From the LA times, a bold move, but unlikely they can pull it off.
Germany to close all 84 of its coal-fired power plants, will rely primarily on renewable energy
Germany, one of the world’s biggest consumers of coal, will shut down all 84 of its coal-fired power plants over the next 19 years to meet its international commitments in the fight against climate change, a government commission said Saturday.
The announcement marked a significant shift for Europe’s largest country — a nation that had long been a leader on cutting CO2 emissions before turning into a laggard in recent years and badly missing its reduction targets. Coal plants account for 40% of Germany’s electricity, itself a reduction from recent years when coal dominated power production.
“This is an historic accomplishment,” said Ronald Pofalla, chairman of the 28-member government commission, at a news conference in Berlin following a marathon 21-hour negotiating session that concluded at 6 a.m. Saturday. The breakthrough ended seven months of wrangling. “It was anything but a sure thing. But we did it,” Pofalla said. “There won’t be any more coal-burning plants in Germany by 2038.”
The plan includes some $45 billion in spending to mitigate the pain in coal regions. The commission’s recommendations are expected to be adopted by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.
…
The decision to quit coal follows an earlier bold energy policy move by the German government, which decided to shut down all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011.
…
The initial targets are considerable, calling for a quarter of the country’s coal-burning plants with a capacity of 12.5 gigawatts to be shut down by 2022. That means about 24 plants will be shut within the first three years. By 2030, Germany should have about eight coal-burning plants remaining, producing 17 gigawatts of electricity, the commission said.
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An absolutely horrific plan.
Putin is laughing all the way to Gazprom bank.
http://www.gazprom.com/projects/nord-stream2/
Just a question here: a few weeks ago, WUWT said that Germany had increased coal mining. (Don’t remember the exact date.)
What happened to that? Is it all going to export?
This bit of news tonight is possibly THE stupidest thing I have seen come out of Deutschland in a very, very long time.
They’ll be sorry. … really, really sorry.
They export goal..
If they keep at it, Germany’s greatest export will be their economy
They shut down the last hard coal mines once and for
good, but the opened lignite mines instead.Sarah, you are correct and someone needs to tell their Energy Minister Peter Altmaier about this plan.
see
https://www.thegwpf.com/green-no-more-germany-delays-coal-exit-indefinitely/
Everyday it becomes clearer how the great German nation fell under the spell of the Little Corporal.
is, delusions and fantasies.
Excellent comment!
Not only Germany but next “Das Welt”
Coal and nuclear power will be replaced by natural gas. There are already gas power plants in germany, but they don’t work economically by now. Coal and nuclear power are still to cheap.
Why Trump has threatened to sanction European companies investing in Nord Stream 2, a pipeline wich is critisized as economically unfeasible?
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream#Economic_aspects ]
I think it all will make sense, when German coal and nuclear power will be replaced by russian natural gas.
Why Germans don’t act? They don’t want to be treated as “nazis” (lose their jobs, get their cars burned,…).
You really think it is a good idea for European countries to become totally dependent on natural gas from Russia? Really?
The blowback from the consequences of this venal, narcissistic idiocy will be akin to the advent of the Nazis.
The Germans have delivered us two world wars and subsequently just bludged off the US-UK underpinned NATO for its postwar security despite having more than enough capacity to pay its way let alone the expertise to maintain a formidable military capacity.
There is something just wrong with the German mindset. Arrogant and self important without judgement.
To be fair, Germany was an occupied nation for forty years after losing a devastating war that they started, then took in tens of millions of communists. They might need a bit of time to recover from that.
Thought it does rather look like they may have decided to commit suicide instead. Fortunately I don’t think I own anything that needs parts from Germany, because I doubt they’ll be available in a few years.
The germans are very sharp people. They will figure out after they shut down about half of those plants that it’s a really bad idea. I’m sure Putin likes the idea of Germany being more dependent on Russian natural gas though. That’s about all the Germans will have left. Putin will have them by the short hairs.
Yeah…..But without reliable and abundant electrical power to power their economic endeavors, where do they get the money to pay Russia for the natural gas? And Petroleum?
They took ten years to integrate the east. Their numbers. The cost to their economy isn’t easily defined. The east had cheap labour but when that ran out mad merkel invited Africa and the middle east to join them and the rest of europe
East Germany did not have cheap labour, because they converted marks at one to one. Both Eat and West Germany had a demographic problem that pre-dated the fall of the Wall. I have worked with plenty of Germans (generally very nice and funny people) but hardly any have any children.
