'Germany's Half-a-Trillion Dollar Energy Bazooka May Not Be Enough' (reuters.com) 322
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.
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.
Chickens come home (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hey, let's turn off all these nuclear plants and buy all our gas from Russa. What could go wrong?"
Re:Chickens come home (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Chickens come home (Score:5, Insightful)
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To be fair Trump's presentation leaves an epic shit ton to be desired.
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To be fair Trump's presentation leaves an epic shit ton to be desired.
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.
Re: Chickens come home (Score:3, Insightful)
Please do not re-write history (Score:4, Informative)
Read this article at CNBC [cnbc.com] (Remember: the NBC corp DESPISED Trump, throwing garbage at him 24/7 for his full time in office) and you'll see why Trump decided to give the allies a bit of shock treatment...pay close attention to ALL the included charts. For decades, American NATO allies under-provisioned NATO and simply counted on the US to back-fill which American leaders did at great expense to the American taxpayers - and one of the worst offenders was Germany which was one of the wealthiest NATO members yet one of the worst under-payers. Even NPR admits [npr.org] Trump did not weaken Europe militarily in this overall effort, and NPR has been practically a Democrat party mouthpiece for half a century.
NATO members got so freaked out by an American president not playing the traditional game of the American foreign policy "experts" and lifetime bureaucrats that they finally agreed to do (and actually started DOING) what they'd long promised but never actually done - paying levels closer to their obligations [reuters.com]. Here [forbes.com] is another article, and another [airandspaceforces.com] (I am using sources generally hostile to or neutral about Trump, not sources who love the guy).
You can certainly find many sources arguing the opposite, but they're usually playing games with the numbers, claiming previous NATO ally commitments (not followed through upon) were actually at work, and those sources are nearly always the same sources who lied for years on end about "Trump Russia Collusion" and engaged in other levels out outrageous dishonesty, invalidating themselves as objective sources. Don't even try using Factcheck.org on anything Trump related; they're run by progressive Democrats and frequently twist their criteria, even Politico which is mighty anti-Trump makes Factcheck look bad.
Trump can be quite a jerk, particularly when he wants to shove somebody into doing something they do not want to do, but sometimes that's required when decades of "normal" politicians and their usual lip-flapping achieve absolutely nothing. There's another kind of jerk though, and one I consider worse: the one who smiles a big toothy smile and talks very smoothly as he robs you and takes your patience as a sign of weakness. As for Europeans getting upset by Trump, well... they needed to get shaken-up; they'd been playing a passive-aggressive game with their NATO friend, the USA, for many years and had become so comfortable they were regularly insulting Americans about it as they did it and with apparent confidence there'd never be any pushback. One of their basic insults was to under-spend on defense, so American taxpayers would have to spend billions more per year, and then brag about their national healthcare services and question why Americans did not have it so good (just maybe if WE only spent less than 2% of GDP on defense we'd have some nice things too...). The Germans were so un-serious about NATO that in addition to not funding at promised levels, in recent years their soldiers were LESS physically fit than their general population (what they provided to NATO was of less value in addition to being less quantity-wise). Trump was not even demanding Europe pay the US money for defense, though his words were often in-artful enough they could be portrayed that way - the way NATO works is that members basically pay that money to their own military and defense companies (they're each agreed to spend a certain portion of their GDP, which sc
Re:Chickens come home (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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And what power plants would that be aside of coal?
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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Re: Chickens come home (Score:2)
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Re:Chickens come home (Score:5, Informative)
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
Priorities (Score:2)
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
Re:Chickens come home (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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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The waste is so insignificant that literally all of the waste produced in the US gets stored in one site.
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 waste is so insignificant that literally all of the waste produced in the US gets stored in one site.
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.
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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you would still produce a fraction of the waste the US does
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).
The US has a lot of oil and gas and right now you should be thankful for that as your country is probably importing quite a bit of that oil and gas.
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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The waste is so insignificant that literally all of the waste produced in the US gets stored in one site.
Huh?
No.
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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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.
Re:Chickens come home (Score:4, Informative)
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]
Re:Chickens come home (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't wait for that Slashdot headline: "Putin Tricks World Into Believing Renewables Lie!"
I'm joking of course but nothing would surprise me about the gaslighting abilities of the people here.
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 of this means AGW isn't real. It however does mean that your purely renewable agenda is Russia propaganda (just like Q-anon).
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Don't feed the russian shills.
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Re:Chickens come home (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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.
