Germany's Renewable Plan Faces Popular Resistance

diegocg writes "Germany has outlined the details of the new 800km (497mi) high voltage power link that will transport renewable power from the north to the industrial south. It is part of the Energiewende plan to replace nuclear power and most other non-renewable energy sources with renewable sources in the next decades. However, the power link is facing a problem: popular resistance from affected neighborhoods."

"popular resistance"?

[Mr. Slippery]

TFA article does not use the term "popular resistance", but properly labels it "not-in-my-backyard" resistance. TFA notes that "Germanyâ(TM)s Energiewende, or energy transformation, has enjoyed widespread citizen support.".

Submitter and editors either do not know what "popular resistance" means, or deliberately spun this post.

Not exactly

[timeOday]

"Germany's Renewable Plan Faces Popular Resistance" implies that Germans in general are opposing renewables. In fact it is a simple case of objection to a particular development project by the specific people who live in its path. It's no different than if somebody were building a shopping mall or a road; some people are adversely impacted and they want to be compensated or block the development altogether.

Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this!

[The Grim Reefer]

Um, let's compare to the US, shall we? Germany, 2013, 810 million tons CO2, 607 million MW h / yr. US, 2010, 5,369 million tons CO2, 3,886 million MW h / yr. Germany is more efficient in power per CO2 emissions.

Don't feel bad, though, because whoever wrote the summary is also ignorant -- it is the north, not the south, that is most industrial.

I don't know where you got your numbers, but here's what is on Wikipedia for CO2 [wikipedia.org] And GWh generated. [wikipedia.org] Let's at least compare the same year for each country.

• US: CO2 6,750,000 / 4,256,100 GWh=1.59 tons of CO2 per GWh
• Germany: CO2-810,000 / 617,600 GWh=1.31 tons of CO2 per GWh

It's certainly better than the US, but considering this big push the Germany is in for clean energy and the US is only half-ass moving in that direction, I'm a little surprised it is as close as it is.

France is on the better side of this by far at: CO2-370,000 / 560,500 GWh=0.66 tons of CO2 per GWh

On the other side of the scale you have India: CO2-7,440,000 / 1,053,900 GWh= 7.06 tones of CO2 per GWh.

Re:NIMBY

[whistlingtony]

Logical Fallacy: burden of proof. "Until someone proves hormesis wrong, I believe its true." Well, I believe that eating unicorn flesh is keeping me young, and until someone proves me wrong, I'm going to believe that too. I'd reeaaaally like to see this properly done study showing that a little bit of radiation is good for you. The old Natural Philosophers used to drink mercury too....

The rest of your post is just one logical fallacy after another, and a giant stereotyping of environmentals, pretty much so you can bash on them. If you were interested in defending nuculear power, you'd do that. Instead you spend your time bashing environmentalists, which leads me to believe that's what you're actually trying to do..... Perhaps I'm wrong. Either way.... https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c... [yourlogicalfallacyis.com] Look 'em up.

Re:Do what the Swedes do

[Anonymous Coward]

I have worked in Germany on energy grid connection projects both onshore and offshore.
Two of the very few international companies that have the capability to do what is needed are ABB (Sweden) and Siemens (Germany).

Let's just say that laying HVDC cables onshore and offshore is a different beast. And we are talking about the big ones here, with integral effects on net stability.

Underground cables of this dimension are unpopular. Securing the rights to lay down this kind of length is really hard, you need contracts with almost all land owners and deowning for others (which is a bitch of course). Then, you need to do the actual laying on a tight schedule for every land owner individually. Anyone who has worked on this with (doesn't matterr if Swedish, German or Danish company doing it) knows this is impossible.
Another issue is that digging up earth is quite often easily more regulated and time consuming for environmental issues than building a few masts.
You think you could plan this all out, but you just can't.
Then, there's the issue of cable maintenance and net stability for these "backbone" grid connections. There's a lot of clever shit available, but if the whole system isn't n-asmuchaspossible, everyone is really, really unsure about the project. Germany has excellent net stability, almost no blackouts. The population really has no tolerance for power outages...
Combine that with the challenges of the Energiewende (Conventional energy is now close to unprofitable, nuclear in the south is shut down, renewable is only relatively stablle in the north)...

Shit ain't easy