The next biggest reason is probably just keeping arrows in the quiver. Why exhaust all sanction options up front and then be unable to influence in the future? Keeping the SWIFT sanction option keeps the ability to influence Russia in the future.
Lastly, a minor component is all of the CIPS and other reasons people bring up.
Yes, doing something big would require many things. Building a bunch of them at the same time would allow you to save many of the pitfalls of nuclear construction: having to redesign each one from scratch.
You’d build power plant factories, fifty of the same plant around the country/continent.
Germany cannot be trusted
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/10/france-to-buil...
Stuttgart 21 is still in construction and the Berlin airport took way longer than expected. And these projects don't have the same severe consequences if the construction is botched.
Not to mention attacks.
When you build a reactor, you probably don't want "first-timers" working on the project for you.
Given Germany's track record in screwing Europe (on top of shutting down nuclear power plants, have a look at the damage Gerhard Schroeder did) this country is dangerous to other EU members.
Wind and solar are the cheapest sources of power. A decades long propaganda campaign has tried, but failed, to cover that up.
Yet this zombie opinion persists in certain political bubbles that get their information from fossil fuel interests.
And now, when one of those fossil fuel interests invades another nation, the prime culprit is... renewable energy? And it's used as an excuse to talk about how utterly indespendible natural gas is, even though experts want us to dump it as fast as possible? Isn't that oddly convenient for Putin, who seems really well liked by all the same people who tell obvious lies about climate change.
The reason why Germany and indirectly most of Europe hasn’t stopped buying gas from Russia is because, despite being a massive (the most massive?) solar and renewable economy, those don’t work very well during the winter.
I’m literally pointing out the emperor has no clothes which is why they’re freezing?
If they were in a climate with better insolation and more predictable renewable sources, then they’d probably be fine. But they aren’t.
If they had adequate storage to deal with peak energy demand during minimum insolation, or had another adequate source, then they would have cut Russia off years ago. But they don’t.
They used to, but they have been shutting them down and not building replacement capacity.
Instead they’re paying out the nose and scrambling because they don’t have viable options, and resisting the political motions they would otherwise do because Russia has them over a barrel.
The reason why Germany hasn't stopped buying gas is because there are 12 million gas heaters spread across the country, heating 20 million homes (nearly 50% of housing).
We currently bring up 150k heat pumps a year (mostly in new developments). At that rate it takes some 60-80 years to convert all existing gas guzzling real estate over to electric heating.
> because, despite being a massive (the most massive?) solar and renewable economy, those don’t work very well during the winter.
Last I checked it's winter and we just broke wind power records, multiple times in a row. Wind power has approximately the same installed capacity as solar (60GW each). But it still doesn't help those gas heaters keep people warm.
What then?
As mentioned by another comment: even if we were to send all that gas used for heating into gas turbines instead and use the generated electricity to operate the heat pumps, we'd use less gas (because it's using environmental heat energy in addition to the intrinsic energy of the gas).
That brings the bonus that we could look into alternative power sources (of whatever kind: I'm sure France would be more than happy to assist bringing up nuclear reactors again, although that's unlikely to happen in Germany for a whole bunch of reasons) when gas is difficult to obtain because electricity is electricity.
But apparently we don't have a sufficient number of people who could do the installation, plus it'd be expensive, and even discounting that, I'm not sure if "We need 12 million heat pump systems. Next quarter?" is something that could _possibly_ work even under normal circumstances (nevermind the supply chain issues we're currently dealing with globally).
That's why I brought up the 150k installed units per year: There's probably room for improvement (I've been thinking that there must be a very profitable career in heating installations), but even if we can install 600k a year, we're still looking at 20 years before we get all the old cruft converted.
By now, even the power plant operators aren't very interested in keeping them running for longer because they already planned to turn them off and dismantle them. Keeping them on for longer means a significant investment to them, for unknown benefit as the societal rift will inevitably break open again. They might invest (so they can continue to operate things safely), delay the dismantling (probably also costs money because they likely started hiring companies already), only to be told a year later to shut things down again (all that money for nothing).
An issue in that has been that renewables build-up has been all but sabotaged politically in the last years, and that storage technology didn't develop as well as estimated, making gas necessary as a peak load compensation mechanism, "hopefully" temporarily. Gas turbine operators are whining for years that they're operating at a loss but they're forced to continue to operate (getting the loss just about compensated I think) to ensure the grid's safety.
Other than _that_, gas is mostly used for heating which is a distinct system. As such, any consideration of "nuclear vs. gas dependency in Germany" is something that seems to be mostly discussed outside Germany: No matter how many nuclear power plants we keep up, gas boilers just don't run on electricity (except for their controller module).
