AlleyCat
2022-01-01 03:43:48 UTC
Reply
PermalinkGermany powering down three nuclear
plants in shift to renewables...
... but plan to keep using coal?plants in shift to renewables...
Subject: Germany: Parties Agree To Phase Out Coal By 2030
From: ***@kymhorsell.com
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2021 12:14:44 -0000 (UTC)
*German parties agree on 2030 coal phase-out in coalition talks - sources
Sooo... no nuclear, but coal? And THAT is supposed to lower what... CO²?
LOL
It will be a repeat of what happened before.
Germany Desperate For Coal Power, As Wind & Solar Power ...
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/02/13/germany-desperate-for-
coal-power-as-wind-solar-power-fail
Germany's held up as the world's wind and solar capital. But, at the moment,
the 'green' stuff can't be purchased, at any price. Its millions of solar
panels are blanketed in snow and ice and breathless, freezing weather is
encouraging its 30,000 wind turbines to do absolutely nothing, at all.
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Germany's 'Green' Energy Failure: Germany Turns Back To ...
https://worldnewsera.com/news/startups/germanys-green-energy-failure-germany-
turns-back-to-coal-and-natural-gas-as-millions-of-its-solar-panels-are-
blanketed-in-snow-and-ice-tech-news-startup
It is not just the wind turbines. Solar panels covered with snow are also
rendered useless. You may call it "coal comfort" as a total collapse in the
wind and solar output leaves freezing Germans desperate for coal-fired power.
For many years, Germany has been held up as the world's wind and solar capital.
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Subject: Germany Forced To Acknowledge That It Had To Delay Its Phase-Out of
Coal, And Would Not Meet Its 2020 Greenhouse Gas Reduction Commitments
From: AlleyCat <***@aohell.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2021 21:40:57 -0600
The WEATHER will not cooperate with alternatives.
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Germany: Coal Tops Wind As Primary Electricity Source
In the first half of 2021, coal shot up as the biggest contributor to Germany's
electric grid, while wind power dropped to its lowest level since 2018.
Officials say the weather is partly to blame.
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Germany is still razing villages for coal mines despite ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/23/germany-coal-climate-cop26
Oct 23, 2021RWE says that it is fully compliant with Germany's current coal
exit plan and that all three of its lignite mines will be closed earlier than
planned. In return for doing so, RWE received a 2.6 ...
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The Reason Renewables Can't Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were
Never Meant To
Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany's renewables energy
transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world.
"Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring
electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the
fossil age and build clean grids from the outset," thanks to the Energiewende,
wrote a New York Times reporter in 2014.
With Germany as inspiration, the United Nations and World Bank poured billions
into renewables like wind, solar, and hydro in developing nations like Kenya.
But then, last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its
phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction
commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in
order to get at the coal underneath it.
After renewables investors and advocates, including Al Gore and Greenpeace,
criticized Germany, journalists came to the country's defense. "Germany has
fallen short of its emission targets in part because its targets were so
ambitious," one of them argued last summer.
"If the rest of the world made just half Germany's effort, the future for our
planet would look less bleak," she wrote. "So Germany, don't give up. And also:
Thank you."
But Germany didn't just fall short of its climate targets. Its emissions have
flat-lined since 2009.
Now comes a major article in the country's largest newsweekly magazine, Der
Spiegel, titled, "A Botched Job in Germany" ("Murks in Germany"). The
magazine's cover shows broken wind turbines and incomplete electrical
transmission towers against a dark silhouette of Berlin.
"The Energiewende - the biggest political project since reunification -
threatens to fail," write Der Spiegel's Frank Dohmen, Alexander Jung, Stefan
Schultz, Gerald Traufetter in their a 5,700-word investigative story.
Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany Eu32 billion
($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German
countryside.
"The politicians fear citizen resistance" Der Spiegel reports. "There is hardly
a wind energy project that is not fought."
In response, politicians sometimes order "electrical lines be buried
underground but that is many times more expensive and takes years longer."
As a result, the deployment of renewables and related transmission lines is
slowing rapidly. Less than half as many wind turbines (743) were installed in
2018 as were installed in 2017, and just 30 kilometers of new transmission were
added in 2017.
Solar and wind advocates say cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make
the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons
to believe the opposite will be the case.
It will cost Germany $3-$4 trillion to increase renewables as share of
electricity from today's 35%... [+] to 100% between 2025-2050
It will cost Germany $3-$4 trillion to increase renewables as share of
electricity from today's 35%... [+] AG Energiebinlanzen
Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany "Eu3.4 trillion
($3.8 trillion)," or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2025, to
increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050.
