With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever.
New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
It's a miracle fuel. It really is wonderful. It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima not been reported so irresponsibly.
And please do not come up with future inventions that will magically remove that issue, that does not help.
Btw, it wasn't really a rush, it was started more than 30 years ago by not building new nuclear power plants. Many of the power plants are actually at the end of their lifetime anyway.
They do, though. That is where the “trash” is. They have become so adept at it, they made a museum out of one facility[0].
Two misconceptions that benefit from being clarified:
1. There is very little waste for the amount of energy produced. If we only used nuclear, it would amount for 40 grams per person per year[1].
2. The waste is not trash, it is extremely valuable. It was valuable in the ground, and it is still valuable out of the ground; just not for the particular reactor that it came from.
[0]: https://www.covra.nl/en/radioactive-waste/the-art-of-preserv...
From refinement to the reactor and spent fuel processing, the nuclear power industry generates a huge amount of trash that is low-grade radioactive and thus cannot be just dumped in a landfill.
The nuclear industry has had over seventy years to get their act together regarding fuel recycling. They'd rather just dump it into pools on-site because it's cheapest and makes it Someone Else's Problem. It's the same attitude of the chemical industry from the 1950's: dump it in a hole and let someone else deal with it after you've long since left.
Here's an idea: let's spend the money on wind turbine blade, battery, and solar panel repurposing and recycling instead.
The coal industry has convinced the ecologists to require titanic standards from literally every green energy source, especially the one with the most stable output.
> Here's an idea: let's spend the money on wind turbine blade, battery, and solar panel repurposing and recycling instead.
I am into doing that, AND the nuclear stuff. No need to tie an anchor to our ankle while we try to metaphorically swim back to the surface.
The two is not exclusive. You do need stable base energy production and none of the renewables solve it well. Hydro could do it, but the locations where it is appropriate are few and it has quite a big ecological impact in and of itself.
I think renewables are very important, but just this week was a comment about Netherlands (I think) where the comparison was 200sqm against 4400 wind turbines and somewhat 20sqkm if you compare nuclear vs. wind/solar.
If you take a look at Switzerland, I have no clue where to put 4k wind turbines. Hell, even 1000 won't have enough space (or you will waste so much forests or agrar or you'll put them into alps and waste the scenery, which will break tourism).
Storing waste so you don't have to look after it for thousands of years is admittedly more difficult. Then again, future generations are always impacted by the choices we make today and I'm pretty sure the kids 300 years from now would rather deal with the cleanup of our nuclear waste than with the consequence of global warming.
We know so well how to handle it that we are wondering how to keep people out of the storage places in the event of a civilization collapse. That is, where current languages are forgotten and we forget what nuclear is. That's how advanced in storage we are.
(Yes, I'm sure issues can be fixed. Point is, nuclear has an awful lot of practical problems for supposedly being miraculous.)
Source: https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ...
Every energy source is the perfect energy source, if you choose to ignore its problems. Just like every operating system is the perfect operating system if you overlook its flaws.
Messing with atoms is better than burning fossil fuels, but let's not pretend that it's perfect.
not been reported so irresponsibly.
"Blame the messenger" is an ancient, and irresponsible game.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/BN-800-running-o...
> BN-800 running on 60% MOX
> The reactor core itself was refuelled and is now using 60% mixed uranium-plutonium oxide fuel, supplied by TVEL and manufactured at its Zheleznogorsk site. The plutonium for this was produced from uranium during the operation of other nuclear power plants and recovered from the used fuel assemblies through reprocessing.
No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy on day-to-day scale, let alone seasonally.
Please don't let the brainwashing gets to you and inform yourself.
The actual power from your outlet is going to be the same no matter which company you buy from, but it's still buying "green power" in a more meaningful way than a zero-sum relabeling.
Since this thread is about Germany, and not everyone on HN reads threads in scope, it's worth pointing out that this is not universal.
In most of Texas, for example, the wind blows most fiercely — and regularly — at night. Solar power contributes to the grid during the day, and wind power picks up that generation loss when the sun goes down. I once saw a graph of it from a utility regulator published in a newspaper.
Not every geography is so lucky in this manner. But because this is the global internet, it's important to point out that solar and wind aren't exclusively daytime sources on most of the planet.