As for booking a contractor 20 years ago: There are funding programmes to encourage folks to go for heat pump systems and other modernizations. The last electricity heating system that was widely deployed in Germany _was_ horribly inefficient, which is no surprise with technology that was already old in the 70s, and the idea "electricity for heating is a waste" has stuck. The political sabotage that I mentioned extended to not really caring about correcting such misconceptions.
you’re still looking at about 4 trillion kWh of energy/yr (possibly a month - hard to get good data) that would be needed to do that switch.
most of it during winter.
Germany currently produces a little over 500 billion kWh of electrical energy a year.
So to replace natural gas for heating in this scenario, Germany would need to produce 9x the electrical power it currently produces. Most of it during the winter.
And not having enough production would kill people.
It isn’t a matter of not having enough heat pumps or people to install them, that’s just the immediate road block if you individually wanted to switch.
It’s a fundamental economic issue that would require investment on a scale heretofore not considered outside of world wars. And maybe not even then.
Right now, we don’t even know of a storage technology that could even work at that scale, let alone what it would cost to do it.
And depending on which way climate changes go, the size of storage needs to be potentially arbitrarily large. The more uncertainty you have, the larger it needs to be.
Unlike a fossil fuel, we don’t have (essentially) arbitrarily large reserves we can pull from, it all has to be made and stored in advance by the same infrastructure that produces your normal production.
The "gas boiler in every second home" scheme locks us into gas to a degree that even "a natural gas burning turbine in every city" wouldn't. But locked in we are.
The push for renewables or the rejection of nuclear power plants is orthogonal to why Germany is stuck with Russian gas.
According to the analysis, the price of electricity in Germany, adjusted for purchasing power, is 45-dollar cents (39-euro cents) per kilowatt-hour. This not only puts German electricity costs as the 15th highest of all the countries included, but it also means Germany has the third-highest electricity prices in the EU... The data included in the study refers to the second quarter of 2021, and so does not take into account the surge in prices consumers in Germany are currently facing.
or look here:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
And then there's wind (as mentioned: we just broke records. In winter. At night.), and water (to some minor degree). And theoretically a comeback of nuclear (won't happen). Or hydrogen storage. Or fusion, or whatever. The good thing about electricity is that it doesn't care where it comes from, and there are many different kinds of sources.
On the other hand: Natural gas boilers require natural gas, and so far we don't have methods to synthesize it from electricity - or anything else - at scale. The main argument in their favor is that they're installed: a pretty important argument though.
https://www.worldbiogasassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/20...
But yeah, big picture, gas is a poor choice for home heating, and should be phased out for health, cost and carbon reasons.
When the consequence of not having enough production is people literally freezing to death, worse case production matters.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/415034/cigarette-prices-...
I wonder what secret tech Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and other nations at the bottom of both lists have that makes both electrical power and cigarettes so cheap to produce? You'd think their neighbours would ask them to install it for them in order to access cheap electricity and cigarettes.
Even if Wind and Solar could supply 100% of demand tomorrow, we cannot convert all uses of oil and gas quickly. Renewables may be the future, but they are not today. The attempts of some misguided politicians to reduce Western extraction* of fossils merely subsidize Putin and dictators like him.
* As opposed for attempts to reduce demand and switch supply to clean fuels which are useful.
Natural Gas has a mind blowing amount of thermal energy, and per unit is essentially free compared to anything else. 42-45MJ/kg.
Near as I can tell, Germany imported 119 billion cubic meters of natural gas in Jan/Feb of last year. A cubic meter of natural gas has approximately 38MJ of energy in it, so that is around 4.5 x 10^18 joules of energy or 1.2 x 10^13 kWh. Something like 12 trillion kWh.
About 40% of that was from Russia (near as I can tell).
Natural gas and Electric heating probably have similar end efficiencies (taking into account electric transmission losses).
Have you heard of heat pumps? If you burn the gas in electricity plants you can get 3x the efficiency of burning gas for heat. So if the heating power of gas is that impressive to you, then renewable backed heat pumps must be about 10x as impressive.
You can even hook them up to the nuclear plants that you were supposedly advocating for before this turned into a love letter to natural gas, Russia's biggest export.
Have you run the numbers on capex to switch everyone to heat pumps, or looked at available grid capacity required if everyone switched?
I’m not saying it’s impossible period - I’m saying no one is being realistic about the cost or trade offs, and seems to be under the delusion that some (most of the time) fanciful faceplate capacity number and cheap price for one part of the story means everything is solved.
It’s time to do the math.
Let's say you can get $600/kwH for storage? If you need to cover let's say 18 hrs of energy needs (electricity and heat using electricity) that would give a sense of capital cost for the storage portion of the solar + wind package for germany as a whole? This excludes cost of conversion of course across the rest of things.
This push to dump nuclear and gas for wind / solar is going to come eventually, just not clear we are there yet in available supply / cost etc.
