Germany's Renewable Plan Faces Popular Resistance 176
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."
NIMBY (Score:3, Insightful)
Strikes again!
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Funny)
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Funny)
"Nicht in meinem Hinterhof"
That's what your mother said last night!
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..so you're implying that "Hinterhof" is what the kids are calling it these days?
...and here I thought that was Hasselhoff..... (evil grin)
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What?
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically all those environmentalists love nature. Now Nuclear Power is bad for nature, all that radiated stuff and so they don't want it anywhere near them and are all for solar and wind power. Now all these solar panels and wind towers are bad for nature, they take a lot of space where plants could grow, stand out which harms that nice mountainous skyline and of course they harm birds, so they don't want it anywhere near them. Good the politicians say lets have all that stuff somewhere where nobody lives and move the electricity through half Germany, great except this requires more power lines and these take a lot of space, harm the skyline, give off electro magnetic waves, etc. so you do not want them anywhere near you. I hope you see the pattern.
Right now we use more coal power to replace the nuclear power plants, because the coal plants where already there and every environmentally "good" solution gets blocked by environmentalists protecting the nature near them.
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Until someone proves hormesis wrong, I believe its true.
Consider 1 or 2 aspirin a day is PROVEN to be better than zero. One hundred aspirin a day will eventually kill you.
Hormesis means, a little radiation is good, while too much is bad.
Except that the NRC, EPA, and other government agencies involved with the multiple aspects of nuclear stuff blatantly disagree.
Lets separate two things:
- Small radiation releases even from nuclear power plants are good (alpha, beta, gamma, neutron radiation)
- Releases of rad
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Informative)
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:NIMBY (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe hormesis is true from this:
I was born and raised in Vitoria-ES-Brazil, an hour drive away from Guarapari-ES-Brazil, yep, that city on Pandora's Promise, that shows up to 30 uSv/s on the geiger counter.
I spent all my summers from age 9-19 either in Guarapari or Marataizes (both monazite sand beaches). And I'm not an isolated case. I have many hundreds of family, friends and acquaintances that did exactly the same. I know dozens of people that lived their entire lifes in Guarapari.
My mom spent a good portion of her last 25 summers doing the same. She's 64, and is extremely healthy. She knows a couple hundred people her age that did the same, only a few had cancer, like 2 or 3% cancer rate.
In Guarapari alone, tens of thousands of people are subject to at least 1 uSv/s 24x7, or 30000mSv yearly. That's many thousands of times maximum recommended yearly exposure.
Studies show Guarapari cancer rates within Brazilian average.
Studies also show that people in Denver and Salt Lake City have less cancer than in sea level cities.
Airline cabin crew (pilots and flight attendants) are subject to 2uSv/s exposure while at cruising altitudes.
Please show me studies with elevated cancer levels among airline crew members.
Guarapari is also know as "cidade saude" or "city of health", it's sands are known to have healing properties, people with chronic diseases go there for their healing powers.
What do you think are in the waters of those hot waters Franklin Delano Roosevelt treated himself in Georgia (hot springs), that's right, also radioactive waters. There are hundreds of similar cases.
There's a nuclear reactor in the UK that is nicknamed a shining reactor, because it glows in the night for neutron radiation that is continuously emitted by the reactor, where are the cancers from that ?
There are a few videos on youtube that show some of this information.
The data is concrete. I challenge to be proved wrong.
Finally, please show me cancer studies that show workers from modern nuclear power plants have more cancers that average. I think you will find they have less cancer than average.
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There's definitely a lot of evidence that low exposure is not dangerous (beneficial...the jury is out). A lot of the wildlife around Chernobyl had dramatically recovered despite high levels of radiation. I don't think this is unusual -- lots of places on Earth see elevated background radiation and we have a history of cosmic events. Most life probably has some yet-to-be-discovered adaptation mechanism.
