5 ms·

This op-ed is getting things so utterly wrong, I don‘t even know where to start. The Energiewende (so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibilit

by mvgcf 4y ago

This op-ed is getting things so utterly wrong, I don‘t even know where to start. The Energiewende (so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility) here in Germany is working just fine. It is a reasonable investment in our future. The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy. The lack of gas is problematic because it is a preliminary product used in chemical processes. This is where a looming recession might derive from. On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint.

Zanfa 4y ago
> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. Grid-scale storage (apart from hydro, but that's basically maxed out or unsuitable for most geographies) is still an unsolved problem for renewables, even the largest lithium-battery ones are basically a rounding error. You'd need multiple weeks worth of battery capacity to really run on renewables. Not even sure if there's enough lithium to make this work theoretically with current tech. > On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated Same is true for every other power source as well. Energy storage for renewables is never included, so you need backups, the €100 billion German defence package announced a few months ago is a direct consequence of "cheap" Russian gas, the millions of people suffering/dying from air pollution related issues from using coal. There's no perfect solution, but nuclear is definitely a strong contender for the best way forward.
- VaxWithSex 4y ago
  It's a solved problem for Germany. Electrolyze Hydrogen, store it in the existing gas infrastructure for the winter. Use the gas plants to burn it in the winter.
  - ThePhysicist 4y ago
    That has a round trip efficiency of around 20-25 % I think (more if you can also use the process heat), so we would need to over-provision renewables by 400 % to make it work.
    - dividedbyzero 4y ago
      There is a ton of unused roof space that could be decked out with solar, though. There are few heat pumps deployed so far, lots of inefficient old houses that could be modernized, plus there is an array of concepts for other storage tech still at a pretty early stage. It's probably going to be a mix of different generation and storage tech coupled with gains in efficiency, and that seems like it could work out.
      - ThePhysicist 4y ago
        Sure, feasible in the long run but don't hold your breath on it to work in the next 5-10 years. China has just doubled their growth targets for solar so producers have trouble keeping up with demand already and we have almost no domestic production anymore, so there's just no way we'll be able to act on this in the near future.
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    I would love to see a reference about this being actively used, in a meaningful capacity (as in: enough to prevent a countrywide blackout).
  - epups 4y ago
    There is no large scale hydrogen storage facility that could take even 1% of German's energy needs.
    - dividedbyzero 4y ago
      Yet.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > There's no perfect solution, but nuclear is definitely a strong contender for the best way forward. Absolutely! But: Nuclear was approximately as cheap as the equivalent LiIon storage a few years ago, but the batteries are getting cheaper and the reactors are not. There are also other chemistries, and other storage options, which I'd include under the banner of "no perfect solution, so let's do everything". > You'd need multiple weeks worth of battery capacity to really run on renewables. I have no idea why this meme propagates. How many people live where there is no sunlight for multiple weeks at a time? And it's not like we don't already have some long distance power lines. PV is so absurdly cheap that overproduction is seriously not a bad solution if you're just concerned about cloudy weeks.
WanderPanda 4y ago
> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. More probably you‘re running on green (washing) electricity certificates from Norway…
- VaxWithSex 4y ago
  Nope, 100% green energy in the hands of the citizens.
  - mvgcf 4y ago
    This. It is 100% green energy. No certificates or whatsoever.
    - tallanvor 4y ago
      Then they're lying to you. Unless you're on a completely separate power grid, your energy is, in reality, provided by the power source closest to you. It might be solar or wind sometimes, but the rest of the time it's probably a non-renewable source. German companies claiming to get their energy through renewable sources are primarily buying credits from Norway and a few other sources in Europe. You can stick your head in the ground and pretend all of the electricity you use is being generated by renewable resources, but as long as plants in Germany are producing power using coal and natural gas, it means you're using that energy.
      - mvgcf 4y ago
        This is not true. There are multiple energy providers selling only renewables. There even is one village that managed to do so on its own for itself. Your argumentation is wrong. What you say is: There is no use in limiting pollution, because there will still be some pollution left anyways. I bet you never clean your place, because it will get dirty soon after.
      - Ekaros 4y ago
        It's funny that those wind and solar contracts don't stop delivering when there is no supply... Makes one wonder about truth.
timbre1234 4y ago
"The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy." Yeah, I stopped reading here. This is just a flat out untruth. I'm sorry if this article doesn't agree with how you wish the world could be, but simply saying things like this that aren't true doesn't help.
ThePhysicist 4y ago
Those renewable energy contracts were mostly a scam in my opinion, most of these providers just bought renewable electricity from the stock market when it was cheap and sold it to consumers at a premium, creating zero new renewable capacity in the process. Greenwashing at its finest. And last year when prices for renewables went through the roof due to several unanticipated factors most of them went belly-up and had to "fire" their long-time customers (myself included) because their business models stopped working as they had built zero renewable energy production themselves. The whole "Energiewende" feels a bit like that: Electricity production was privatized and more than 300 billion € in subsidies went into investors' hands. Now the infrastructure that was created is mostly privately owned and even though renewable energy production currently peaks the prices go through the roof because consumer prices align with the stock market price of electricity and not the cost of production. It really matters how you create renewable energy.
- mvgcf 4y ago
  While you do make a fair point on greenwashing being a problem in general, your opinion does not apply to my non greenwashed contract. 100% green energy and a coop investing heavily in more capacity. This is true for gas (heating) and electricity, btw.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > does not apply to my non greenwashed contract. 100% green energy and a coop investing heavily in more capacity. So you're connected directly to a co-op's green power plant; neither your house nor that power plant are on the national grid where your "100% green energy" gets mixed up with all the other -- non-green -- electricity being produced nationwide?
ucha 4y ago
> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. How can you receive energy purely from renewable energy sources when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? Germany doesn't have any significant capacity for electricity storage. It's such a bold statement but it seems physically impossible.
- mvgcf 4y ago
  One example: my energy provider builds biogas plants. Guess what, they turn agricultural waste into electricity. Even at night. Your argumentation is similar to suggesting Tesla should stop developing electrical cars because there is no charger infrastructure. So 2010.
  - ucha 4y ago
    I thought biomass was marginal but you actually produce almost as much electricity with biomass as with natural gas. I stand corrected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany
disgu 4y ago
> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. No you don't. Just because you pay for Ökostrom or whatever doesn't mean that the electricity you actually use was produced by renewables. It's one grid. You use the electricity produced by coal plants just like everyone else.
- mvgcf 4y ago
  I am glad you got my point: My share of energy consumption is completly covered by renewables.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > My share of energy consumption is completly covered by renewables. Only if you a) Pretend that the electricity you get doesn't come from the same grid as everyone else's, where the input to that grid is a mixture of renewable and non-renewable energy, and b) Don't look too hard at how many others make that same boast: Being "green" is "in", so lots of people's consumption "is completly covered by renewables"... Perhaps a larger proportion of electricity consumers than he proportion of electricity actually generated by renewables? I mean, if you can happily -- and unthinkingly -- echo the empty promise on your electricity bill, so can everyone else. Your claim is point-less.
dispat0r 4y ago
> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. On paper maybe, most people are actually using electricity generated from conventional power plants most of the time, and we are paying the highest energy prices in the world for that. > On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint. Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint. False dichotomies. See for example Flugplatz Brandenburg-Briest: https://goo.gl/maps/WATEJANE9wiHk7UAA https://goo.gl/maps/WATEJANE9wiHk7UAA And pastureland can continue to be used as pastureland simultaneously with both PV and wind.
dang 4y ago
> so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility Please omit swipes like this from your HN comments. They're against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and they weaken your argument.

