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Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/21/2011 10:53:55 PM   
InvisibleBlack


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Status: offline 		Interesting article I came across the other day on Germany's plans for producing power going forward.

Faced with plans to close all of its nuclear reactors by 2020, Germany is now moving towards other energy sources ... but despite increasing investment in renewable energy, it's also building coal and gas-fired power plants.

quote:

Despite Germany's Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (German Development Bank) being set to underwrite renewable energy and energy efficiency investments in Germany worth $137.3 billion over the next five years, Merkel's government has now announced that in addition to going green, it will also build a dozen coal-fired power plants as part of the country's future energy mix. In order to assure the energy transition, the government also plans to subsidize new natural gas power plants as well.
 
Germany has been on the forefront of the "green revolution" in many ways, and no one has ever accused the Germans of being technologically backwards. I find the fact that they're building coal-fired power plants interesting.
 
quote:

The government's newly pragmatic approach contrasts with the hopes of many environmentalists, who believe that Germany now has a historic opportunity to embrace renewable power rather than pursuing the retrograde step of commissioning new coal burning power plants.
 
The issue seems to be that with the Germany economy stalling, the costs of propsoed renewable energy solutions are too expensive, and the time-frame to develop more efficient solutions is too long to meet their deadlines.

quote:

But the renewable power sources will be costly. On October 19 the German Association of Industrial Energy and Power Users complained that electricity price had increased even though its quality has decreased and noted that next year its members will see their electrical power invoices increase by 9%. As for the economics of the shift, electricity from conventional coal fired plants costs roughly $83 per megawatt-hour, the price increases roughly 50% to $124 per megawatt-hour for wind energy, $207 per megawatt-hour for offshore wind power, and $268 per megawatt-hour for solar, the last more than three times the cost of coal-fired electricity.
At a very basic level, if the growth of production (say GDP) is below the level of population growth, the only possible result is a widespead increase in poverty and, if the difference becomes pronounced, human misery. Is the right answer at this time to pursue expensive and/or undeveloped energy solutions, despite the economic problems facing the global economy, or to provide cheap "efficient" energy as quickly as possible to keep production and consumption costs down and resume the pursuit of renewable energies once economic conditions have recovered?

Is Germany doing the right thing?

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/21/2011 10:58:07 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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Status: offline 		Theres at least 2 other threads on this.

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/21/2011 11:04:56 PM   
InvisibleBlack


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Status: offline 		My bad then. I didn't see anything on the first three pages in the forum.

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/21/2011 11:07:52 PM   
willbeurdaddy


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Status: offline 		The announcement was in May. Look back around May/June.

The most interesting part of your article is this:

"Despite Germany's Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (German Development Bank) being set to underwrite renewable energy and energy efficiency investments in Germany worth $137.3 billion over the next five years, Merkel's government has now announced that in addition to going green, it will also build a dozen coal-fired power plants as part of the country's future energy mix. In order to assure the energy transition, the government also plans to subsidize new natural gas power plants as well."

Amazing what intelligent leaders come up with.


< Message edited by willbeurdaddy -- 11/21/2011 11:10:16 PM >

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/21/2011 11:13:25 PM   
SpanishMatMaster


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Germany has a huge problem with the coal lobby, firmly established since the times of Bonn and Adenauer.

There are also political reasons for this. The nuclear stop was an idea of the social-democrats (well, actually of the green, but the SPD agreed and implemented it). The Christian-democrats wanted to cancel it, but at the precise moment they were moving towards it, Fukushima happened and suddenly it became politically impossible. Now the CDU Government is trying to "pay back" the environmentalists by "showing" them that the only alternative to nuclear is coal.

This said... how are revewable energies supposed to develop if nobody invests on them? The only way to produce cheap renewable energy is to invest massively on it, which impulses the technology development and reduces the costs by "scale economies" (sorry if my English is poor on this).

