As I said, and as the article linked in the OP makes clear, this is a temporary situation until Germany gets more geothermal plants online.
It isn’t dishonest at all; it’s a temporary step that the German government has decided is necessary to achieve both their short term and long term goals.
From what I’ve read, Germany is planning on increased use of natural gas plants, and they’re still going to have working nuke plants until '22.
[QUOTE=Snowboarder Bo]
Yes, the TBA said they could do it. You said they could not, that it was akin to using a “magic pony” method. Unless you have someplace to find facts that contradict them, I’ll take it that you were talking out of your ass and have no real idea what they can and cannot do.
[/QUOTE]
It’s not up to me to prove your point…it’s up to you to provide data to support your position. You haven’t done so.
I quoted a couple of numbers from your blurb. This hardly constitutes a firm total. I asked you to back up your assertions with REAL cites showing REAL numbers. Not because I necessarily doubt that they have expanded their geothermal, but because I’m interested to see the real numbers on how much and put those numbers into some sort of context with their total energy and how much energy they get from nuclear. You seem to have some issue with backing up your assertions with more than some hope and a few cites that don’t really have anything more than some vague figures in them. The information is out there if you want to do the work to get it. Either you do or you don’t.
My argument amounts to skepticism that they can replace their current nuclear power (let alone make a dent in what they are currently getting from coal) with wind/solar/geothermal or other non-biomass based ‘renewable’ energy sources. I have asked you to provide some hard numbers to back up your own assertions that they can, since it’s the basis of YOUR freaking OP, and you have failed to do so. You have fallen back on hope and vague cites that say vaguely what you seem to want to hear but without any context.
Do you have any cites to this news? They have been buying power from France since before they decided to take these nuclear reactors off line. If your geothermal is doing so great, why hasn’t it and wind already stepped up to replacing the energy they get from nuclear? What is the projected crossover for when it will? Do you have any hard figures?
I’ve read it several times.
No…the truth is that your OP has hardly any facts in it at all. I found this cite (which is also mainly fact free) that seems to contridict the statement above from the one cite you had with anything remotely resembling facts in it:
Here’s the thing. ‘Germany’ doesn’t import electricity nor does ‘France’ sell it. Power companies in France sell power to users in Germany (say, a manufacturing plant).
The question for you to answer is how much electrical energy over what period will Germany be losing by getting rid of their nuclear power plants, and realistically how much of it will they get back through ‘renewables’…and what will the breakdown of those ‘renewables’ be in terms of how much from wind, how much from solar, how much from geothermal or hydro and how much from biomass. You haven’t shown ANY of those things thus far, though they are easy enough to find online.
That’s because in any of these wide eyed discussions about alternative energy it always boils down to a lot of hope and not a lot of actual facts or what the costs will be. And this discussion is no different. You haven’t bothered to try and put together any facts, just a couple of cites with a few vague and unsupported assertions in it, and your own contribution of hope. Show me the money. Show me the hard data. If it’s not going to take magical new breakthroughs and innovations then show me the technology as it exists today and how it will be able to make up the difference in energy needs for 22 reactors going offline in 10 years. Because the way it looks to me right now, they are having trouble meeting their every day energy needs TODAY…while they still have those nuclear power plants on stream. If they are having troubles now, even if those troubles aren’t the norm, then how’s it going to be when 22 large nuclear plants are taken out of the mix? How will they make up that difference without building more coal or natural gas plants or buying electricity from other countries in Europe?
Show me the money if you want to be convincing. Do some freaking research and stop whining about your fantasy assumptions that I came in here to say “anything Bo says is stupid”. I don’t care if you think I don’t know anything about this subject or not, frankly, or if you think that my skepticism is just some sort of a knee jerk reaction against alternative energy or for nuclear. I don’t give a flying fuck. What I DO care about is that you haven’t done much of anything to support your argument here at all, which is a shame because this could be an interesting debate, and it’s going to be an important test bed for both alternative energy and whether or not it can replace nuclear and pull it’s weight on a large scale…or whether, in the end, a country like Germany will be forced to build more coal plants to make up the difference, thus putting more pollutants including CO2 into the atmosphere.
