate is the only profitable industry in Turkiye, environment, safety regulations, and human rights be damned.
> You also can't do cell phone towers, because they are ugly (fair enough)
You can disguise cell phone towers[0]. It hurts cell phone company profits though, so they'll only do that if the cost of the cheap ugly tower is more due to objections.
Looking at those example makes me think that Jesus really loves cell phone towers.
The disguises are pretty cool, and a really good option. My objection is when people complain that they have poor coverage in the area where they live. They want the phone companies to fix it, but only on their terms. There have been examples where cell phones companies have offered to put up towers in areas where people complained, then the same people turn around and demand the most expensive solution. That sort of behavior takes a certain type of self-centered people to pull off.
Windmills are rather hard to disguise and if you think they're ugly then sure, it's going suck having them placed in view. I happen to think they look great, so I'm less affected. What I don't understand is the sense of entitlement. People will rather have everyone else pay more for power, or keep coal power plants running, than lose money of their holiday home. Seriously, we've seen windmill parks 15km out to sea blocked, because someone believe it would mean that their holiday home would, in theory, lose $20.000 in value (Out of $325.000).
>If anything, NEPA likely stifles newer, environmentally-friendly industries more than older incumbents, which have had many years to work the process in their favor. 42% of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) active NEPA projects are related to clean energy, transmission or conservation, while only 15% are related to fossil fuels. Based on available data, offshore wind offers one of the starkest examples: The U.S. has 42 MW of offshore wind production that is operational, 932 MW under construction, and 18,581 MW bogged down in permitting, most of which are waiting on NEPA analyses to be completed. The climate crisis requires a rapid build-out of clean energy infrastructure but current NEPA permitting processes enforce the status quo, benefiting the fossil fuel industry.
It's really a tragedy that this was originally intended as legislation to benefit the environment
> That honestly completely insane that the legal process makes up for the vast majority of time in infrastructure projects like this.
This time is usually necessary to improve the quality of the projects. It is for a reason that this procedures exist. In the past and still today, we are destroying the environment, endangering people's health and reducing their quality of life through hasty decisions. Therefore citizens have decided to enact planning laws to improve the situation. Of course, the duration of planning periods are a cost factor, but one needs to find a sweet spot between them and the (not only financial) cost of projects going awry.
And remember that it were the Greens under Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck which were primarily in charge for the fast implementation of the LNG terminal.
If the complaints turn out to be valid, you’d have to undo the infrastructure work and restore the prior state, which sometimes is impossible, and in most cases cost-prohibitive. So what you’re saying is that either there are no valid complaints, or you’ll be dismissing any valid complaints.
Pretty much every large-scale renewables project in Germany is blocked by this bullshit. I don't believe in environmentalists anymore. They're the biggest blockers to actual progress in combating things like climate change.
Err, don't the more current facts dismiss your post as well towards what you were commenting for? Coal is going up. Gas is going up. Both not renewable.
It's baffling really to see comments like this, honestly. You're completely misrepresenting our progress with renewables and how both our government and environmentalists have hindered our development of both the industry and real projects.
Nuclear is commonly not considered a renewable, and the nuclear capacity was already EOL but for some power plants they went over the original closing date so was prologued, not closed.
You understand these aren't the same people, yes? The latter are wealthy entrenched (mostly conservative) NIMBYs who have no care for the environment, and have a deeply personal agenda. They may have appropriated the language of environmentalists when they talk about the impact of projects on their lives, but dismissing environmental concerns because some are using them in bad faith is not reasonable.
Even more broadly, what takes time is the governance, legal, bureaucratic, etc, processes. Governance is a lore unto itself.
While we may think we are dealing with 'reality' we are mainly dealing with the artifacts of the governance system - and it believes itself to be the determinant of reality itself!
It only pays lip service to the idea that it is there to facilitate and improve people's lives - the idea of governance/social contract/etc is an just an expedient idea that aseerts itself to be the master not the servant. It is the enemy of the individual.
Growing up, Germany always seemed like a paragon of virtue. Starting somewhere around the VW Emissions Scandal, my view has changed. Did Germany change over the last 20 years, or were my perceptions off from the get-go?
I think Germans are asking similar questions. Brandenburg Airport was delayed a lot and for things which ought never to have gone wrong. I think Merkel made a joke about there still being plenty of high-quality German engineers, just that they all worked in Switzerland.
