This has come up many times by now. But the supposed transition to renewable energy in Germany was merely a substitution of natural gas for nuclear power.
What bothers me greatly is that Germany still has not come to turns with the fact that they need nuclear power. That is a long and costly investment to make and you need to start right away.
LNG can only get you so far and renewable sources just can't provide the energy needed, as should be clear by now (although it was widely understood for the past 30 years at least).
> and renewable sources just can't provide the energy needed, as should be clear by now (although it was widely understood for the past 30 years at least).
The cost of renewables has fallen, but the cost of grid scale energy storage is still quite high. When the cost of the entire energy grid is viewed holistically (including required storage if using renewables) the cost of nuclear is competitive with renewables.
Unless people are suddenly ok with blackouts, energy grid have to be robust. For renewables, that means having enough stores energy for times of decreased production.
I have long considered that those buying their power from wind or solar should have remote relay switches in place that simply cut power when there is no solar or wind produced. Seems exactly what they are buying.
Barely: the majority of energy tabulated as "hydroelectric power" comes from pumped hydroelectric storage. However, computing this as hydroelectric power is very naive:
Option a) the power to pump was generated using fossile fuels. In this case pumped storage is just "greenwashing" energy and doesn't actually produce any.
Option b) the power was generated using renewables. In this case the pumped storage just counts the renewables twice.
This "pumparound" is what makes up the gains in hydroelectric power, not only in Germany, but in most countries: There simply isn't infinite amounts of useable space for hydroelectric power.
If you look at the generated energy, though you will see a constant increase in generated power:
2016: 11,258 MW hydroelectric power, of which 6,806 MW (more than half) are pumped. Generation: 21.5 TWh
2019: 11,022 MW hydroelectric power, of which 6,364 MW (still more than half) are pumped. Generation: 27.88 TWh
A major component of the rise in generation is that pump-around.
From an energy storage PoV they aren't even that effective: Let's say you wanted to supply Munich and surroundings with power for 3 days (~2Mio people). Let's also assume that there are only people living there, so no industry or infrastructure. Let's also assume we have 100% efficiency in our pumped storage system. Let's also assume that everybody lives in two-person housholds (to make the math eaiser). According to destatis, a two person houshold consumed 3221kWh in 2018 (without industry and infrastructure).
Dividing by 356 gives us the daily consumption.
In Joules, this amounts to 3.25710^13 joules.
Dividing by 9.81 m/s^2 and we achieve a value of 3d3.3210^12 kgm.
There are now two ways to handle this:
1. high mass
2. high distance
Let's choose something flashy and pump lake constanze (bodensee), the largest freshwater lake in central europe. We would have to pump this up by almost a quarter of a meter to save this amount of energy. And this is with completely optimistic values: double this for electric cars, then add the same amount for electric heating, then again for industry, then add another at least 20% for inefficiency of the hydroelectric generation. And then you have to consider that this is one German city. Or, maybe in a different view: German renewables only need to lose 1/40 th of their efficiency for you to be in this situation (if you want to go 100% renewable).
One also has to consider that, even if it were possible to add more capacity (which the German hydroelectric association doesn't believe is), one has to consider that hydroelectic is by far the most environmentally destructive of all power generation methods.
Simply the flooding of a single valley is such an utter environmental disaster, that one has to be very sure that this valley absolutely _has_ to become a hydroelectric installation. Additionally one has the construction of the damn itself, as well as the enormous disturbance of every instance of wildlife both up and downstream for decades to centuries (and that ignores the both human and wildelife destruction brought on by a damn break).
I would gladly take the construction of a nuclear powerplant over a hydroelectric one, considering that the biblis reactor alone has a nameplate capacity of almost half the amount of non-pumped hydroelectric power.
These costs are always misrepresented, even here on HN where people should know better. Incremental costs on a sunny day do not represent the true cost of a renewable system.
They never include massive battery costs, and are never designed to provide robust baseload power. The grid needs to be up 99.5% of the time. The rule of thumb in engineering is that every 9 costs another 10x - and this applies to energy production most especially.
It's such an absolute cluster-F that I honestly believe the renewables and anti-nuclear movements in the West are promoted by the Russian FSB.
Yeah, not quite sure what to say at this point. It's been pointed out over and over that wind and solar do not provide reliable power and apparently that point just goes over people's heads? What do people think Germany has massive subsidies for?
Yet every discussion has claims about how energy storage is somehow a solved problem; usually with some handwaving about pump storage or how batteries have gotten cheaper. There are, interestingly enough, never any real world examples of this.
It's perfectly rational to argue that solar and wind have obvious merits that could be worth subsidizing but that usually isn't the argument. Solar and wind are always cheaper period. Which just isn't true
IMHO, Germans are betting on not getting bashed by the workers unions only.
When the whole anti-nuclear frenzy from the 90s came in.. coal workers seized the opportunity.. and they couldn’t get rid of them until the EU pressure was too much .. so they turned to the next cheapest option.. which at the time was gas… and until the EU realizes gas is also not green.. gas is the new coal.
Biofuels maybe. I don't know a thing but I remember learning most fossil fuels wouldn't happen today because organisms have become more efficient at consuming all parts of plants and fossil fuels are from parts of the plant that couldn't be broken down at the time
They shut down two reactors, and are currently reliant on other countries nuclear generated power. As long as they get to say _they're_ not the ones producing it, it's okay?
I'm all for renewable energy, but this is hypocritic nonsense fuelled by emotional decision making, and not helpful towards that goal.
Please, stay calm. Germany is in a transition process. Nuclear is phasing out, renewable is coming. In the EU Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Norway, and Portugal have no nuclear power plants (Estonia has none, but is planning one; Croatia has none, but operates one together with Slovenia; Poland is planning one for 2040). Germany is just joining this club of "hypocrites" this year.
In the next years, Germany is going to export more electric energy than importing. Yes, there are days when Germany needs to import electricity, but that this includes electricity produced by nuclear power is only due to the fact that other countries are slower in their transition process or have decided against it. You should not blame Germany for being fast, when others are just slow.
Belgium was also stupid enough to try and shut down all of its nuclear plants. So now they had to open gas powerplants which are way more polluting.
Now they had to roll back their decision because it's totally bonkers, and open back some less polluting nuclear plants.