by mvgcf 4y ago

Zanfa 4y ago

> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. Grid-scale storage (apart from hydro, but that's basically maxed out or unsuitable for most geographies) is still an unsolved problem for renewables, even the largest lithium-battery ones are basically a rounding error. You'd need multiple weeks worth of battery capacity to really run on renewables. Not even sure if there's enough lithium to make this work theoretically with current tech. > On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated Same is true for every other power source as well. Energy storage for renewables is never included, so you need backups, the €100 billion German defence package announced a few months ago is a direct consequence of "cheap" Russian gas, the millions of people suffering/dying from air pollution related issues from using coal. There's no perfect solution, but nuclear is definitely a strong contender for the best way forward.

VaxWithSex 4y ago
It's a solved problem for Germany. Electrolyze Hydrogen, store it in the existing gas infrastructure for the winter. Use the gas plants to burn it in the winter.
- ThePhysicist 4y ago
  That has a round trip efficiency of around 20-25 % I think (more if you can also use the process heat), so we would need to over-provision renewables by 400 % to make it work.
  - dividedbyzero 4y ago
    There is a ton of unused roof space that could be decked out with solar, though. There are few heat pumps deployed so far, lots of inefficient old houses that could be modernized, plus there is an array of concepts for other storage tech still at a pretty early stage. It's probably going to be a mix of different generation and storage tech coupled with gains in efficiency, and that seems like it could work out.
    - ThePhysicist 4y ago
      Sure, feasible in the long run but don't hold your breath on it to work in the next 5-10 years. China has just doubled their growth targets for solar so producers have trouble keeping up with demand already and we have almost no domestic production anymore, so there's just no way we'll be able to act on this in the near future.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  I would love to see a reference about this being actively used, in a meaningful capacity (as in: enough to prevent a countrywide blackout).
- epups 4y ago
  There is no large scale hydrogen storage facility that could take even 1% of German's energy needs.
  - dividedbyzero 4y ago
    Yet.
ben_w 4y ago
> There's no perfect solution, but nuclear is definitely a strong contender for the best way forward. Absolutely! But: Nuclear was approximately as cheap as the equivalent LiIon storage a few years ago, but the batteries are getting cheaper and the reactors are not. There are also other chemistries, and other storage options, which I'd include under the banner of "no perfect solution, so let's do everything". > You'd need multiple weeks worth of battery capacity to really run on renewables. I have no idea why this meme propagates. How many people live where there is no sunlight for multiple weeks at a time? And it's not like we don't already have some long distance power lines. PV is so absurdly cheap that overproduction is seriously not a bad solution if you're just concerned about cloudy weeks.