But ich bin Ausländer, and my German isn't good enough to do an in-depth analysis of local media opinions on any topic, so I may just be focusing on a few headline cases and mistaking the details for the gestalt.
The foreign conception of Germany as a paragon of effectiveness always did sound weird to me. The whole political system is set up to require broad consensus to move anything forward. That makes it really difficult to get any meaningful change out of that political system, unless there is a real, tangible pain that is felt throughout most of society. On the other hand, it should be noted that this approach has important positive effects.
Since the businesses of relatives work/-ed for some time with big German businesses I heard from them locally unheard stories about cash only payments for the delivery drivers and re labeling the products with “made in Germany stickers” big style. I also used to work with experienced Siemens guys. They told me about old Siemens business development practices. Bribing clients was so normal like eating lunch every day. And now Germany has a chancellor involved in CumEx business in the past. For me Germany is another corrupt shady country with rich puppeteers pulling the strings from the shadows. Paragon of virtue is elsewhere.
Genuinely curious which countries HN users think are actually paragons of virtue.
Multiple times, I've had the experience of thinking a country is a paragon of virtue, then finding a thread here or on reddit full of people from that country complaining about it...
Seems like Singapore, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, and the Netherlands are the "paragon of virtue" countries people complain about the least.
I remember an Israeli acquaintance laughing hysterically at our lack of problems, because the front page of a major NZ newspaper was about a large seal that had got onto a motorway and was causing trouble. Seriously, our major news items often read like we all live in some hick back-country village. That’s a good thing, by the way.
One of the 3 major “scandal” highlights from 2015: “National cabinet minister Murray McCully is involved in the controversial setting up of a sheep farm in Saudi Arabia in partnership with Saudi businessman Hamood Al-Ali Al-Khalaf, seemingly to negate the risk of Al-Khalaf suing the New Zealand government”. Another highlight from 2017: “Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei reveals that she had at one time committed benefit fraud during the 1990s”.
Honestly I feel like most of the ones in the UK — until Boris — were just as parochial, only scaled up a bit. BJ was a walking scandal who has forever sullied British politics, and it’s no surprise that the various PPE scandals that are coming out happened on his watch.
Sorry, but what 'scandals'? The one where he had a handful of people in his garden? I mean theoretically during COVID administrative actions, but in practicality it has nothing to do with anything at all other than optics? BoJo was clownish, but he was not doing deals with Russians or stealing money.
Angela Merkel made massive deals with Putin for expansion of energy integration which was a key economic driver in a massive war in Europe. Gehard Schroder cut a deal with Russian Oil companies after he was voted out as Chancellor, just as he was leaving office whereupon he took Board Positions on said Russia Oil companies literally the day after being out of office including massive monetary payments. Which is beyond conflict of interest, just straight corruption, that of course also put Germany - and Europe including the UK on a trajectory to war.
Justin Trudeau was caught wearing Blackface. Twice. And there are other instances of this, as he has hinted 'he doesn't remember how many times he did it'. He implemented extrajudicial measures to quell a protest that was threatening his political legitimacy, while lying to the public that it was at the behest of the RCMP, whilst they in fact denied it was at their request. Those measures included the ability to seize individuals finances. He's allowing local provincial leaders in Quebec and Alberta to literally ignore the Constitution without a challenge. His family accepted $500 000 in consulting fees and travel from an entity his cabinet subsequently awarded a $1 Billion 'no bid contract' to. He bullied his Justice Minister into not investigating SNC-Lavalin, a massive international construction firm. There is $32 Billion in unaccounted for COVID payments. The $5M/year government payroll project is now close to a Billion dollars in cost.
Those are mostly 'material issues' meaning the scandals in these circumstances affect the nature of our governance, some of it in existentially consequential ways (aka 'extrajudicial actions').
I have no love or support for Boris Johnson - but 'scandal' is how the press (especially even outside the UK) turned his floozy escapades into material issues while they ignored nearly criminal actions elsewhere.
'Forever sullied British Politics' ... you must be young.
I'm Dutch, and I am upset we have gotten close to a narco state.
It's still nowhere close to true that drug dealers are being elected at the national level here, nor are national politicians clearly being pressured by drug dealers. But at the municipal level, there are a few cases of elected drug dealers and many cases of extortion.
More worryingly is the infiltration of this business into wider society. Farmers who are asked to rent out sheds, and getting blow-back if they say no is a common example. Rampant corruption and extortion of dock-worker in Rotterdam is another example.