I always find it a bit funny that the green parties are so retarded that they take decisions that cause more pollution. They really live in this idealistic world that is completely separate from the real one. Hippies...
Why, if you can score a quick political win by just buying gas from Russia? Nothing bad can come from sending billions of euros to a maniacal dictator threatening to nuke the West, and energy dependence on the said dictator would never create any problems, right?
> Following Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant meltdown, Germany’s antinuclear lobby kicked into high gear, and tens of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. The German government quickly passed legislation to decommission all of the country’s nuclear reactors
> ...
> found that nuclear power was mostly replaced with power from coal plants, which led to the release of an additional 36 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, or about a 5 percent increase in emissions
So yes, they're fast. So much so that they've outpaced any plans that should have existed to go alongside phasing out nuclear power.
I hope you're right and they're at least going to be in good shape in a few years, but I both doubt that, and it doesn't change the damage they're doing right now.
By skilfully omitting details and cleverly juxtaposing statements, the article you cite evokes connections and conclusions that are not correct. I would therefore like to mention a few things that are also important in this context.
The decision for abondoning nuclear power did not follow the Fukushima desaster of 11 March 2011, but preceeded it by more than 10 years. The agreement between the German federal government and the energy supply companies to phase out nuclear energy dates back to 14 June 2000. The first nuclear power plant was shut down permanently in Nov. 2003. It was planned to shut the last one down between 2015/2020. In 2010, a new government extended the operating term by several years (depending on the individual power plant), but returned in 2011, after Fukushima, to an earlier phase out, but which was still later (2022) than the initial decision from 2000.
The first decision for abondoning nuclear power was a project of a coalition of the SPD (labour) and the Green party. From late 2005 to late 2021 the Green party was not part of the government. The result was a slowdown in efforts to switch to renewable energies, in particular before 2010. But even after Fukushima the government was very slow to push ahead with the measures necessary for a switch to renewable energies, especially the planning and implementation of new long-distance power lines.
The operators of the nuclear power plants were more or less the same as the operators of the coal-fired power plants: RWE, Vattenfall, E.ON/PreussenElectra, EnBW. (The STEAG is the only major coal-plant operator that was not involved in nuclear energy.) In other words, Germany's nuclear industry is more or less identical with its carbon-based industry. It was their lobbying within the Merkel cabints from 2005 to 2021 that resulted in the deal to replace nuclear with coal, instead of switching to the new technologies of their competitors faster.
The deficits in the current situation were therefore not caused by the political forces that advocated a switch from nuclear and coal to renewable energies, but by those who stood in the way of this change.
Personally, I very much support this restructuring, but I am not dogmatic. In view of the situation in Ukraine, I would have spontaneously thought it appropriate to extend the lifetime of the last three nuclear power plants. However, I have read in the press that this is not practical for at least two reasons: firstly, in order to keep them running longer, they would have to be maintained (technical tests and repairs would be necessary), which would mean that they would have to be taken off the grid soon for several month, and secondly, the procurement of new fuel elements would reportedly take about one and a half years.
The rational short term future is renewable+nuclear. 100% renewable with intermittent sources with current tech is nearly impossible, and we need to act now. But don't take my word for it, that's what the IPCC says too. We need a low carbon non intermittent on demand energy. France proves everyday that works, now.
Don't fall for emotional reasonings, lobby or geopolitical narratives relayed by useful idiots NGO[0][1], in the coming years it is not renewables vs nuclear, it is renewables with nuclear, both against carbon emitting energies.
If you double-down on renewables, then you double-down on natural gas. Germany decided to close down their nuclear and coal generation, so the only thing that is left is natural gas for base load (and to augment renewable intermittency problems).
Or on batteries, or on liquid salt thermal storage upgrades for old fossil plants, or on hydro storage, or on salt cavern pneumatic pressure, or on hydrogen, or on regenerative iron dust cycles, or...
The idea that it's nuclear or fossil for baseload is a false dichotomy, that ingores the dozens of intermediary storage solutions.
Solar is currently the cheapest source of energy with a margin. Add storage to an overproduction system, and it's still cheaper.
The german failure to finish the "energiewende" is a political one, driven by corrupt conservative politicians and the privatized energy sector, to press as much return out of their old investments as possible.
Solar and wind are not just intermittent on a day to day basis, they are intermittent on a seasonal one -- as we saw last year the wind can not blow as strong for months at a time. Much of Europe could be blanketed with a large weather system for days cutting the sun and so forth.
Even flow batteries simply can't store enough energy, hydro storage is limited by geography and other solutions are currently niche and have yet to prove scale up. Green hydrogen probably has the most promise as a large scale storage technology that's close enough to natural gas to make workable.
Energy is so critical to our civilizations that you can't just make assertions that it'll be OK, you need to be certain. Getting it wrong can be terminal.
And I'm going to make a prediction: Nothing will change because this isn't a political issue. This is a materials science, physics, and chemistry issue. We do have have a battery technology to get around solar/wind intermittency issues. Doesn't matter who is in charge.
I assume you're saying that we don't have the battery technology. But we don't need batteries in this system. I imagine energy storage via lifting rocks uphill or giant flywheels or molten salt caves.
Those are batteries (i.e. things that store energy for later use). You'll notice that none of them are actually used at any scale, and certainly not to provide baseload for solar/wind.
I mean, they are all energy storage, but they aren't the chemical based batteries I thought you were talking about. I know flywheels are in some use. But, in general, they are technically sound and can be scaled up with sufficient investment and demand. As opposed to creating new battery chemistries, which requires research.
> Or on batteries, or on liquid salt thermal storage upgrades for old fossil plants, or on hydro storage, or on salt cavern pneumatic pressure, or on hydrogen, or on regenerative iron dust cycles, or...
Source? Looking at this report[1], battery storage methods are 2x-3x the cost of "combustion turbine" (natural gas?). Presumably the kW and kWh costs for storage costs don't factor in the underlying of the energy they're storing, so the actual cost is likely higher.
If you want hours of battery storage sure, not if you want seasonal storage. That makes solar+battery a niche, not something you base your energy economy on. Besides, even if you did there's not enough minerals being mined to do battery grid storage at scale to move entire economies over to it.
I'd be very happy with renewables+batteries, but the fact it's so quiet suggests to me this isn't so simple. Certainly in Northern Europe where dark, windless winters exist - i.e. you need storage potentially for weeks, not a small few hours.