Kind of rude to invite everyone to your party then dump the punchbowl on the lawn.
Yes, I accept they had a lot of rebuilding to do then reintegrate with the East but for the last decade or so they could readily have been ramping up their defence spending to the 2% mark.
There is nothing to have stopped them having a small, compact but high quality military that could at least appear to be solid with the US. Where were crack German troops in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Iraq 1990 etc? They have been taking soft options militarily and posturing morally.
If Germany invested all the social welfare for “guest workers” from southern europe and Turkey – to keep them in the NATO – instead in a powerful army, would you be really happier? I guess UK and Poland wouldn’d.
It’s not as if the data isn’t there. The following website shows the energy mix in Germany. This week note the small contribution by both wind and solar. On the night of January 24, the contribution
of wind is zero and solar of course is zero. Doubling the fleet will be 2 X 0 or 0 unreliable energy. If you look back on earlier weeks you can find periods of over two weeks on which wind is working at less than 10% of capacity. Imagine the increased number of wind turbines needed to over produce energy for a future two week lull. Imagine the batteries or pumped storage needed to store the energy for two weeks of German industry. Well maybe there won’t be that much industry.
It seems incredible to me that Germany does not see the dangers in their abandonment of fossil fuel and nuclear. Perhaps the plan is to become reliant on Gazprom. What could go wrong?
https://www.energy-charts.de/price.htm
First Crimea, then Ukraine, then…
Germany already appears to be a nation that doesn’t even want to be able to defend itself…
Due to the WWII. You guys (allied) took the guts away, now Germany eats from the hand of Putin.
Hugs How did we do that? By defeating them? But either way we rebuilt them, too. Japan also. So don’t go blaming the Allies. They attacked, not us.
“You” didn’t beat them, the allied did manage to create a post WWII Germany in which thinking is gutted. The good communists completed the fathermurder so that poor guys still fear of being Natzists and try be so progressive.
I think this ‘fear’ of being an N drives Germany.
Germans have huge guilt about the war and that’s holding them back on creating a big army. A suicide-wish is a more likely explanation for the idiocy.
They are moving towards the same situation as they were in during the 1920s. Economic collapse, which leads to serious political polarization about what to do for it. We are seeing both in their early stages – the watermelons on the Left, opposed by AfD on the Right. Although neither one is quite as radical and violent as their counterparts of a century ago, they are going to move that way as the economy dies.
Much the same in France, Italy, most other European nations.
They might not be as radical and violent as back then, but once a certain threshold is passed people can go full postal with surprising ease. There are many such examples in history of that. Then there is only one way forward, destroy the other side.
I went to Rome last November and one of the days I went to Ostia. I was absolutely stunned at the level of graffiti praising Hitler and decrying the levels of immigration. There is a bonfire being built in Europe that will inevitably erupt in the not too distant future that will be talked about for as long as we have talked about WWII.
Think again. You come off like the indoctrinated AOC.
‘Responsibility for WW2’ https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7544
and:
Who started bombing civilians first:Germany or Great Britain https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8172
and:
Operation Barbarossa Was A Preventive Attack https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7999
and:
WWI Forum
https://forum.codoh.com/viewforum.php?f=27
Yeah, yeaah. And Mein Kampf was not in any way what Hitler meant, long before he came to power and then did what he said he would do. It’s not Germany’s fault at all.
Just absurd fantasies.
So it is not the fault of the American voters at all that O’bummer got elected twice?
If you want to know more about who attacked civilians first then go and talk to the survivors from Poland who miraculously escaped the Nazi death squads in the late 30’s, Long before the war even began !!!
For Europeans WW2 began in September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland…..
Wally
You are off your rocker! Spend just little time reading 1st order material and not spin doctoring. I would suggest you start with Hitlers own words. But 6 million dead jews and at least as many eastern europeans in labor camps and death camps should give you the basic idea of Hitlers actual views.
By the way the similarities between Hitlers use of Jews as the focal point of hatred for all the supposed ills that the German people had suffered is eerily similar to the lefts blaming of white males for all the supposed sins in the world.
The difference is white males in America will not surrender their weapons and meekly walk into the death camps.
I’m always fascinated by arguments over who bombed civilians first. The funny part (not) is you’re talking about the wrong war. I don’t know who did it first, but civilians were being bombed from the air in 1915.