I do want to note that the problem here isn't that we legalized weed. The problem is that Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe. Antwerp (in Belgium, another country) is facing similar problems because of their port.
What doesn't help either is our 'financial services industry'. Read: tax-haven and ownership hiding. Those are legitimate (though probably immoral) but it is a great climate for money-laundering. Both because there is lots of other money flows to hide amongst, and because the experts that could do it are already here. All they need is convincing to do illegal work.
> I do want to note that the problem here isn't that we legalized weed.
Part of the problem is that the Netherlands didn't legalize weed.
The current policy in the Netherlands leaves the actual wholesale production, supply and distribution in the hands of drug cartels and gangs.
Only the retail sale and consumption is legal.
> The problem is that Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe. Antwerp (in Belgium, another country) is facing similar problems because of their port.
Yep. Except the problems more limited in Belgium for some reason. Tonnes of cocaine is smuggled through Antwerp, but there is less of the associated violence.
You also seem to forget that the vast majority of amphetamine and MDMA marketed in Europe is manufactured in illicit labs in the Netherlands.
There's a huge environmental issue with the wastes from these labs being dumped in the Dutch countryside.
> What doesn't help either is our 'financial services industry'. Read: tax-haven and ownership hiding.
Tbf, that is a BeNeLux wide problem, with Lux being the worst offenders.
I wonder if the Netherlands would be a good place to experiment with the libertarian approach of just legalizing everything.
Like, if the drugs are manufactured in the Netherlands already, legalization won't change that.
The hope would be that legalization would reduce the associated violence and corruption. You'd have legitimate, "above-board" producers outcompeting the assholes, with state power on their side.
Just have to do it quickly before state power gets totally corrupted.
I guess the best counterargument would be that export is the key issue, and receivers of Dutch imports would cut those imports off of if the Dutch aren't making even a token effort to restrict illegal-in-recipient-country drug smuggling.
> I wonder if the Netherlands would be a good place to experiment with the libertarian approach of just legalizing everything.
No, for two reasons. First the political climate here is turning against legalization. We are pushing back on the free sale of weed, and production was never legalized, and attempts at legalizing production are consistently pushed back.
Second, our production of non-weed is inherently criminal. Legalizing it will only give these criminal enterprises a legitimate facade. The production is part of a bigger criminal organization, so legalizing it won't actually turn them away from crime. The criminal organizations are not 'small time doing crime to pay the bills'. Our most notorious captured criminal was recently suspected to be attempting to hire mercenaries from the Balkans (I forget which country) to break him out of prison with a helicopter escape. That is intentional criminality.
It's interesting to me that Finland is right next door to Russia and yet so different. I suppose that goes for Baltic states like Estonia as well though. (Speaking of which, does anyone have dirt on Estonia?)
Probably just my ignorance as an American. I have vague positive associations with the Netherlands due to: bicycles, legal weed, advancements in agricultural technology and ocean control, historical contribution to the development of capitalism/merchant republic history, plain-spoken culture, and Dutch friends of mine.
They also seem very stable, and have been allies with the USA for longer than pretty much any other country.
For British people, the Dutch are seen as plain-spoken and very socially liberal. Also they were the last country to successfully invade, although with some handy PR we now call it The Glorious Revolution rather than “the time the Dutch conquered us”
> Did Germany change over the last 20 years, or were my perceptions off from the get-go?
There has always been corruption. Germany under Kohl was also called Bimbesrepublik at times. "bimbes" being a cutesy/deragatory term for money in Kohl's idiom.
I believe it's mostly just that more comes to light these days and private media companies are more willing to poke at it. A lot of it is also not super extreme, so you can argue it away if you want to and squint on each individual item, and ignore the sum.
There’s an incredible amount of corruption among German politicians, especially among the “richer” parties CDU/CSU and FDP who are constantly being lobbied and bought by managers in the bigger industries (e.g. automobile and construction). That’s one of the reasons why Germany is so behind with environmental issues, technology/digitalization, and government transparency.
> especially among “richer” parties CDU/CSU and FDP
OTOH, Gerhard Schröder, former head of fed government, and long-time member and chief of the social-democratic party, is/was sitting in the board of Rosneft and Nord Stream.
Ms Kaili, currently being accused of having taken bribes, is a member of Greece's Pasoc.