We know that high levels of radiation are dangerous but statem
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I know exactly what LNT means. And it's BS. Search hormesis in youtube, and you'll find a few medical PhDs defending it.
If the max recommended exposure of 1 mSv/year was anything credible, Guarapari would have very elevated cancer levels, off the scale. The workers in a nuclear power plant that get the most radiation get a tiny fraction of what Guarapari inhabitants get.
I didn't say 1% out of one million people get more cancer than usual in Guarapari, quite the opposite. A typical quote is 30% of us will ge
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Flies into the face of real world data. It's in direct conflict with people that make a living out of flying at 30 thousand feet and higher (lots of cosmic rays due to thinner atmosphere). It's in direct conflict with every large population that lives on top of large monazite sand resources (large alpha emitters).
We are continuously exposed to lots of radioactive Radon gas and it's decay, it seeps from underground everywhere (generated by decay of thorium in the earths core, then seep towards the surface).
I
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A lot of the wildlife around Chernobyl had dramatically recovered despite high levels of radiation.
Actually, all that Chernobyl's wildlife proves is this:
It is beneficial to wildlife populations to not exist in proximity to humans.
Given that fact, the recovery and increas in Chernobyl's wildlife becomes suddenly very, very uninteresting. Add to that the fact that the average life expectancy of somewhere around 90% of species living in the wild is below 20 years, and you get while doing longterm exposure studies on them is also kinda moot.
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Coal kills hundreds of thousands yearly. Any normally operating coal power plant (and the mine its supplied from) is a constantly occurring environmental disaster.
A Chernobyl type accident won't happen again, ever. The reactor had no secondary containment vessel, if it had one, it would have been much like three mile island. The reactor would have been a total loss, but there would have been no deaths, maybe a few cancers.
Even then, if you consider every mutation, every cancer as a death, Chernobyl is about
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He was describing the phenomenon commonly known as NIMBY.
At least they are better than the BANANA environmentalists.
Wrong (Score:3)
It has nothing to do with nature. I have had a lot of experience with the pointy end of many "environmental" groups.
Most environmental groups I have seen are made up of about 1% of people actually concerned about nature. The other 99% (particularly the money and resources they use for lobbying), is made up of land owners, and financial interests looking out for themselves and their investments. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but using the thin veneer of environmental concern to hide their more
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Interesting)
Give them a choice - Nuclear in their back yard, Coal burning in their back yard or this. The choice of None Of The Above is only an illusion.
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The choice is real, it's consequences - rolling blackouts - are fantasy. You regard whatever you're used to as normal, the default state of affairs, even if that something is a grid of social and physical infrastructure that costs billions per year to upkeep. And, regarding it as the default, the idea that it needs to be actively upkept is rejected by the mind - a wo
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This is Germany, we're talking about, so that's not NIMBY, but the St. Florian Prinzip: "Heiliger Sankt Florian / Verschon' mein Haus / Zünd' and're an! (Saint Florian / spare my house / burn others' (house) down).
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Generate power from the waste heat of a steam plant?
Back to thermodynamics for you. Pay particular attention to any formulas you find for maximum theoretical efficiency and how that relates to hot and cold side temperatures.
Also be informed, Europe is denser then the USA. Many European cities already have central steam systems running off waste heat. Like NYC. Between using the initial waste heat and heat pumped out of the north sea the Dutch get greater then 100% heating efficiency from their fuel (an
Re:NIMBY (Score:4, Insightful)
Large, powerful, long range transmission lines aren't that expensive. My Brazil transmits many tens of GWs worth of electricity over distances around 2000km. They are great if you have a cheap electricity source (large hydro), that you can't really choose where to build (you must build in the strongest flow rivers that have enough vertical gradient).
