However, with generation from solar - Germany’s second largest source of clean electricity behind wind - set to plunge this winter due to reduced daylight, Germany’s total clean power generation looks set to decline just as energy consumption levels rise from higher demand for heating.
There’s a big push in Germany to install heat pumps. If people doing that are getting dual air conditioner/heater systems installed, it may be that it’ll increase summer demand for electricity, and that’ll mitigate some of that.
As things stand, Europe’s peak electricity demand is during winter, due to electricity-powered heating.
In the US, peak electricity demand is during summer, due to air conditioning.
What you’d ideally like is, if your generation is non-dispatchable, for demand to more-or-less track when power is available. In general, solar is going to tend to be generating at the right times if your peak load is from air conditioning, and the wrong times if your peak load is from heating.
European adoption of air conditioning is increasing.
In Italy, sales of air conditioning units grew from 865,000 a year in 2012 to 1.92 million in 2022, according to the industry association Assoclima. These were mostly for business and not residential use, with growth reported in the first quarter of this year.
Most are split heat air pump systems, that can heat spaces in the winter, which Assoclima says can reduce gas consumption as prices spike during the war in Ukraine. That dual-use attracts consumers.
What I don’t know is what the total impact will be.
We’re headed for a warmer climate in Europe, that’s for sure. So time will help us
Not really sure. Depends on if/when the gulf stream collapses.
We are headed for a more extreme climate thats on average a few degrees warmer. While the heating period may get shorter, the peak load due to heating in extreme winters will increase. Thats the exact opposite of what you want in an all renewable grid.
It amazes me the carbonless energy source, nuclear, is shunned so hard by the green community that Germany is reopening coal plants.
We live in truly wild times.
Too expensive, takes too long to build, still fossil.
How is nuclear energy “still fossil”?
It is not, but if you spout lied loud enough some people believe you.
Except your wrong. It’s the most expensive form of energy generation. The question is are you just dumb or saying wrong stuff on purpose. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
Scheiße, I’ve upset the Germans.
That needs more than a lunatic on an online board.
The levelised cost doesn’t take into account the need to offset intermittence, which is the big fucking problem that the entire population of Germany seems to be ignoring.
Ah yes you don’t have the exact same problem with nuclear because energy usage never fluctuates. But even if it would takes 10 times more money to store solar energy it still would be cheaper than nuclear.
Rare earths for batteries are a bottleneck, especially if you want to electrify transport too.
It is a limited resource we dig out of the ground in countries we don’t want to be depending on, because to do it in our own countries is too dirty for us. Then we use this bound energy and convert it into heat we release into the atmosphere. The only thing missing for being technically “fossil” is that it’s originated from organic matter.
Short from that, it definitively classifies as not renewable, not sustainable, dangerous, not climate neutral, expensive, antquiated idea. And in the sense of being an antiquated idea at least, it is “still fossil”.
It is not fossil, but i agree that we should switch over to use the term renewable instead, because that’s the goal.
It isn’t but it has all the same downsides as fossil fuels in terms of being dependent on some countries for fuel imports, extraction being extremely environmentally damaging, limited supply,…
This does not justify closing existing, already payed, plants. And it’s not fossil.
The only way these plants could have continued to run would have been with extensive maintenance - they were already running under a special permission allowing them to forgo scheduled maintenance. This maintenance could not have been put off any longer and would have meant the shutdown of the plants for an extended period as well as high costs that nobody (including the plant operators) was willing to pay. In effect, just continueing to run the plants as they were would have invited disaster by gross negligence. Another factor is the human factor: since the end of nuclear power generation has been a long time coming, a lot of the specialists at the various plants have changed their plans accordingly and moved to other industries or even countries to pursue new carreer opportunities, so that the knowhow and manpower to operate these plants simply does not exist anymore.
The real failure is that the existing alternatives have not been allowed to grow as needed. Previous governments have not just cut subsidiaries for power sources like wind, they have made it near impossible to install new plants with idiotic, over the top regulations and laws.
Damn, if only you had existing plantd you could be using in Germany… Oh wait.
You mean the ones that are at the end of their expected lifetime and have been scheduled to shutdown for 12 years which surely hasn’t lead to a lack of maintenance and upgrades that would have been done otherwise? The ones that made up a tiny percentage of our energy mix even before they were shut down?
Oh you mean like the old plants in France that are out for maintainance so much, that France has to buy electric power from Germany? https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/01/05/germany-power-trade
France whose best idea this year was to make a law that now allows new built power plants to be built besides old ones, so “THEY CAN USE THE SAME PARKING LOT” because that was the ONLY idea they had to “speed up” the planning and building phase of power plants that in case of Finland took 13 years longer than expected, which was costly for the French power plant builder because they had to pay late fees?
The repeated delays led to bitter compensation disputes between the Finnish operator TVO and Areva (seated in France), with the latter ultimately agreeing in March 2018 to pay TVO financial compensation of €450 million.