Always glad to help out! https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/london_bombing_of
Wait a minute though.
Picture this. In a fairly typical freezing mid winter Germany (insert name of country) the wind is not blowing and the Sun is not shining, and Mr Putin decides the Germans can have his gas at double the price.
After a few million Germans have frozen to death the remaining grown ups tell the idiots in charge where to go. End of the global warming farce.
Or am I wishing on a star? By
There is one big thing wrong with the German mindset Kuma, Murkle!cl
About a hundred years ago, a British (?) politician said that “The German is either at your feet or at your throat”. Exchange ‘throat’ for ‘economy’, and consider just WHO is running the EU, and you may sympathise with that speaker…
Good thing Britain is getting out of this mess just in time.
To whom? Germans? If they are in their right minds, which is clearly not a majority of Germans.
To me? No, I don’t care for Germany or Germans. It serves them right to suffer. I believe that the move will cause immense suffering, and will serve as a salutary example of the foolishness that warmunism has engendered.
“Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.”
Edmund Burke, Letter i. On a Regicide Peace. Vol. v. p. 331.
http://www.bartleby.com/100/276.41.html
Agreed. It will be a laboratory of leftist ideas turned into reality, as if the world needed another example. Will they be able to carry this plan through to its 19-year completion? Or at some point will the privations foisted upon the German people lead to such strong political opposition that the current government policy must be stopped (likely accompanied by a declaration that they have “won” the climate war)? How much higher will electricity rates go? Will their economy suffer as most here anticipate? Will there be political upheaval? We will be watching with interest.
Well The German people hve maney years in elections to change that?
God help them, Putin will be laughing his head off if Germany plan to use Gas to paper over the unreliables cracks.
The EU reliance on Russian gas will ensure they darent complain or act next time Putin decides to “liberate” more of the Ukraine or somewhere else on the EU’s borders or in the Baltics.
“This is an historic accomplishment”,
True, A plan that will starve, impoverish and freeze all good germans, (and bad ones).
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
What could possibly go wrong? What renewables will be taking the place of these plants? What back up do they plan to have or have they decided that having backup is too pessimistic?
A plan put in place “in the fight against climate change”
Think about that for a second. It is like saying you are going to fight the wind blowing or the sun coming up. Hey I have an idea. How about cutting off you head to fight hair loss or sinus problems. It would certainly cure blindness.
Hah.
https://stopthesethings.com/2019/01/24/pulsing-punishment-wind-turbine-infrasound-delivers-perpetual-torment-for-neighbours/
I guess maybe they decided to run the economy entirely without reliable electricity (no nuclear, no coal), that should work, right?
No! It will not work. The policy be reversed before its fully implemented. Intermittent electric power will not be tolerated by the voters.
As it seems now, the green blob is on the rise. These Green Godfathers of pc will see that the will of the voters will be wilfully ignored.
Like they’re trying to do with Brexit .
Yes, there will be postponements after postponements. Don’t forget they have made many such decisions over the last 20 years – always to be delayed or forgotten about.
Please note that in their announcement, they confused “voted to” with “accomplished.”
And “accomplished” is once it is achieved, not at the commencement announcement.
Classic virtue signalling.
Like Sweden decided to close nuclear power plants in 1980. As a result, they have more than doubled the production of nuclear power.
The production was about 60-70 TWh in 2017. (for some reason, the article in Wikipedia is somewhat outdated. Maybe the little activists are lacking energy?)
Maybe they saw the ‘excellent’ examples provided by South Australia and Victoria this week and thought that they would emulate them?
Neither of which had problems caused by renewables or a green grid, but problems entirely due to climate related extreme weather!
griff
January 28, 2019 at 12:53 am
“Neither of which had problems caused by renewables or a green grid, but problems entirely due to climate related extreme weather!”
Hardly.
“It’s being billed as wildly extreme, but Melbourne officially peaked at 42.8C. Bob Fernley-Jones looked back at the long Melbourne Regional Office data going back to 1855, and found around 30 corrected “50″ examples of a day of 42C or more. Days like this are one-in-3-year-event. This is summer in Melbourne. It’s not rare and any half-competent planner would plan accordingly.
As Bob points out the highest spikes in Jan ’39 and Feb 2009 are arguably outliers “resulting from freakish hot northerlies (and the most terrible Victorian bushfires). If they are waived as outliers, then for the rest of the record from 1855 it’s all pretty dam flat?”