Instead, old fashioned water cooled nukes can be built anywhere you have a cold water source like the sea, a river, a lake. They only have problems where the water is too hot (like over 30C / 80F in the summer). Proposed high temperature reactors could even be air cooled, and don't require cold air either, so they can be built anywhere. Nuclear isn't cheap, but if you don't have a big old hydro plant, they are the only low cost, reliable, clean electricity source a country can have. Spent nuclear fuel (SNF) is not a real problem, if we build the LFTR / Thorium reactors, since they can burn the uranium SNF (like 95% Thorium for 5% SNF), and there are other solutions to burn the SNF too. If all SNF in the world were fissioned, it would make up for a few decades of our entire electricity supply !
Don't let others tell you that nuclear must be expensive. Half of current nukes cost is a direct consequence of anti nuclear lobby to over regulate nuclear power plants and the cost of multiple stop/resume construction due to political pressure to shutdown nuclear power plant construction. Nukes seem expensive, but when you consider that the uranium is cheap (less than 15% of the total nukes cost) over it's lifetime a nuke is cheaper than coal (don't even need tax breaks, just low interest loans, since the nukes cost is mostly before it starts operating, much like hydro).
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A nuclear plant has no problem if the water for cooling is over 30celsius ... the lake or stream has a problem if the plant puts so hot water back into it.
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One example:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com... [nytimes.com]
Water above 75F (24C) requires shutting down the reactor.
Water cooled nuclear plants operate at 350C, 20C difference in cooling water reduce the thermal cycle which reduce turbine efficiency.
That the part I understand exactly why.
It could be one extra example of NRC overregulation, I'm not sure this is really necessary, or just, the reactor hasn't been tested with temperature above a certain temp, so we can't allow it to be operated at such and such temp.
I know L
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If you link something you should read it first.
That particular plant cooled its pumps with that water.
France shuts down its nuclear plants because they are not allowed to put the heated cooling water back into the rivers.
A huge difference!
I also don't get why you always bring up your pet project: LFTR reactors. They only exist on paper. And unless one builds one and we see how it holds up under production we know nothing about it.
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I thought the allies, and later Russia, broke up the partitions of Germany? You mean they still behave that way?
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Germany was very divided since forever. In fact, Germany as a state did not exist before 1871, it was divided into severall small kingdoms, duchies and so on before that.
Different dialects of German are often not even mutually intelligible. It is so bad that even though I speak fluent standard German, I cannot understand someone speaking full Bavarian dialect. As a comparison, as a fluent Russian speaker I can sort of understand other Slavic languages, even these that are as far away from Russian as Czech o
"popular resistance"? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"popular resistance"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. 3,300 Ohm resistors were some of my favorites, but for popularity it's mighty tough to beat the trusty 47 KOhm 5% tolerance 1/4 watt film resistor for popularity.
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3,300 Ohm resistors were some of my favorites,
Me too, but eventually, I found that the 3,300 Ohm ones couldn't reproduce the richness of base base I'd come to expect. There also lacked depth and there was a certain tinnyness quality, too.
I found that the 3,301 ohm ones (more expensive, but worth the price) were a substantially better match to my Denon cables.
Re:"popular resistance"? (Score:4, Funny)
Submitter and editors either do not know what "popular resistance" means, or deliberately spun this post.
It's obvious: popular resistance = popular voltage / popular current.
But I can't help but wonder if the author intended to refer to popular impedance.
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The energiewende is just a euphemism for scrapping nuclear power. No extra commitments to alternative energy were made, and it certainly isn't clear if any projects enjoy widespread support.
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The german plans are that we are 100% renewable till 2030, wich extra commitments do you want further?
This plan has wide spread suport, obviously everyone believes they won't build a wind park in front of his/her house or a power transmission line.
Not exactly (Score:5, Informative)
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This.
Its a poor use of the word "popular" which can mean "of the people as a whole". Resistance by affected neighborhoods' residents doesn't imply that it is common or shared by the German population in general.
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It's true that solar and wind aren't very dense, on the other hand you can use the same plot of land indefinitely instead of
the transmission would go further (Score:5, Interesting)
Norway (and Denmark iirc) have plans on laying down more (sea) cables to Germany so I guess this link in reality would connect southern Germany to Norway.