Gas is more than electricity. You need gas for heating - good luck installing electric heating in millions of homes until the next winter - and you need gas for chemical processes.
>Or on batteries, or on liquid salt thermal storage upgrades for old fossil plants, or on hydro storage, or on salt cavern pneumatic pressure, or on hydrogen, or on regenerative iron dust cycles, or...
None of those are actual options. Pumped hydro is pretty much the only viable option but you need the geography for it. Germany does not have the geography to roll out pumped hydro at enough of a scale to bridge the intermittency issues with renewables.
But don't believe me, look at the present reality - there is no nation on earth that is able to power it's economy with renewables (+batteries). The only viable option is hydro-electric and unfortunately, we've pretty much ran out of places to dam.
>Solar is currently the cheapest source of energy with a margin.
Again, there is no battery technology that is able to store enough excess energy to power a modern economy (or even a mid-size city).
>The german failure to finish the "energiewende" is a political one
The sad part is that it isn't. Material science is hard and you can't just will non-existent technology into existence ... as the Germans found out. That's why Germany was signing multi-billion/multi-decade deals with Russia to import their natural gas.
Haha. For those not following this post Fukushima germany basically cancelled / shortened the permits for a bunch of plants. This had nothing to do with plants being in such bad condition they would have closed anyways, that's a total lie in almost all cases.
Germany is shutting down pretty nice later gen plants commissioned in 1989. The US is still operating much older designs commissioned in 1969 (20 years older).
Do you have sources? If I remember correctly the closing of nuclear facilities (that weren't about to be closed anyways) was decided in the beginning of the century, when the green party was in the government the last time. Then a Merkel-led government dropped that decision. Then the Fukushima catastrophe happened and Merkel reinstated the exit from nuclear power.
What blows my mind is that by using nuclear power and creating nuclear waste for a few decades, society created a problem that coming generations have to take care of for millenia.
Angela Merkal called this a destruction of national property, and they (CDU) extended life of plants 8-14 years. There were 17 plants at the time.
Total production that has been shutdown (baseload power) is around 19,689MW now post fukushima.
They've been able to replace maybe 4MW's with solar at this point? It's kind of mind boggling how much was shut down - the problem this has caused for electrification in germany is significant as now german electric prices are actually very high not low.
Annual contracts for electricity are running 46 cents / kwH which is CRAZY if you want to electrify your country.
France which is right next door, has much more annoying labor laws / high cost of labor is perhaps half that price.
They produced 51Twh/365/24 = 5.8GW in avg delivery.
Nuclear generated it's power around the clock. I'm not sure solar is covering the evening peaks and the prices for electricity make going to things like heat pumps and electric dryers much more expensive than you'd expect in germany so the economic case for electrification in germany has started to run way way behind the case in other places that have kept nuclear in the mix.
And yet they don't. This is the frustrating part of the discussion, because proponents will just name-drop every hypothetical technology. The actual reality is that nobody is actually doing it (using batteries as baseload), even though there is a political desperation to want to implement it. There is a reason why every natural gas company either supports and pushes wind/solar projects. Every large scale wind/solar deployment leads to a corresponding increase in natural gas investment.
That should be a clue that there are some major (and insurmountable) issues with deploying batteries at grid-scale. It's sad this is a game that is being played on the public, where the public is made to believe wind/solar investment leads to less reliance on fossil fuels.
it was 21cts/kwH last year (but sold 18cts to EDF own competitors, the liberalizations laws in europe make no sense) so i guess less than half that price.
I was previously ardently against nuclear power, and now I'm staunchly for it.
The world needs to be rid of oil, there are few other things that have caused as much human and environment suffering as oil. Hell, I even back bio fuels, as bad as they are, as long we can conclusively show they have a major impact in oil use and aren't just a subsidy handout farmers.
Glad to hear that you're keen to move away from fossil fuels. I'd add that renewable energy production methods are currently cheaper, faster to construct, easier to secure (both in terms of perimeter and supply chain), easier to train staff for and maintain, and safer long-term than nuclear energy production methods.
>I'd add that renewable energy production methods are currently cheaper, faster to construct, easier to secure (both in terms of perimeter and supply chain), easier to train staff for and maintain, and safer long-term than nuclear energy production methods.
... and are not viable without baseload provided by fossil fuels. Unfortunately there is such a thing as cloudy days, night time, and days without wind.
This is a bit of a blanket statement. It's more nuanced than this of course. If your energy generation is geographically spread out, there might not be a need for gas as a base load. Since Europe is getting more and more interconnected wrt electricity transport I suspect we'll get there sometime in the future but right now it's an issue. Different storage mechanisms will also help alleviate the issues, but that's also sometime in the future.
Does anybody know why Germany isn't really using their domestic gas fields? According to the german EPA equivalent[1] there's enough for 10 years of usage.
While I agree with the need to shut off Nordstream I, I am not sure Germany can afford this right now due to historically low gas reserves [2].
I have to disagree with the tone of the statement "We can afford the consequences". Who is "we"? The lower middle class of Germany, who already suffers some of the highest taxes in the world and the highest energy prices in the world? The government clearly does not care about energy prices: Gas prices are nearly 50% taxed, are they willing to lower it for lower income families? No.
An unfortunate and overlooked fact is that Europe (Germany in particular) effectively exported the resource curse problem to Russia, which was probably the country in its sphere least likely to deal with it well. Hindsight is 20/20.
Besides the fact that we can't exactly build infrastructure for those gas fields overnight, I think Germany wants to avoid any association with sort of problem. The fear I would have is that they'd have to get that gas from the U.S. / Canada, which exports the resource curse problem to the U.S. and Canada instead.
Meanwhile, how Germany is going to solve the spot-generation problem, is unclear.
> Gas prices are nearly 50% taxed, are they willing to lower it for lower income families? No.
Lowering gas taxes is an effective subsidy for Russia.
They should do something to offset the impact. Something like Canada's carbon tax rebate, for instance. Give the money to consumers rather than indirectly to Russia.
There is a lot that can be done in the short term to economize gasoline consumption while still going about day to day business: lower speed limits, buying more fuel efficient cars - or cars that need no fuel at all, carpooling, using more public transit.