Remember when they laughed at Trump? (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember their smug laughs as Trump warned them of precisely this. I feel bad for the german people that their leaders are so blindingly incompetent as to dismiss the warning because they didn't like the source.
Maybe they'll choose better leaders in the future.
Re:Remember when they laughed at Trump? (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember their smug laughs as Trump warned them of precisely this.
Everyone warned them of this.
I feel bad for the german people that their leaders are so blindingly incompetent as to dismiss the warning because they didn't like the source.
They had a booming economy from the cheap Russian energy, so I don't feel too bad for them. I feel worse for the Ukrainians, due to Germany funding the Russian war machine in exchange for cheap energy.
If it makes you feel better (Score:5, Insightful)
What Germany was trying to do was make Russia dependent on foreign trade so that they could cut them off from the global economy and force Putin to back down.
With a sane person that would work. But Putin's dying and that's made him crazy. This is his last great hurrah for Mother Russia. His legacy. Or it was suppose to be. Basically an end of life crisis only instead of a Ferrari it's hundreds of thousands dead and displaced by a dictator.
Which sadly is what happens with most dictators. You give somebody that much power and you are *fucked* when their brains go in old age. I'm just hoping my country doesn't make the same mistake with Trump or Ron DeSantis.
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What Germany was trying to do was make Russia dependent on foreign trade so that they could cut them off from the global economy and force Putin to back down.
Yeah but instead they got to the position where he could cut them off and gave a ton of money a bunch of which did go towards his rather poorly equipped military. Trouble is even with the oligarchs and corruption, it's still big enough to cause a lot of misery.
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Normally he would be worried about the massive economic damage to his country but he's not planning on living long enough to care. Either that or he's completely lost the plot Howard Hughes/ Spruce Goose style.
What I'm saying is Germany was wrong but only because they thought they were dealing with the rat
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> The mistake they made was thinking that Putin was still rational. What they didn't realize is he's dying and he's losing his marbles as he dies.
What sources? He seems to be dying of numerous diseases but can't find any reliable sources, the most credible seem to say the contrary:
During this summer when the rumours seemed to peak:
https://www.politico.com/news/... [politico.com]
And in early December, a humorous piece:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/b... [forbes.com]
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Well, the Germans are pretty dumb for thinking that in a global economy, Germany, one of the smaller countries on earth could cut them off, when Russia borders a few of the largest countries and also some of the most impactful economies on earth (China, Japan, Finland , Norway, Ukraine) and through its various ally/puppet border states also has access to the Middle East, Africa and the rest of Asia.
Germans, their delusions of grandeur has cost them already 2 World Wars and soon a third.
Everybody dies, Putin
Re:Remember when they laughed at Trump? (Score:5, Insightful)
They had a booming economy from the cheap Russian energy
They could've had an even cheaper source of energy: Nukes that were already built and running with the sunk costs already spent.
Buying gas from Russia wasn't a mistake. Depending on Russia because they shut down all the alternatives was the mistake.
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Actually, energy prices, gas and electric, industrial and consumer, in Germany always have been in or around the top five in Europe. Germany does not have, and for a long time has not had, cheap energy.
Almost everyone was buying plenty of Russian resources, not just the ones you happen to dislike. Germany is merely one of the players in this.
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Yes, but you didn't get smug dismissal and patronizing laughter at Mr Obama, did you?
I wonder why that is? Perhaps 'enlightened' European diplomats confused the messenger with the message? How...superficial and pedestrian.
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Hmm? You seem angry about something or other, could you be a bit more coherent so I can give a useful reply?
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It was generally believed Trump said this to promote American LNG. Because America first. He didn't give a shit about Germany. Not that the Germans were right in becoming so dependent on Russian gas, but I wouldn't say that taking Trump seriously is a more stable solution.
I would say that taking Trump seriously would have been a far more stable solution. Despite what Trumps motivations could have truly been. If his statement was to be solely to support American LNG, and the Germans heeded it, they wouldn't be freezing over there now. Despite what you feel about America, we usually have a habit of supporting our Allies and generally do not start wars of conquest.
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Well, who could have foreseen that the village idiot was actually right once with one of his warnings?
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Well, who could have foreseen that the village idiot was actually right once with one of his warnings?
Anyone could have foreseen it.
Warnings should be judged on their merits, not on who is doing the warning.
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This 100%, because even a stopped clock is right twice a day!
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Well, who could have foreseen that the village idiot was actually right once with one of his warnings?
