'Germany's Half-a-Trillion Dollar Energy Bazooka May Not Be Enough' - Slashdot
source link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/12/16/1410210/germanys-half-a-trillion-dollar-energy-bazooka-may-not-be-enough
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'Germany's Half-a-Trillion Dollar Energy Bazooka May Not Be Enough'
schwit1 writes: Germany is bleeding cash to keep the lights on. Almost half a trillion dollars, and counting, since the Ukraine war jolted it into an energy crisis nine months ago. And it may not be enough. "How severe this crisis will be and how long it will last greatly depends on how the energy crisis will develop," said Michael Groemling at the German Economic Institute (IW). "The national economy as a whole is facing a huge loss of wealth." The money set aside stands at up to 440 billion euros ($465 billion), according to the calculations, which provide the first combined tally of all of Germany's drives aimed at avoiding running out of power and securing new sources of energy. That equates to about 1.5 billion euros a day since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Or around 12% of national economic output. Or about 5,400 euros for each person in Germany. Germany wants renewables to account for at least 80% of electricity production by 2030, up from 42% in 2021. At recent rates of expansion, though, that remains a remote goal.
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by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 16, 2022 @09:43AM (#63135114)
"Hey, let's turn off all these nuclear plants and buy all our gas from Russa. What could go wrong?"
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They had plenty of warning from Trump 4 years ago. They snickered at him.
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To be fair Trump's presentation leaves an epic shit ton to be desired.
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Which is bigger: an epic shit ton or a metric shit ton? (Personally, I prefer imperial shit tons - but I'm an old geezer)
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I don't remember my imperial to metric conversion for epic shit ton to metric shit ton.
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Yes because adult humans are so well known to take advice from people essentially calling them a bunch of assholes.
One of the big reasons Putin thought he could get away with this invasion of Ukraine was that he thought that NATO was weak and wouldnt unite around Ukraine. A lot of that comes from Trump's 4 years of pissing off our allies.
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they just put their priorities out of order. The number one priority is energy independence. Its a colossal national security component. Once you have that, then you can begin to phase out less desirable sources, so long as you never violate energy independence. The last thing the german people need is to get duped into condoning another genocide simply because another country is holding their energy hostage. Im all for expanding all forms of clean energy, esp ones that are distributed and allow for redundancy. But to cut off other sources prematurely at the expense of energy independence can have dire consequences... like "stop supporting ukraine or i cut off your gas" or "pay 3x the previous rate to support our invasion and annihilation of our neighbors". It puts them in a weak posture.
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And what power plants would that be aside of coal? Germany has barely any oil and as far as I know no uranium at all.
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Wind. Especially offshore in the North Sea.
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If wind was actually blowing, Germany wouldn't have an electricity problem as they already have more installed capacity than the typical consumption. Instead it's now at... 2% capacity factor [imgur.com]
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So thwy should use solar, duh! Solar and wind complement each other after all!/sarcasm
Not every country can be energy autark. But for crying out loud at least diversify your sources...
Everyone acts like your friend in Europe until their asses are sat on that hot stove and suddenly mask shipments get diverted at ports.
Cooperation is great. Trust growing from cooperation is great. But being utterly dependent on somebody else WILL put you in deep doodoo sooner or later even with absolutely no malice involved.
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Germany is relatively landlocked with the area that connect to the North Sea, there are islands that would prevent such massive infrastructure and the other side in the Baltic Sea where such operations could be easily affected by Russia (as they already showed willingness to do with Nordstream 2)
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How much Koolaid do you have to drink to believe the Russians would blow up their own pipeline when they can simply switch off the valve? It was obviously a western terrorist act but then again we dont call terrorism when its done by Western terrorists.
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Coal is not a bad energy source - they just have to fit proper water scrubbers in the smoke stacks.
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mosts peeple do not even realize that the united states is technically a collection of 50 independent countries... referred to a sovereign states. But the umbrella of the federal government makes things like currency, trade, national defense, transportation, energy, water, and conflict resolution between states streamlined. "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare,
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That was in fact the original design, but people have been conditioned today to believe that the federal government is supreme and that the states are merely subservient divisions thereof. Public "education" working exactly as designed.
The EU member states should really try to learn from this experience, lest the same thing happen to them.
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>mosts peeple do not even realize that the united states is technically a collection of 50 independent countries... referred to a sovereign states. But the umbrella of the federal government
Nah I'd say we're more like an HOA at a gated community. We collect HOA fees (taxes) and dole them back out to states based on who broke the least number of rules. A large portion of said taxes go towards maintaining the private driveways and landscaping (Interstate highways, parks) and Barney our security guard (The
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Whats more important? That children in the Donbass study from Ukrainian language textbooks as Zelensky wants or we dont destroy the earth with global warming?