So I don't think its infinite, but extremely high and not overnight.
If you convert natural gas heating to electric (using efficient heat pumps), that adds roughly 9x the energy needs. So $5.4 trillion. And that is just to cover average ‘overnight’, with a little buffer. If there is a problematic couple days during winter? People would freeze to death.
Energy needs would likely be more ‘peaky’ during winter, so these would need to go up a bit to deal with the spikes, but it’s probably order of magnitudeish correct.
The current German population is about 83 million, so that would only be about $65,000 for every man woman and child in Germany for the minimal best case storage needs.
For realistic ‘no mass casualty events due to lack of available heat energy every other year’, it would probably need to be 3-4x higher at least.
To protect against a 100 year storm or the like, 7-10x is probably a better idea. But I doubt anyone would ever pay that.
However, the attempts to reduce fossil extraction don't help the climate (the West just imports from some dictatorship which doesn't care), and ironically have their own negative externality.
Russia is invading Ukraine because Putin knows that the consequences of invasion will be small relative to his perceived benefits. NATO/"The West" will not risk a larger confrontation over Ukraine.
Unfortunately, I think that same conclusion extends to the smaller NATO countries. Will the rest of NATO really risk a nuclear war if Russia decides to invade one of Latvia/Lithuania/Montenegro/Estonia? As recently as last year, the US had an anti-NATO President. This could happen again in the near future. If it does, Putin will be emboldened to continue expanding Russia's sphere of influence.
Once you attack a NATO member you are almost automatically at war with all the members of the alliance and you'll probably have to face already present nato troops as soon as the war starts.
Depends how defending looks. I can see some drone strikes, some bombing runs, but the danger of it escalating to a nuclear war is would be high.
I just don’t believe Americans would accept turning their cities to glass to save Lithuania.
Now I understand, pretending they would, makes the deterrent work. But I hope nobody tries to call the bluff on that one.
Actually, that's not the right question, because Europe by itself doesn't have the military strength to escalate. So it'll be down to American politicians and American voters.
American here. Yes. Fuck with us. Please.
Biden is our president right now and his temperament does seem to be less than what is required.
> As recently as last year, the US had an anti-NATO President.
There's a lot fucked up about NATO and its post Soviet history, including our recent president. However, it was largely neglected and America was bearing the brunt of its cost and few of its benefits. Seeking to make it more equitable and discouraging Russian energy dependence is not the same as being "antiNATO".
Germany is one of the more vocal opponents to nuclear power. Reliance on Russian gas started in the 70s, as part of the Ostpolitik. It was a deliberate decision during the cold war under the theory that trade partners don't wage wars.
The anti-nuclear stance started in the 70s as well (although a bit later) as part of the peace movement (building nukes is comparably easy when you have all the tech around as a byproduct of civilian use. See IAEA) and went in full force after Chernobyl blew up (in some parts of Germany wild mushrooms and boar are still contaminated today). It took until 2000 to bear fruits though because the Green party ("anti-nuclear" is their reason d'être) first came to federal power in 1998.
The peace movement leaned left and there has been some Russian influence in left circles but it seems unlikely that 1970's Russia ran a "abolish nuclear so you buy more gas" campaign. If there has been any anti-nuclear campaign on their part it was aiming to keep nuclear weapons out of West Germany (none of the above surfaced in East Germany).
The 2010/2011 detour in German politics (delaying the nuclear turn down by 14 years, then mostly re-reversing the decision after Fukushima) is just a minor side note in that (net effect: it delayed the exit by ~5 years).
They jumped on electronic warfare as a new type of weapon.
It costs practically nothing to get a huge effect if successful.
If I was a country with limited resources compared to the US , electronic warfare is getting massive funding because of the bang for the buck. There is no conspiracy theory, just common sense.
I mean my god, have you not been paying attention to the migrant crisis, the funneling of Rosneft incentives to far-right political parties in Western Europe? It's all just a conspiracy to suggest these are successfully weakening the EU?
It's not giving russia the benefit of the doubt, I'm just very doubtful that russian intelligence services are so competent while being much less well funded and having a lot less material reach than their american counterparts. Yet, it would be ludicrous to just assume that even the CIA could have the means to manipulate the public opinion so much that you'd get such a widespread anti nuclear sentiment in big country like germany, right? All of that without getting detected.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
Quote:
As of October 2019, around 15,000 Facebook pages with a majority US audience were being run out of Kosovo and Macedonia, known bad actors during the 2016 election. Collectively, those troll-farm pages—which the report treats as a single page for comparison purposes—reached 140 million US users monthly and 360 million global users weekly. Walmart’s page reached the second-largest US audience at 100 million. The troll farm pages also combined to form:
- the largest Christian American page on Facebook, 20 times larger than the next largest—reaching 75 million US users monthly, 95% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
- the largest African-American page on Facebook, three times larger than the next largest—reaching 30 million US users monthly, 85% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
- the second-largest Native American page on Facebook, reaching 400,000 users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
- the fifth-largest women’s page on Facebook, reaching 60 million US users monthly, 90% of whom had never followed any of the pages.