It wasn't just Trump, every US president for the last several decades issued the same warnings to Germany and the EU. As well as energy experts, the engineers who work on their own grid, etc.
Re: Remember when they laughed at Trump? (Score:2)
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Hundred years? More like 1000 years of idiot German kings.
German kings? Germany has only existed for like 180 years at most. And they had emperors, not kings. Are you thinking of Prussia?
Germany was the golden boy (Score:5, Interesting)
Now it looks like it was all part of a carefully crafted plan by China and Putin to get rid of Germany's manufacturing industry
Re:Germany was the golden boy (Score:5, Interesting)
Now it looks like it was all part of a carefully crafted plan by China and Putin to get rid of Germany's manufacturing industry
The plan was crafted by the west. Buy assets from China / Russia in an effort to spread democracy based on the theory that wealth stabilises nations. The theory was wrong.
Hindsight is an amazing thing. People are oh so clever when commenting about the past, but not so much when planning for the future. Germany didn't have a "dirty secret". It had a policy widely supported and in line with much of the rest of the western world. And while this article may be about Germany's economy specifically it's asinine to pretend that this is a Germany problem.
Wars have massive economic and social affects including on countries who do business with and aren't directly in conflict with the countries at war. Putin has set the entire world back decades, whether that be Germany's economy struggling without gas, grain and cooking oil shortages in the 3rd world even going so far as to affect Australia, or by exposing silent allegiances in nations increasing geopolitical tensions between 3rd parties such as Iran and USA as each country has conciously backed a different party in the war.
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A consistent propaganda campaign that served to distract from everything bad the Kremlin does by immediately pointing fingers at other issues around the planet, leading stupid people to believe that the real actual true problems and evils come from the nebulous "West", suppressed a lot of valid criticism as Russophobia.
Even today I see the propaganda efforts play out in m
Re:Germany was the golden boy (Score:5, Informative)
Hindsight is an amazing thing. People are oh so clever when commenting about the past, but not so much when planning for the future. Germany didn't have a "dirty secret". It had a policy widely supported and in line with much of the rest of the western world. And while this article may be about Germany's economy specifically it's asinine to pretend that this is a Germany problem.
No hindsight required. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and everyone just found it more convenient to pretend they didn't see anything.
"hindsight" is actually an interesting word (Score:3)
It's hindsight when everybody can look back in history and say, "well golly, we really blew that one! if only we'd been able to see X, then we'd have known what we were about to do was wrong..."
It's not really the same thing, however, when there were people back then pointing out how foolish the plan was, and they were routinely denounced as stupid, or narrow-minded, or "war mongers", and told they were not "seeing the big picture" no matter what arguments they made and what evidence they produced.
In cases
Re:Germany was the golden boy (Score:5, Insightful)
Wind/solar doesn't make them more dependent on gas, all that did was make their electricity prices sky-high. Shuttering Nuclear and Coal makes them more dependent on gas, that's orthogonal.
Spinning up some gas turbines to cover the transition from wind to coal power, when coal power is still present, is a drop in the bucket compared to industry and heating use of gas.
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Wind/solar doesn't make them more dependent on gas, all that did was make their electricity prices sky-high. Shuttering Nuclear and Coal makes them more dependent on gas, that's orthogonal.
Spinning up some gas turbines to cover the transition from wind to coal power, when coal power is still present, is a drop in the bucket compared to industry and heating use of gas.
Those gas turbines provided 20% of Germany's total power. The renewables that cost $500B Euros, those provided 4%. When you ask a German why they shuttered their nuclear plants and why not build more, they say it is because of cost. So no, I don't think you can just hand wave away the impact of renewables on Germany's energy policies. They took the capital that should have been used for nuclear and wasted it on renewables. That's the impact and it isn't orthogonal to them shuttering their nuclear plant
Ah, the Slashdot memories (Score:5, Insightful)
What happened to these Slashdot classics?
October, 2015: "Wind Power Now Cheapest Energy In UK and Germany; No Subsidies Needed"
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
May, 2016: "Germany Had So Much Renewable Energy That It Had To Pay People To Use Electricity"
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
May, 2017: "Germany Sets New National Record With 85 Percent of Its Electricity Sourced From Renewables"
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
March, 2021: "Wind Replaces Coal As Main Source of Power In Germany"
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
There's a bunch more from 2022 but they seem a bit more, ummm, panicky.
Re:Ah, the Slashdot memories (Score:5, Informative)
What happened to these Slashdot classics?