The countries are already trading energy and I would guess they would need this as a mini super grid to make a larger percentage of the energy renewable.
Bonus nerd info. Heres a link to a almost live view of the input and output of electricity and natural gas from Denmark: http://www.energinet.dk/Flash/... [energinet.dk]
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Norway is, I think, mostly hydroelectric and probably at peak coverage already. I wonder, how much power can they supply Germany with? Cool map by the way.
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No the project mainly aims to connect the northern german wind plants to the south. Often there is so much wind power produced that plants need to be disconnected/shut down. Of course connecting Denmark and Norway as well will likely happen, but in relation to our own wind production they both don't deliever so much power.
Use an underground cable (Score:4, Interesting)
Use an underground cable. They build underwater HVDC lines all the time, so you can build underground lines. One of the nice things about HVDC is that the capacitance between conductors doesn't cause losses, so you can put the conductors close to each other as long as you have sufficient insulation.
IIRC in the past the problem w/ buried HVDC lines is that the cables were so thick, and couldn't be bent too much, so you needed cable reels so big that they could only fit on a ship. I believe that problem has been solved, and you can now use cable reels that will fit on a truck.
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I'm all for it - as long as the guys opposing the "normal" cables also pay for the increased costs. Last time I looked DC high voltage cabling was about triple the costs of AC, all things considered (like the need to convert from AC to DC to AC)
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HVDC cost is a function of line length. If it was always higher why would anyone use HVDC? The converters are expensive, but the actual cables are cheaper. The electrical losses are also lower for long distances, so that saves money too. Breakeven point for cables on land is about 500-600km, and this is an 800km link. The article doesn't say one way or another, but it'd be surprising if they weren't planning on using HVDC anyway. The cost of underground and overhead HVDC lines is about the same. It's actual
Ah, the perennial ice storm argument... (Score:2)
Underground burial greatly reduces heat transfer from transmission lines, as the surrounding earth eventually becomes a saturated heat sink.
Underground repairs are more common and more expensive than aerial repairs, so unless freezing rain is a seasonal issue, it doesn't pay once the initial investment is surrendered.
Underground service lines are not free of problems, and fail with more frequently due to lightning strike and flooding.
Legacy lines
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Legacy lines are mostly overhead, so we're talking massive outlays of money to rebuild a new grid.
We're talking about the construction of an entirely new line, not rebuilding an old legacy one.
Also, are you talking about underground distribution in general, or HVDC in particular? They're different issues.
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I was with you till you said underground. If you had the kind of money to lay underground transmission lines across an entire country you may as well fund free solar and battery storage on every roof of every house.
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Do you have an estimate of the cost for these two approaches? I don't, and unless you do, how can you decide which is cheaper?
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I don't, but it wouldn't be too much of a difference. It's one thing to dig a small hole in your yard. It's quite another for a major government project to do it. Burying stuff is unbelievably expensive when done as a major project. If I want to provide power to the shed I get a shovel and start digging. If the government does it they get soil tests, get the lawyers to look into if they can, do underground surveys, and the project blows out before they even scratch the dirt.
I say this as someone who works a
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Then you have the major problem of digging anything in Germany which is every time you dig into the ground near a city you end up uncovering an unexploded ordinance left over from the war. Going underground is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than going overhead, if not closer to 2 orders of magnitude.
I'm comforted by the fact that when the alien overlords destroy humanity and conquer earth we'll have left plenty of booby traps for them as they dig for resources.
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Post? I lost him in the title :-P
Do what the Swedes do (Score:5, Interesting)
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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 con
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compared to a whole lot of slow and expensive pylon raising/repairing and a whole lot of slow and expensive pylon construction+setup, you mean?
Replace that with "fast and cheap" and you have it. For above surface work, you've just mentioned all the infrastructure needed. It's a lot cheaper and faster than digging extensive tunnels.
