Czech republic has some really nice quarries and dams where you can swim for free or next to free. One thing I've noticed is that Czechs only seem to go to such places when it's really really warm. So they're often empty even when they're perfect for swimming. At least the ones near me in Plzeň. I grew up swimming in the Atlantic so my idea of swimming temperature may be different to average Czechs!
The "interesting" part is that the mine closing will significantly reduce the water supply to Berlin on its own, and filling the pit will probably raise the issue to possibly catastrophic levels: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/spr...
This report seems to be a bit one-sided. They say the lakes will be used as reservoirs for rivers like the spree. The issue is that the spree was feed for years with excess water from the old mines which had to pump the water out. Now they don’t pump water anymore to fill up these lakes and some parts of the spree run low on water during summer. The water table fell a lot over the last 10 to 20 years in Berlin. I’m not sure what exactly contributed to this situation overall. But they had plans to pump water from the Elbe into the Spree to help out with the situation. But cities downstream are not happy about the situation. For me this feels like a somewhat similar situation to the Colorado River situation with the upper and lower basins.
Yes climate change is the biggest issue. But also the fact that the spree was artificially topped up for roughly 100 years and the cities and industries count on that water.
To provide a counterpoint that is missing in the article: Conservation organizations are somewhat skeptical that these projects might take much longer and be more expensive than planned, due to climate change.
Projects like Garzweiler and Hambach were expected to take 25 to 30 years to fill up, but with droughts like this summer it might take much longer and the water would have to be diverted from already stressed ecosystems like the Rhine.
This whole topic has become much more complicated in the last years...
It's dependent on the minerals being prospected for and the mining techniques as well as general awareness and regulations that were in place during operation. Yellowknife has a huge ecological issue due to Arsenic being actively used in Giant Mine[1] but that was introduced to ease mining (mercury is also commonly used for gold extraction and purification, though occasionally offsite). So it really depends on the mine. Mines are never good for the environment but how toxic they are will vary.
No, not exactly. Many kinds of rocks and soil will release Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) or otherwise release sulfates and heavy metals into the environment. Of course a lot of this will already be known from the treatments they had to do when keeping the water table low when mining.
When I was a kid I remember a number of very old stone quarries that had been allowed to fill, then years later they had to put up warnings for people to stay out because the high Ph water was dissolving metals into it.
There's a sandstone quarry I've swam in, the deep end is 60+ feet deep. I wouldn' want to be a lifeguard there. Although the added depth doesn't really mater past about 15 feet.
There are lots of these in northern Minnesota and they used the tailings to turn the areas into some really great mountain biking trails, which really helps those old mining towns.
One might think that they've come to the conclusion that it's time to phase out coal and move towards renewables.
But coal is still big in Germany, and with the current Minister for Economic Affairs, Katarina Reiche [1], the fossil fuel lobby has installed a puppet in that position, one who is going all in on fossils again and pushing legislation that makes it much harder to expand solar and wind capacity.
Even though no one needs coal anymore, big companies like RWE still forcibly demolish villages to expand their mines and show off their power .
Wind and solar power do not provide dispatchable power and they therefore do not replace conventional power plants.
Germany isn't keeping their coal-fired power plants and they're not building new gas-fired power plants despite the energy transition but because of it.
You're spreading conspiracy theories when you claim Katherina Reiche is a fossil fuel puppet. She is doing what has always been the plan for the energy transition: Building gas-fired power plants.
That plan is even in the DENA study for the energy transition:
And before you claim DENA is some sort of fossil fuel lobby organization, they're not. DENA belongs to the German state and was founded in 2000 by SPD and Greens:
"Wind and solar power do not provide dispatchable power and they therefore do not replace conventional power plants.
Germany isn't keeping their coal-fired power plants and they're not building new gas-fired power plants despite the energy transition but because of it."
4 hour storage battery operated renewables are now cost competitive with gas plants.
I remember reading somewhere that they are planning on using excessive wind/solar energy to generate Hydrogen gas and use that for energy instead of Hydrocarbon gases.
Sorry, but in Germany there isn't even much of a debate anymore about whether she is a puppet of the gas industry. She even asked EnBW for arguments in favor of gas-fired power plants in order to avoid holding a technology-neutral tender process as required by the EU: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/katherina-reiches-minister...
Yes, the so called base load isn’t the strength of intermittent renewables and yet Germany turned off clean, nuclear power in favor of gas and coal plants.
I was thinking about hybrid approach. Drilling to 5km and get water that has 200 C and use natural gas to provide additional heat to produce steam at 374°C.
Alternatively, flood the mineshafts and set up heat exchangers. Wait for Co2 turbines to become viable and get rid of gas.
The Tagebaurekultivierungsaktivitäten have been going on for a long time. I remember visiting some former open pit in the 90s, as they started filling it, noting how it would take like 10 years or so. Pretty strange land.
