← Back to context

Comment by jttnr

7 hours ago

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

18 comments

jttnr

Reply
cbmuser  6 hours ago

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

  • foota  3 hours ago

    "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.

    • jttnr  2 hours ago

      Exactly, but it is not a binary thing. The most capable solution is a combination of both. The batteries can kick in within seconds to bridge a couple of hours, while the gas turbines have enough time to fire up slowly as the batteries get close to empty and there is still no wind or sun.

  • sajithdilshan  2 hours ago

    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.

  • planb  6 hours ago

    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...

  • yangm97  6 hours ago

    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…

    • b2ccb2  5 hours ago

      Fear. I grew up when the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl reached us. I didn’t grow up eating mushrooms. We still measure radioactivity here, ask any hunter. When Fukushima happened, it tore open an old wound. Is it rational? I’m not sure, but I remember my parents taking in 2 Ukrainians for a month to detox in Germany.

      2 replies →

    • crote  4 hours ago

      Base load is an obsolete concept. A renewables-heavy grid simply doesn't work that way.

      Renewables like solar have a per-MWh generation cost of zero. You literally have to make the electricity price negative before it makes sense for the operator to shut it down. Their profitability depends only on the average electricity price: the high market price during the winter makes up for the near-zero market price during the summer.

      In a free electricity market there is absolutely zero demand for a power plant which generates a constant amount of power and acts as the "base supply". With dirt-cheap renewables its capacity simply isn't needed during the summer and its nonzero running costs makes it unable to compete. What is needed instead is a peaker plant which can supplement renewables, and which is profitable when it operates only during low-sun low-wind "dunkelflaute" winter weeks.

      Nuclear is fundamentally incompatible with this. It is the most expensive form of electricity generation and its costs are dominated by the need to pay back a massive construction loan. In a free market a nuclear power plant would only be able to operate for a few weeks per year, which instantly kills its business case.

      Want nuclear? Then you'll have to accept that it will require huge government subsidies, and that during high-supply moments you'll be turning off free renewables to make space for expensive nuclear.

      If anything, one could say that renewables will be the new base load supply. The real question is: who will be doing the peaking?

    • mschuster91  5 hours ago

      > and yet Germany turned off clean, nuclear power

      Oh ffs. Nuclear power is not clean. Look what the GDR left us with the Wismut "heritage" - mining for uranium is incredibly toxic, and safely disposing of the spent fuel and all the other irradiated remains is incredibly expensive.

      We just don't see it in our Western nations because we get our uranium from Russia, other -'stan countries and remote regions in Australia and Canada where barely anyone lives to care about the destruction.

      As for the disposal, over half of the already measly budget for the Ministry of Environment goes to take care of the nuclear waste - 1.4 billion euros A YEAR [1]. In contrast, only 400 million euros are spent on environmental production. Nuclear power wasn't just never clean, it also was never cheap because the true costs were never accounted for.

      [1] https://taz.de/Budget-des-Umweltministeriums/!6102402/

      1 reply →

  • martin_a  5 hours ago

    > 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.