Then it should be easy for you to show that they are doing this and on track to complete it…with some actual facts. Right? Telling me that a Germany government agency says they can do something is not the same thing as demonstrating that they ARE doing something, and showing in hard terms what that something is (i.e. how much electrical generation are they getting out of geothermal today, how many plants are under construction currently and what is their projected capacity, and how many are planned in the future and what will their projected capacity be? And, for a bonus, what will it all cost?).
-XT
I wouldn’t call it dishonest, simply NIMBYism. The objections Germans have to nuclear power have more to do with not wanting a Chernobyl in their own back yard than saving the planet or whatever.
Also, Germany is at a high latitude – the Gulf Stream effect makes Europe warmer than it would otherwise be, but can’t do squat for its decreased solar energy density.
Did you have a point that you’d like to make? Energy demand went down with the economy, and is now getting back to normal with the economy? This is news to you? Or anyone?
In 2009, for the first time in 30 years, there was a decrease in world energy consumption, of 1.1%. This was followed by an increase of 5% in 2010.
So sure “getting back to normal” as long as we define “normal” to be continually increasing. Which is the opposite of your original point.
I see you’ve dropped the whole thing about china and india too. I find it breathtaking that anyone could believe they “don’t have electricity now” and “probably aren’t going to ever need [much energy]”. I wasn’t sure if I was being whooshed…
What I meant was that people in these discussions often buy into the nuclear propaganda machine’s scare tactics of speaking about China & India’s energy demands being the same as “our” demands, like Germany’s and the US’s energy demands.
They’re not the same thing. The US & Germany are already fully electrified and aren’t experiencing anything like the energy growth demands of developing countries. Both China and India have sizable portions of people who don’t even have electricity or aren’t yet connected to a large reliable regional energy grid like better developed countries enjoy. That’s not the case for the US or Germany nor is either country facing an imminent energy shortage, and certainly not an energy shortage from which only the nuclear power fairy can save us. That fairy’s been writing checks her technology can’t cash for going on 60 years now, and the world so far is not one little bit better for it.
Nuclear power will be an answer for some countries, but it’s not that big of an irreplaceable deal for most modernized countries.
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
What I meant was that people in these discussions often buy into the nuclear propaganda machine’s scare tactics of speaking about China & India’s energy demands being the same as “our” demands, like Germany’s and the US’s energy demands.
[/QUOTE]
Do you have a link to anyone in any of these discussions saying anything remotely like that? I’d be shocked if anyone was saying that China and India’s energy demands are the same as those in the US or Europe. I smell some straw in the wind.
Because the US and Germany are ‘already fully electrified’ doesn’t mean that our own energy demands are static or dropping. The fact that China and India are no where near ‘fully electrified’ means that their own demand for energy is going up and will continue to go up in the future. They will have to get that energy from something. What will they get it from?
You don’t seem to be grasping any parts of this discussion here. Germany is planning to remove 22 nuclear power plants from service…that’s a significant percentage of their total electrical energy production. THAT is where the shortage is going to come from, and what they would have to make up the difference somehow. Since they are getting rid of nuclear they will have to make up the difference from somewhere else. What will it be? They are having periodic shortages NOW (that’s why they have had to buy electricity from neighboring countries)…what will the shortages be when they take all of their nuclear power plants out of the equation by 2022? Will they build more wind and solar plants? Undoubtedly. Will they build more geothermal? Sure. Will it make up the difference? I’ve seen no evidence that it will in that time frame. Even if it does, it won’t change the amount of pollutants like CO2 they are currently emitting, since they will be replacing a clean energy system (that produces a lot of their total electrical energy) with…clean energy systems. The net balance will be pretty much zero, emissions-wise. No idea what the costs will be but I’d guess pretty freaking expensive is probably an understatement.