10 years? That's nothing. Flooding Hambach will take approximately 40 years. And that includes water from the Rhine carried there by pipeline, which in the current state of the Rhine is... optimistic.
Why mention nuclear but not wind? Wind has nearly as low an LCOE as solar, and is still dropping too, and wind power is anti-correlated with solar power, meaning we get more wind at night and in the winter.
One of these things is not like the other. You can have solar next week at a reliable price and you'll be able to buy insurance for your solar array on the private market. Nuclear isn't going to happen no matter how many data center projects get hyped. No nuclear project will be complete before we're all talking about data centers like we talk about the Metaverse.
Why would that be unreasonable? Generating some power somewhere, sometime isn't hard. Generating the right amount at the right time in the right location is. (In other words logistics.)
So yeah the cost is in moving and storing the electricity by maintaining and expanding the infrastructure.
Even if the number of gas turbines will increase (it's not increasing nearly as much as you'd think if you just look at the number being built, because old ones are also being decomissioned), the amount of gas being burnt on an annual level is going to be going down. These gas plants are for bridging gaps left open by wind and solar which cannot yet be covered by batteries.
If you believe in the transition to renewables, Germany fundamentally does still need gas turbines to make that happen, more than we currently have.
That's not inconsistent. A robust grid will have enough capacity of any sort to cover peak demand during a dankelflaute but enough zero-emissions generation and storage to cover generation at all other times.
And that's exactly what Germany is doing. Their natural gas plants only run ~15% of the time. Usage is going down faster than capacity is going up.
1. There should be plenty broken up press board after the apocalypse. It is apparently quite flammable but sometimes gives off bad emissions. Perhaps you should set up a website where people can print a guide to press board emissions, so we all will know which to cook foods with and which to only heat with.
2. And there should be plenty of auto tires. Here's a fella who needs only a few tires each day to heat a 12' x 16' corrugated metal siding workshop:
Oh, now thats cool.
This is quite normal thing to do for many open pit mines or rather hard not to do if the pit goes below the water table.
There are some very nice natural swimming pools in the local area thanks to that, for example:
https://www.kudyznudy.cz/aktivity/koupaliste-u-libuse-v-lule... (stone quarry, IMHO one of the best summer swimming pools anywhere)
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zatopen%C3%BD_lom_v_Blansku (stone quarry)
https://www.jednoustopouceskem.cz/listing/lom-kaolinka-prime... (kaolin mine)
Czech republic has some really nice quarries and dams where you can swim for free or next to free. One thing I've noticed is that Czechs only seem to go to such places when it's really really warm. So they're often empty even when they're perfect for swimming. At least the ones near me in Plzeň. I grew up swimming in the Atlantic so my idea of swimming temperature may be different to average Czechs!
The "interesting" part is that the mine closing will significantly reduce the water supply to Berlin on its own, and filling the pit will probably raise the issue to possibly catastrophic levels: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/spr...
I go often to a quarry lake in Canmore (near Banff)
I recently went swimming in one of these submerged mines/quarries in North America. This one flooded during a severe hurricane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Brownstone_Quarries
The Minnesota Iron Range is full of these and they're absolutely beautiful; terrifyingly deep, however.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAL_d-5FsGQ - Tioga Pit Mine (225' deep)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Mine_Pit_Lake (450' deep)
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Luleč is really amazing and the food they have there is top.
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This report seems to be a bit one-sided. They say the lakes will be used as reservoirs for rivers like the spree. The issue is that the spree was feed for years with excess water from the old mines which had to pump the water out. Now they don’t pump water anymore to fill up these lakes and some parts of the spree run low on water during summer. The water table fell a lot over the last 10 to 20 years in Berlin. I’m not sure what exactly contributed to this situation overall. But they had plans to pump water from the Elbe into the Spree to help out with the situation. But cities downstream are not happy about the situation. For me this feels like a somewhat similar situation to the Colorado River situation with the upper and lower basins.
https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2026/07/wasser-mangel-...
> The water table fell a lot over the last 10 to 20 years in Berlin. I’m not sure what exactly contributed to this situation overal
Climate change, as your article says.
It also says that they want to use those new lakes as reservoirs to help out the situation.
Yes climate change is the biggest issue. But also the fact that the spree was artificially topped up for roughly 100 years and the cities and industries count on that water.
So it will be rough for the area. It’s man-made though. That’s why I compared it to the Colorado basin situation around lake Lake Mead. Here is another article: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/spr...
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To provide a counterpoint that is missing in the article: Conservation organizations are somewhat skeptical that these projects might take much longer and be more expensive than planned, due to climate change.
Projects like Garzweiler and Hambach were expected to take 25 to 30 years to fill up, but with droughts like this summer it might take much longer and the water would have to be diverted from already stressed ecosystems like the Rhine.
