What makes me so angry is the ridiculous decision to phase out nuclear by 2023 and only "try to phase out" coal by 2030s or something. And in the meantime burn even more coal to replace the closed nuclear plants.

Who's going to stop them tho?

I’m afraid it won’t be that easy to get rid of coal. Especially without help from nuclear.

Especially sad since nowadays it's not even especially cheaper than some other sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...

Sure makes decommissioning nuclear (and bringing coal back online to replace it) look better and better. Good job, environmentalists.

Do you really think environmentalists are the driving force behind this?

Environmentalists are not the driving force to mine this coal, but many campaign heavily against nuclear, and the effect of decommissioning nuclear in Germany has been increased coal activity.

I'm not placing the blame at the feet of environmentalists, so much as ruing unintended consequences.

Well yes, but environmentalists usually also call for large reductions in energy consumption as they know renewables can’t provide a like-for-like replacement. Are the consumers of electricity not also to a degree complicit by creating the demand in the first place? I think it helps to look past the proximate cause.

Presumably the same environmentalists are also backing the exit from coal. Using nuclear instead would have just displaced this mining activity (for the uranium) to somewhere else in the world.

But yeah, Merkel’s nuclear shift did seem pretty rash.

It's funny how people associate that nuclear shift with Merkel, given how it mostly was Merkel flip-flopping away from her prior policy of overriding the existing agreements about phasing out nuclear once it started to look bad...

Which environmentalist groups are anti-nuclear? I've never heard that position from groups in the US.

Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND, "association for the protection of environment and nature, Germany"), Greenpeace, Union of Concerned Scientists, Sierra Club, to name just a few.

Yes. Environmentalists are complicit.

There are people who term themselves 'Eco-modernists' who are almost always pro-nuclear power:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecomodernism

There is also 'environmentalists for nuclear' that includes Patrick Moore, one of the co-founders of Greenpeace and James Lovelock:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmentalists_for_Nuclear

James Hansen, possibly the original driving force behind modern greenhouse gas concerns is also pro-nuclear.

It is definitely not fair to say “treehuggers, every single one of them. There are a lot of environmentalists who are absolutely pro-nuclear. Just like any mass of people, blanket generalizations are almost always just wrong.

We can do better than that here.

Oops, that sentence was ambiguous. I meant every single one of the talking points. Treehuggers is absolutely the right term in the context of this article, though.

> obsolete resource

RWE (the big bad evil company who wants to cut down Hambach) would like to shut down a few old and unprofitable coal burning plants. They are forbidden from doing so, because these plants "are essential to the grid". Doesn't sound obsolete to me.

Sounds like it's time for Germany to invest some money into energy storage solutions rather than relying on coal-burning plants to take up the slack when solar and wind are slacking.

This applies equally so to most nations, of course.

I'm tempted to argue that storage makes renewables more expensive, but that argument would rest on the assumption that it was even possible to buy storage capacity at a scale of multiple terawatt-hours.

Solar wind and hydro only provide 25% of Germany's energy needs.

That figure is out of date -- looks like it was 33% last year and climbing. Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

All told coal accounted for 37% last year. So if the trends continue (and it seems like they will), then renewables will eclipse coal by around the end of this year.

Build more solar and wind and add more energy storage to get you through the lagging periods and no more coal capacity will need to be added to the grid, nor new coal mines dug.

It's still not currently obsolete, then. More like, "hopefully obsolete soon".

Deprecated then?

Not really obsolete. 50% of german energy comes from coal and 50% of that comes from lignite. And Germany has been building renewables like mad for the past decade and only get 25% of their energy from that. Cost isn't the issue here but time to deployment.

Biggest issue is not the production, but the lines. For political reasons the big north-south power lines are not being built. Everyone is afraid of the grid.