If Germany were most motivated by energy independence they would not have closed so many nuclear power plants. There are in fact lots of decisions that politicians make that are inconsistent with aiming for strategic benefits but are consistent with an earnest (and sometimes quixotic) concern for the environment. If the UK was so bent on energy independence we would have made more progress on heat pumps. Yet gas boilers (lifespan: 15 years) are still being fitted today. In truth, governments thing about energy security a bit, they think about green stuff a bit and they aren't always very effective agents of change...
I also think you're not right to imply that energy production largely happens as a result of government direction. In fact, energy prices are high at the moment and the prospect of profit drives development of green energy a great deal (not that subsidies don't have an effect as well).
To be honest (and I hope I'm not straying into a personal attack here - that's not intended) I think your viewpoint sounds clever because it is cynical. Cynical views - especially the attribution of an ulterior motive - usually sound clever. But I think your post is at best partly right and perhaps even mostly wrong. Political realism is a drug to take only in small doses.
"A regulation on co-ordinated demand reduction measures for gas: This targets a 15% voluntary reduction in EU gas demand between 1 August 2022 and 31 March 2023, compared with its five-year average. The European Commission has adopted the European Gas Demand Reduction Plan with best practices and guidance for member states to help them reduce gas demand."
https://www.iea.org/reports/how-to-avoid-gas-shortages-in-th...
"In March 2022, the European Commission and International Energy Agency presented joint plans to reduce reliance on Russian energy, reduce Russian gas imports by two thirds within a year, and completely by 2030.[15][16]
In April 2022, the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said "the era of Russian fossil fuels in Europe will come to an end".[17] On 18 May 2022, the European Union published plans to end its reliance on Russian oil, natural gas and coal by 2027."
"A fully open study from Zero Lab at Princeton University published in July 2022 and based on the GenX framework concluded that reliance on Russia gas could end by October 2022 under the three core scenarios they investigated – which ranged from high coal usage to accelerated renewables deployment.[63][64][needs update] All three cases would result in falling greenhouse gas emissions, relative to business as usual."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022–2023_Russia–European_Unio...
Then there's coal, oil, and gas. Reducing these is the mammoth task in terms of energy self-sufficiency and independency. Nuclear was marginal at best. France will be a different (very problematic) story…
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
Most road transport, building heating and many industrial processes use energy that isn't electricity.
> Nuclear energy has only contributed to 10% of electricity generation in Germany - not to the total energy supply.
That number isn't correct, which I pointed out. In both cases we were talking about electricity. I don't see the added value of your comment.
2022: 9.9%
The primary energy consumption of electricity from nuclear power was even lower.
At the same time, the risk of war has been downplayed ever since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Read into that what you will, but it sounds very geopolitical to me.
Currently, sure. But it's possible to load enough nuclear fuel from Australia on a rowboat to power Germany for 10 years (that would be about a suitcase).
The important event was Chernobyl in 1986, from then on it was pretty much clear that Germany would leave nuclear power behind (and this was the Green party's main agenda, and what made them 'big' during the 90's).
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sanction-gerhard-schr-de...
Not defending Schröder in any way, just pointing at some discurs issues.
If an event has never happened, and the risks have been adequately mitigated, no, I don’t see the need to worry.
The fact that this is a very common German word should tell you something about the complicated relationship of the Germans to nuclear energy ;)
While Schroeder might have had his own interests in mind and eventually became Putin's useful idiot, the shutdown of nuclear power was a popular opinion in Germany at least as far back as Chernobyl and then reinforced by Fukushima.
The day-to-day idle chatter of your local representative is really irrelevant over the time horizons of a green transition. This is cultural ideological wash. If there were no security or economic basis for green transition, it would fail upon contact with any non-trivial security or economic issue.
Consider that the UK fired up coal plants when energy prices rose too much. Did it really ask the public to be colder for awhile? Of course not. Ours do not suffer, but theirs (be it india, china, africa...) well they ought not use coal that causes climate change!
The idea that green transition could happen for "values" reasons is ahistorical nonsense -- the values of all countries are the prosperity and the survival of their nation, and anything which threatens this will be handled ruthlessly.
It's rather dangerous to hold any stock in the idle ramblings of politicians speaking under no material duress -- they will say anything and promise anything, as will any of us, when it's cheap to do so. This is hot air. A kind of hot air the rest of the world now understands the west produces with abandon, it is now clear to everyone outside our countries what sort of propaganda we prefer. And it is this sort (moralising about values in the summer, ruthless hypocrisy in the winter).
So my comment here is to point out, to those who can take a longer view of these issues than that printed in newspapers, that there are macro forces at work preserving the green transition -- which is quite reassuring.
In the world we're entering, security competition is returning and this will be a significant drive of war-time-like funding behind energy transition. This is great news.