It baffles me how people can’t see all of this. They are going to try and replace a system that is currently producing a large percentage of their electricity and that has no emissions with, hopefully, a system that will produce close to the same energy (in a less reliable way if they go heavily with wind power)…but one that will cost them billions or hundreds of billions of euros to put in. :smack:
It’s not irreplaceable. We have coal and natural gas power plants that could make up the difference. In the US we are seemingly not going to build new nuclear plants in the future, so over time our own nuclear energy will fade. But that will be over decades with time to ramp up other forms of energy to replace our aging nuclear. Germany, however, is going to forcibly shut down it’s nuclear energy production in a pretty short time frame, so they will have to either ramp up something else (quickly) or plan on buying more and more energy from their neighbors…or both. The could certainly do that as things stand today, since they have a nice trade balance with the rest of Europe and one of the strongest economies in the EU. Or, they could build a bunch of wind, solar, geothermal, etc production and augment it/make up the difference with more bio-mass electrical production, coal, natural gas, etc. It depends on whether they want to spend a lot over the next decade on new power production or whether they want to spend a lot later on in buying power from other countries in Europe.
-XT
Oh, so what you’re saying is that you don’t accept any of the figures in the articles I’ve linked to, and you want MORE cites with those same numbers before you’ll believe them. :dubious:
I understand. That’s a great debate tactic you have there: No, I don’t accept that cite. I can’t say why I think it’s unacceptable, but it surely is. :rolleyes:
That’s the sum total of your contribution to this thread.
ETA: As anyone else reading this thread can see, I’ve provided cites. At this point, if you don’t think those cites are accurate, it’s up to you to provide countering cites. That’s how debates work.
[QUOTE=Snowboarder Bo]
Oh, so what you’re saying is that you don’t accept any of the figures in the articles I’ve linked to, and you want MORE cites with those same numbers before you’ll believe them.
[/QUOTE]
The cites you’ve given don’t HAVE any details in them. How hard is that to understand? They don’t substantiate anything. If you want to convince anyone that isn’t already convinced then you will need to do some fucking work and find some cites with some beef in them.
Is that plain enough? Do you understand what I’m saying now? Whether you do it or not is your affair…it’s your OP. But do you NOW understand what I’m saying? :rolleyes::eek::(:dubious::smack: (since you seem to love the things)…
And your debate tactic seems to be ‘I’ll post some fluff cites and then not bother with substantiating any of them when asked, then try and pretend that calls for a cite are unreasonable’. Let me know how that works out for you. Thus far it’s been others who have put any beef into your thread at all.
And sadly, yours has been even less. How does that make you feel, considering you started the thread?
-XT
You could have just posted “I still don’t think any of the things in your cites are real facts” and saved yourself a lot of typing.
So you don’t think the numbers for increased use of geothermals are real? is that what you don’t buy? Why? What’s wrong with the article? What would be an acceptable cite to you?
You don’t think the German agency really said they could supply all their base energy needs with geothermal alone? What would be an acceptable cite for that? Do you read German?
You don’t believe the reason the AP story gave for Germany’s recent need to purchase power from France, or the line that Germany was until very recently an energy exporter? Why? What is it about the AP story that you find suspicious?
Your line of argument continues to be: I don’t believe any of your cites, although you have no reason to disbelieve them. All you do is crow that there isn’t a fact in there, without ever saying what it is you don’t believe or why you don’t believe it is factual. You obfuscate and evade, and try to claim that there aren’t facts when there clearly are.
Why don’t you try refuting anything with a counter claim, rather than just claiming that my cites contain nothing? Because you cannot.
Here, refute this one: Germany has increased it’s production of geothermal energy by 2774% since 2004. I linked to an article that gave that figure. Prove it wrong, if you can.
I gave you the figures for this, and you ignored them and claimed that my cite had no numbers.
I challenge you again: prove the article’s numbers are wrong.
You can read the original TAB report (in German) at:
[QUOTE=Snowboarder Bo]
I gave you the figures for this, and you ignored them and claimed that my cite had no numbers.
[/QUOTE]
What, this??
Sure, that’s easy. In 2003 they said it COULD ‘be used to supply the entire base load of the country’. It hasn’t. It’s not even close. Here is the breakdown as of 2008. Note that geothermal isn’t even on the chart, unless it’s in the Other part of the graph. Here is the summary of the TAB report (not in German…gods know what you thought you were doing posting it in German. Did you think that most posters READ freaking German??):
Basically, this is much the same as reports saying that we COULD get all our our energy from sunlight or from the wind or the tides. Theoretically it’s true…we could. Realistically and practically, however, it ain’t gonna happen, no matter how much wishful thinking and hope one applies.
