Spoils the landscape image view is apparently a valid argument to block their construction, so you just need enough signatures every time a new construction site gets announced.
So I think we can 100% blame “renewables”.
> I don't think they've stopped this campaign even after it ended in catastrophe either. It's certainly still going on in the UK - for example just yesterday I saw a BBC article telling people that building more natural gas production here is pointless because wind and solar are cheaper, presumably based on the raw per-MWh number with no storage to fill in the gaps when it doesn't produce. That is not a useful replacement for natural gas at all.
To find out why we didn't roll out cheaper renewables, insulate our homes better and use less imported fossil fuels after the last gas price crisis.
And you can go back in time, to the first Ukraine gas crisis, and back through all the other crisis and find the same kind of response from certain people, who basically had their opinions created for them with fossil fuel dollars.
2014 : "Germany’s energy policy is expensive, harmful and short-sighted"
> 2014-03-17 Germany is a showcase for how-not-to in green energy. It is pumping hundreds of billions of euros into subsidies for ineffective and unreliable solar panels and wind turbines that leave poor people struggling to pay their electricity bills and do almost nothing for the climate.
President Carter told people they'd need to insulate their homes and drive more efficient cars in 1977 for example, which was a poor political move in a country run by fossil fuel interests.
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/19/archives/transcript-of-ca...
> One choice, of course, is to continue doing what we have been doing before. We can drift along for a few more years.
> Our consumption of oil would keep going up every year. Our cars would continue to be too large and inefficient. Three‐quarters of them would continue to carry only one person—the driver—while our public transportation system continues to decline. We can delay insulating our homes, and they will continue to lose about 50 percent of their heat in waste.
> We can continue using scarce oil and natural gas to generate electricity, and continue wasting two‐thirds of their fuel value in the process.
Except in France where they went all in on nuclear and ended up exactly as screwed as they are in Germany.
(Yes I know they have the fancy new EPR reactor under construction in Flamanville but that is not ready yet)
If France had kept the rate up of getting a new reactor up and running every 1 to 3 years like they did during the peak I don't think they would have this issue now. Also both France and Germany are at this moment heavily being propped up by Swedish nuclear power (and hydro).
> (Yes I know they have the fancy new EPR reactor under construction in Flamanville but that is not ready yet)
Wikipedia says: In December 2007, construction of the unit itself began. This was expected to last 54 months, with commissioning planned for 2012
They've been building that specific reactor for nearly 2 decades, so it's not for lack of trying and rather puts a different spin on their lack of nuclear at the moment.
If they were instead building some known/built before reactor at the same time the risk would not be so great. As with solar or wind you don't just build one single wind mill or panel but instead multiple (and hopefully at multiple different sites/projects) to minimize the risk of one of the projects going bad. (this is pretty basic risk management stuff)
Basically it all boils down to the "France is not really building much nuclear anymore" category. If you are only going to get one reactor to build every decade or two you want to make sure it is the biggest most advanced one you can get a permit for to maximize production but at the same time you maximize the risks.
Even now France are spending a fortune on new reactors and it still will not be enough to make up for the ones that will age out.
They're officially hoping wind and solar will make up the difference.
Im pretty sure the green lobby in Germany is due an apology from the nuke fans. This all-in on nuclear approach wouldnt have worked any better for Germany than it did for France it would just have soaked up cash.
> They're officially hoping wind and solar will make up the difference.
You better if you don't build anything else. If I was only building X I for sure would hope that would be the solution. Hoping that the solution would be Y would be kind of self defeating.
edit: Looking into this more looks like most Swedish nuclear plants are also owned by the state (though Vattenfall). Is Finland the only country with actual privately owned nuclear power plants in EU?
Nuclear power simply cant exist without lavish subsidies.
Which one? Even Olkiluoto (OL3 with its decade+ delays included) is doing just fine financially.
> Nuclear power simply cant exist without lavish subsidies.
Point me to these subsidies in Finland.
It is the wind and solar that is getting lavish subsidies here (well used to they are now finally going away slowly bringing actual market economy back into the picutre)
edit:
> One is Soviet in origin
How does this matter? VVER-440 is actually a solid design and has been in use for decades without any issues in Finland (and many other countries). These days all the parts and upgrades are sourced from the west. Also a western standard safety vessel and all other safety features were upgraded when it was built as we Finns did not really trust Soviet safety design (as in it was never turned on with standard Soviet safety systems installed as is)
Areva (the French state) took a 5.5 billion euro loss building Olkiluotu.
>How does this matter?
Pretty much all nuclear power is an offshoot of the military, but the Soviet Union's civilian nuclear power industry was a little more obviously an offshoot of its military.
With Vattenfall the same is true but is less obvious. Sweden essentially took out an option on having nuclear weapons while still adhering to the terms of the NPT.
That is Arevas problem not the buyer/operator of the reactor (TVO). If you sell something at fixed cost then you sell something at fixed cost. Sometimes contracts go bad (and TVO has come to the help of Areva to the tune of extra ~2.5 billion euros)
It was Areva who bid really low to win the contract. So low that Atomstroyexport, Siemens, Westinghouse, Framatome and GE never bothered to put their final bid in (Areva was the only one to put a bid on in the final round). If you intentionally underbid then be ready to eat some losses. And TVO made sure during the bidding process that there were enough insurances to ensure that the project would be finished even if it went overbudged/got delayed. Basically TVO made a really good deal.
If I made solar panels and sold a project to build a solar park at 100 million and it ended up costing 200 million to build due to MY (the builder/contractor) fuck ups how actually is it the fault of the buyer? You eat the loss as the builder and try to learn something from it.
