[ExI] germany to nuke its nukes

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:16:39AM -0700, Damien Sullivan wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 10:42:34PM -0700, spike wrote:
> 
> >    [1]http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/7588000.html
> >    Are you fer it or agin it?  Why?
> >    Other's comments?

In general, these days you cannot trust anything what comes out
Berlin. To wit, this is the exit of the exit of the exit.
It would be indeed surprising if it would not be renegaded upon, again.

Only older cohorts are primary voters of conservatives and
social democrats both, so the problem will be naturally taken 
of by way of the graveyard.

The neoliberals are finished, the new left are in rigor mortis
and the only winners, for now, are the greens -- simply because
the other parties insist to snub the public opinion. 

However, the greens are a mainstream, conservative (which is why
they can at all do coalition with the CDU/CSU conservatives)
well versed in realpolitik and have a growing disconnect between the
top and the base. So their further prognosis is rather dubious
as well.

As an anarchist, I'm quite pleased with this outcome. This
is not Belgium yet, but we're slowly getting there. 
 
> Agnostic.  Seems like cutting coal would be smarter than cutting

Coal is dead. No major new facilities will be built. The existing
ones will be phased out after nuclear will be phased out. By 2050
renewable should be in >80% range, maybe even >90% range.

> nuclear.  Though a bunch of the plants were scheduled for decommission
> anyway due to age, before being extended, before this post-Fukushima

The most scandalous about the situation is that newer, safer plants
were shut down by the operators so that operation licenses would be
transfered to older, unsafe, yet paid off plants. Why? To maximize
the profit of effective power monopolies. How can you solve this
by technology? You can't.

> decision (which after all happened at an old plant.)  The Wikipedia page
> on Renewable Energy in Germany was quite impressive; it's jumped from 6%
> to 17% of electricity in the past decade.  Nuclear is 22% of
> electricity.  Solar tripled from 2007 to 2009 and nearly doubled again
> in 2010.  (Mind you, to 2% of electricity.)  

It's 3% by now, and the interesting part is it matches peak demand
almost always. To illustrate a bit:

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met_y=sp_pop_grow&idim=country:DEU&dl=en&hl=en&q=germany+population+growth

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met_y=eg_use_pcap_kg_oe&idim=country:DEU&dl=en&hl=en&q=energy+consumption+germany

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met_y=eg_use_elec_kh_pc&idim=country:DEU&dl=en&hl=en&q=electricity+consumption+germany

meanwhile, a typical day in Germany looks like this:

http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/34/34773/2.html

Solar peaks at 14-15 GW, while the still running nuclear 
plants only deliver 7. This is not being possible because
of power imports, but because of renewable maximum demand
matching and existing overcapacity of conventional power.
 
> They've got their work cut out for them, but they're investing heavily,
> sort of like their Apollo Project or Iraq War.  Or Interstate Highway,
> to be less cruel to ourselves in productivity comparison.
> 
> Perspective: they had already planned to have 35% of electricity from
> renewables by 2020 -- so they'd already planned to be nearly there, not
> counting energy efficiency measures.

Germany could switch off nuclear by 2014, if it really wanted to.

In practice the existing renewable growth is far to little, since
electricity is a small part of total energy demand, and we need
to substitute the entire coal, oil, and most of fossil natural 
gas by 2050. Frankly, I don't think there's enough money in
the economy for that. 

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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