Those 10 years require the use of fracking, which is I think too bad for the environment, especially for a country as densely populated as Germany. The resources that don't require fracking are only enough for 1-2 years of consumption at current levels.
Germany just today cut a NatGas deal with Qatar to reduce RUS dependence [0]. They are certainly looking, as they should.
I'd say the biggest issue with the local fields is that they are likely undeveloped, and that takes time before the oil flows. Ironically, from what I've gathered watching the US fields, the fracking wells take less time to turn on/off vs the more ordinary wells.
If Germany can turn on any local wells, especially quickly, it should help significantly, since the big issue is to buy time - time to switch to new sources of NatGas/Oil, and time to replace sinks with renewables.
Also to consider is the relative harm from some short-term drilling & fracking, vs the damage if RUS has the funds to expand their aggression into more of the EU.
And Germany has a third blow coming if Xi decides to invade Taiwan, and Europe decides to stop trade with China in retaliation (given the high dependence of the German economy on exports to China).
Although I agree Europe should take the risk to stop importing Russian gaz, I disagree refugees cost GDP points. Refugees are usually young and educated and this is another reason for them to be so much welcome in ageing countries. A few years ago Germany alone accepted almost one million syrian refugees, with no consequence on GDP. Europe as a whole can easily integrate the complete population of Ukraine. This is not a desirable outcome for this war though.
First, almost any contract would include a force majeure clause which allows termination due to a war (among other acts).
Failing that, the German government could just change the law to disallow the contract. Russia could ask for a binding(ish) decision from the international community, but this is one of those situations where I doubt the decision would go in their favor even if they were in the right legally.
According to Ukraine's energy minister and an economic advisor in this article[1], gas is paid for in Euros and Germany could block the transfer to Roubles.
> We propose that the Europeans continue to pay for pipeline-delivered gas and oil, but that the euro-denominated accounts of those Russian pipeline operators be frozen in terms of withdrawals. If properly implemented and enforced, this would mean that all gas customers continue to meet their contractual obligations, while through force majeure the EU creates what would be effectively escrow accounts for the duration of the war.
I don't know where people get the illusion from that you could "just get it from somewhere else" in matter of days/weeks. That's simply not the case at all. Even
if we speaking about month and accepting Gas prices doubling or more it close to impossible.
But the EU can't accept Gas prices exploding to that degree.
While this article loves to blame Germany they kinda forget that part of this Gas is resold in to neighboring countries.
Also in all of Germany (through slightly more so in east Germany) most houses heat with Gas, warm Water with Gas and especially on cheaper (longer not renovated) apartments also have a Gas oven and Stove. Until ~20 or so years ago central gas heating + gas stoves where the most common way to build apartment houses, in recent years its central gas heating + electronic stoves/ovens.
Due to disagreements with Russia in recent years gas imports also have been limit to long term contracts, hence there are no (in this context relevant) gas reserves.
Also while people love to say Germany is unnecessary switching of atomar power plants the truth is what they did wasn't building new ones. All the still running power plants are already operating well beyond the time they where build for. With the Ukraine conflict Germany "suspended" the shutdown of them, but they still need to shut down. Germany has space wise not much space. It can't afford a single reactor failure at all (like Germany might literally collapse if there is a reactor meltdown with some of the more central power plants).
When the conflict started Germany did fast line some projects to become more/faster able to switch off or massive reduce Russian gas (like started building LNG ship terminals). But all of this takes time. Luckily spring is coming so it might be possible.
But if you now would stop Gas you would practically derive millions of EU citizens of an affordable way to cook, heat and wash. And with affordable I don't mean cheap, but like affordable at all.
With existing instabilities from COVID and a word wide re-emergence of facism you can guess twice if the EU would to so. Their main priority is to protect their citizens and constitution/democracy. Switching of Russian Gas now (like in a week) would likely fail both.
So it's not an option at all, at least not _yet_.
If their would be a doable way to switch of Russian Gas it would have been done. Similar if Russia could no longer send Gas they also would have done so to create massive internal instabilities in the EU.
So the Gas sells are currently something neither party (Germany/Russia) likes but neither can stop either.
This war has laid bare ten years of poor strategic planning with alternate energy and PHEV vehicles that would have neutered not just Russia, but Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and OPEC in general.
Oil supports totalitarian regimes, and degrades the integrity of democracies by supporting multinational petroleum companies that have a long and detailed list of dirty tricks to get what they want.
You're suggesting that Russia wants Germany to stop importing gas? If so, why doesn't Russia stop selling it, like they threaten to every now and then?
Russia wants to put Germany in a bad negotiation position. If internal pressure to shutdown Russian gas becomes too strong, and shutting down Russian gas is a tremendous self-inflicted harm, a better alternative for politicians is to find a quick compromise with Russia.
Without russia having to publicly force this to happen.
It did create extra few devices that can be used to escalate on and send messages using towards a declaration of a war. Ain’t stupid if it works I guess.
e: also: didn’t verify but seen on social media that there had been studies on general difficulties of construction for nuclear plants, and apparently in one such data, it was estimated that 3-6 times more machinery such as valves, pumps, motors, etc would be necessary compared to other types of generator[, and industries in some nations had declined compared to golden ages that they would no longer be able to source that amount]. Everyone can make a nuke but not necessarily at scale, it seems.
The analysis I've heard leading to the invasion is the interdependence is calculated since that's what brought peace to western Europe, they'd hope the same with Russia.
> I wouldn’t doubt, given the nefarious consequences for Germany, that this site is Russian INFOSEC campaign.
Is this a variant of poe's law? In other words, a campaign is considered so ridiculous that it couldn't possibly legitimate, and must be part of a foreign disinformation campaign?
> Why did Germany put itself into this strange Russian dependency is also very strange.
For the same reason, the US has long been dependent on Russia for space travel and is still dependent for the ISS: It worked for a long time quite well, was cheaper and more secure than the alternatives, and that Putin running amok was a scenario that most people did not think was likely, if they have imagined it at all. Recall that until recently the US was more concerned about China than Russia.
This Russian gas dependency was solidified well into Russian recent developments. After Crimea invasion, as an example. After Russian influence over American election.
> After Crimea invasion, as an example. After Russian influence over American election.
There wasn't that much bloodshed in Crimea. And to be honest, nobody really knew if the people there were pro or anti Russia anyway.