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/01/melbourne-200000-houses-blacked-out-10-companies-curtailed-as-1-in-5-year-hot-day-hits/
So not having enough power from wind because wind doesn’t always blow is a problem because of Climate Change? What?
Australia gets hot and always has done. This week hasn’t been near an actual record, just near BOM’s records, which only go back to 1910.
Try some facts with your propaganda once in a while.
Griff
can’t you just go away again? your drivel is no less annoying than it used to be.
Which only stands to prove that renewbles can’t provide the needed energy in today’s climate.
Coal, Gas, Nuclear would have had no problems supplying the necessary MWh needed to supply the uptick in demand created by the summer temperatures. Renewables (Unreliables) Not So Much.
Griff…Would you agree then that, given the current state of the climate, reliables are far more necessary than renewables for supplying the energy required to keep society cool during hot summer months?
Ummmm… hardly extreme:
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/01/melbourne-200000-houses-blacked-out-10-companies-curtailed-as-1-in-5-year-hot-day-hits/
Not only can we expect more of the same from time to time, S.A. already got more of the same in the past, from time to time. Try another excuse.
The article says
“The initial targets are considerable, calling for a quarter of the country’s coal-burning plants with a capacity of 12.5 gigawatts to be shut down by 2022. That means about 24 plants will be shut within the first three years. ”
and
“An opinion poll by ZDF television Friday showed 73% of Germans are in favor of a speedy phase-out.”
So who knows ?
If the German people put their mind to something, they are a very powerful force,
whether misguided or not, I can’t say.
“An opinion poll by ZDF television Friday….”
Do we know if the poll taken was reliable?
ZDF, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, has a bad reputation for government unindependent MSM journalism.
Steffen Seibert, government spokesman since 2010, was before that, lo and behold, a journo and news anchorman with the ZDF. Hôni soit qui mal y pense.
No, not the Voters, their Industry, their wealth generators.
Maybe replaced by Russian gas?
LNG is not renewable and it is fossil fuel…
Yes, but Germany wants to surrender to Russia, and this is a way to do it.
Natural Gas is renewable…sort of. It is being produced at a landfill near us.
Whats’ that got to do with anything? Germany can’t function without either coal, or gas, or nuclear. They have to choose one. The alternative is death by renewables.
Don’t discount the possibility that they want to die. One symptom is the birth rate among ethnic Germans which is well below replacement.
It really doesn’t matter what the Germans do as we only have 12 years left to avoid Armageddon! (sarc)
And they’re signed up to the EU directive that means only electric vehicles can be sold in Germany after 2030 ……… be interesting to see how fast the German economy crashes and burns then when everything is ‘powered’ by renewables…
Thank God the UK is meant to be leaving the EU in a few weeks
The UK will be so much better off without the EU millstone around its neck.
Whilst I agree with “thank God we are leaving the EU” just stop and think what the British rulers have in store with their global warming agenda.
It is every bit a stupid as the Germans. And we have ZERO opposition to the hare brained globalists.
Since they are next door to France’s 72% nuclear power, perhaps they plan on France to keeping them supplied with electricity.
They only need to bring money.
Poland will take revenge and invade Germany with coal power.
This may explain the recent lovey-dovey interaction between Mama Merkel and little boy Marcon.
All over the Australian MSM like a rash, as if it will make a difference!
In fact Germany has been propping up France, where safety issues closed many reactors and extensive maintenance is needed on the country’s aging reactors…
https://www.ecowatch.com/france-nuclear-power-shut-down-2086414462.html
Germany also supports France during high demand
https://www.erneuerbareenergien.de/archiv/german-power-exports-to-france-increasing-150-482-33036.html
Great! Both economies and countries will collapse.
Meanwhile, in reality, France is doing just fine, buying only minimal amounts from Germany: https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=FR
“nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Germany”
Now that’s an oxymoron.
I see history repeating itself here…”Germans sadly follow a lunatic leader into (green) hell”. This will not end well for Germans. “Leaders” showboat and virtue signal while population suffers and pays and pay and pay…
I would hope whoever succeeds Merkei will have more sense, and do away with this madness.
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer is her annointed successor in the CDU and could become Chancellor. She has somewhat waffled on energy policy but is reportedly anti coal and anti nuclear, but pro gas and renewables while insistent that they must remain a world leader in implementing Paris.
Putin is counting his money while doing backflips over this news as Germany will become heavily dependent on Russian gas.