You're no doubt right that much of the current political class is unaware and unfit to transition their thinking fast enough to handle this; but they will. Most politicians of the last 200 years thought this way quite naturally.
That said, I think energy independence is a really major concern but one that few countries actually do something about. I personally believe Merkel shut down the nuclear reactors due to popular appeal more than anything to her own party’s benefit.
Energy independence is extremely important. During the height of winter 2022, Russia was pressuring Europe to abandon Ukraine and with Russia being Europe’s major supplier of natural gas, the upcoming cold winter meant that Russia had a lot of leverage, being able to force Europe to decide between freezing or weakening support for Ukraine. In the end, the US decided to ship an exceptional amount of natural gas to Europe (over 74% of natural gas produced in the US went to Europe during that time!) as a major foreign policy move in pursuit of its main goal of keeping Ukraine independent by ensuring continuing Europe support. Unfortunately, it had a direct cost on me and everyone because my natural gas bill during those months was literally the highest it has ever been.
Apparently later Gazprom Germania planned some actual sabotage that was prevented.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-raided-gazprom-in-germany...
https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/putin-gas-russland-deutschland-...
To keep a 30 year old nuclear power plant safe you will sure see time of maintenance increasing, thus reducing its output. A 30 year old solar panel? Take it off your roof, recycle the old one, put a new one on and we can be sure it will be more efficient. Just this simplicity when replacing panels makes it a no-brainer. Granted, the blades of wind turbines are still not being recycled, but they slowly get there.
But I think you're wrong on one point - going green isn't an economic hit in the scheme of things - even not counting the possibly incredibly high costs of climate change into the future (food insecurity, more frequent and more severe weather disasters, etc.) - renewable generation is cheap, and storage is also getting cheaper every year. Energy efficiency improvements have also seen demand trending down even as populations increase and there is a push towards electrification. Meanwhile nuclear has always been pretty expensive, and coal and gas prices have been fairly high in recent years. With some demand management, more distributed storage, new battery technologies, economies of scale etc., the cost of highly renewable grids is not likely to be a big deal.
We just need better/cheaper storage solutions, as a $10k Tesla battery just doesn't stack up.
Back in the early 2010s, it was very heavily subsidised for sure, my father managed to get in then and even with a system half the size of mine he hasn't paid for a power bill since... The system was a lot more expensive to install per kilowatt then but the feed-in tariff he gets is insane and is still locked in for another five years or so...
Both processes running off a renewable grid is a great step forward.
Though, I suspect, most of that shift comes from the US now being an energy exporter because of shale. If that had been the case earlier, it seems likely the iraq war wouldnt have happened, in that there would be no motivation for the US to 'improve' the region.
It also seems likely that US support for Israel may end with increasing shale and increasing green energy. It's hard to image the severe consequences the US has faced for support will outweigh the value of having a stronghold in the region.
Perhaps Israel might sense this waning US dependence on the ME, and this may be part of its prior attempt to normalise relations with SA, etc. It has always struck me that one of the precipitating issues 'in the air' for Hamas was likely a concern for israeli-arab friendships forming.
If that were to happen, presumably the arab-world sentiment about israel could shift against them, and that would be a catastrophe for Palestinian interests.
It's quite plausible then that much of what we see at the moment is partly a result of US shale plus long term concerns about green transition.
The Suni (Saudi arabia) vs Shia (Iran) divide currently dominates power politics in the middle east. This is also what motivates Israel's foreign policy (and also Iran's and Hamas' actions). Since the start of the war in Afghanistan, the US has been trying to excert military influence in the region without investing either troops or money. Afghanistan shows how that tends to work out. US influence on the region is at a historic low both economically and politically.
The widthdrawl from afganistan wouldntve happened without shale, america would be giving up a overwhelming order-imposing capacity in the region to induce chaos; that wouldnt make sense if it needed the ME as it did in the 2000s.
It's not entirely clear how relationships would exist in the ME if it wasnt the site of great power resource competition. The superstructure of the current setup, indeed the borders of the countries we are talking about, are drawn by these issues.
You are indeed agreeing with me when you say that part of what's happening is waning US "influence" (really: interest) -- the US has had, since obama, an explicit ME withdrawl policy that it's never been able to fully execute.
What we are, indeed, seeing are the effects of that withdrawl over time.
I'd love to see such a plot :D One would have to come up with some proxy-metrics to stand in (one shouldn't use explicit axis labels though, that would destroy the nice vibe of having such a plot). There might be dozens of plausible versions of such a plot that might even differ enough to allow any claim one wants.
https://www.ranken-energy.com/index.php/products-made-from-p...
https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2023/03/22/chinas-economic-secur...