Russia and USA have been influencing each others elections, and those of almost every other nation in the world for many decades.
These events weren't even close to what is happening now. Also, why is it Germany's duty to protect Ukraine anyway?
Politics aside I'm curious to hear unreal environmentalist (I consider myself a "real" one) how they imaging the world.
For instance "gas pollute, stop ICEs vehicles!" fun to hear, who can provide new e.v. to replace gazillions of cars in a snap and provide the needed infrastructure to recharge them... Again for gas: I live in a "class A" home, so I'm all electric but how can a classic home be heated without gas or oil or wood? 30+kW power from heat pumps? Oh, of course we can build new homes, who pay? How this can be done in dense cities made of multi-apartment buildings?
Long story short: in 50+ years we can probably rebuild actual society in a new one with different infrastructures etc, definitively not tomorrow. That's the point.
Ok, so what is the solution you propose? Quit russian gaz cold turkey, today? Let people in Berlin freeze to death tonight? (Temperatures are 0 degrees C at night)
It is not comfortable but inside houses you do not freeze to death like that. Sleep in your clothes, buy an electric heater next to your bed, get an electric blanket etc. I slept for quite a long time like that in the Netherlands because my mates squat building had no heat. That was during one of the coldest winters where all canals in Amsterdam were frozen enough to skate on. So yeah, not comfortable but freezing to death is not happening if you just take some care.
Living can be intolerable real fast. It does not have to be death. I think the OP was not saying literally.
Also, if the majority of the population is losing heating and need to do your suggested preparation, I wouldn't bet my luck on successfully getting a heater and a electric blanket. There was a freaking toilet paper shortage in covid because of panic buying. These and whatnot will be gone in minutes.
The issue isn't electricity, it's the fact that German municipal heat plants run on natural gas. Replacing all of that with electrically-powered equipment (centralized or at the endpoints) takes time.
It's not clear that the majority of Germans are willing to do that, especially since it wouldn't just end the war right away. I've also heard a politician on German news quote the estimated "few percent GDP decline" as a result of banning gas imports from Russia, which apparantly implies that it's "not possible" ("nicht machbar"). They make it sound like it's on par with breaking the laws of physics and our of their hands...
How to set up Germans for a bloody revolution and make them pro-Russian in three easy steps.
1) Make fuel extremely expensive.
2) Quickly massively lower standard of living, e.g. by turning off heating in winter/early spring
3) Purposefully crash the economy, leading to mass unemployment.
The actually morally necessary step is to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine, enforced by force with NATO fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems.
People (possibly rightfully) consider that this could lead to a WW3, possibly escalating into the usage of nuclear weapons.
So far so good.
So the bargain we do is basically "Ukraine, we would do everything for you, except for starting WW3, which you hopefully understand!".
Really? Everything? Then quit Russian gas cold turkey! No matter how bad it will be (possibly fairly bad, I admit), it will still be less than WW3, which we bargain is the only thing that we don't want, everything else we would do for Ukraine.
> The actually morally necessary step is to establish a no-fly zone above Ukraine, enforced by force with NATO fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems.
The "total NFZ over Ukraine" idea will definitely lead to a direct war with Russia because it essentially requires striking AA sites within Russia and Belarus.
The only NFZ scenario that's plausible is a partial NFZ with a sufficiently large buffer zone that it does not overlap with Russian AA on Russian soil. Which puts Kyiv outside the NFZ, btw.
“Don’t trip the most obvious trigger for ww3 until all avenues for sanctions, embargoes, and boycotts have been exhausted. This obviously includes stopping gas purchases from Russia.”
But as D’s A, I would wonder where this stops. Should US be opening domestic production with gusto? Should Germany demand oil from Middle East with threats of soft and hard power? Shall they buy from Iran, Russia’s friend? Shall they embargo China, who presumably still buys fossil fuels from Russia, and every other customer of Russia?
Assume Germany’s need for gas is not elastic - they can’t simply endure with less. To what lengths shall they go to avoid Russian gas?
Once Russia is economically desperate, will ww3 be triggered anyway?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do wonder about them.
Ceaușescu was deposed (and very rapidly shot at the wall) also because of the fact we, Romanians, were freezing in our very homes. That and the food rationing.
I believe the plan is to let Russia fire first, and escalate progressively until a) Russia wisely retreats, or b) Moscow is fallen, while carefully rendering nuclear options seem undesirable. That except the last part was how it went last time for us.
Agreed. In other words, the EU and US are at war with Russia by all means except direct fire. In a war, citizens will have to make sacrifices. This may include painful economic sacrifices.
A half-hearted proxy war, perhaps. It’s hard to ask US citizens to make real sacrifices (who, beyond symbolism and sympathy, probably don’t give a practical shit about Ukraine - specifically, very few are interested in sending family members to die in Ukraine).
Not sure how my 25 cent analysis of US would translate to Germany, but demands on citizens should probably not get too out of sync with the level of existential threat the citizens perceive. If there’s a perception problem, fix that and then make the demands for sacrifice.
Also, making sacrifices may looks good for a few days, but it will sure cause massive problem after that. And, the funny thing is many people indulge in so much luxury, I don't think it is even possible.
Nor did millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghanis and so on.
Millions of Ukrainians did not sign up for it.
In fact: almost nobody except for the aggressors signed up for a war and even there that's debatable, usually it's only a few people at the top and then 100's of enablers and thousands to millions of conscripts, who didn't sign up for it either.
But that doesn't mean that you won't end up in a war. The question is how much control you will have over the location of the battlefield. That's why the Americans had this 'fight them over there rather than here' doctrine going. Which given their lack of proximity always was a bit of misdirection, but that doesn't mean that the idea by itself does not have merit.
But that's outside, not inside. Even an old building with lesser insulation and double-pane windows will hold a higher temperature when inhabited. Humans radiate more than a few watts. It's not comfortable, it's definitely a health concern, but it's still not 0°C.
An anecdote from earlier this winter when the electricity prices peaked in Europe: my girlfriend and I live on 79 sqm in a modern apartment building with triple-pane windows, and because of the landlord being a stingy d*ck we went through several weeks without any heating. During the worst 7-10 days we had a temperature of -4°C outside, but never below 15°C inside. When the temperature rose to 5°C we had about 18°C inside.