Olaf Scholz, as head of the city of Hamburg and proponent of the G20 2017 summit, is responsible for unheard of chaos and destruction during said event. Without any chance of re-election, he changed mid-term into the position of a federal minister and handed his former position to unknown und unelected Peter Tschentscher. Moreover, there's been a penal charge brought against Scholz due to his role in large-scale tax fraught in the CumEx/Warburg bank affair.
This isn't held back by the bigger industries but by entrenched boundaries of responsibilities in the administration (defined in the regulations), data protection, and over-engineering.
Latest example: Warning the population. Instead of simply sending SMS to all active phones in an area, it has to be cell broadcast, which doesn't work on old phones. The reason seems to be (information in media is... limited) that sending SMS would not provide a way to send a cancel/warning-end message. That's only possible with cell broadcast. And that hasn't been used so far due to data protection concerns (there's a list of phones that have been warned, i.e. were in the affected area).
Oh, it aboslutely is held back by creative lobbying. Back in late 90s / early 2000s, Telekom (recently privatized telecom monopolist and owner of the landline network) lobbied hard against building up a fibre network by over selling wire based DSL using existing copper lines. Germany still pays for this.
Cell Broadcast is part of GSM since 1995. It's the phone manufacturers' fault that it doesn't work properly. Other countries have been using it for years now.
SMS also gets ignored all the time since spam and fraud over it is rampant nowadays.
My mobil phone number has existed since the beginning of time. It is listed in the public phone book. It was on my private web site for a long time. I've never not handed it over to any sign-up that needed a phone number.
I cannot remeber receiving any spam and/or fraud SMS, ever.
Maybe I'm just lucky, or the report of huge amounts of spam/fraud SMS is elsewhere, but not in Germany.
Data protection sounds like a huge brainwashing that Germans have been submitted to. At my work we analyze driving data, but our internal portal cannot be made public (with public I mean accessible within the company's intranet) because there might be people and cars in the video and this would violate their data protection rights.
In the end everything need some extra layers of bureaucracy to comply with the laws or is simply not done. And the funny part is that many think this is how it works in other countries too.
The reason cell broadcast hadn‘t been used in Germany was a desire not to “burden” the telco providers with the implementation. I’m sure they lobbied against it.
Germany went so far as to request a change in EU legislation that required cell broadcast to be used.
After the last warning test day was disastrous, it was decided to implement it after all.
This wasn't done because of a failed test. Only after over 100 people drowned in their homes in July 2021 because every single layer of the government failed to warn people about flooding they decided to do something.
This is not correct. A major of a town activated the town's sirens but because the only state-wide protocol in place was for citizens to return home or stay inside and turn on radio or TV, this was counterproductive. Plus, public radio and TV only started reporting after dozens of people were already dead.
It was a complete failure on all fronts where the federal and state governments then tried to blame part-time mayors afterwards for not being experts in catastrophe management.
Well, to be fair, I liked the way it was done. It was loud and dragged attention immediately - I'm pretty sure if it was an SMS I wouldn't even notice for hours. The only drawback is that once you acknowledge the alarm, it's gone, there is no place to read it again.
At the beginning of April 2022, it was announced that Gabriel would become Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe (Arms industry).
(Wikipedia)
I had a similar rosy view of the Japanese nuclear industry in 2010. After the Fukushima accident in 2011, I found that it would have been prevented if the Fukushima plant had followed regulations as strict as the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires, or if it had just built protections like the nearby Onagawa plant had built [1]. With further digging, I found that Japan had a rather poor nuclear safety culture before Fukushima too [2] [3]. I had even read about the 1999 criticality accident around the time it happened but downplayed its significance in my mind. Due to a combination of excellent consumer products exported from Japan and positive cultural stereotypes circulating in the US about Japanese attention to rules and quality, I incorrectly discounted prior evidence of defective nuclear safety culture in Japan.
With hindsight I also think that language barriers play a role in leaning on stereotypes. When companies with English-speaking employees have internal problems that leadership is ignoring, I can read complaints from lower level employees (anonymous or otherwise) posted online. But I don't know where Japanese power plant workers hang out online. Even if I did I wouldn't be able to understand what they're writing. So my views get colored more by whatever makes it into English-language media, which may be less representative.
Your perceptions were off. They have excellent engineering culture, which has bolstered every part of the economy & allowed them to perform poorly almost everywhere else IMO.
That's a fascinating opinion, as I've never thought of Germany being a symbol of virtue. If anything, Germany is a paragon of bureaucracy. They have excellent engineering when used for good, but as history taught us, that's not always the case.