It makes no sense to blame anti-nuclear sentiment on Russia. The evidence just isn't there, they happen to heavily benefit from it but the anti-nuclear sentiment but are not the primary cause.
Unless you are saying that russia could do the same in the future, which I agree is possible but we would still ultimately end up knowning about it. The anti nuclear movement in europe is pretty grassroots and the fact is that we don't have any proof of substantial russian influence on that subject even if everyone is much more on the lookout (as your links indicate)
but still people seem genuinely shocked and continue to fall back on their myopic cold war view of the geopolitical european landscape by their mainstream media (without any suspicion or question of the narrative) it seems largely the result of being separated by the Atlantic ocean and a bulk of European countries that the average American cannot name.
Already I can see people from Poland and EU countries furiously downvoting and flagging my comments as "Russian Propaganda"
None of this is a surprise to us here in Germany, our relationship with Russia might be shocking to someone sitting in front of FOX or ABC news.
Even more shocking might be how the German elite and the working class view the Ukraine situation. To them, Ukraine was a source of worry due to its cheap labor wages and proximity to Russia would create a competing industrial center.
Even more outrageous might be how many in Germany are actually in favor of Russia's actions to take Ukraine away from EU/NATO.
It's funny to me how people still think EU can last like this.
> Even more outrageous might be how many in Germany are actually in favor of Russia's actions to take Ukraine away from EU/NATO.
Both of those are very strong claims. What are your sources?
It has nothing to do with this. Keeping nuclear power around would help a bit when it comes to electricity in particular, but natural gas is also used for heating and industry, where nuclear power just isn't a direct replacement.
Since most reactors are old, and would need expensive refurbishment to continue using them. It wasn't so much a choice between not denuclearizing and using gas. It was between a huge and expensive investment in mostly new nuclear capacity, vs a combination of new renewable energy and inexpensive natural gas. Since natural gas is easier to combine with renewables, and easier to gradually phase out as renewables became more mature, there was some rationality behind the decision.
Maximizing investments in renewables is probably the most important thing to do, because it's easier and faster to scale, and easier to get started with in developing countries which will be so important to avoiding increased emissions, so getting the costs down on those has huge benefits.
That said, yes, it was dumb making Europe dependent on Russian gas. I guess there was some hope that this would keep Russia in check through economic ties, but this has now obviously been proven wrong.
This is a natural consequence of democracy. By design, leaders of a country can't do something their voters don't agree with.
LOL.
That is not how bureaucracy works. Most of the key positions, that have power are not voted in. Most democraties does not vote president into his position, like it is done in US. So, it has nothing to do with democracy, but bureaucracy. And bureaucracy does not have allegiance to voters, but only to their own survival. And as long as democratic society is no threat to bureaucracy, it has no reasons to stick out and do something on their own initiative.
Germany is mostly importing finished products (natgas) from Russia. This is like Russia sending bread to Germany and Germany is eating the bread.
Whereas Russia is sending the US unfinished products (crude). The US is then refining the crude and selling it to someone else. This is like Russia sending wheat to the US, the US making bread out of it, and then selling the bread.
It's much easier to stop baking and selling bread than it is to stop eating bread (if that is all you're eating).
It just won't be here tomorrow though.
I'm more of a hawk on CCP and Russia
But I'm a mega super hawk when it comes to spending painfully NOW to stand a chance against the worst of the worst of climate change.
Any shutdown would increase gas prices worldwide. Just because the UK doesn't use Russian gas direct, it does buy gas on the open market, when Germany can't buy it for €1 per unit from Russia, they'll pay €1.20 from the UK (which has 50% domestic production, Norway having most of the rest), pushing prices up for the UK and other countries despite not using Russian gas direct.
The failure here was the inability to boost nuclear and renewable sources in Europe over the last 8 years to reduce reliance on Russia.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/counterfeit-parts-pr...
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It's like falling out with IT support. Suddenly your ticket to fix a printer takes 2 days, rather than 5 minutes because that is the "SLA".
Or the gas ships from the US will be there in the next month. Russia is not the only one who sells gas. Just the lowest bidder
They are expensive and unsafe especially if you think about sabotage, not to mention the most recent problem with reactors.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/counterfeit-parts-pr...
Because Europe is dependent on Russian gas (thanks to an ill thought out denuclearization drive), and both Europe and US governments prefer their economic and electoral interests over Ukraine or the international order. The rest of the article are really silly excuses (Russia is a relatively small economy and can't meaningfully hurt the dollar etc.).