In fact the German government also had that idea but it's not that simple. For once, you can't power the gas heaters in millions of households with electrical power. Also the plant operators would have to buy more uranium to continue operation – from Russia. So that kind of defeats the purpose.
Sure, in retrospect it would have been better to invest even more money into renewables ten or twenty years ago, and to keep the nuclear power plants running for just a few more years. But you can't change the past so that discussion really leads to nothing for the current situation.
There are gas reserves in Germany that would last for months (I've seen 6-9month figures). Maybe cut gas purchase rate to 50%. That would give >1 year of runway.
Again, a mass oversimplification of current issue.
Gas reserves wont last that much because human hoards if they know government are starting to use reserves. And, when politician act, they should think about future too. And, can they purchase gas at 50%? Are those written in deals?
interestingly, most split air conditioning units also have a heating function. Usually, they convert 1kwh of electric energy into 4-5 times the heat energy.
Heating with electricity is therefore something quite achievable and sometimes even economical. At current German electricity prices of 0,33 EUR/kwh electricity heating is currently cheaper than gas heating (currently at 0,20 EUR/kwh for new contracts - was at 0,04 before the crisis).
Most people here don’t have air conditioners - more than used to, but most of the people I know here (Nürnberg area) don’t.
I feel like we temporarily dodged a bullet by sheer laziness - before the pandemic, we were all set to do the whole Energiesanierung with full KfW incentives, which would have required chucking out our oil furnace (replaced right before we bought the house a few years ago) for, most likely, natural gas. Instead, we are still sitting on 1.5 years of normal or possibly 3 years of very carefully used heating oil supply.
Now, like everyone, we’re looking into heat pumps. Because we are still sitting on a year or two of heating oil, I think we shouldn’t be competing against our gas-heated neighbors for that changeover this year or next.
It is more like 2-3 times, depending on the outside temparature and degrading rapidly below e.g. -5C. Also, there is a noticeable effect on quality of life (noise, sometimes uncomfortable air currents).
You know that 90+% of heating in Berlin is Gas based,
probably 50%+ of stoves and ovens are gas based.
More warm water is also gas based.
Numbers are similar for many parts of eastern Germany.
For western Germany the a slightly less, but still very high.
Gas Germany imports is also re-exported to other countries.
Some financially much worse off.
You are literally asking Germany to derive a non-small amount
of their financially weaker of people of heating, cooking and
warm water. And this would not just affect Germany but other
EU countries too, destabilizing all of the EU.
At the same time it doesn't necessary stop the war, and might
even escalate it even.
Also many of the alternative sources we could buy gas from don't
have the infrastructure to ship it to us fast enough (yet).
Worse some of the alternative sources are states like Qatar, which
are from a democratic, ethical and cultural point of view worse then
Russia, they are just spacial further away...
The main objective of the EU is to protect it's citizens and implicitly
secondarily democracy. Switching of Russian gas _now_ would fail both.
Leading to internally instability we can't afford which would be a perfect
presence for the word wide re-emerging fascism.
Now that's how it's now, a lot of thinks are already underway to change this.
To be fair here, an extra blanket on the bed, a sweater during the day, and everyone could reduce rheir homes to 12C. Massive, massive savings in gas usage... maybe enough for all!
@dang can you please explain why I am getting flagged for sharing my opinions on the issue happening right now?
Can someone go through my opinions and prove me that I am a troll? My opinions are mine, based on what I have read and experienced in this life. I know my opinions are not popular, but it doesn't make them invalid. This is happening again and again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30756420
Maybe I'm naive but I can see why Western countries tried to get Russia on board the world capitalism gravy train.
Obviously the context has changed massively in the past month, maybe even since 2014.
In any event, less reliance on fossil fuels is a good thing, and at the moment, less reliance on Russian fossil fuels in the EU is probably a good thing.
I still remember the pictures of Merkel and Putin, when Merkel was negotiating for this stuff. Putin brought a big dog because he knew Merkel had a fear of them. Hindsight is 20/20 perhaps.
It's really hard to understate the guilt that has existed in Germany over WWII. Also, in Western Europe, there's much more of an understanding that it was Russia that took the brunt of the fighting, not the U.S., and when the Berlin Wall fell, there were many who hoped for a new start.
But Russia, with its geography and its legacy, was notoriously difficult to switch over to capitalism. The 1998 crash of the ruble left deep scars on the country. It may have almost been inevitable that a figure like Putin would arise, in part because we (in the West) were naive about how capitalism would take hold there.
Regardless, there's the reality that there is now. Germany needs to be able to act in its own self-defense, and Europe needs to wean off of Russian fossil fuels, if only because the lines have been drawn. It's not clear that that arrangement was ever good for the rise of a friendly and economically healthy Russia.
Not really, no. The USSR and China were pretty isolated spheres and there wasn't all that much trade between those blocks and 'the West' for a very long time. That all changed in the 80's, 90's and accelerated in the 00's.
The idea was that if we don't want to engage them in a military way in a direct confrontation that by trading so much with each other that our economies would suffer substantially from either one breaking off that we would avoid doing so. The economical version of 'MAD'. That turns out to have been a mistake. What happened between WWI and WWII is not really representative in comparison.
Just looking at it was "fine" (not terrible, not great), but once I went back to HN I felt a flash like a sudden relief on my eyes. The pain was physical...
As JP Morgan said, a person always has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
I think the sympathy for Ukrainians is a bit of a pretext. It's not just a pretext, there is clearly a lot of sympathy in Europe for Ukraine, not the least because of the geographical and cultural proximity, and we all know ukrainians personally. But the real reason for Europe to be tough on Russia is because Russia is now directly threatening EU countries (Baltic states, Poland, etc). And I do not understand how we can justify financing what has become a direct enemy.
Which is why an equivalence with Yemen or any other conflict, no matter how violent it is, isn't really convincing.
I think we need to acknowledge that no “red line” implied by NATO’s mutual defense pact has been crossed yet (to my knowledge). I think there are instincts and interests champing at the bit for any pretext to engage with Russia using the lives of their neighbors kids to do so, but for now, I think it’s wise to keep that impulse in check and talk about what the red line really is in a practical sense.
Naturally, and I think Putin will stay clear of that red line.