And more coal for everyone else.
German coal, like German politics is very low grade and not worth digging or exporting.
Perhaps the dumbest move of all was shutting down the nuclear plants because of a very unusual set of circumstances that could never possibly occur in Germany, helped along by sloppy Japanese thinking in not providing local power back up. But then, who plans for a tsunami? The German
govt lacks the ability to understand even the basics. Of course making plans 11 years out is the easy part. By 2030, I expect most of the civilized world to be building small modular molten salt nuclear plants by the bucketful. These will doom a reneable Germany to the same high energy costs disdvantages of her industry, causing any still around by that time to leave. GErmany’s power costs are already close to those of wind-crazy Denmark – the highest in Europe. Plenty of German companies have set sail for the U.S. due to energy costs. Probably also the reason BMW has expanded their factory in South Carolina , now the largest BMW plant in the world. And South Carolina is 60% + nuclear power.
Well, the Germans once thought it would be a good idea to invade Russia in the winter…with a 2500 mile supply line…that went well. Lets face it, those Germans can really be wacky people.
Roughly transporting the ‘natural’ gas 2500 miles uses roughly 35% of the energy content of the gas transported which significantly reduces the benefit of burning natural gas over coal.
Transporting gas uses significantly more energy than transporting a liquid or a solid.
P.S. The largest reserve of natural gas in Europe is found in Germany. Of course the green idiots hate fracking almost as much as the burning of coal.
William Astley
I’m curious about your numbers, William. Are you saying pipeline transmission of natural gas uses the equivalent of ~35% of the intrinsic energy of the transported product? That doesn’t sound very credible to me – it sounds way high – so I’d like to know where that figure came from please. Can you provide a source please? Thanks!
Operation Barbarossa started on June 22. You probably live in NZ or AU.
Napoleon’s French invasion of Russia began on 24 June 1812.
Maybe the next one should be pencilled in for a Spring kick off.
And it was wildly successful initially.
And do not forget what happened to the Swedish invaders prior to Napoleon. Even Tammerlane had difficulties in the forests north of Kiev. General winter seems to always step in to complicate the day.
You’re highly leftist “History Channel” indoctrinated.
Operation Barbarossa Was A Pre-Emptive Attack https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7999
So was the invasion of Poland LOL.
Fancy someone quoting revisionism.
Or just history as most of us know it. There is zero evidence that Stalin had any plans to attack Germany.
Stalin doubted than the non-aggression pact would last and did order some limited war preparations, but the sheer scale of Op.Barbarossa still caught the Soviets off-guard.
After the siege of Malta failed, the Axis oil supply from N.Africa started to dwindle as Malta-based Allied bombers harassed the tanker convoys. Hitler needed oil and the closest known sources were in Soviet territory. I expect that was the main motivation for breaking the non-ag agreement and opening the eastern front.
Romania, by then a top-ranking oil producing country, was the backbone of the German oil industry. In the 1930ies, large chemical plants were built in Germany to generate oil from – coal. Leunawerke in Saxonia had by far the largest processing pants (Bergius method). Italian – Libyan oil was not even second – tier. Russian oil around the Caspian Sea and Baku had much higher prority. Erich von Manstein said to Hitler: “If we dont get the Baku oil, the war will be lost.”
Wally
It actually was. But the Germans didn’t know anything about that, as Goebbels admitted.
Musial, Bogdan: Kampfplatz Deutschland. Stalins Kriegspläne gegen den
Westen. Berlin: Propyläen 2008, 585 Seiten, 29,90 €
Suvorov, Viktor. Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? (Viking Press/Hamish Hamilton; 1990) ISBN 0-241-12622-3
For the first book an in-deep knowledge of the German language is indispensable.
“By 2030, I expect most of the civilized world to be building small modular molten salt nuclear plants by the bucketful. ”
Not if American liberals have anything to say about it. Who was it who said that giving clean cheap energy to people is like giving guns to children?
Paul Erhlich, in a publication put out by the anti-nuclear Abalone Alliance, claimed having cheap and unlimited power was like “giving an idiot child a machine gun”.
Thanks, Tom.
Giving Paul Ehrlich an audience is like giving a foolish child a machine gun.
American liberals won’t be running government anytime soon. They are moving farther left and are spending all their energy on trying to win the last election. Yeah they took over the House, but without having an honest retrospective on why they lost the election and reviewing their policies, all those citizens who finally got jobs and bigger paychecks will be increasing the vote for Republicans with also an increased support from African Americans.
