Please omit swipes like this from your HN comments. They're against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and they weaken your argument.
Grid-scale storage (apart from hydro, but that's basically maxed out or unsuitable for most geographies) is still an unsolved problem for renewables, even the largest lithium-battery ones are basically a rounding error. You'd need multiple weeks worth of battery capacity to really run on renewables. Not even sure if there's enough lithium to make this work theoretically with current tech.
> On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated
Same is true for every other power source as well. Energy storage for renewables is never included, so you need backups, the €100 billion German defence package announced a few months ago is a direct consequence of "cheap" Russian gas, the millions of people suffering/dying from air pollution related issues from using coal.
There's no perfect solution, but nuclear is definitely a strong contender for the best way forward.
Absolutely! But:
Nuclear was approximately as cheap as the equivalent LiIon storage a few years ago, but the batteries are getting cheaper and the reactors are not.
There are also other chemistries, and other storage options, which I'd include under the banner of "no perfect solution, so let's do everything".
> You'd need multiple weeks worth of battery capacity to really run on renewables.
I have no idea why this meme propagates. How many people live where there is no sunlight for multiple weeks at a time? And it's not like we don't already have some long distance power lines.
PV is so absurdly cheap that overproduction is seriously not a bad solution if you're just concerned about cloudy weeks.
A year is probably more than is needed, but I don't know how low storage can go before it causes problems. If I guess a week is sufficient then every million German residents need a 43m cube.
This isn't unbuildable if there is sufficient political will.
Yeah, I stopped reading here. This is just a flat out untruth. I'm sorry if this article doesn't agree with how you wish the world could be, but simply saying things like this that aren't true doesn't help.
No you don't. Just because you pay for Ökostrom or whatever doesn't mean that the electricity you actually use was produced by renewables. It's one grid. You use the electricity produced by coal plants just like everyone else.
Only if you
a) Pretend that the electricity you get doesn't come from the same grid as everyone else's, where the input to that grid is a mixture of renewable and non-renewable energy, and
b) Don't look too hard at how many others make that same boast: Being "green" is "in", so lots of people's consumption "is completly covered by renewables"... Perhaps a larger proportion of electricity consumers than he proportion of electricity actually generated by renewables?
I mean, if you can happily -- and unthinkingly -- echo the empty promise on your electricity bill, so can everyone else.
Your claim is point-less.
The whole "Energiewende" feels a bit like that: Electricity production was privatized and more than 300 billion € in subsidies went into investors' hands. Now the infrastructure that was created is mostly privately owned and even though renewable energy production currently peaks the prices go through the roof because consumer prices align with the stock market price of electricity and not the cost of production. It really matters how you create renewable energy.
This is true for gas (heating) and electricity, btw.
So you're connected directly to a co-op's green power plant; neither your house nor that power plant are on the national grid where your "100% green energy" gets mixed up with all the other -- non-green -- electricity being produced nationwide?
> On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint. Building thousands of windmills in forests and installing solar on farmland also has a high ecological footprint.
False dichotomies. See for example Flugplatz Brandenburg-Briest: https://goo.gl/maps/WATEJANE9wiHk7UAA
And pastureland can continue to be used as pastureland simultaneously with both PV and wind.
How can you receive energy purely from renewable energy sources when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine? Germany doesn't have any significant capacity for electricity storage. It's such a bold statement but it seems physically impossible.
Your argumentation is similar to suggesting Tesla should stop developing electrical cars because there is no charger infrastructure. So 2010.
More probably you‘re running on green (washing) electricity certificates from Norway…
German companies claiming to get their energy through renewable sources are primarily buying credits from Norway and a few other sources in Europe.
You can stick your head in the ground and pretend all of the electricity you use is being generated by renewable resources, but as long as plants in Germany are producing power using coal and natural gas, it means you're using that energy.
Your argumentation is wrong. What you say is: There is no use in limiting pollution, because there will still be some pollution left anyways. I bet you never clean your place, because it will get dirty soon after.
The Energiewende (so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility) here in Germany is working just fine. It is a reasonable investment in our future.
The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy. The lack of gas is problematic because it is a preliminary product used in chemical processes. This is where a looming recession might derive from.
On sustainable energy sources: I, as many other germans, receive all of my electricity from purely renewable energy sources for more than ten years now. 24/7.
On nuclear: The cost of nuclear power is wildly underestimated, especially for the generation of nuclear power plants in use right now. They are expensive both in terms of dollars and in terms of their ecological footprint.