So... Germany is doing a good job investing in renewable energies. The matter of the deadlines is a real issue, and it can be understood why renewable energies cannot be the only option in the short and middle term. But the move towards coal energy can only be understood by the mentioned factors, and will be done at best using... well, exactly, new technologies, like liquifying the CO2 to deposit it in the old coal deposits.

As for the strongest argument presented, the prices of energy, I would like to point out that the numbers come from a place called Oilprice.com mentioning "economists" whose name is not provided, nor are the sources provided. I fear that these prices may be inflated, outdated, and that they do not take in account the externalised costs: The Rhine, for example, was almost completely devoid of life at the end of the 80's . To recover it from the huge pollution was a titanic tasks whose costs have never been calculated as part of the energy costs of the powerful Rhineland coal industry.

Costs must be considered as a whole. The cost of polluting the environment. The cost of destroying life diversity. The costs of nuclear accidents (multiplied by their probability). The costs of radioactive pollution. And it is a constant of the lobbies of the different industries (including the renewables! solar energy lobbyists ignored the costs and pollution produced by the fabrication of the cells for decades!) that they tend to ignore all costs they can externalise while they include the ones of the competing energies.

I would take these numbers with more than a pinch of salt. Here are the numbers of a placer called "nuclear fissionary"... what a surprise, they look different...

http://nuclearfissionary.com/2010/04/02/comparing-energy-costs-of-nuclear-coal-gas-wind-and-solar/


< Message edited by SpanishMatMaster -- 11/21/2011 11:17:14 PM >

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/21/2011 11:16:38 PM   
SpanishMatMaster


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< Message edited by SpanishMatMaster -- 11/21/2011 11:17:04 PM >

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/21/2011 11:17:58 PM   
InvisibleBlack


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Status: offline 		That was what I wanted to highlight - not that Germany is ending their nuclear program or going green, but that despite these stated objectives they're building coal-fired power plants and apparently with funds formerly intended for renewable energy sources.

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/22/2011 4:02:27 AM   
SpanishMatMaster


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quote:

ORIGINAL: InvisibleBlack

That was what I wanted to highlight - not that Germany is ending their nuclear program or going green, but that despite these stated objectives they're building coal-fired power plants and apparently with funds formerly intended for renewable energy sources.
Well, that is true, indeed.

It does not mean that those power plant won't have any mean to fix the CO2 on the floor. I do not know. Do you know, perchance?


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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/22/2011 7:17:47 AM   
samboct


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I can't open the link- the Capital One ad kills my Mac.

I don't know how the economics of Germany's nuclear plants work, but I know in this country- the economics are a deep, dark secret. There are three problems with nuclear plants:
1) The cost of cleanup from an accident like Fukushima bankrupts the utility and the taxpayer, not the ratepayer, gets the bill. Never mind that the nuclear industry has borrowed a page from the cigarette companies science and legal departments, and is claiming that the Fukushima accident didn't kill anyone. (I think there was similar claptrap about Chernobyl.) But since nuclear plants can't get commercial insurance- if there's an accident, the taxpayer gets to pick up the tab.
2) The cost of dealing with the waste is horrific- a Westinghouse engineer giving a talk about the renaissance in the nuclear industry sheepishly admitted that the cost of dealing with the waste fuel is two orders of magnitude higher than the initial fuel cost. Bear in mind that most of the initial fuel isn't reacted, so there's not much mass change between fresh fuel and spent fuel. Current costs of uranium are around $100/lb which means that the cost of processing the spent fuel are approx. $10,000/lb. He didn't have "exact figures."
3) The costs of uranium have shot up quickly in the past few years. The nuclear industry's concern is natural gas, but I would add that escalating fuel costs might also throw a monkey wrench into the nuclear power industry's plans.

In terms of why Germany went with coal and natural gas plants...

Again, extrapolating from the US...utility executives are very, very, conservative. In their ideal world, everything would be baseload power, and there'd be little variability in demand from day to day. Heavy machinery and industry have these characteristics- residences and office spaces do not.