The Trump phenomenon is also changing the R party, getting rid of the RINO repubs who’ve been living in the Swamp as paid up members of the DC elites. The rest of the world is waking up from the neomarxbrothers’ nightmare perpetrated by the same types. Brexit, Austria, Italy, Poland, the French gilêts jaunes riots, Brazil (I’m still hoping a little bit for our lost cousins in Australia), Canadian provinces are turfing out the left and Trudeau will be gone. India, China and a growing number of African countries are pushing out the the neocolonial agents of the elites and are going gangbusters on coal.
Germany is opting for the American model re energy with Russian gas as the main energy source’. It’s basically all over.
Pelosi destroyed the Trump phenomenon.
LOL
For a whole THREE WEEKS.
Get informed.
She destroyed the Trump phenomenon in her fantasies. She is now the proud owner of the non-wall and the caravans.
This is called whistling past the grave yard. As long as the Lefties have the media at their back, they start every election with a 5% lead.
So that’s what happened in 2016?
Complete List of President Trump’s Accomplishments in the Two Years Since His Historic 2016 Election Win
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/11/here-it-is-complete-list-of-president-trumps-accomplishments-in-the-two-years-since-his-historic-2016-election-win/
Through illegal discrimination that nobody is doing anything about liberals have come to control education from K-12, and through university. Each graduating class is a little more liberal than the last.
Imagine if conservatives controlled education, how dominant would they be in the political arena? That’s how dominant liberals will soon be.
I don’t know from where the idea that this movement is liberal came from, it is not. It appears to be a re-run if the Weimar republic. The progression and end point will probably be very similar.
But they are going to build Scalectric pretend cars powered by fairy dust and unicorn farts, not real grown up vehicles in Carolina.
There you go again (to quote President Reagan)
By 2030, I expect most of the civilized world to be building small modular molten salt nuclear plants by the bucketful
Why? The idea has been around for decades and nothing has come of it yet. While I would certainly love to see MSRs become a reality (assuming they’re everything they’re hyped to be) the fact that, to date, no one has succeeded in making them work to scale commercially suggest that a bit of caution in such gung-ho pronouncements is in order as so far all “modular molten salt nuclear plants” have been and continue to be is vaporware.
If research on MSR had been subsidized as heavily as wind and PV research, the story would look completely different. The Green Blob prevents such research successfully (for the sake of our children) and politicians follow suit obediently.
So 28 fools voted to commit slow but literal suicide. Won’t be too many years before the ‘yellow vests’ come out in Germany, as they probably won’t willingly do so.
They are Germans not French. French riot. Germans obey orders.
Do they obey orders to riot?
Disguise it as Oktoberfest and everything goes.
How can 45 billion Euros allocated over 15 years mitigate the damage to millions of lives and to the skills of the soon to be former leading manufacturing technology nation on earth? The U.S. Spends that amount yearly in Afghanistan! Germany will under this plan lose its capability to make steel and copper (both require baseload power and steel making requires coal and coal byproducts). I guess the Germans will.import such materials from smelters and mills in less enlightened nations. Such was German exveptionalism (It sure wasn’t and isn’t in politics).
It’s all just more impossible leftist hot air.
In a year they’ll be quietly scrapping the whole absurd idea.
Germany’s economy is extremely export based, even the left knows that they will not get to steal more German taxpayers money if the economy crashes due to lack of sufficient energy.
Much ado about nothing.
The plan to eliminate coal-burning plants as well as nuclear means that Germany will be counting on renewable energy to provide 65% to 80% of the country’s power by 2040.
I presume “renewable” means wind and solar. Stupid question: What happens should they get a cold snap in January and the wind stops blowing (as often happens on the coldest days)? Where does the electricity come from? What’s the plan?
Tell me what goal you have in mind for 2040. I’ll give you a plan to get there. Just don’t ask me to guarantee that it will work (no skin in the game). I’ll have retired to Micronesia by then.
Killer Marmot
The only thing I can think of is that they import their electricity for those periods via Europe wide interconnectors, thereby simply displacing their CO2 emissions.
I mean this has been the plan all along hasn’t it, to create a United States of Europe.
I can’t help but wonder if this is simply a knee jerk reaction to their current failing CO2 emissions reduction policy. The problem is of course, that it failed for a reason and the 75% support for this will rapidly erode as electricity bills rise beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest.