Your comment here sounds like it is referencing WW2, which is a little silly. Germany changed massively after that (I mean, it was literally two countries for a few decades).
Governments can look very different from one decade to the next. So it doesn’t make sense to reference a war-time government from 80 years ago as an example of how a current government behaves.
Maybe it's a Cold War propaganda relic? Growing up as an Englisher, history was divided into "Bad Germany" (1930-1945), and "Good (West) Germany", ever since, and the only real stereotype we had of the Germans was that they'd get up early to stake out spots by the pool on holiday. I have to assume that during the Cold War there was a great deal of propaganda highlighting the relative merits of West Germans.
Yes I have a German friend who spends 3 months a year filing their tax situation. German paperwork is insane. And because a lot of the country is surprisingly technologically backwards, everything is on actual paper still.
Takes me about an hour to do the same in the UK and half of that is trying to remember how to log in and do it.
I like to complain about complex German taxes as much as the next guy, but this is way overblown.
You can send in your tax documents digitally and there are decent software packages to help you do it correctly. For most people it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours a year.
That is for your typical employee. If you’re running a corporation, do not try to file your taxes without a tax advisor.
For most people with regular employment, filing taxes in Germany is completely unnecessary because employers and banks withhold and pay them directly.
There are some tax benefits which are only accessible if you file taxes but if you don't want to take advantage of these tax benefits you don't have to file them. In general you also get 5 years to do it.
Wasn’t talking about Elster which is admittedly bad.
20€ gets you software from third party vendors that is easy to use and guides you through the process. (WISO Steuer etc.)
It’s just not true. Elster is already electronic for couple years. If you know what are doing it takes 4 hours max. I recommend your friend to find good tax advisor if he/she is not capable to do it by himself/herself.
The uninformed bullshit by the person you replied to is the reason I typically don‘t comment on German topics anymore on HN. Alas, my Gell-Mann-Amnesia is strong and I read comments on other topics even though they are probably as little based on reality as these comments on Germany.
Elster is an electronic version of paper forms. It requires redundant manual input of information that is present on different sub-sheets of the forms. Like the paper forms, it requires input of information that the government already has. Filing on paper doesn't take more time than filing through Elster.
Also, it's not unlikely that the government is printing the electronically filed information in the traditional paper format to be able to process it the traditional way. (maybe not for taxes, but it's surely the case for some other processes.)
But I agree that "3 months" is probably the time required to collect information, not the time needed to summarize the information for the government. Some banks take a couple of months to send the required yearly investment income/taxes-paid statement.
Some information can be entered automatically in Elster, e.g. the information submitted by your employer. For people with simple tax situations, e.g. regular employee and no additional complications filing the taxes is pretty straightforward. It can be a bit intimidating if you've never done it before, but almost all the information you need to fill out will be automatically provided. You need to get your bank/broker statements and enter them as well, but those tell you exactly in which line you need to put the values.
There's certainly a lot of improvement possible, but for simple cases it's pretty easy already (if you've done it at least once before).
It's all relative. In the most simple case there is no reason (and no requirement) to file a tax report at all.
Adding information from the employer is data that the employer has already submitted. Investment data could be transmitted from banks to the tax office directly, instead it's paper, as it always has been for the traditional process. The only iformation that would require filing is such not created through parties that are transmitting data anyway. e.g. private loans, collecting rent, etc.
As soon as any information is required to be transmitted, all information is required.
It's a process designed for execution on paper put into a computer. It's not a process designed for full automation. If any private company would operate that way they wouldn't be making any money.
Exactly. The scandal wasn’t so much that a company defrauded investors (happens) but that regulators didn’t catch on to it and actively interfered with attempts to uncover it.
The aim was to engineer a legislative and social move away from petrol and diesel cars, and engineer acceptance in environmental restrictions (or greater governance), in support of the fake climate crisis, that no one has seen. Except in statistics.
Most of what we see are meta narratives playing out, that are meant to capture the minds, and get us to consent willingly to greater governance. Turkeys voting for Christmas.
I didn't say anything about taking away freedom. I said - "get us to consent willingly to greater governance".
You believe the stories you are told, you trust the emissions testing, you trust the government to do something, the law-making process, the corrections to the bad acts on the part of corporations, etc. You've literally no idea whether any of that is true! I doubt you even think you are being gassed by cars.