This whole topic has become much more complicated in the last years...
Mining operations often are toxic environments for various reasons aren't they?
It's dependent on the minerals being prospected for and the mining techniques as well as general awareness and regulations that were in place during operation. Yellowknife has a huge ecological issue due to Arsenic being actively used in Giant Mine[1] but that was introduced to ease mining (mercury is also commonly used for gold extraction and purification, though occasionally offsite). So it really depends on the mine. Mines are never good for the environment but how toxic they are will vary.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine
Excavation pits can be clean and I'm pretty sure they would have considered what was left in the pit.
What you're thinking of is the processing aspect of mining, which is a whole different beast.
No, not exactly. Many kinds of rocks and soil will release Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) or otherwise release sulfates and heavy metals into the environment. Of course a lot of this will already be known from the treatments they had to do when keeping the water table low when mining.
When I was a kid I remember a number of very old stone quarries that had been allowed to fill, then years later they had to put up warnings for people to stay out because the high Ph water was dissolving metals into it.
This really depends on the composition of the minerals. Butte, MT is famous for its pit that is filled with highly toxic water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana#Berkeley_Pit (or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-Ej2EtE744 ).
Haunted Hydrology's video for October 8 is about divers in flooded mines:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/V-HW5HAL7Lk
This reminds of a retirement community that was developed in Rome, GA on the site of an old limestone quarry.
https://www.thw.com/projects/49-senior-living/323-berry-coll...
Turning old brownfield into usable and livable space is a win all around
These strip mine reclamations are just great.
In the 1990s, we lived on a lake in Indiana that was reclaimed from strip mines. Recommended.
There's a sandstone quarry I've swam in, the deep end is 60+ feet deep. I wouldn' want to be a lifeguard there. Although the added depth doesn't really mater past about 15 feet.
https://www.cityoftenino.us/parks-recreation/page/quarry-poo...
This quarry in chicago used as a storm water buffer is cool. It would be interesting to drive over it when it is full.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/environment/2026/07/11/chicago-...
There are lots of these in northern Minnesota and they used the tailings to turn the areas into some really great mountain biking trails, which really helps those old mining towns.
Interesting machine that mines the coal and makes the lakes possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8772vEfUu8
On the one hand, it's nice that they're doing it.
One might think that they've come to the conclusion that it's time to phase out coal and move towards renewables. But coal is still big in Germany, and with the current Minister for Economic Affairs, Katarina Reiche [1], the fossil fuel lobby has installed a puppet in that position, one who is going all in on fossils again and pushing legislation that makes it much harder to expand solar and wind capacity. Even though no one needs coal anymore, big companies like RWE still forcibly demolish villages to expand their mines and show off their power .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherina_Reiche [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine
They came to the conclusion in 2018. There is a law in place to phase it out completely by 2038.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausstieg_aus_der_Kohleverstrom... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
Wind and solar power do not provide dispatchable power and they therefore do not replace conventional power plants.
Germany isn't keeping their coal-fired power plants and they're not building new gas-fired power plants despite the energy transition but because of it.
You're spreading conspiracy theories when you claim Katherina Reiche is a fossil fuel puppet. She is doing what has always been the plan for the energy transition: Building gas-fired power plants.
That plan is even in the DENA study for the energy transition:
https://www.dena.de/fileadmin/dena/Dokumente/Pdf/9262_dena-L... (p. 29)
And before you claim DENA is some sort of fossil fuel lobby organization, they're not. DENA belongs to the German state and was founded in 2000 by SPD and Greens:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Energie-Agentur
"Wind and solar power do not provide dispatchable power and they therefore do not replace conventional power plants. Germany isn't keeping their coal-fired power plants and they're not building new gas-fired power plants despite the energy transition but because of it."
4 hour storage battery operated renewables are now cost competitive with gas plants.
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I remember reading somewhere that they are planning on using excessive wind/solar energy to generate Hydrogen gas and use that for energy instead of Hydrocarbon gases.
Sorry, but in Germany there isn't even much of a debate anymore about whether she is a puppet of the gas industry. She even asked EnBW for arguments in favor of gas-fired power plants in order to avoid holding a technology-neutral tender process as required by the EU: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/katherina-reiches-minister...
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Yes, the so called base load isn’t the strength of intermittent renewables and yet Germany turned off clean, nuclear power in favor of gas and coal plants.
I wonder how that happened…
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> conspiracy theories when you claim Katherina Reiche is a fossil fuel puppet
lol, wtf?!
Before becoming a minister she was employed by E.ON (for non-Germans: one of the big four energy companies in Germany) to lobby for their interests.
She is _the_ prototype of a fossil fuel puppet.
> and they're not building new gas-fired power plants
Uh... Whut? They're not just building them, but actively subsidizing them: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-government-appro...