How much is this going to cost? (Score:2)
I think "green" energy would be great if it didn't cost so much. I may be mistaken but I recall that Germany has some of the most expensive power in Europe. The prices would be higher if they weren't buying electricity from France.
Part of what makes wind and solar expensive is that it is almost never where you need it. People like to live by water, fresh water to drink, sea water for cheap transport of goods. Industry likes to be where the raw materials are or can be transported to cheaply, by water usu
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Windmills and solar panels will change the scenery. Whether they "ruin" it is a matter of opinion. The power lines to connect them are inherent side effect to a power source dependent on location.
Nuclear power plants can be placed where the power is needed. Doesn't always remove the need to run ugly power lines but it does reduce it. Nuclear power plants could also be put underground if that is what people want. They can and have been put under water too.
The argument is about power lines now. It will
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I think "green" energy would be great if it didn't cost so much. I may be mistaken but I recall that Germany has some of the most expensive power in Europe. The prices would be higher if they weren't buying electricity from France.
Power prices depend on your contract, some have expensive power mine is rather cheap, calculated it a few days ago to something like 25cent/kW/h. I don't know what you mean with "green power is expensive". Wind power right now is the cheapest power.
Usually we export more power to
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You lost us at 25cents/kWh being cheap.
Put money where mouth is (Score:5, Interesting)
My algorithm for NIMBY is "I'll let this be in _my_ backyard, for n dollars/euros," where you set n to zero and slowly increase it until you get a combination of bids that can be assembled into a working solution. Then you charge the NIMBYers whatever cost that is, to pay the bids. You wanna pay an extra 7 cents per KWh to have the lines be somewhere else? Ok. You don't want to pay it? Ok, you get the lines, and lower energy costs than your stuck-up neighbors.
How does everyone not win (or at least break even) in such a scenario?
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Unionising. When you start at zero and work your way up you'll meet group resistance from the people affected. We had this here recently with tunnel projects. The properties which needed to be reclaimed at the tunnel exit were eventually all sold to the government for nearly 8 times their actual value.
I would love a government to try and build a HV transmission line in my backyard. I should get nearly $8m for my property if history is anything to go by.
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And everyone lived happily ever after. Take the $8M if that's what everyone insists upon shoving in your face. The people who paid it, feel good. I'd add "comma chump sucker" to the end of that, but everyone (including you) is laughing their asses off, so it's hard to type. That is how appropriate the "everyone lived happily ever after" thing is.
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Yep, until my next rates notice says I owe $10 more due to rising government costs.
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Yep, until my next rates notice says I owe $10 more due to rising government costs.
You have $8M!
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Only if it was my property being sold. A few years ago the government reclaimed an entire town in order to build the dam. Just before approval the greens managed to get it knocked down because of a single species of frog that lived in the area. They are now sitting on $1m worth of land they spent over $200m on.
Naturally this $200m black hole had to come from somewhere.
I'm not saying there's a better way, but this is far from a simple way of building infrastructure which can quickly lead to cost blowouts as
how do you say... (Score:2)
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"What's the German translate of boo-fucking-hoo you whiney, self-important, stuck up assholes?"
Schadenfreude.
Why is renewable power centralized? (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't need to be and shouldn't be centralized.
I can't power my home with a personal coal power plant or power my home with a personal nuclear power plant. But I CAN power my home with a personal solar array or wind mill or whatever. Renewable power should be decentralized.
Rather then pushing these big renewable plants, instead give home owners a machine that lets they use locally sourced power in their home electrical grid. So the system will take from local power before it draws from the grid.
This makes more sense for a lot of reasons.
1. The land required for renewable energy is huge. But if everyone uses a little of their roof space then its no big deal. And they don't need to supplant ALL energy consumption just some of it.
2. You don't waste energy in transmission or over supply. The point should be to have homes be more self sufficient so they don't need as much power from the grid. Not to supply the grid with their power. That isn't economical. Rather simply have people need less because they produce some of their own power.