October, 2015: "Wind Power Now Cheapest Energy In UK and Germany; No Subsidies Needed"
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
May, 2016: "Germany Had So Much Renewable Energy That It Had To Pay People To Use Electricity"
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
May, 2017: "Germany Sets New National Record With 85 Percent of Its Electricity Sourced From Renewables"
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
March, 2021: "Wind Replaces Coal As Main Source of Power In Germany"
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
There's a bunch more from 2022 but they seem a bit more, ummm, panicky.
FTA:
Despite these efforts, there is little certainty over how the country can replace Russia; Germany imported around 58 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas from the country last year, according to data from Eurostat and German industry association BDEW, representing about 17% of its total energy consumption.
I don't think many countries can lose 17% of their energy supply without getting panicky.
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Even if Germany replaces the lost grid power with a different source, the need for petrochemical resource influx is still enormous based upon the structure of Germany's heavy industry and manufacturing ecosystem. The oil and natural gas is an input into manufacturing plants that produce plastics and chemicals that are feed-stock for more advanced products. The lack of power is only a part of the issue why the German industrial machine is well and truly screwed.
Re: Ah, the Slashdot memories (Score:2)
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These gas-burning devices cannot quickly be replaced by electricity equivalents.
Yeah, they can. I just left an apartment that my primary source of heat was a gas fireplace. I don't have a fireplace in my new apartment. I like fireplaces. I went down to home depot and bought an electric fireplace. It sits in the corner looking like a tacky electric fireplace but keeps my office warm. Total time, including trip to soul sucking bit box store, about 30 minutes.
I'm not saying that all Germany needs to do is pop down to the local walmart and buy electric heaters and all thier proble
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I went down to home depot and bought an electric fireplace.
That electric fireplace probably uses 9x the energy as your old gas powered one. So no, it definitely isn't a solution. And it isn't simple as you suggest. That "solution" would likely massively increase (3x) the CO2 emissions that heating your apartment requires.
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Germany doesn't have an electricity problem.
Look at this map https://communitiesforfuture.o... [communitiesforfuture.org] .Germany is full coal&gas for electricity, so it is a total failure. The Green's country is one of the biggest co2 emitter, lol.
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Germany's mistake as I mentioned elsewhere was assuming Putin was a rational actor. What they didn't realize is that he's dying and has gone off the plot as a result. The war in Ukraine is doing a massive damage to Russia both economically and militarily.
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Maybe they printed them out and are burning them for heat?
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Nothing happened to the articles, so why did you cite them? "Wind Replaces Coal As Main Source of Power In Germany" seems to have been correct. But wind didn't also replace methane, nor was it expected to.
Those articles were the results of Germany's energy and emissions accounting that would have made the Enron accountants envious for their creativity. If the Germans didn't use the power, they didn't count the natural gas they burned to make it. Basically, they didn't count their spinning reserves. They ignored them in their energy calculations (where their power came from) and they ignored them for their CO2 emissions. When you do that, the numbers look pretty good (that's how you get such articles and
Who's Fault Is This? (Score:3)
Wait, I thought high energy prices were Biden's fault? That's what the sticker at the gas pump told me.
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Wait, I thought high energy prices were Biden's fault? That's what the sticker at the gas pump told me.
Biden doesn't determine German energy policy. You can still blame him here.
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Wait, I thought high energy prices were Biden's fault? That's what the sticker at the gas pump told me.
America doesn't have high energy prices.
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Gas prices are low because opec slowed production before the midterms hoping that republicans would win. They didn’t win and then opec increased production back up.
SPR Not Drained (Score:2)
If you frame it like that sure it seems bad. If you actually look at he numbers though we're well above 50% of our more recent high in 2010 https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com] .
Get back to me when we're well below the half way point.
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If you assume they refill it in the most absolutely foolish manner possible then I suppose those are risks.
In reality what they'll likely do is wait until the inflation has passed and oil prices have gone down a bit before they start adding large amounts back into it. Since we're selling high and likely buying low we might end up finishing ahead in terms of overall costs as well.
Blame (Score:2)
That's dumb. It's Biden AND Trump's fault for having the fed double the money supply when supply chains were constrained. When inflation is creeping up you don't announce trillions of dollars of deficit spending.
Time to abandon private/public partnerships (Score:2, Insightful)
They need to build around 30 GW of off shore wind power in 8 years, if private companies have to deal with greenies every step of the way it will never happen. Government needs to step up, have some balls and ram it all through. Start building, you don't have time for multi-year environmental impact assessment. Change the law, squash lawsuits, disobey the EU courts if they get in the way and just build it.