Because of pinky-promises about 'hydrogen' some time in future.
Cool, but how is this bigger than, e.g. East Finland's lake landscape?
The title is incorrect. The articles’s text adds “artificial”:
“Part of Lusatian Lakeland – now Europe's largest artificial water landscape”
Even that’s debatable, I think, given, for example:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alqueva_Dam: a 250 km² artificial lake
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd_Reservoir: over 3,000km²
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJsselmeer: 1,100km²
=> it depends on such things as whether you call a reservoir a lake, how you define “water landscape”, etc.
This is a great idea. I think there are issues with possible contaminants but if that can be sorted...
I wish someone would try to convert them in geothermal plant.
I think you need to go much, much, much deeper for that.
I was thinking about hybrid approach. Drilling to 5km and get water that has 200 C and use natural gas to provide additional heat to produce steam at 374°C.
Alternatively, flood the mineshafts and set up heat exchangers. Wait for Co2 turbines to become viable and get rid of gas.
Millimeter wave boring (aka death star laser) is supposed to help with that.
Germany is pretty famous for tagebaurekultivierung.
The Tagebaurekultivierungsaktivitäten have been going on for a long time. I remember visiting some former open pit in the 90s, as they started filling it, noting how it would take like 10 years or so. Pretty strange land.
10 years? That's nothing. Flooding Hambach will take approximately 40 years. And that includes water from the Rhine carried there by pipeline, which in the current state of the Rhine is... optimistic.
Is it safe to recreate in water that has been exposed to all of that mining slough?
Now please bring back solar + nuclear energy and stop pretending that burning oil is cleaner.
Why mention nuclear but not wind? Wind has nearly as low an LCOE as solar, and is still dropping too, and wind power is anti-correlated with solar power, meaning we get more wind at night and in the winter.
Yeah wind too.
The north, where I live, has lots of windmills and more is being built
> Wind has nearly as low an LCOE as solar
Because production costs aren't what's setting the prices, supply and demand is.
Cheap solar and wind power doesn't help when it's not available.
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One of these things is not like the other. You can have solar next week at a reliable price and you'll be able to buy insurance for your solar array on the private market. Nuclear isn't going to happen no matter how many data center projects get hyped. No nuclear project will be complete before we're all talking about data centers like we talk about the Metaverse.
Good luck with solar in Germany when you will be paying a fee for feeding in energy to the grid during solar peek time from 2027 onwards.
Why would that be unreasonable? Generating some power somewhere, sometime isn't hard. Generating the right amount at the right time in the right location is. (In other words logistics.)
So yeah the cost is in moving and storing the electricity by maintaining and expanding the infrastructure.
Do you have a source? Can you "waste" that energy instead of feeding it in?
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Added 17GW solar in the last 12 months, reached 129GW: https://solarzubau.de/deutschland/
Cool, these are currently supplying 0.06% of their installed capacity:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/fifteen_minutes
Very useful.
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We are currently busy building new gas turbines. lol.
Even if the number of gas turbines will increase (it's not increasing nearly as much as you'd think if you just look at the number being built, because old ones are also being decomissioned), the amount of gas being burnt on an annual level is going to be going down. These gas plants are for bridging gaps left open by wind and solar which cannot yet be covered by batteries.
If you believe in the transition to renewables, Germany fundamentally does still need gas turbines to make that happen, more than we currently have.
That's not inconsistent. A robust grid will have enough capacity of any sort to cover peak demand during a dankelflaute but enough zero-emissions generation and storage to cover generation at all other times.
And that's exactly what Germany is doing. Their natural gas plants only run ~15% of the time. Usage is going down faster than capacity is going up.
https://unpopular-truth.com/2024/07/05/natures-influence-on-...
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We have to build new gas turbines since wind and solar do not provide dispatchable power.
I hear there is a shortage of blades for the turbines.
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We changed the URL above from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/germany-is-... to an article that has more information.
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I feel bad for the post-apocalypse folks who won't be able to find any dry, solid fuel to burn.
I dunno:
1. There should be plenty broken up press board after the apocalypse. It is apparently quite flammable but sometimes gives off bad emissions. Perhaps you should set up a website where people can print a guide to press board emissions, so we all will know which to cook foods with and which to only heat with.
2. And there should be plenty of auto tires. Here's a fella who needs only a few tires each day to heat a 12' x 16' corrugated metal siding workshop:
https://www.farmshow.com/view_articles.php?a_id=1072
Another article with photos:
https://www.farmshow.com/a_download_page.php?aid=MzI4Nw==
3. Finally we see:
"Study Shows Dangerous Plastics Are Being Used As Fuel To Heat Homes":
https://www.slashgear.com/2075676/plastic-fuel-burning-heat-...
So I don't see a problem finding dry combustible fuel, In fact gathering fuel will be somewhat like gathering manna in the desert!8-))