But you probably support early scraping of functional cars, subsidising of electric cars (even though they are dirty to produce and not fit for purpose), artificially increasing the cost of travel (fuel taxes), food production, deliveries, etc, you support forcing cumbersome travel options on everyone (public transport accessible via tracking ids), decreasing parking, pedestrianising of areas, etc.
But these options are not ones you wanted either! You have simply been told they are good, you are saving the planet. You might not believe in religion, while you pay penance for your sinful nature.
In the past, towns and cities were engineered in order to provide access for cars - people then were told that was good, and believed it! It seems to me, that whatever government tells people is good, if they see it on a screen, they believe it! Even though they are actually poorer and have less options. Its amazing to me, that this is all it takes! To take ever more money from people, for less - you simply tell them on TV!
And I'm the one doing mental gymnastics! Do you actually notice the world at all? Do you verify any of your cherished beliefs? Has the water risen? Is it warmer? Was weather ever unchanging?
I don't know why this comment was down-voted. I feel exactly the same. When I saw the news source, Wall Street Journal, I wasn't surprised to see how much the article focused on sweeping away "pesky" environmental laws. Ask anyone who lived in Germany, UK, US, Japan in the 1970s. They can tell you all about life before environmental laws. It was hell. And sadly, the narrative is always stolen away by complaints about "my view will be ruined", ignoring all of the good these laws do for our environment. It would be better to improve the environmental laws to exclude "views" as something to be protected.
That's crazy, and no, it wasn't. Yes, there was lots of pollution. No, it wasn't hell. And much of what enables the high quality of life today with less pollution is build upon what was done then.
> It would be better to improve the environmental laws to exclude "views" as something to be protected.
And to be more focused on humans. If you weigh a city's needs vs that of field mice and you side with the activists who pretend to speak for the field mice, you've lost sight of what's important.
>And to be more focused on humans. If you weigh a city's needs vs that of field mice and you side with the activists who pretend to speak for the field mice, you've lost sight of what's important.
If you side with the humans in cities, and the only environmental laws you have are for their protection, you will screw your rural neighbors something awful. Countries already under-fund and often abuse the rights of rural communities and their citizens, which make up over 25% of the European people. Sure, the 75% in urban areas are able to out-vote the 25% rural population, but that doesn't make screwing over your neighbors a good thing.
Yes, but to add some context to it: The very party that initiated this complex, was previously instrumental in installing environmental blocking rights, Habeck's Green Party. ;)
The headline is misleading. What Germany did here was building a dock for a floating LNG terminal, not the LNG terminal itself.
The whole point floating LNG terminals is to be able to provide a site within a very short timeframe.
Germany didn’t build a fixed LNG terminal yet neither did they build a floating LNG terminal themselves. These floating terminals are rented from other countries.
This has historical precedent. Many plants were built in such time scales. About a quarter of them shut down early or destroyed themselves because they were so unreliable, the rest generated electricity less frequently and with more correlated outage than a wind turbine.
China is the only exception, but they still take 4-8x as long to build a nuclear plant compared to a wind farm, it's just that both take less time.
This is a misleading piece. What Germany did was to rent a floating LNG terminal. The real terminal still needs to be built, unless they want to add this cost to the already extremely high cost of LNG, for the long run. The so called solutions that Germany found to the gas problem only can be considered throwing large amounts of money to the equation. It may work in the short term, but the country still needs to find a way to support its industry for the years to come, or it will go broke.
Dunno about the numbers for Germany, but Estonia and Finland rented a floating terminal for ten years. That should be long-term enough to phase off all major demand of LNG. Regarding the cost, I calculate a miniscule fixed cost of 0.1 cent / kWh or 1 EUR/MWh, assuming the capacity will be used in full.
"The vessel’s evaporation capacity is 140 GWh/day and even more than 40 TWh per year [--] The total cost of the LNG floating terminal project is estimated at EUR 460 million under a 10-year lease. In addition, there will be costs related to the volume of use."https://gasgrid.fi/en/fsru-en/lng-floating-terminal/
I don't think there is any floating structure in the world that amounts to more than a rounding error in the context of the German budget, let alone a few barges with pipes and pumps.
This article's comment section wins the award for most really smart people saying really dumb things because they hold strong opinions on subject matter far outside their area of expertise.
Fear of russian aggression gave us the internet, nuclear weaponry, jet engines and the space program.
russia's genocide in Ukraine is proving to be a huge catalyst for green energy and drone technology. Those of us whose ancestry include refugees from russia's Pogroms are very happy to see a future with an impotent russia.