So, getting back to the question at hand, currently (well, in 2008 according to the link I provided above) Germany gets 15% of it’s energy from renewables (wind, solar, biomass, hydro, waste and Other, presumably your geothermal) and 23% from nuclear. That’s today. By 2022 they will have to have replaced a large part of that 23% with something else, in addition to what they have today…and that’s just to stay even with what they have today (where we know that, even with the nuclear they have shortages and have to occasionally buy power from other countries).
According to this (2007 data unfortunately…my Google-Fu is weak tonight), Germany produced 133.507 Billion of Kilowatt Hours of electricity, or 22% of their total from nuclear. Presumably that hasn’t changed much since 2007, since quick search seem to indicate the percentage is still around 22%. So…that’s what they would have to replace if they got rid of their nuclear power plants. That is in addition to their current renewable energy. And they would have to do this by 2022.
So, Bo, how are they going to do it? Since 2007 they have perhaps increased the percentage of their renewable electrical production by, what? 2%? Maybe 3%? Andy they STILL have nuclear carrying the load for 20+%. Your cite says they COULD get it all from geothermal, but that was a report from 2003…and clearly they haven’t. They have already increased their wind and solar, and perhaps they could double that…which would give them an additional 10% (being generous). 22-10 is still 12% shy, however. So…where are they going to get that other 12% from? Geothermal? There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that, despite a German government report saying they COULD get it from there that they actually ARE getting major energy from that source (I couldn’t find much on it, and I assume from your evasions and posting links in German that you couldn’t either, or you would have posted them), so where? More biomass burning? Maybe. More hydro? Doubtful. So, what does that leave, Bo? Natural gas and coal? Or do you have some other non-magic pony solution to plug in?
Even with the (to me) generous assumption that they could double their wind and solar by 2020, I’m not seeing how the numbers work out…thus, I’m skeptical Bo. Do you have anything remotely resembling hard data to back anything up with? I’m not going to waste a whole lot of time trying to disprove your unsupported assertions that your cites show everything…or anything really. You don’t seem to want to bother backing up anything up yourself, with the exception of what was probably a 5 second Google search to a report in German, so I’m not seeing much profit in continuing the discussion.
-XT
Here’s the crux: I didn’t make any assertions in the OP, but you made the assertion that “it ain’t gonna happen”.
All I did was cite an article and ask 2 questions:
You came back with the assertion “it ain’t gonna happen”. I countered with a cite that the German government agency says “it can happen” and the article linked in the OP says that the German government overall says “we’re gonna do it”.
So, I ask you again to support your contention that “it ain’t gonna happen”. As I said before, the argument that “it hasn’t happened yet”, which seems to be all you have, isn’t sufficient to back up your assertion.
Thanks for finding that article in English, btw.
Where did you get that number? One plant was already shutdown due to continuing malfunctions, and another 7 old plants shut down for tests after Fukushima won’t be restarted. The rest of the 17 plants will hit old age and be shutdown as originally planned anyway. This isn’t really new. This was Germany’s plan under the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder. It was Merkel who bowed to the energy scarysteria machine and decided to renew some aging nuke licenses, just like the US. Then Fukushima happened and Merkel, and the people of Germany, saw how helpless one nuclear power plant made Japan, a fully modern, industrialized, technologically advanced nation. They’re simply going back to their original plan.
You’re being dramatic. Germany only gets less than a quarter of its electricity from nuke, and some of the plants were down anyway. Importing a little extra electricity for a little while isn’t the downfall of civilization. Their renewable energy sector already produces as much energy as 28 nuclear power plants.
It’s not that much energy and so what if it costs billions or hundreds of billions of euros. Something is going to one way or the other and nuclear’s near and long-term (really, really, really long-term, like 100s and thousands and hundreds of thousands of years) downsides aren’t worth the risks.
As I said, they aren’t shutting down all their nuclear power plants overnight. The US can’t keep renewing licences on dangerously aged nuclear power plants forever either. Since the price of decommissioning nuclear power plants seems to go up just like their construction costs, it’s probably better to start the extremely expensive task of tearing the things down and rendering the areas relatively safe now.