3. Personally sourced power is largely immune to price fixing, political blackmail, and other attempts to control people through energy supply. This is because the power is supplied by solar cells and other similar things that can be bought from many sources. The issue with the Russian pipeline is really only the best known example. There are many examples on a daily basis all over the world.
4. Nothing is as likely to get renewable energy installed and maintained then personal participation in it. The world is littered with failed green energy projects on all continents. But the solar power cells on people's roofs... those work. Those are maintained.
etc...
It shouldn't be centralized. Renewable energy should be decentralized.
Re:Why is renewable power centralized? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are advantages to distributed power, and they can be combined, but relying purely on distributed renewables is a bad idea.
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You lose a lot of that efficiency in the rest of the system.
Panels on your house don't need hundreds of miles of cable. They don't need big transformer stations. They don't need the grid itself. There is so much cost added and efficiency lost in the transmission that you really are playing a zero sum game.
And if you supply even a SMALL amount of power locally it adds up.
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4. Nothing is as likely to get renewable energy installed and maintained then personal participation in it. The world is littered with failed green energy projects on all continents. But the solar power cells on people's roofs... those work. Those are maintained.
If solar gets cheap enough, then it'll be worth putting these things on your house even if the utility won't buy your excess power.
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Why should the government buy solar cells for power plants but people have to pay for them directly for their roofs?
What I am suggesting here is that INSTEAD of the centralized power plants we instead GIVE solar for people's roofs.
We don't even need to give the panels. Just give people the box that lets them plug a panel into the home and install it. Then they can decide if they want to buy a panel and put it in.
If it just canceled all the day time power use of all the residences that would be significant.
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Why should the government buy solar cells for power plants but people have to pay for them directly for their roofs?
Because society is retarded?
What I am suggesting here is that INSTEAD of the centralized power plants we instead GIVE solar for people's roofs.
Why? I don't see the value in doing so. Either it's economically viable on its own in which case people will do it without need for such support. Or it's not, in which case we shouldn't be subsidizing poor economical decisions.
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Except for they're building the solar power plants so your zero sum game argument isn't taking that into account.
Would I prefer if the government didn't try to social engineer everyone all the time?
Yes.
But if they're going to do it... and they are... then I want it to do it in a way that is more healthy.
Putting the units at everyone's home means people can install panels there without having to install anything else. All the electronics etc to wire into the home electrical grid would be there. So all an ins
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But if they're going to do it... and they are... then I want it to do it in a way that is more healthy.
First, what makes you think this is more healthy? Distributed generation has its own problems. And the subsidy efforts have been tried before. There's just not that much value in slapping expensive panels on the sides of houses.
If everyone just had ONE solar panel at their house it would have a big impact of power consumption. It would mean most of the power used by homes during the day would be nullified.
While that would be nice, there isn't much need for it. After all, the current distribution system works quite well.
Also, you're in the peculiar grounds of the "politically feasible". Here, centralized power generators and distributors provide more reliable kickbacks, making their
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1. They have at no point tried GIVING people the box that lets you wire solar panels into a house for free as well as subsidize the installation 100 percent. That has NEVER been done.
Instead what they do is build tens of billions of dollars in boondoggle solar power plants in the desert that ultimately shut down after anywhere from five to ten years.
Have you ever seen the deserts of California? The ruins of abandoned green energy projects going back to the 60s are littered across the sand for hundreds of mi
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They have at no point tried GIVING people the box that lets you wire solar panels into a house for free as well as subsidize the installation 100 percent. That has NEVER been done.
What makes this any better a use of public funds than chucking money at the usual suspects? Giving people stuff for free that they don't need doesn't strike me as an improvement.
You don't have to get crazy with the panels. Just providing a couple hundred watts at EACH home would be a major contribution.