Were I a younger man I would be very tempted to start selling domestic diesel generators in Germany.
It won’t happen
New Guy,
“Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower
My dad taught me that expression when I was a wee lass, long before King used it.
My grandfather,, in 1973, taught me that one, and I am pretty sure he learned it before the turning of the last century. Some wisdom is eternal.
Actually, its “piss in the other.”
Neither would they invade Russia.
What they keep quiet about is the fact that they rely on nuclear power generated across the border in the Czech Republic: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/czech-republic.aspx
Germany’s Merkel has already flushed Germany’s cultural future via immigration
The last coal plant closure without nuclear build out will be the coup-de-grace
The harsh reality is that by the time the final coal plant closures hits, full Islamization of Germany’s legal and political systems will be in place. That’s not racist. Its the reality of differing birth rates between two very diffrent cultures in one land.
And if the EU remains intact (I give that about a 5% chance), the children of those immigrants and their children will be full EU citizens able to move about anywhere in the EU to keep the islamization going. And you can bet that will happen as energy costs destroy living standards and jobs in Germany.
And George Soros will be laughing his ass off in whatever depth of hell his evil soul is in by then. He’ll finally have his revenge on Germany’s Christians.
Merkle will Have accomplished what Suleiman could not.
I guess it will all work out since many if them come from areas that do not have reliable power. Nothing to adjust to.
It just means the civilized world is shrinking. Oh, well, it was a good run.
Joel, the Germans are going to be switching to Russian gas, not renewables. They had relied on German ingenuity, a can-do self reliance and a societal beehive order and obedience to be the best at the new green society.
They failed and recognize that the big failure, that of their competitive industry and economy were next. The deal with Russia on gas is huge. If it weren’t, they wouldn’t be willing to court such American displeasure over this deal.
They had front-loaded their economy with supporting indigent EU members, opening their doors to hoards of more indigents and culture/society killing demographics on top of the green silliness. They are at a point similar to that of the devastation of their country wrought by themselves with the Second World War. Trump and Brexit were the catalyst, the kick in the A55 that re-engaged their brains.
I had written Germany off 15yrs ago not seeing anything that could save them. Now, I believe they can turn a corner. The Russians love and respect the Germans and both countries will be beneficiaries economically and industrially. Russia will in this way, also overcome the Western propagandized view of them put up by liberal elites and largely also bought into by the right.
At the present rate of immigration by Muslims and high birth rate, all of western and northern Europe will be under Sharia law by 2060. Eastern Europeans are more sensible. They realize the threat of Islam.
Let`s see. Shut down nuclear; shut down coal; will natural gas be next. The Germans are suicidal.
The free market system, with environmental guidance from govt, should determine the natural direction energy production and pricing should go. When govt dictates what will happen, ruin is sure to follow. Will the people in Germany’s govt, that made these decisions, be held accountable – therein lies a huge problem.
Who is John Galt?
As the woman said………….you can ignore reality, but you still suffer the consequences of ignoring reality.
This is problem of Climate Science being dogma based instead of evidence based.
This must get close to a perfect description of insanity. Given no coal or nuclear, limited gas and oil and no chance of solar power producing much for the great majority of the time, this only leaves windmills to power the economy. Yet, as the German grid engineers must have been telling their political masters until they were blue in the face, windmills are simply not fit-for-purpose for powering more than a small part of the electrical power grid of a developed nation. There are two reasons:
1) windmills need almost constant back-up by power stations using alternative energy sources (if there are any!) which, in turn, makes the whole ball-game hideously expensive; and
2) the physical properties of windmills mean that they only work well in winds between around 15mph and 50mph (not far above which they have to be shut down) and, even then, the significant sensitivity of the output between around 15mph and 30mph means that large output fluctuations inevitably occur, leaving grid engineers with major power planning headaches even at relatively low percentages of wind-driven power supply.
Anyone thinking they can run the bulk of the electrical infrastructure of a major developed economy with
windmills is living in cloud-cuckoo land.
I appreciate the cloud-cuckoo reference. And add; it’s an insult that anyone takes the name White Rose without understanding and respecting the historical context.
Intermittent renewables above 25 % penetration triples the cost assuming you have natural gas backup. Germany says they will buy hydro power from Norway when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. But this will entail huge costs of electricity degradation from long distance power losses. It also involves massive upgrading of Germany’s power infrastructure. If you don’t build natural gas plants as a backup then you will have power outages. Does Norway have enough hydro power to power all of German industry?
