German riot police clear protesters for coal mine expansion

>The past 17+ years of political failure did the German working class a real solid. When the head of a state advises people to “use a sponge and not shower so often to preserve hot water” it’s almost surreal that a government charging 45+% of tax of a countries GDP is unable to ensure people have hot water, heating or keep up the electrical supply for industry.

It is only common sense. Is it surreal that central planning does not work? We know that for a long time.

I am engineer, I was born in Spain. I have a company in Europe. For me it was completely nuts what the german Government did with the money, I worked on those projects because it was were the money was. Spending fortunes on solar panels(manufactured from coal in China) where there is no sun?

I was in favor of putting gas pipelines with Russia, but it was really nonsense not creating alternatives instead of a single provider. Letting a single bomb destroy your entire economy?

High taxes does not protect you against stupidity, on the contrary.

Germans are awakening to reality, and that is a great thing. It will take some time and pain though. But seems people only learn this way.

It is not as bad as in Ukraine. I was in Kiev one week before invasion, everybody was like: "Ohh, Russians will not attack, they never do". Those guys later had to improvise Molotov cocktails against tanks because they were ill prepared, never fired a gun.

You pay a high price for stupidity.

Yes, it is a total failure of policy over several decades that has finally been exposed. Hence why politicians are so keen to assign the blame on "the war".

Not arguing against the political failures, but mind that the impressions of "several family members" do not yield figures reliable for any conclusions.

It's a result of a situation largely outside of their control (the war), so I'm not sure if I would call it a failure. It's unfortunate of course, but it's a speed bump in the long run. Maybe it's even a blessing in disguise, without Putin nuclear would have been dead and buried in many countries. Now there is more interest from the public and governments than before, but the economics are still a big issue and the current high-interest (loan interest) environment definitely doesn't help. It would not surprise me if governments agree to unfavorable terms to help finance these things, governments have a huge information disadvantage here.

We seem to have a different definition of irony than Freak_NL. Fair enough :-)

France is a net importer. I am not sure what exactly you mean by "France is one of the biggest exporters" though.

Here a graph that shows "total energy used in the country minus its production of energy", which shows that France that mostly produces nuclear energy consistently requires more energy than it produces.

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/france/Energy_imports/

Even though that wasn't really what I am talking about. The reality is that France frequently has to shut down many of their reactors, which causes them to for longer periods of time require energy from Germany.

The reason for that is that for example in July 2022, 29 of their 56 nuclear plants were offline due to outages. Given that as you the majority of what France produces is nuclear energy, this is a big problems. These offline plants still require energy for cooling. So if other countries didn't provide energy France would have had a blackout. A lot of that is evidently cold by climate change and heat (these problems mostly happen in summer), but at the same time France for example at the end of 2021 had issues and needed to import energy for heating.

This is not to be pro-gas or coal at all. I think they should be abandoned as quickly as possible for many reasons, CO2, pollution both at energy production as well as fuel production, limits on availability, etc. This is to say that just everyone switching to to nuclear energy isn't a magical fix.

There is a strong need for mixes, both in how energy is produced and saved. And when I say saving, I don't mean batteries, but storage plants, some for long time storage like pumped storage hydroelectricity, and various types with typically lower storage, but quicker response times for spikes to prevent outages. Cause then one can actually make use of less consistent energy sources. Short-term and long-term storage work. And the more of those you have to more stable your energy grid will be, regardless of whether you use nuclear power or other power. And you won't have to shut down plants so quickly, because you overproduce at certain times of the day, be it for solar energy or less demand at night, for nuclear energy.

> smart grids.

Yes they bring an instant and infinite stream of EU and government funds.

Flywheel batteries have been proposed many times in the last 15-20 years, and there's a good reason none of them have gotten off the drawing board. They are very dangerous and not very energy-dense.

> If emissions are reduced, emissions are not zero. That's the fundamental lie.

What are you trying to say here? That reducing emissions is not good? That only 100% reduction is good and anything less is bad? That's quite a strange point of view to have.

This is willfully ignorant. Yes it has been used, but that was not its design function. I'm not justifying its use, but it's unfair to qualify it as de jure baseload when in reality it may be temporarily de facto base load.

I'm getting the impression that "the top" has already decided to go with deindustrialization. I hope to be proven wrong.

Diversification is always important, and sorry but putting all your eggs into one basket (here, hydro power) is just plain bad.

Even nuclear is not a solution, just look at France and Switzerland who had to take down a lot of their nuclear capacity beyond the broken-down NPPs because they lacked cooling water.

A decent renewable power grid has to have a lot of different energy generation paths: hydro, solar, wind, bio-gas, tidal (where possible), geothermal, enough interconnection paths to other regions, storage (battery, pumped hydro, flywheel) and regularly tested backups. The backups may even be fossil, no one has a major issue with that, the key thing is that the backup capacity must never be assumed as a regular operational capacity. And obviously, the generation capacity has to be scaled in a way that assumes a decent set of overproduction as no kind of power generation has an availabilty/capacity factor of 1... if your total consumption is, say, 100 GW, you have to have at least 200-300 GW in generation capacity.