Problems with renewables- currently not suitable for baseload power- the demand is too intermittent. No proven economical technology exists for large scale storage outside of pumped hydro, and the cost of better transmission lines is high- as well as having potential siting problems. No major utility executive in the US would dare suggest that their utility is going to go to all renewables at this point- it'd be suicide.

This leaves two known technologies for baseload power: gas fired turbines and coal. Gas fired turbines are cleaner and emit less CO2, and are throttleable- they actually can work well with renewables picking up demand if needed- but it's an expensive solution if your high capital cost plant is idle. Disadvantages- cost of natural gas is all over the map- changes in the past few years on the order of a factor of 4 have been seen. You're a German executive- do you want to base all your production on the cost of a resource which varies in cost by such a large amount? And Germany may not have much resources in the way of natural gas. Naturlich, nein, danke.

This leaves coal-a fuel which Germany has abundant supplies of and stable pricing. New coal plants can be built that are more efficient than older generation plants. What would actually make a lot of sense is to get rid of some of the older, inefficient coal plants that are currently supplying baseload power- something that's not really possible in the US giving the current permitting processes. I don't know about Germany.

The economics of renewables is probably a red herring- it's simply a conservative business decision to stick with existing technologies rather than gamble on unknowns. It also means that the tax on CO2 is too low.


Sam

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/22/2011 12:38:34 PM   
Politesub53


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Status: offline 		The cost of renewable energy isnt a red herring. here in the UK cost is extremely prohibitive, with the industry suggesting consumers are now paying about 8% extra on bills. In fact despite the UK leading the way with wind farms, when they were needed most during last winters record cold snap, they were utterly useless due to no wind. Germany, like most of the Eu contries has signed a deal to reduce carbon emissions by 2020, frankly I doubt emission targets can be met. Here is a link on costs of renewables in an article printed last year.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,718951,00.html

And a link re the UK, where we already have massive off shore wind farms.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/8028328/Britains-offshore-windpower-costs-twice-as-much-as-coal-and-gas-generated-electricity.html

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/22/2011 9:24:19 PM   
SpanishMatMaster


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Status: offline 		The costs of renewable energy are usually not obscure. Usually. I gave a sample of costs which the enviromentalists tried to hide.

But the costs of non - renewable usually are, because nobody internalises the costs.

If the "door to door" costs of renewables is 8% more as the usual costs given for non-renewable, then renewable are cheaper than non-renewable. Because the usual costs given for non-renewable usually do not internalise absolutely anything. And they are much more than this 8%.

BTW, if it was not so and the costs were actually 8% higher for renewables, I would gladly pay. It is very cheap, for preserving the environment. Extremely cheap.


< Message edited by SpanishMatMaster -- 11/22/2011 9:26:11 PM >

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/22/2011 9:35:45 PM   
Termyn8or


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They are doing the right thing. As fucked up as the world economy is now, you need to go with what you know and stick with what works.

The whole green movement has to go on a back burner temporarily, TEMPORARILY. Let's recover a bit and get this capitalist system tuned up a bit. Nobody should waste the money on this right now. If anyone has a problem with Germany it's becasue they are not in enough debt or some fucking reason like that. The people who say mortgage everything. The Germans ain't falling for that shit again.

T^T

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/23/2011 12:28:30 AM   
SpanishMatMaster


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Termyn8or
They are doing the right thing. As fucked up as the world economy is now, you need to go with what you know and stick with what works.
Prussia, 1760. Famine. Crops are not growing well with this weather. Somebody suggests that potatoes would grow better.
A farmer look with suspicion and says "as long as we have a famine, we better go with that what we know and stick with what works".
And plants more crops.

Just saying.