But there are many other means to be tough with Russia without triggering an all-out war. Not giving him money or trading with him is a start. Providing an unlimited supply of weapons, intelligence and humanitarian aid to Ukraine is another.
We should also be mindful that staying clear of a direct confrontation with Russia doesn't mean Russia should be allowed to set up all sorts of arbitrary red lines in term of what they claim constitutes an act of war. Providing planes to Ukraine for instance isn't an act of war by any standard. Biden's veto on the transfer of the Migs was really an act of weakness that will call for Putin to define more red lines. I heard general McMaster recently mentioning Russian pilots were shooting at US troops in Korea and Vietnam.
I don't get how people behave when you try to look from other people's perspective and share your opinion, if it doesn't match with their opinion, you immediately marked as "brainwashed", "troll", "stupid conservative" and so on.
Why on Earth we gave up diversity of opinions and started thinking only one side is always right.
* US can ban mass media - stopping propoganda. any other country banning media - violation of freedom of speech
* US invades a country, destroys economy for another 50 years - fighting for human rights. any other country, aggressor
* CIA tortures - that's fine, we need to get terrorists. any other country - human right violations.
* US says something - right! any other person - ohh brainwashed, troll, as if we don't have a brain and we don't compare actions of governments
I think the guidelines are pretty straightforward - pure politics is inappropriate for HN, but if it's some phenomenon of interest to hackers then it's okay: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As to who decides, I believe it's a combination of user flagging and moderation by a few HN mods.
First of all, I am not a Russian, not paid by Russia and 100% chance I can't prove it to you that I am not a troll, so I don't care, that's clear. What I can tell you is, I don't trust USA with its politicans like
* Colin Powell (famous lier, who lied to invade another country) and many more stupid politicians.
I don't trust Putin as well, but that's not main issue here, my concern is ordinary people, like you and me are dying! for what? they even don't know. Imagine you wake tomorrow with bombs are dropped in your neighborhood, would you care about what Biden or Putin is talking about? No, you will try to save your family, because they are civilians like you and me. My guess is, this war is because of geopolitical games (not my expertise, just thinking out loud), not because we deeply care about Ukrainian people or Russians, we just care about our pockets, and selfish imperialism. If they don't obey us, let the regime change!
Is it hard to imagine there are people who want Putin to win as fast as possible so that fewer lives are lost and nuclear war is prevented? Ukraine should have stayed neutral wrt NATO, and at any time Zelensky can end his war, but he won't.
this is exactly my point, thanks for pointing it out better than me! I don't care who wins at this moment, I vote for stopping war, not only in Ukraine, but in all other countries. If war stops tomorrow either with Russian win or EU win I am happy for both
We are human species, we haven't chose Earth, why millions should get killed for the ambitious of very small subset of humans
Let me copy/paste my question here and check if it was trolling or legitimate question:
Question sounds pathetic, sorry for that, couldn't find better words, but mostly civilians are suffering in this war, why don't you ask Zelensky to surrender and stop this war?
Here is my rationale:
* every single day of war costing more civilian lives from Ukrainian side
* every attack is destroying Ukraine
* every weapon sent by West as a "help" is going to increase resistance, which in turn makes war to last longer.
* don't expect intervention from West, otherwise we might see nuclear bomb thrown to somewhere
* we can ask same question to Putin, why don't you stop the war, but he started war, so he is not going to stop it unless agreement is reached
Let's talk about different cases of power balance:
1. Russia has more power: that means eventually Ukraine will be capitulated
2. Ukraine has more power: Ukraine will win this war, assuming it won't attack Russia, whole Ukraine will be in ruins, lots of lives lost, but in Russia side no civilians are killed, economy will recover, people will say Putin was to blame, now he died, include us to EU
3. equal power balance: war indefinitely
4. Someone from government kills Putin: Then they can say, look we killed him, we are not responsible, so lift the sanctions, similar situation to Option 2 will happen
Option 2 is unlikely at this moment, even if it happens, Ukraine won't win economically, look at what happened in Libya, Syria their economies didn't recover after war.
Stop the war, don't expect Putin is going to stop this war, don't fuel war with weapons.
As a young adult during the Bush years, I felt strongly that we needed to take aggressive action to replace foreign oil dependence with new energy sources (renewables, nuclear, whatever, sign me up). Politically, I saw both a nationalistic reason for it, as well as the obvious environmental reasons. Paul Friedman's "Real Men Tax Gas" seemed like the right angle that cut across the ENTIRE political spectrum. Really, who can disagree with this?
But I could offer a concession, at the time, that the solutions were not off-the-shelf available.
Now? The bottom has fell out of the "we can't" argument. Solar just kept going down in price along with batteries. Anyone defending coal power is hardly doing so on the price argument. A solar-based economy is not familiar, no. We will have to build infrastructure that turns on and off daily and seasonally in response to electricity supply-and-demand balance. There are large engineering changes needed... but no cultural ones.
There's no day like today. The energy transition will benefit our friends and crush our enemies.
Differently from earlier refugee waves, the Ukraininan one may well be a net positive for host countries. I keep hearing stories by refugee helpers that these people want to work, to the point where they refuse host locations if there is no infrastructure (and no jobs) nearby.
“Fools for relying on Russian energy in the first place.”
This is a tough one. Yes, but at same time there was and still is a long term benefit to normalizing Russia’s identity as a “Western” power. That’s a long haul project and Germany/EU wasn’t wrong to engage economically with them, mutually, to that end.
Given the history of Germany/Russia in particular, this mutual dependence is arguably working exactly as it was intended - cooling impulses.
Arguably an error to become strategically dependent upon a resource pool you’re not capable of securing for yourself when the chips are down but hasn’t that ever been Germany’s post-industrial challenge? Much to the world’s relief, I might add.
>This is a tough one. Yes, but at same time there was and still is a long term benefit to normalizing Russia’s identity as a “Western” power. That’s a long haul project and Germany/EU wasn’t wrong to engage economically with them, mutually, to that end.
Engaging economically is one thing, dependence on Russian energy is another. It was absolutely insane post-2014 to have an energy strategy with such a profound dependency on Russia. One US President warned Europe and Germany of such a dependence, and they quite literally laughed at him to his face.
At minimum Germany and the EU could have taken measures to ensure optionality in the event that Russia did as Russia has historically done.