Russian Gas was helping transition Europe to renewables and now we are throwing it all away so Zelensky can force local governments in the Donbass to use Ukrainian language textbooks instead of Russian textbooks as they have been using for over 200 years. Most of the Donbass was captured from the Ottomans and settled with settlers from Russia. It wa
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Yeah, I'm not overly fond of nuclear power in some ways... the waste is extremely difficult to deal with putting it politely... but insofar as I know Germany had reliable reactor designs and they weren't built in areas susceptible to calamitous natural disasters. Nuclear power, while not ideal, could have kept the lights on, and the heat going, starving an aggressor nation of money.
No civilization ever uses less power overall unless it is in decline. ALWAYS have surplus power, and keep planning for more power to be added. Use multiple sources, retire some only after ensuring you have adequate replacements on-line and tested... with extra in reserve.
Heaven knows we pay enough for power... the energy companies and governments could make sure it's not in short supply.-
Waste is a non-issue. Just put it in a warehouse on-site.
Electricity usage in most of Europe stabilized or even went down over the past few decades due to big improvements in efficiencies. But obviously we still need a lot and will need more as transportation is getting electrified.
So about that 440B number. Guess how many new plant you could build for that? Many. Even the ridiculously overpriced OL3 unit in Finland only cost ~10B and makes 1.6GW. Assuming nobody would learn anything from building dozens of
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I agree nuclear waste is not really a big problem but but nuclear is only 8% of US energy mix, it's a full oil&gas country, no wonder they can store the waste in one site.
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The US has the bulk of the world's nuclear reactors and far more nuclear power than any other country. And while we could store all the waste at one site (we even have that site), Congress blocked that so we store everything at the powerplants needlessly. So whatever excuse you want to use here isn't reasonable. Whatever country you are in could get all its power from nuclear and you would still produce a fraction of the waste the US does. And all that is before you consider that we have reactor designs
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Strange, US has only 96 nuclear plant, the country where I live has like 50+ nuclear plant, how is it a fraction? Also if we compare US to Europe which is more fair, Europe has 180 reactors(still way too low). USA has been anti-nuclear for a long time (same as most countries).
Sure, that's why I want more nuclear reactors, nobody want to depend of USA, Russia or Saudi Arabia for its energy. And USA won its energy independence only because they don't give a fuck about climate or environment so I don't k
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Why not just dump the waste into the Mariana trench? Why even try to store it on land?
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Power plant nuclear waste is currently stored on-site, because the US failed to fund the storage facility at Yucca Mountain.
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The best safeguard against terrorism is to not go mess up other countries. If the US stayed at home there would be no terrorist threats except from domestic terrorists.
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Putin spending millions and millions of dollars to fund supposedly "Green" groups that really just advocate against the middle and working class sure did pay off.
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Holy shit! Germany lying all these years about their renewables capacity is now Putin's fault too!!!! Is there anything that man can't do?
An environmental group that springs up out of nowhere with millions in funding from Gazprom does raise questions
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/art... [thetimes.co.uk]-
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We have KGB records going back to the 1970s that detailed operations that funded environmental groups in several dozen western countries. We know that the current FSB will fund politically radical groups in other countries and that includes environmental groups. We even have financial records of western environmental groups and can trace some of the funds back to Russia. How much proof do you need? The post you responded to included a link to such an example. Denial isn't just a river in Africa. None
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Don't feed the russian shills.
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When the FSB manages to carry out one Color revolution then come and scare me about the FSB. Obviously the CIA was much more competent than the KGB thats why the west won the cold war. The KGB and FSB are just boogeymen the govt uses to trample on civil rights in the name of national security.
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Wind and solar could go wrong. Since the goal is "renewables" which means "intermittents", which means "CCGTs burning gas to replace them when it's not windy nor sunny".
The story brags about "42% of electricity generated from renewables". What it omits is that they now have well over 200% of installed nominal capacity in renewables, which could barely produce 42% on paper because Germany is neither very windy nor very sunny. And that much of that number is "surplus Germany couldn't use, because it was windy everywhere, so it had to be exported". And then it wasn't windy, and there would have been no power if not for CCGTs. It would have been blackouts.
And as long as policy is "more intermittents", the problem is only going to get much, much worse, because damage intermittents do to stability of national grid as a whole is cumulative. The more you have, the less stability you have, even if you do have access to cheap natgas to spin those turbines. And when you don't have access to reasonably priced gas, you're just fucked.
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Thats the kind of policies people in the UK got fed up with.. The EU is driven by far left delusionalists.. Germany had decades of Angela Merkel setting the stage for this catastrophe.. Nobody to blame but themselves and their deep rooted reluctance to listen or even look at reality in fear of looking in anyway nationalistic.
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actually, that decade long strategy was working pretty well until scholz reversed it and started pandering to all the nato bullshit, and it would have worked even better with nordstream-2. which was the whole point, of course, with the added bonus of a massive transfer of public treasure to private hands, business as usual. worry not, the elites will stay warm and cozy.
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