” In winter 2010/2011, Norwegian reservoir levels were extremely low, and in certain specific hours, electricity prices reached record levels after a long period of low temperatures and low inflow. However, the power supply system was able to meet demand. High prices were important in encouraging lower consumption, higher production and more import of electricity.”
https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftproduksjon/
Based on that quote it seems the answer is unlikely.
With this plan Germany’s electricity costs will skyrocket. Since electricity is only 15% of total energy used in the economy, the CO2 emissions won’t go down much. So one questions why would a sane government do this? The only conclusion is that German leaders are insane.
Their real plan is to import electricity from outside, perhaps even building plants in other countries. Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Czechia, and others will be glad to supply electricity from coal and gas. They’ll also continue to buy nuclear powered electricity from France.
They just might be able to make it work if they keep 8 or so coal plants as a ready reserve for a windless day or two.
With enough money, you can accomplish just about anything, Philo. That doesn’t mean you can still sell BMW’s at a profit.
You can if you build them in S. Carolina where BMW is expanding their manufacturing plant. HQ in Germany, build everything somewhere else. Economic suicide.
BMW also built a plant in Mexico rather than in South Carolina. The reason for this is EU has tariffs on vehicles built in US (at least at that time). Mexico has free trade agreement with the EU where the cars are sold.
“Those that don’t learn the lesson of South Australia are doomed to repeat it.” Apologies to Santayana.
Are Germans so guilt ridden that they are determined to create their own holocaust by committing genocide against their own people?
does Putin have something on Merkel? Gazprom is dancing
Doubt it, she was born in West, grew up and got chemistry PhD in the East, just coincidence that at the same time Putin was head of USSR operations there.
Merkel’s predecessor Gerhard Schroeder is chairman of the board of Nord Stream AG and of Rosneft, the Russian Gas company. What do you suppose Merkel’s next gig will be?
I am personally glad Germany is doing this. It will give the rest of the world a truly visceral and horrifying example of the Green Blob and World Government. I give them 2-5 years into the program until they invent some reason of slowing the closures and reopening either the nuclear or coal plants.
We can all count on the MSM for their ability to report on the outcome of this as honestly as it reported on the Socialist utopia of Venezuela…
Germany can act as an object lesson, showing the reality of renewable energy dependence. I expect that like South Australia you will see the sale and installation of generators at residences and businesses will skyrocket. Carbon dioxide emissions will rise because of that assuming the fuel is available ot run the generators. If not, then Germany’s economy will collapse. It’s businesses will move to countries with reliable energy sources. All of Germany will then resemble the East Germany of the bad old days of the Cold War, and they will have done it to themselves.
Gonna need a long cable from China.
They might just switch over to wood pellets (renewable!)) imported from Siberia. They’re going to run out of lignite anyways in a few decades.
Depending entirely on Russia for your energy, brilliant.
All they have to do is invade Russia to get control of the natural gas supplies. That usually works well…
coal-burning plants with a capacity of 12.5 gigawatts to be shut down by 2022.
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The date of 2022 is key. Merkel has announced she will resign as chancellor in 2021. She will get the credit for shutting down the coal plants, which she can then parley into some choice position in the EU, UN, etc.
Merkel’s successor will get the blame if the lights go out, so Germany will be forced to buy Russian gas. If Putin says jump, Germany will ask “how high”.
No. The Germans will obey without asking any questions. They are trained to do what they are told.
“There won’t be any more coal-burning plants in Germany by 2038.”
I’ll believe it when it happens.
More than likely the populace will get tired of freezing in the dark long before the last coal plant is shut down.
Agreed, it will never happen
I am surprised at this, considering the abject and documented failure of the Energiewendung. This is national masochism.
The Germans, at last estimate, individually pay at least three to four times as much for their electricity usage as I do. Watch that cost go up as they get closer and closer to the drop-dead date (no pun intended; I’m serious) for the plants that are closing.
Why the rest of CDU/CSU hasn’t got rid of Merkel already I’ll never know.
Its been said, Larry, that Germans use 1/3 the electricity as the U.S., so its a wash. Actually, it is evidence of their relatively small and homogenized country.
While the U.S. thinks and acts big, this latest elitist scheme shows just how small Germany’s thinking has become.
A bottle of Islay says that it won’t happen.