Have you heard the Fukushima nuclear disaster is currently estimated to cost $245 billion dollars? That’s not including the non-nuclear costs of the disaster. Who’s crazy enough to build one of these things with that kind of liability hanging over it?
[QUOTE=Snowboarder Bo]
Here’s the crux: I didn’t make any assertions in the OP, but you made the assertion that “it ain’t gonna happen”.
[/QUOTE]
You asserted that your articles were hard facts but weren’t willing to back them up with actual hard facts.
And I did show that they haven’t done much to move geothermal forward to coming even close to meeting even the energy they get from nuclear, let alone to meeting their whole electrical energy production. ‘It ain’t gonna happen’ is a pretty reasonable view based on where things stand today, whether we are talking about just the geothermal aspect or them ramping up their renewables to make up for the nuke plants they plan to get rid of. Now, if you want to include non-renewable sources, such as coal and natural gas, then sure…they could do it in the time frame they are looking at. Never said otherwise. IS that what you are saying?
Unless you have a magic crystal ball, all we can do is look at what they have actually done since that report wrt geothermal. They haven’t done it. They haven’t even gotten close. Hell, it’s not even listed as one of the major sources of energy in any page I’ve seen. That was over 8 years ago.
No problem, though you could have found it yourself and gone a long way to simply providing the data I asked you for. It was a pretty easy Google search.
-XT
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
Where did you get that number? One plant was already shutdown due to continuing malfunctions, and another 7 old plants shut down for tests after Fukushima won’t be restarted. The rest of the 17 plants will hit old age and be shutdown as originally planned anyway. This isn’t really new. This was Germany’s plan under the chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder. It was Merkel who bowed to the energy scarysteria machine and decided to renew some aging nuke licenses, just like the US. Then Fukushima happened and Merkel, and the people of Germany, saw how helpless one nuclear power plant made Japan, a fully modern, industrialized, technologically advanced nation. They’re simply going back to their original plan.
[/QUOTE]
Not sure to be honest…for some reason I had 22 nuclear plants in Germany on my brain. Ok…so, they will be shutting down 17 plants. It still represents 22% of their total electrical production. That it was part of the original plan is pretty meaningless, since the reason they scrapped that plan and were going to extend the nuke plants is because they want to try and keep their CO2 emissions low, and they couldn’t do it under that plan. Now they are back to the plan, but I’m still not seeing how they will achieve it without more coal and natural gas plants. Disagree? Fine…show me how they will do it. How many wind turbines or solar panels or geothermal plants will they have to build (and at what cost) before 2022 to make the goal without having to build coal or natural gas power plants or buy energy from other countries (which use coal, natural gas and nuclear primarily).
I’m not being dramatic, I showed the actual figures. 133 billion KWH is what they have to replace. Will importing electricity be the downfall of civilization? Nope…I said in an earlier post that Germany could easily do this, considering their positive trade balance with the rest of the EU. I freely acknowledge that they will probably do this to some extent. But that won’t make them a nuclear trendsetter if they have to buy the energy they can’t produce because they got rid of their nuclear power plants…and it will be a bit hypocritical if they buy energy from France, considering that they get over 70% of their electricity from nuclear power plants.
And their renewable energy sector does NOT produce more energy than their nuclear power plants, according to the cite I linked to earlier…unless you have a better cite showing this is the case? The info I read said they were getting around 17-18% of their electrical power generation from renewables…they are getting 22% from nuclear. Currently. That means they will have to increase their electrical energy production from renewables by 22% ABOVE the 17-18% they current get to make up the difference…if you claim they can replace nuclear with renewables alone. That’s 133 Billion KWH, according to 2008 data. How are they going to do it? Feel free to go into detail and link relevant information.
They are shutting them down (from a power generating perspective) by 2022…in theory. Did you read the article linked in the OP? They were planning to extend that by a decade or two, but now they aren’t. Which, again, means they have to make up the difference by 2022 somehow…either internally or externally. To me, that means they will build wind and solar and geothermal and whatever else they can (at fairly large cost), and STILL have to either buy more power from other countries or build coal and natural gas plants. Or both.
What has this got to do with anything? Do you expect Germany to get hit by a 9.0+ earthquake and tsunami sometime soon?
-XT