Between 2000 and 2019, Germany grew renewables from 7% to 35% of its
electricity. And as much of Germany's renewable electricity comes from biomass,
which scientists view as polluting and environmentally degrading, as from
solar.
Of the 7,700 new kilometers of transmission lines needed, only 8% have been
built, while large-scale electricity storage remains inefficient and expensive.
"A large part of the energy used is lost," the reporters note of a much-hyped
hydrogen gas project, "and the efficiency is below 40%... No viable business
model can be developed from this."
Meanwhile, the 20-year subsidies granted to wind, solar, and biogas since 2000
will start coming to an end next year. "The wind power boom is over," Der
Spiegel concludes.
All of which raises a question: if renewables can't cheaply power Germany, one
of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world, how
could a developing nation like Kenya ever expect them to allow it to
"leapfrog" fossil fuels?
The Question of Technology
The earliest and most sophisticated 20th Century case for renewables came from
a German who is widely considered the most influential philosopher of the 20th
Century, Martin Heidegger.
In his 1954 essay, "The Question Concerning of Technology," Heidegger condemned
the view of nature as a mere resource for human consumption.
The use of "modern technology," he wrote, "puts to nature the unreasonable
demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such... Air
is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield
uranium... to yield atomic energy."
The solution, Heidegger argued, was to yoke human society and its economy to
unreliable energy flows. He even condemned hydro-electric dams, for dominating
the natural environment, and praised windmills because they "do not unlock
energy in order to store it."
These weren't just aesthetic preferences. Windmills have traditionally been
useful to farmers whereas large dams have allowed poor agrarian societies to
industrialize.
In the US, Heidegger's views were picked up by renewable energy advocates.
Barry Commoner in 1969 argued that a transition to renewables was needed to
bring modern civilization "into harmony with the ecosphere."
The goal of renewables was to turn modern industrial societies back into
agrarian ones, argued Murray Bookchin in his 1962 book, Our Synthetic
Environment.
Bookchin admitted his proposal "conjures up an image of cultural isolation and
social stagnation, of a journey backward in history to the agrarian societies
of the medieval and ancient worlds."
But then, starting around the year 2000, renewables started to gain a high-tech
luster. Governments and private investors poured $2 trillion into solar and
wind and related infrastructure, creating the impression that renewables were
profitable aside from subsidies.
Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk proclaimed that a rich, high-energy civilization
could be powered by cheap solar panels and electric cars.
Journalists reported breathlessly on the cost declines in batteries, imagining
a tipping point at which conventional electricity utilities would be
"disrupted."
But no amount of marketing could change the poor physics of resource-intensive
and land-intensive renewables. Solar farms take 450 times more land than
nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells,
to produce the same amount of energy.
Efforts to export the Energiewende to developing nations may prove even more
devastating.
The new wind farm in Kenya, inspired and financed by Germany and other well-
meaning Western nations, is located on a major flight path of migratory birds.
Scientists say it will kill hundreds of endangered eagles.
"It's one of the three worst sites for a wind farm that I've seen in Africa in
terms of its potential to kill threatened birds," a biologist explained.
In response, the wind farm's developers have done what Europeans have long done
in Africa, which is to hire the organizations, which ostensibly represent the
doomed eagles and communities, to collaborate rather than fight the project.
Kenya won't be able to "leapfrog" fossil fuels with its wind farm. On the
contrary, all of that unreliable wind energy is likely to increase the price of
electricity and make Kenya's slow climb out of poverty even slower.
Heidegger, like much of the conservation movement, would have hated what the
Energiewende has become: an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes
and local communities.
Opposition to renewables comes from the country peoples that Heidegger idolized
as more authentic and "grounded" than urbane cosmopolitan elites who fetishize
their solar roofs and Teslas as signs of virtue.
Germans, who will have spent $580 billion on renewables and related
infrastructure by 2025, express great pride in the Energiewende. "It's our gift
to the world," a renewables advocate told The Times.
Tragically, many Germans appear to have believed that the billions they spent
on renewables would redeem them. "Germans would then at last feel that they
have gone from being world-destroyers in the 20th century to world-saviors in
the 21st," noted a reporter.
Many Germans will, like Der Spiegel, claim the renewables transition was merely
"botched," but it wasn't. The transition to renewables was doomed because
modern industrial people, no matter how Romantic they are, do not want to
return to pre-modern life.