The only way to meet the schedule, is Trumpian style governing ... or FDR style governing if you prefer
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P3 Is likely faster and cheaper once you strip the legal hurdles. It isn't like you build a wind turbine with a lot of manual labor.
Re:Time to abandon private/public partnerships (Score:5, Insightful)
Trumpian style government fashioned itself as imperious: I declare and it's done. In practice, the man and his bootlicking enablers were so incompetent that very little of substance actually got done. About 40% of the time something was declared and then never actually followed through. Another 40% of the time it was declared and immediately shot down by the courts. About 10% of the time something was declared, and almost immediately taken back. The other 10% actually happened.
In specific terms of energy policy: just how much executive action during the Trump administration actually took place that made a material difference? And how significant were any of those actions to the real things that drive energy: incentives and market forces.
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Example from the Trump years: there were 51,000 e
Most of Europe (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Most of Europe (Score:2)
Re:Most of Europe (Score:4, Insightful)
But I cannot blame Germany, because I never thought Russia would actually start a war... I think not many people did.
It's not like they had a track record of doing exactly that. [cough] Chechnya, Afghanistan, Crimea[cough]
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But I cannot blame Germany, because I never thought Russia would actually start a war... I think not many people did.
It's not like they had a track record of doing exactly that. [cough] Chechnya, Afghanistan, Crimea[cough]
You forgot Georgia and Armenia.
Re: (Score:2)
For example, in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea, [...] But I cannot blame Germany, because I never thought Russia would actually start a war...
I can blame them because Russia did start a war in 2014. It turned out differently that time because Ukraine wasn't in a position to fight back. They knew, everyone knew that Putin was happy to invade places. Somehow, Putin invading more of Ukraine yet again came as a total shocking surprise to Germany.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? They annexed Crimea in 2014 with minimal opposition from the West and nobody thought they wouldn't just keep going? It's like saying that giving up the protectorate over Hong Kong wouldn't have resulted in its immediate annexation.
Bazooka? (Score:3)
Panzerfaust, bitte.
Re: (Score:3)
Panzerschreck, danke.
That's Close (Score:2)
enough to fund a couple of nuclear power plants.
They don't have great renewable corridors (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not according to Fox News [youtube.com]!
(Further context on this hilarious alternative fact [youtube.com].)
Re: (Score:2)
the US on the other hand has plenty of energy corridors for both solar and wind
No, it doesn't. Doesn't really matter where you put renewables, they don't work. Unless you are a small volcanic island or have a small population with a lot of hydro, nuclear needs to be a huge chunk of your baseload generation. Renewables can't provide baseload. If California shuts down diablo canyon, PG&E won't be able to keep the power on in California and California is about as good as it gets for renewables. It has lots of sun, plenty of wind and lots of natural gas. Even there it doesn't wo
Price for being blind since 2014.. (Score:3)
Germany and EU pays price for being blind since 2014...
Russian invasion started 8 years ago.
In these years instead of diversification of energy sources Germany was building Nord Stream II
Oh how convenient EU lived at a price of Ukrainian, Georgian, Chechen, Byelorussian blood...
Oh please (Score:5, Insightful)
Scaring people with big numbers is a cheap trick. Germany's gross domestic product was €3.6 trillion in 2021. Most people aren't even throttling their heating. Yes, there's a lot of complaining, but there's always a lot of complaining. It's Germany.
Fuck Putin, that little bitch. It doesn't matter what it costs. Russia will be much worse off when this is over.
Religion (Score:4, Insightful)
Germany's decisions were not made based on rational evaluation; they were made based on religious fanaticism. In fact, Germany has an entire very powerful political party based on religions fanaticism. No, not the *Christian* Democrats; it's the Green Party.
It's interesting that as a population turns away from traditional religions such as Christianity or Judaism, the newly liberated still yearn for religion, and many have found it in Climatism or Wokism to guide their moral compass.
Absorbing East Germany had a price (Score:2)
Absorbing East Germany meant absorbing hundreds of thousands of pro-Soviet Ossis and not just the infamous Stasi, or the Berlin Wall border guards who shot those trying to escape to freedom.
Integrating subversives into the German economy ensured energydependence on Russia and wishful thinking obviously played a part. In consequence Germany became dependent on the existential enemy of European culture, Russia, whose NeoSoviet leader Vladimir Putin took full advantage.
Serious aggressive EU investment in dive