WanderPanda 4y ago

> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. More probably you‘re running on green (washing) electricity certificates from Norway…

VaxWithSex 4y ago
Nope, 100% green energy in the hands of the citizens.
- mvgcf 4y ago
  This. It is 100% green energy. No certificates or whatsoever.
  - tallanvor 4y ago
    Then they're lying to you. Unless you're on a completely separate power grid, your energy is, in reality, provided by the power source closest to you. It might be solar or wind sometimes, but the rest of the time it's probably a non-renewable source. German companies claiming to get their energy through renewable sources are primarily buying credits from Norway and a few other sources in Europe. You can stick your head in the ground and pretend all of the electricity you use is being generated by renewable resources, but as long as plants in Germany are producing power using coal and natural gas, it means you're using that energy.
    - mvgcf 4y ago
      This is not true. There are multiple energy providers selling only renewables. There even is one village that managed to do so on its own for itself. Your argumentation is wrong. What you say is: There is no use in limiting pollution, because there will still be some pollution left anyways. I bet you never clean your place, because it will get dirty soon after.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      It's funny that those wind and solar contracts don't stop delivering when there is no supply... Makes one wonder about truth.

timbre1234 4y ago

"The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy." Yeah, I stopped reading here. This is just a flat out untruth. I'm sorry if this article doesn't agree with how you wish the world could be, but simply saying things like this that aren't true doesn't help.

ThePhysicist 4y ago

Those renewable energy contracts were mostly a scam in my opinion, most of these providers just bought renewable electricity from the stock market when it was cheap and sold it to consumers at a premium, creating zero new renewable capacity in the process. Greenwashing at its finest. And last year when prices for renewables went through the roof due to several unanticipated factors most of them went belly-up and had to "fire" their long-time customers (myself included) because their business models stopped working as they had built zero renewable energy production themselves. The whole "Energiewende" feels a bit like that: Electricity production was privatized and more than 300 billion € in subsidies went into investors' hands. Now the infrastructure that was created is mostly privately owned and even though renewable energy production currently peaks the prices go through the roof because consumer prices align with the stock market price of electricity and not the cost of production. It really matters how you create renewable energy.

mvgcf 4y ago
While you do make a fair point on greenwashing being a problem in general, your opinion does not apply to my non greenwashed contract. 100% green energy and a coop investing heavily in more capacity. This is true for gas (heating) and electricity, btw.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > does not apply to my non greenwashed contract. 100% green energy and a coop investing heavily in more capacity. So you're connected directly to a co-op's green power plant; neither your house nor that power plant are on the national grid where your "100% green energy" gets mixed up with all the other -- non-green -- electricity being produced nationwide?

ucha 4y ago

> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. How can you receive energy purely from renewable energy sources when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? Germany doesn't have any significant capacity for electricity storage. It's such a bold statement but it seems physically impossible.

mvgcf 4y ago
One example: my energy provider builds biogas plants. Guess what, they turn agricultural waste into electricity. Even at night. Your argumentation is similar to suggesting Tesla should stop developing electrical cars because there is no charger infrastructure. So 2010.
- ucha 4y ago
  I thought biomass was marginal but you actually produce almost as much electricity with biomass as with natural gas. I stand corrected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany

disgu 4y ago

> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. No you don't. Just because you pay for Ökostrom or whatever doesn't mean that the electricity you actually use was produced by renewables. It's one grid. You use the electricity produced by coal plants just like everyone else.

mvgcf 4y ago
I am glad you got my point: My share of energy consumption is completly covered by renewables.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > My share of energy consumption is completly covered by renewables. Only if you a) Pretend that the electricity you get doesn't come from the same grid as everyone else's, where the input to that grid is a mixture of renewable and non-renewable energy, and b) Don't look too hard at how many others make that same boast: Being "green" is "in", so lots of people's consumption "is completly covered by renewables"... Perhaps a larger proportion of electricity consumers than he proportion of electricity actually generated by renewables? I mean, if you can happily -- and unthinkingly -- echo the empty promise on your electricity bill, so can everyone else. Your claim is point-less.

dispat0r 4y ago

> On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7. On paper maybe, most people are actually using electricity generated from conventional power plants most of the time, and we are paying the highest energy prices in the world for that. > On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint. Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint.

ben_w 4y ago
> Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint. False dichotomies. See for example Flugplatz Brandenburg-Briest: https://goo.gl/maps/WATEJANE9wiHk7UAA https://goo.gl/maps/WATEJANE9wiHk7UAA And pastureland can continue to be used as pastureland simultaneously with both PV and wind.

dang 4y ago

> so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility Please omit swipes like this from your HN comments. They're against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and they weaken your argument.