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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

As a transitional fuel source, gas turbines seem like a good choice. I still find their decision to decommission nuclear odd but having done so and with no appetite to reverse a gas fall back works fine. Easy to deploy, well understood tech and the least offensive of the carbon intense electricity sources.

They can sit on standby for ages and be up to load inside the window battery stacks would drain on. That's all you need and the battery can arbitrage and do FCAS outside of those times.

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The only problem with gas is that Germany does not have its own gas. After Russian supply stopped it has to buy it from Azerbaijan, which not only has its own trail of human and civil rights abuse as well as ongoing military aggression, but also is plausibly suspected in reselling the same Russian gas.

why they don't buy from norway?

A simple fast food meal in Norway costs $14. More expensive there..

Germany got about 43% of its natgas from Norway in 2023.

And 0% from Azerbaijan, as far as I can tell, though other EU countries did -- very little, although there may be plans for this to increase in the future.

https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...

https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Gasversorgung/aktuelle_g...

https://www.bruegel.org/dataset/european-natural-gas-imports

Germany has made many strategic errors in many domains over the last 20 years because of political and ideological priorities over pragmatism and long term thinking.

But all in all, at this point gas turbines make some sense, especially if they allow to speed up the phasing out of coal power, which is still 25+% of electricity in Germany.

We burn a lot of the gas that comes out of the ground off at the well.

Getting some energy out of that would be a net positive.

> because of political and ideological priorities over pragmatism

FWIW, depending on cheap Russian gas was very pragmatical and it worked well for the economy.

But not very strategic.

It wasn't, but also Germany's strategic options are limited. US, being its strategic ally, is also its economic rival, and will not hesitate using its advantage of having own energy source. Self-sufficiency solely on renewables is also not an option, at least short and middle term.

Germany had a reliable energy source with many sources of fuel.

And then turned it off for no good reason at all. (Lots of bad reasons).

They could start fracking... now their industry is going down, energy is going up and they cant even see US.

Leaving nuclear energy aside, European countries have massive reserves of shale gas. They decided not to exploit them and to be dependent on foreign powers instead. We read about Russia but now Germany imports from the US (shale gas!) and Qatar. The US have won the jackpot with the war in Ukraine: split Russia and Germany, and reaps the dollars as well.

Yep...

But I still don't understand how the people (and opposition politicians, businesses, etc.) don't get mad with the government about the nordstream issue.... the destruction caused a lot of damage to the german economy, ecologically it was a huge disaster, and somehow there is no blame game, no consequences, no nothing... some fingerpointing, some "we don't know", some "yeah maybe it was..", and quiet. It's like a local kebab store burned down, "we don't know exactly what happened, but we won't use too many resources to find out, because it's not worth it"... except that it's literally billions of damage in this case, and 'noone cares'.

I wouldn't be surprised if ALL German politicians were getting kickbacks for Russian gas. All politicians in power are very corrupt.

Germans have very weird relationship with russia. That we, east of germany and west of russia dont quite understand. They always think, that russia will be better this time. Quite naive. And dont want to anger it.

My feeling is that Germans just don't care about Eastern Europe somehow. Germans are generally comfortable knowing that the money they spend on Russian hydrocarbons will be used to attack and destabilise their "allies" to their East. As long as it doesn't directly impact them they don't care.

And what if it turns out that Germany is currently sending billions of euro to the country that blew it up? I don't think anyone in the government wants to answer this question

It doesn't even have to be a transitional fuel if we have cheap efuels.

Which is about as realistic as the idea of fueling these new gas power plants with (green) hydrogen.

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