> Pretty much all nuclear power is an offshoot of the military, but the Soviet Union's civilian nuclear power industry was a little more obviously an offshoot of its military.
And microchips are an offshoot of military weapon projects (getting small/light enough computers to fit fighter planes). Just because something started with military use/funding/backing does not mean we should not use it.
before macron and europe (and the european electricity market) our policies made us a nuclear powerhouse. we re not anymore
Can someone translate this narrative into actual numbers? It sounds like a political soundbite but to those not following the problem there’s gotta be more to “exactly”
So it is easy to look in the middle of summer and say "Look, half of France's reactors are offline! It is obviously not working out! They should have been green like us and use lignite and Russian gas!!!"
France also messed up when they decided to postpone some maintenance due to COVID (not sure how that was a valid reason) and they have a lot to do this time, so it is taking longer than usual.
France has nuclear and hydro, while Germany as is much discussed, has coal and renewables.
Coal is of course bad (they even imported some from Russia), but renewables seem to have been the smart choice and what everyone, France included, will be moving to.
(Germany probably uses more gas for manufacturing things too)
Hardly a smart choice and one that has been generating huge emissions, especially compared to France.
Germany really only kicked off Energiewende in the early 2000s.
Germany is still a massive emitter because of this, in addition to being cornered because of its reliance on Russia and decision to cut it off without alternative in place.
> for completely different reasons.
Main reason being strategic energy independence. Something Germany is suddenly being reminded is important. Low emissions have come as an added benefit.
Choices were made...
Because it's a lie and it's always been a lie. The nuclear power stations that were turned off contributed a relatively small amount compared to solar and wind added to the mix. And they cost more.
It's just that turning them off made certain groups (Vattenfall, American government) furious. This was nothing to do with environmentalism or energy independence but led to a lot of propaganda about both.
The supposed environmentalists who spat venom at the German greens for "not turning off coal plants fast enough" were not in the slightest bit bothered by Poland next door not turning off their coal plants at all.
>Main reason being strategic energy independence. Something Germany is suddenly being reminded is important.
And because France was unwilling to shoulder the eye watering costs of maintaining and replacing their aging nuclear plants they're in exactly the same position. Instead of $3 billion wind farms with a 65% load factor theyve got $15 billion nuclear plants with a 75% load factor. What a win for nuclear power.
The only people who this hasnt dawned on yet is the people who lapped up the anti german nuclear propaganda. The hole currently filled with natural gas that France has dug for itself because of nuclear power's insane cost is something that they simply dont think about. Nuclear propaganda always avoids mentioning cost.
Had Germany had another 6-7 years to prepare theyd be in a better position to withstand the gas being cut off then France instead of roughly the same. Their dependence was going down, France's up.
Germany still uses a lot of coal and gas and has high emissions as a consequence. It prefers to use oil rather than keeping nuclear plants open. Its reliance on Russia and then decision to cut it off without alternative is hurting hard. I believe these are all facts, not lies.
That all sounds rather disastrous to me.
This is not Germany-bashing, either. I live in the UK so I know what a really disastrous energy policy looks like.
Which doesn't prove Putin was influencing these policy directions, but it sure makes you wonder.
[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/putin-bl...
You genuinely think Putin tried to save the EU from this "mistake" of replacing fossil fuels with renewables?
These are people who don't know the difference between a watt and a joule.
So, another way of looking at it is - Germany is still producing most of its electricity from non-renewable sources. Adding nuclear, it's still ~40% from coal and gas [0]. So again, what surplus?
In contrast, France is producing ~70% of its electricity just from nuclear, with another ~19% from renewables.
Note that either way, the major energy expenditure that ties all of these countries to Russian gas is not electricity, it is heating.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/romania?country=DE...
The whole problem with renewables is the temporal variation and lack of large scale storage.
Producing hydrogen (and potentially converting that into more traditional gasses) is a perfectly viable solution, but of course such infrastructure can only be stood up over years and decades. It's not relevant for this winter.
> They found the former has a considerably lower Capex and a payback time of only two years. [compared with Lead Acid batteries]
I wouldn't thought that a Gravity Battery would've been more efficient than compressed air: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery
Also TIL about geothermal heat pump energy storage: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-09-geothermal-ideal-energy-... :
Germany is in the process to switch over to electricity for heating, too. There are a lot of incentitives to install new heatpumps for example.
Edit: Having a mostly renewable grid with backup coal/gas/nuclear is much much easier than having an entirely renewable grid.
Additionally in the winter we have complementary wind production from our windfarms.
For ~9 months of the year. For winter you need some other form of production that you can turn on at demand.
For example a panel in Helsinki produces less than 1% of its nominal output in the darkest months of winter.
edit: Just go and look at https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/sol... if you check December of 2021 you can see that the avg output was ~2MWh/h with solar 395MW of capacity installed at the end of 2021.
It has a much smaller molecule.
And sure, having about 3x renewable generation and consuming the excess generation when it's above the demand, into producing green hydrogen, is about what the longer-term plan for electricity production looks like. There will still be times when renewables will be insufficient, on calm winter days, but infrequently, and then electricity can be produced back from that green hydrogen, but overall there will be surplus, resulting in hydrogen replacing the one produced currently from fossil fuels, for steel production and other industrial uses.
I don't think they've stopped this campaign even after it ended in catastrophe either. It's certainly still going on in the UK - for example just yesterday I saw a BBC article telling people that building more natural gas production here is pointless because wind and solar are cheaper, presumably based on the raw per-MWh number with no storage to fill in the gaps when it doesn't produce. That is not a useful replacement for natural gas at all.