>Fear of russian aggression gave us the internet, nuclear weaponry, jet engines and the space program.
This isn't quite true. Jet engines were already being developed during WWII, including in Germany. The space program in the US was partially a by-product of the German rocketry developments.
So yes, wars and conflict have driven many technological developments, but some of them go back farther than you think, or are not just because of "fear of russian aggression".
Yes, and between the terroristic birth of communism, and 9/11, protection from russia's annexation of dozens of countries and their sociopathic disregard for life was as the primary motivation of Europe and America's defense research. Now they are also helping get the contrarians behind green power. It will also the lazy oil-bearing gulf states hang themselves.
Yes the germans created rocketry and the first jet engines, which they created as weapons against the communists. In cooperation with Europe, the United States of America annexed hitler's scientists and technologies, and used them to help defend ourselves from the communist plague. We also quite successfully commercialized these technologies.
Fear of being a communist slave by a country which has no problems working or starving its captives to death in the name of the state ideoloy, well, it's a hell of a motivator. I remember my great grandmothers' stories about the russian pogroms very well.
I don't know the official reason, but this seems very obvious to me. Because there frequently are paywalled articles that are of value to the HN audience.
Wouldn't it be more constructive to give arguments first for the opposite: Why should hacker news limit paywalled articles. Since you acknowledge you are already offtopic, you could add a little more than just ask a question that is a little too broad for an easy answer.
I'd say HN should prefer the URL that fits its readers best. Which in this case means paywalled URLs should be replaced with the available workarounds for that problem, ie URLs through that archive.ph.
That "evidence" is at best circumstantial. One counterfact is that Nordstream pipeline at the time of it's destruction was not transporting gas, i.e. it had already been shut down and abandoned by the Germans.
It's certainly better evidence than was ever offered for the supposed Russian role in the incident. If all your news is from English-language war media, you won't be convinced by Sachs. (Who is refreshingly frank with respect to a variety of issues now that he's been through that whole Lancet task force farce.) Outside Europe and North America, however, no one believes it was the Russians.
The pipeline was no longer transporting gas, but it certainly hadn't been "abandoned". That would have been monumentally stupid, especially in the context described by TFA.
There is no evidence as far as I know, but logic can give you some hints in this case.
Who would profit the most from physically cutting out Europe from Russian gas?
Consider the USA. They now plan to sell LNG to Europe for 4x the price it's sold domestically. This was still going to happen, but since the pipeline has been severed, it is now a certainty that the deal will go forward.
That is, the possibility of Europe getting scared of the crisis and backtracking on its distancing from Russia is now null. Now it's either rely on the US overpriced LNG or starve and suffer the cold. Isn't that convenient?
Given the low consideration the US have of Europe behind the curtains (who doesn't remember Victoria Nuland's famous "Fuck the EU"?), doesn't that make it even more evident?
> Who would profit the most from physically cutting out Europe from Russian gas?
Ooh, ooh, I know, I know! Australia! Unless you were going for Qatar? I think Qatar is making the most buck right now by diverting its sales of LNG from Asia to Europe instead, but I don't have the exact statistics in front of me.
Although actually the best answer is probably Russia. The fact that the pipeline is no longer operational means that Russia no longer has to pay contract penalties for failing to deliver the gas it was contractually obligated to deliver. (Natural gas is usually delivered via long-term fixed-price contracts).
> Yeah, let's save some cost on contract penalties by blowing up a pipeline which costed way more. Smart move, how could I not think of that.
Sunk cost fallacy. The pipeline was already not operating, and the political climate has definitively shifted to the point that Europe finds it desirable to reduce its reliance on that pipeline. However much the pipeline cost to build has no bearing on the future balance sheet of profit/loss on the pipeline, and if Russian policy is to permanently set the income of the pipeline to 0, an action to reduce the cost of the pipeline to 0 as well makes a great deal of fiscal sense.
> the USA has plenty, through the UK.
Curious why you call out the UK here, given that the pipeline does not go anywhere near UK territory. Why not Denmark, which is where the pipeline explosion took place? Or any other country with access to the Baltic, like Poland, the single loudest critic of Nord Stream?
Because the UK is the closest to the US in terms of geopolitical alignment, especially after brexit. Together with the US they've been the strongest supporters of NATO co-belligerence in the Ukraine/Russia war, even within NATO itself, let alone Europe. I might also cite the Liz Truss phone hack, but it hasn't really been confirmed.