>Given the history of Germany/Russia in particular, this mutual dependence is arguably working exactly as it was intended - cooling impulses.
It does not appear (to me) that Russia has cooled their impulses at all.
Exactly! Whataboutism or even the fallacy of relative privation seems to be just everywhere these days. I don't understand the appeal of it. Someone is trying to do something good, is it really neccessary to shoot it down just because there are OTHER bad things that need attention? Such a strange way of moving the spotlight to themselves, in pretending to shine a light on bigger problems.
Oh when you expose crime, it is freedom of speech, diversity of opinions right? But when others expose double standards of West (usually politicians) and crime, it is whataboutism right?
Nobody is exposing double standards here. It's simply not hypocrisy to care about the war in Europe, and not care about Saudis killing Yemenis somewhere far away.
This is very obviously not a double standard, as the first one directly affects Europeans in a way which the second one does not.
what you are suggesting is we should not fight for basic human rights and give everyone equal opportunity to live (they haven't chose to be born, so why not give them at least a chance to live), instead we should fight for people who are like us? close to us? And we don't give shit to other people dying?
Imagine, Germany bans Russian oil, does it make you a happy if they buy oil from Saudi? For me its same, both sides are killing innocent people, why make a switch then?
How is it hypocritical for Europeans to care about a war in Europe but not about a war in the Middle East?
War in Ukraine directly affects European security and pushes millions of refugees into Europe. The Yemeni conflict obviously does not directly affect Europeans.
Especially when Saudi oil would be used to substitute for Russian oil. It's not really moral to buy Saudi oil instead given that the Saudi conduct of warfare in Yemen is worse than the Russian conduct of warfare in Ukraine.
instead of banning Russian oil, I would first start with banning sending weapons to Ukraine and demand 240 hours non-stop negotiations to stop the war sooner. 10 days of not leaving anywhere unless consensus has been reached
There won't be consensus. This war started over one party having lots of demands and not even recognizing the other party as sovereign and the other party just wanting to be left in peace. How the fuck should a compromise look like here?
It's like being robbed at gunpoint and negotiating a deal with the robber about how much you might keep.
> This war started over one party having lots of demands and not even recognizing the other party as sovereign
Can you name the party?
if you say Russia, put yourself on their shoes and answer the question, if you see NATO expanding to your borders together with the country ruled by people like Geroge Bush, Hillary Clinton (see how she is happy for destroying whole nation and their government: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlz3-OzcExI), Joe Biden (I was suggesting we bomb Belgrade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vei_18YcC6E) and Colin Powell who blatantly lied about bio weapons and illegally invaded another country, would you believe their word and allow them to expand to Ukraine? Country fighting for free speech who put Julian Assange on jail because he exposed US crime?
I wouldn't believe, I don't agree with Putin on starting war, but I also believe, he didn't wake up with migraine and decided to start a war, no he was pushed to this war
That's completely and utterly bonkers. First of all, Russia has nuclear weapons. No one is ever going to invade Moscow as long as that is the case. Full stop.
Second, even if there were no nuclear weapons in play, NATO ain't the USA and UK alone. Most NATO states had more or less castrated their military to the point that even successful conventional defense depends cooperation with all other members. That's over since 2014 and even more so since 2022. Putin woke the sleeping giant. Germany alone will more than match Russia's conventional military in the future. Putin created his own opponent. Before that, NATO was structurally incapable of attacking Russia conventionally without a year long buildup of forces.
And finally, if it comes to the thread of a color revolution: Putin has had all the chances to both develop close and lasting ties to the EU and make his own people happy. He had the money and the tools. All he would have needed to do was to stop running the country like a mafia clan. He could have gone down in history as the great Russian reformer but now he will go down as its grave digger.
This war started in 2014 when a foreign funded protest was created to overthrow a democratically elected (albeit corrupt) government. This government then responded to local demands for autonomy in minority provinces by attacking them with neo-Nazi militia for the past 8 years.
That's just retroactive rewriting of history. These "local demands for autonomy" where a violent, foreign funded, uprising. It was about to be crushed by the legitimate Ukrainian military which was in turn crushed by the Russian army. The Neonazi militias occured afterwards and filled the power vacuum left by Ukrainian army.
Consensus on we believe your nation should not exist?
Ukraine already once found the consensus of give up worlds 3d largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees. It worked out great.
regarding the security guarantees, it appears that memorandum was not legally binding, and provides no real guarantees, as per the US themselves, and pre-2014.
"Regardless, the United States publicly maintains that "the Memorandum is not legally binding", calling it a "political commitment"."[0]
"not legally binding", below.
"Media Statement by the U.S. Embassy in Minsk
April 12, 2013
Repeated assertions by the government of Belarus that U.S. sanctions violate the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances are unfounded. Although the Memorandum is not legally binding, we take these political commitments seriously and do not believe any U.S. sanctions, whether imposed because of human rights or non-proliferation concerns, are inconsistent with our commitments to Belarus under the Memorandum or undermine them. Rather, sanctions are aimed at securing the human rights of Belarusians and combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other illicit activities, not at gaining any advantage for the United States."[1]
seems that guarantees weren't worth the paper written on, in the first place, but everyone keeps on talking about them as if they were ironclad somehow.
The sad truth is there was no real guarantees at all, just an empty promise to make it politically feasible for the Ukrainian politicians to sign.
You have Russia actively trying to overtake Ukraine and yet somehow lack of military support for Ukraine should help negotiations? That seems to be true only if you want Russia to prevail. How can you force the sides to negotiate? There’s very little leverage.
The environmentalists did this. They killed nuclear. They killed wind in Bavaria. This is the price of all that. Europe has destroyed her nature over the centuries, and now Europe won't do her part. If Russia has Germany by the balls, it's their own fault.
CSU (a conservative / right) is the only party that strongly is in favor of the 10H rule, which is responsible for stopping wind energy (it says that people need to have a distance of 10*heightOfThePlant to the plant
what you call environmentalists are mostly NIMBYs. The green party, actually, is in favor of abandoning 10H.
What bothers me greatly is that Germany still has not come to turns with the fact that they need nuclear power. That is a long and costly investment to make and you need to start right away.
LNG can only get you so far and renewable sources just can't provide the energy needed, as should be clear by now (although it was widely understood for the past 30 years at least).