What Germany needs is a source of wind that works at night. I've read that Spain imports energy from North Africa. Perhaps a more robust link in that direction is the solution.
that is bullshit. also besides that germany is small compared to other countries and dense, there is no time of the day where its nowhere windy nor sunny. so at the moment there is just no need to purchase green energy certificates for the bigger providers, they can either buy power from other providers or they can produce their green power. and also it does not matter, since if you need 3kW and they can't deliver green power at the moment they will deliver more green power later, thats how it usually works.
> No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy on day-to-day scale, let alone seasonally.
also bullshit. it has nothing to do with cost, more with there is no storage for everybody.
most providers that offer 100% green power actually do generate the amount of power in green that you use (that is their premise) of course they can't create different power lines, thus it's a mix.
(in germany it's forbidden to mark your product as "100% green power" if you buy certificates, of course you can write it some where but if your contract states it, it would be illegal, but there is a difference between contract and marketing, of course... Energiewirtschaftsgesetz - EnWG §42)
In a lot of countries customers are billed significantly less during the night than during the day for electricity, so the incentives already exist to make it financially worthwhile if a home battery pack that can provide a days typical use can be installed at a reasonable cost.
This would substantially smooth out base load requirements and mean that renewables could make up substantially more of the energy mix.
Can you explain why, please? I'm genuinely interested. I don't understand how this would be anything other than rich prepper niche market.
Installing batteries in all homes is going to be more expensive than grid storage, since you will need to pay more in total installation costs rather than installing ginormous grid batteries (or reversible dams, where feasible) in bulk.
At scale the costs could come down quite substantially given that the basic chemistry is iron, salt, water and little else - at which point it's a substantial financial boon to the customer given that they could see an up to 50% reduction in their energy costs (going by tariffs in my own region) to compensate.
The net effect would be the same but might be cheaper overall.
This is what I think the real benefit is, and also why I think we'll see both. I don't see the political will or financial commitment materialising for large scale energy storage in the short term because it's an upfront cost to a taxpayer whichever way you slice it.
Individuals are free to self-fund their own battery pack installations though, and can then decide if the upfront cost is worth the reduction in rates to shift energy usage to non-peak times. Once that sufficiently takes off it becomes easier to sell the public at large on the idea, and will also drive down costs, at which point I could see wide-scale grid storage becoming thing. At that point, renewables are scalable to almost 100% of energy usage (assuming vehicles and industry transition away from combustion machinery).
Iron flow sounds great though. Thanks for mentioning, I'll look into it.
On the other hand, if there is no government mandate, or if customer demand for renewable energy exceeds that mandate, then it provides a profit incentive for the utility to install/purchase more renewable energy.
They stopped, publicly reasoning that the proceeds from selling certs could be used to build their own additional renewable generation. I suspect it was just leaving too much money on the table, though.
Of course, even a 100% renewable supplier needs to buy from the market to smooth out peaks in energy consumption for their customer base.
(disclaimer: i work for such a renewable energy supplier)
I guess my prices are actually a little over $0.10 and a watt over a year is a little under 10,000Wh as shown in your calculations, so those offset to make the estimate even more accurate (than necessary).
With the way the world is today, we'll all be paying SF prices soon.
https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-...
These days the price is different for every hour, in near future they move to 1/4 hour pricing.
About 10% of finnish household contracts are market price contracts. Most of the contracts are kinda continuous (price changes every 12 months) or fixed (e.g. a two year fixed price contract).
I actually made a little calendar subscription service[1] to help our household plan when to run the dishwasher, drier etc. and we've saved about 50% this quarter despite the rising electricity costs. You can usually tell when it's cheap/almost free too just by sticking your head out the window, since it's mostly always the cheapest on especially windy days.
We buy energy from any Finnish seller with contract separate from transfer of electricity (a natural monopoly).
In the cheaper public utility districts here, the per kWh price is only double those rates, with no time of day pricing or similar shenanigans.
Our contract in Sweden is NordPool market price + 0,006 USD/kWh. Typical electricity prices in Sweden is anything from 0,001 USD/kWh to 0.5 USD/kWh, it varies widely day by day. This is what enables people to be able to save by using electricity when it's almost free.
Just for my curiosity though, Where did your 1Eur come from? The prices were >20ct for 10 years now. Or do you calculate without taxes and stuff?