So you say it for exactly the reasons I thought you would. (Although I think Poland is, again, more vocal in NATO support for Ukraine than UK.)
Of course, circling back to the topic at hand, the problem with blaming the US for the pipeline explosion is that it makes no fucking sense for the US to blow it up.
Germany had already committed to weaning itself off of Russian gas and Nord Stream as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine. There has been no real political support for backsliding on this decision, so the best possible scenario for the US were it to blow up the pipeline would be... a continuation of current policy; there's no real gain to be had by blowing it up. The risk of blowing it up is an uptick in criticism against the US for being foreign interventionists, resulting in increased political pressure to force the EU to force Ukraine to accede to substantial losses to Russia. Even if the US were stupid enough to desire a complete cessation of gas, the way they would want to go about it would be something that minimizes the chance of political blowback--in other words, the operation would want to do stuff that keeps it out of headlines, and a pipeline explosion is a pretty dramatic affair that is completely at odds with how to achieve your political ends.
Another element to consider is that it's very well-known that there is a gas shortfall problem in 2023 without Nord Stream. There's not enough LNG import capacity to fully replace it until about 2024, which means if it's cut off entirely, there is going to have to be some form of politically painful rationing going on to make it through the winter of 2023-2024. If your goal is to sell more gas, creating a situation that forces people to use less gas is counterproductive. And, again, as popular appreciation of gas shortages come about, it's going to create more pressure against support for Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine war.
If you look at it instead from the perspective of Russia, it makes a lot more sense. Russia already decided to stop exporting gas through Nord Stream about a month before the explosions, so it isn't going to be losing any revenue if it blows it up. In lieu of achieving military success on the battlefield, its theory of victory seems to have shifted in the fall towards making Ukrainians' and Europeans' lives as miserable as possible to force Ukraine to the negotiating table just to make the war stop. A dramatic explosion pushes the gas shortage issue into the headlines, and has enough plausible deniability to avoid political blowback. Especially because there's a decent cadre of people who will blame everything on US interventionism (and that's more or less official Russian line anyways--the Russia-Ukrainian war is the fault of the US, not Russia), even without any real evidence. Really, the strongest evidence that it's not caused by Russia is that it makes more strategic sense than Russia has shown itself capable of in the war to date.
The only thing that makes sense to me is it was blown up to force the Russians to expend resources protecting their infrastructure inside Russia. So likely Ukrainians did it while the Baltic states just looked the other way.
1) USA becomes a natural gas exporter based on fracking mostly in the Appalachians.
2) USA tells Germany they can't turn on Nordstream 2. Threatens German officials if they turn it on.
3) Russia invades Ukraine.
4) Some country sabotages Nordstream 2.
5) Germany builds port to import natural gas via the sea. Mostly from Qatar and USA, but definitely not from Russia.
Did I miss anything?
Now I read an article in the WSJ praising Germany for helping USA's natural gas exports. Meanwhile the German Greens get more militaristic and anti-environment every year.
It's cheaper to import natural gas via a pipeline than via diesel powered ships, and it's impossible to deliver enough via ships for all of Europe. Yet the German Greens prefer burning diesel to get their natural gas in slowly if it means we can pretend to be sanctioning Russia. But were not actually sanctioning Russia because we're stil buying fuel from them, only at a set price.
As a European I get sick of being America's bitch sometimes. Russia is still selling all of their natural gas and oil. We've accomplished nothing but gimped ourselves for the sake of licking American boots. The USA just told ASML, Dutch supplier of chip making infrastructure, that they are not allowed to sell to China. Why, because China bad and we're America's bitch. That's the only reason given. Once again ASML was forced into compliance by threats from the Americans, and they complied because we're their little bitch that they get to smack around.
My winter gas prices are through the roof. Not because of Russia, or Ukraine, or any European reason. But because the Americans won't let us buy gas from Russia and instead force us to import it via the sea from the USA, Qatar, etc.
Point 4 and 5 should be switched around. Germany decided to build the LNG terminals before Norstream 2 was sabotaged. Pretty important, because at that point it was already very questionable if Nordstream 2 would ever go into operation.
Except this time we know what happens when you try to cooperate with Russia - eventually you get invaded and genocided, as evidenced in Ukraine. USA is a lesser evil.
We need them to starve just a little bit and the world will start becoming a much better place. Most of our (EU's) problems are literally caused by Germany's double standards over the past 20 years.