Economically, you really need more than that. Installing panels isn't going to be cheap and the labor cost of putting even a small panel up on a roof is going to have a considerable ante (for most installations, someone will have to drive out, climb on the roof, and do some non trivial stuff which potentially can damage the roof). S
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1. In regards to what makes this better, because this way you're doing several superior things.
A). You're not screwing up the existing grid with unreliable power.
B). You are more efficiently using renewable energy by using it locally.
C). You are ACTUALLY enabling people to install solar on their homes at a very low cost. You can find panels on Amazon or ebay that retail for a couple hundred dollars. You'd need lots of them to power a whole house but all we want is to lower in the introductory cost of solar.
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If its their wind mill that they put by their home they might be fine with it.
For one thing, it could be one they bought to go with their home. Possibly it would look like one of those old dutch windmills.
The ones used by the wind farms are ugly and industrial. If you had to sell them to home owners they might look very different.
I guess it's high voltage direct current (Score:3)
Otherwise we'd be talking about the project facing popular impedance [wikipedia.org] rather than popular resistance.
NIMBY (Score:2)
Ireland is sufferi
Making Indian Point Redundant (Score:2)
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Or just use the excess geothermal power available from up north... Since it can provide base load power, unlike solar.
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Or just use the excess geothermal power available from up north.
Could you provide more details on this? The only geothermal plants I see in Germany are tiny 5MW deals. It would take 200 of those to replace one nuclear reactor.
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Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of co-generation. A 5MW geothermal plant costs about $25M. Replacing a 1GW nuclear reactor with 200 of those would cost $5B. That's a 20%-40% price premium over nuclear.
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You're ignoring the increased power cost to build, ship, and regulate loads of power over long distances.
Co-generation allows one to REDUCE power used, REDUCE pollution (since site location means no transmission), and also reduce heat impacts on the environment.
All supposed aims of the German government.
Plus, it's cheaper.
But it does require you to stop subsidizing old inefficient methods of industrial production.
Which, surprisingly, creates more German jobs for Germans.
Can't have that, right?
High voltage transmission loses less than 1% per 100 miles. Germany isn't even 500 miles across.
You think that building 200 power stations that involve drilling 5000m deep holes will have no environmental impact?
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Dude, the cogen build out has been going on for decades, world wide, driven by market forces.
At this point they are building hot houses besides rural power plants, in some cases to functionally replace cooling towers. The low hanging fruit is long gone.
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Germany has been there and done that. An ancient volcanic structure in southwestern Germany was explored for geothermal potential. Wells were drilled and water was injected. But when a 3.5 earthquake rattled dishes in Basel just across the border, the eco-weenies abandoned geothermal as being another power source too horrendously dangerous to contemplate.
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Maybe they should stop making "more" transmission lines for power and start using co-generation of their waste heat in the industrial south so that they "need" less energy.
Partly right. If they don't want transmission lines then perhaps they should answer "NIMBY" by using wireless microwave transmission instead?
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How about no power lines, no power for YOU!
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Price is the reason they're burning brown coal instead of gas.
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If the governments of this world took all the subsidies and concessions and things away from the coal, oil and gas industries, coal wouldn't be as cheap and the incentives to use better alternatives to generate electricity would be higher.
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Don't forget ceding sovereignty to Russia in return for natural gas. Those pipes get turned off, there will have to be major emergency precautions taken to prevent tens of thousands of Germans from freezing.
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Same thing they do on every other issue.
"Fuck you" to the rural communities, and "whatver you want/need" to the big cities, and especially the Prison Guards' and Police Unions.
Re:Ah the Germans, they're really bad at this! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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.
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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.
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.
This is because Germany now uses coal power plants instead of nuclear plants to produce the necessary electricity.
France is on the better side of this by far at: CO2-370,000 / 560,500 GWh=0.66 tons of CO2 per GWh
How surprising, nuclear energy is green energy.
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It might have to do with the fact that modern automobile was invented in Stuttgart (south of Germany).