When France finally will have a new power plant it will just replace the old ones and add nothing to the grid.
Holding France’s old power plants up und building new ones, despite no one in the private sector wanting to invest into it, costs so much money that they have to use funds that were meant to build social housing to keep them up and start building. In the UK investors are so unwilling to invest, because of high risks of building costs exploding and projects finishing 12+ years late, that the government considers to give them “upfront money” to even think about investing into Sizewell C.
https://www.ft.com/content/7311cbdd-f245-43ff-92a3-9b763959a2db
France aims to start construction work on the first pair of reactors by 2027 and to be completed by 2035. The last reactor that Paris commissioned, however, is more than a decade behind schedule.
Thats realistically 2045, when it is only 10 years late and that means the old power plants of France that were build in the 80s and 90s, having huge problems with maintenance and stress corrosion NOW, will have even more problems 12 - 22 years from now. I doubt they will make it for so long at all.
France is a mess and it will cost the whole EU billions to finally free them from their dead end. Not to mention that their unrealistic dreams of nuclear power also lead to them not having the money or the will to invest in insulation and heating/cooling that is not depending solely on electricity, which they desperately need to do and Germany does for years now.
I hate that the nuclear power chills have made the jump from Reddit to the Fediverse.
Virgin nuclear supporter vs chad renewables are faster and cheaper
And yet, energy production from coal hit a new low in October.
https://nitter.net/energy_charts_d/status/1720012402433909073#m
Don’t scare them with facts.
It amazes me that the most expensive and slowest to build energy source that produces the worst waste imaginable is so cherished by some online trolls that they constantly demand to consider nuclear over renewables.
We truly live in wild times.
You’re right. Instead let’s burn coal instead!
But nobody is doing that.
Of course it fucking will and us Swedes ends up short-ended to pick up the slack of a nation making uneducated child-like decisions that we didn’t even get to vote on or even have as much as a say in!
It’s Nordstream all over again, thank you very fucking much!
Thankfully, Finland recently completed a new nuclear power station that will help us both this coming winter.
You mean besides:
- German fossil fuel electricity production is down a lot compared to the same period last year
- Germany exported a lot of electricity to France last winter, which will likely not be the case this winter
- German electricity consumption is down a lot
All of that perfectly well explained in the commentary even with lovely graphs, but well lets first hate on Germany and ignore the facts. Makes life so much easier right?
The article (as stated in the fucking title) is about how Germany will most likely need to substitute their energy grid with imports and coal power…
No not really lol. They speculate that maybe they may need to burn more coal this winter.
While being very clear about how speculative the whole commentary is, as it largely depends on how much wind and solar will offset.
Of course, it’s speculation, we cannot tell the future. But looking at the graphs provided, Germany has steadily generated leas and less power in 2023. What kind of miracle are you hoping for this winter? 100 % sun hours with steady winds?!
Winds will pick up in winter and sun will go down. We’ll see i guess. Don’t know why everyone in this thread is so fucking angry
Because it affects many of us on such a personal level. Middle-class households in Sweden are struggling financially, much because of the energy prices.
The environmental changes caused by burning fossile fuel are being felt, now more than ever before.
And it fucking stings the eyes when you hear uneducated fools talk about how bad nuclear power is when it really would help us eleviate both these issues.
The problem isn’t that we shutdown our nuclear power, the problem is that despite the government knowing it for decades, they didnt plan for a proper, renewable substitute. The current government has to pick up the slack from the Merkel government (and as a thank you declines in polls).
Sadly, nuclear power isnt something you can just switch on or off.
Ig you haven’t read up on some “long term storage” facilities already leaking and failing after mere decades due to cut corners?
https://ecology.wa.gov/Waste-Toxics/Nuclear-waste/Hanford-cleanup/Leaking-tanks
Also nuclear is not something we (germany) could just get back on short term.
Nuclear isnt at all the silver bullet yall make it out to be
Nah you just all fell for the same altright idiots like us germans. You wont struggle. And even then, why are you blaming germany and not your own fucking politicians. Grow up.
Nuclear isn’t the final solution. But it beats burning brown coal by a large margin. This combined with the push to go full EV is a simply a bad strategy. They are “going” to shut down their fossil plants by 2045. But meanwhile the air pollution of these plants is also staggering seeing how much NO2 these guys put out. Sadly there are a vast amount of people applauding these decisions pollution ref facts coal mines
final solution.
Bad choice of words when talking about Germany.
Germany didn’t have anywhere near the amount of nuclear power plants or lifetime left in them at the end here that keeping them running would be even worth discussing and building new ones would be the kind of thing that only matters in 2045 because that is how long it would take.
Another circlejerk article for Europe with a hypothetical scenario as an opinion piece just to get people angry. Seems weird that something like this is coming from Reuters - I thought they did mostly matter of fact reporting for things that happened and not stuff like this
It’s an article with listed facts, graphs, and data you fucking dullard, just read the damn article.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.
no u