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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/23/2011 1:52:37 AM   
Politesub53


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Status: offline 		8% extra cost isnt cheap to the poorer end of the spectrum. Elderly people or those in poverty have a choice in winter, eat or keep warm. prices rising faster than income mean it is impossible to do both.

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/23/2011 5:07:07 AM   
SpanishMatMaster


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quote:

ORIGINAL: Politesub53
8% extra cost isnt cheap to the poorer end of the spectrum. Elderly people or those in poverty have a choice in winter, eat or keep warm. prices rising faster than income mean it is impossible to do both.


1. The comparison between a one-time 8% energy cost increase and the income and price rises in general is a fallacy, as the first would happen only one year and the others, not.

2. The 8% extra cost would not be of the whole energy, only the part substituted by renewables. The part which is already produced with renewables would need no substitution.

3. The social costs can be covered by taxes or additional social services - if needed.

4. It is not needed. In no western European country I know, including the UK where you live, are the poor really forced to choose between freezing and suffering hunger. And of course in Germany it is indeed so.

5. Even if it were so, the State could cover the expenses of the poor. Would this be a sensible investment from the State? Yes, they would get that money back with wonderful profit, as these substitution means more R & D in key areas for the long term, cheaper energy production prices due to scale economies in the short and middle term and...

6. ... the fact is, that the real costs of renewable energies are negative compared to traditional ones, because of externalised costs. Actually, I could simply return your argument back with a 50% for the renewables, if the consumers would pay all the damage done to the environment.

7. And the rises of the consumer's costs would decrease waste, reducing that 8% anyway at the end.

Therefore, I really suggest that you abandon this line of argumentation, Politesub.

Best regards.

< Message edited by SpanishMatMaster -- 11/23/2011 5:29:39 AM >

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/23/2011 5:23:00 AM   
MrRodgers


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Status: offline 		Whole regions and cities in Europe are proving the naysayers wrong and are in the process of eliminating the use of all fossil fuels...some almost entirely.

The costs, one time, the benefits...for all time.

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nut case leftists - 11/23/2011 5:26:02 AM   
ArizonaBossMan


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Status: offline 		Nice fairy tale. Use it when it makes sense. Sometimes it does. Wind power can make sense if the population is close to the power source. Remember the splash T. Boon Pickens made with wind power? Notice nothing is being said now? That's because it makes no sense economically. Yet. Maybe some day. What that idiot o'dingdong is doing with the canadian pipeline is beyond stupid. He is pandering to the nut case leftists (I know, the phrase is redundant).

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/23/2011 5:28:31 AM   
SpanishMatMaster


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quote:

ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
Whole regions and cities in Europe are proving the naysayers wrong and are in the process of eliminating the use of all fossil fuels...some almost entirely.
The costs, one time, the benefits...for all time.

And Brazil is making a serious attempt for the whole country for 2014.


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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/23/2011 5:33:02 AM   
MrRodgers


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quote:

ORIGINAL: SpanishMatMaster

quote:

ORIGINAL: MrRodgers
Whole regions and cities in Europe are proving the naysayers wrong and are in the process of eliminating the use of all fossil fuels...some almost entirely.
The costs, one time, the benefits...for all time.

And Brazil is making a serious attempt for the whole country for 2014.


The one thing most of these programs settle on though is the use of methanol/ethanol for vehicles which is of course a fossil fuel but at least the cleanest.

Brazil is the world's most productive ethanol, methanol developers.

< Message edited by MrRodgers -- 11/23/2011 5:34:51 AM >

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RE: Germany going green, despite the costs - 11/23/2011 5:35:33 AM   
Sanity


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Pure fantasy

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/northeast/view/20111018windmills_stopped_at_night_after_bat_death/srvc=home%26position=recent

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/16/us-dutch-wind-idUSTRE7AF1JM20111116

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/prince-philip/8901985/Wind-farms-are-useless-says-Prince-Philip.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1394945/The-green-killer-Scores-protected-golden-eagles-dying-colliding-wind-turbines.html


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