The other 4 reasons are smog over cities, growing political leverage of the domestic renewables industry, climate change, and the improving learning curve making it financially pragmatic.
I think this provides a framework for how to market renewables to a domestic conservative political audience. It's cheaper, yes, but primarily it's good for national security and sovereignty. It's even better for individual sovereignty if we're talking about individual household solar, whereas oil and gas makes the individual beholden to the state or corporations (or worse, a foreign hostile state).
Only if you are off-grid, otherwise without the grid you have no power unless you get a setup that uses an inverter that is of an entirely different class than the ones commonly used. And then you need a substantial amount of local storage as well and you're going to have an absolutely minimal energy budget in the winter.
For grid independence you need to have either multiple redundant sources of energy and a backup generator (which consumes a fossil fuels), an absolutely massive battery (far larger than is economically feasible) or a grid hookup.
I've reduced the energy consumption of our house about as far as it will go without seriously affecting quality of life, and yet it won't go down below 500 W draw on average, so about 10 KWh on a daily basis. On an annual basis we're 7.7MWh surplus but in winter we are net consumers. Starting March 1st we are in the plus on a daily basis and we could - if we had a battery, which we do not - be neutral. But we're still heating with gas and that leaves four months to cover or about 120 days.
During those 120 days we consume 4 times 350 KWh, so 1400 KWh or thereabouts and produce about 700 KWh with the biggest gap near the solstice in December (due to the very short days). It is simply not feasible to bridge that gap with batteries and we also consume about 450 cubic meters of gas per month in that period, which for a house this type and size is actually pretty good.
So I don't buy the 'personal autonomy' argument unless you want to cut your winter consumption to ~30% of your summer consumption, set your house to 14 degree room temperature (in many households that would be grounds for divorce) or get a 500 KWh battery system, which would set you back approximately $300K at the best prices that I can find today. I don't think that's worth it.
And it's in much of Europe where a village or a few villages being without power for a day or more is headline news.
No, we were way ahead of our efficient house here in Europe because we were able to design that efficiency right into the structure. That house sipped power and the heater ran off the damaged trees on the property that we cleaned out annually.
I kept pretty careful logs of consumption before pulling the trigger on going off-grid and it's interesting to see how the reduction in consumption factored as much into that as the increase in renewable energy. Once the windmill was added the generator basically never ran again.
Everything depends on where you live. But for any country more than a few degrees off the equator that's the reality.
> Regarding personal autonomy, I wouldn't treat it as this binary thing.
That's fair, but 'personal autonomy' for 70% of the year and utterly dependent on existing infrastructure and fossil fuels for the remainder is still bad. But better than 100% dependency, sure.
> If you're survivalist minded, solar is your only hope at any level of independence, even if it's not 24/7 autonomy.
Depends on where you live ;)
Seriously: I engage in engineering, not in satisfying paranoia and 'any level of independence' starts with ruthlessly curbing your energy budget below that which most Western countries' inhabitants would consider acceptable living standards. And even if I personally would be ok with that I don't see how I would make that decision for myself while at the same time not make that decision for those around me who depend on me for their needs. In a vacuum you can make that argument, but IRL people don't live in a vacuum.
No man is an island.
In an extreme situation when you have no grid for a week then yes, having to slum it by only heating one room.
Every house having 50kwh would allow massive grid smoothing when wind and solar are fluctuating. Just one day of storage would allow a lot of arbitrage, but when power is cheap overnight and run solely off battery when it’s expensive.
With solar panels that can fill it up daily (eg. blackstart)?
So what you say was the case 20 years ago but no longer. Energy supply-wise, U.S. does not care about Middle East at all, and Western world overall, only somewhat cares, but it's not a major concern, not like it was in 1970s let alone not like it was in 2000s.
Among these goods are solar panels
That the US and the UKndecide to bomb the Houthis over this, and escalate the whole already FUBAR situation is not the best idea of you ask me.
Oil/coal/etc. is distributed 'unhelpfully' for western and asian interests, and it's use once. So the countries which have it must be permanently available for oil trade. Whereas with green energy, barring the provision of somewhat renewable metal supply, states do not need particularly complex diplomatic relationships.
The reason for the world's attention now being drawn to the middle east isn't as simple as Hamas. Europe needs trade open from the middle east, and it needs oil. This is at the heart of trying to balance interests in the region wrt israel.
Both china, us and europe are overwhelmingly against any disruption in the region which is why it hasnt spiraled into a full-blown regional conflict yet.
Issues such as these play strongly on the minds of states as they try to transition. China's "going green" because its a net importer, and very worried about its dependence on russia and the middle east.
This, I think, should give us hope. Whilst going green is an economic hit, it's a massive security boost. And states almost always trade wealth for security (, since, in the end, without secrutiy your wealth will disappear).