Comment by looping__lui | Hacker News Reader

Comment by looping__lui | Hacker News Reader

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Because renewables (which I am personally fond of; PV on my roof) cannot cover Germany’s electricity needs/baseload but only supplement it.

Driven by an ideological agenda of Ms Merkel and the green party, they shut down nuclear power plants (needed to cover our base load in chemical/manufacturing/whatnot) and replaced it with gas from Russia (don’t ask me why). Now that Russian gas isn’t exactly on the table anymore and we not only depend on Russian gas for heating but also a great deal for electricity (nuclear was shut down, remember) we have no choice but ramp up to coal thanks to the Green party.

The fact that Germany’s “greenest” (carbon emissions-wise) day was still worst than France’s most polluting day speaks volumes.

Wind power and solar DO NOT suffice to cover Germany’s electricity need unless you go full-scale deindustrialisation (which the Green party certainly would favor). I’m all in for PV on everyone’s roofs, I have geothermal heating for my house, I built everything low energy - but please lets stop the ideological destruction of our economy and our environment by the Green party’s “vision”.

Germany already had Russian gas, by pipeline, the cheapest fossil gas with the cheapest delivery method. Plans were already in place for another pipeline with twice the capacity.

If this choice was actually made to please the greens, as the theory goes, that would have been a first for Germany, a country built on its close ties between industry and government. Not to mention that the greens aren't usually fond of burning fossil fuel.

Occam's razor should suffice to understand the political process that went down here.

> Driven by an ideological agenda of Ms Merkel and the green party, they shut down nuclear power plants (needed to cover our base load in chemical/manufacturing/whatnot) and replaced it with gas from Russia (don’t ask me why).

You have been misinformed. They shut down nuclear to replace it with renewables. They already used Russian gas at the time.

You cannot replace nuclear with renewables in Germany. You cannot shut down production if the sun doesnt shine or there is no wind. There is a non-trivial amount of electricity that needs to be available 24/7 and there needs to be a source of electricity that can be ramped up quickly when demands spike or renewable isn’t delivering.

I actually agree on this, but I was just replying to your statement that they decided to shut down nuclear to replace it with russian gas.

How would you technically replace nuclear with renewables? How do you manage excessive/insufficient supply?

you actually can. it's expensive, but it's an option. what's the cost compared to nuclear? I'm not sure.

Enlighten me how. 1) What do you do at night? 2) What do you do if there isn’t sufficient supply? 3) What if there is too much supply?

1. night currently isn't a significant problem. there's usually lots of wind, businesses aren't open and people don't use a lot of electricity when they're asleep. this may become worse overtime with increasing numbers of EVs charging at night.

2. this is the hard part, but there is good news.

solar and wind over large areas are fairly consistent and with HVDC you can transfer power 1-2 thousand miles with low losses. there's also a small but rapidly growing amount of storage on the grid. right now, we treat hydro as primarily generation with a side benefit of storage, but it's shifting to primary storage with a side benefit of generation. doing so gives most grids a decent ability to scale up and down renewable generation at will. lastly, you can use fossil fuels when everything else isn't giving you enough. a fossil fuel plant that runs a couple times a year for a few hours is a lot better than 40% of the grid being fossil fuel year round.

there's also a decent amount you can do in terms of demand shaping as the grid gets smarter. electric hot water tanks can be used as batteries where you set them up to turn on when there's excess power. you can also do things like make agreements with energy hungry sectors (like ore refining) to throttle output when necessary (compensating them for the lost revenue).

3. this is easy. refill batteries, smelt aluminum, turn off generation.

Do you have any idea how enormous the electricity consumption of our industry is where 24/7 production just is going on and on? Take a look here: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

If I eyeball the electricity consumption correctly, the lowest consumption was like 50 GW at 3 am in the morning and the highest was 60GW (+20%) at 1pm.

Our freakin grid is NOT capable of managing an additional load for EVs as of today or any time soon. We cannot produce enough electricity to move gasoline driven cars to EV because we right now barely manage to keep or industry alive and geothermal heatpumps and whatnot will strain it further. So regarding 1) its BULLSH*T its a massive problem.

2) Where do you live that you believe Germany can store electricity in hydro? Why do you believe there is demand shaping when we literally need a constantly high load (see 1)???

3) Yes, I understand. Easy peasy. If i get a battery for my solar panels, the investment costs are effectively above 30cents/kWh which is bogus. Yes, you can just turn off that aluminium smelter or chemical plant running a continuous process.

You clearly have never been close to an industry complex, worked in anything remotely related to “Germany’s industrial backbone”. It’s ideological wishful thinking.

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