Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Krishna Gans – According to the German climate website Kalte Sonne, the renewables obsessed German and city of Hamburg governments intend to shut down local coal and nuclear power plants, but have no serious plan to make up the resulting energy shortfall.
Hamburg’s large power plant Moorburg is shut down – after 5 years of operation
from cold sun
The decision announced by the Federal Network Agency, according to which the coal-fired power station Moorburg will cease power production after 5 years of operation by the operator Vattenfall, will make the power supply in northern Germany a lot less secure. Because on December 31st In 2021, the Brokdorf nuclear power plant will also be shut down due to the Nuclear Energy Phase- Out Act .
After that there are no more large power plants in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein that could compensate for the strong fluctuations in wind and solar energy. That was the main reason of the construction of the 1600 MW large power plant Moorburg how’s then First Mayor Olaf Scholz in the remarkable inauguration speech stated :
“The prosperity of an industrial society depends to a large extent on whether it succeeds in generating or procuring the required energy and keeping it available. In such a way that it is firstly available to companies and consumers with a secure supply, secondly: economically, thirdly: sustainably and environmentally friendly … Hamburg also and above all has many electricity-intensive large consumers and the city is proud to have them at the location. She cannot and does not want to do without them. Whether steel, copper and aluminum, but also aircraft construction or scientific companies such as the German electron synchrotron, DESY, they would all have a difficult time in Hamburg without a reliable and inexpensive power supply …reliably and with a high degree of utilization of what we can extract from the earth. “
From the end of 2021, the fate of Hamburg’s electricity supply will depend on five high-voltage lines in the west, east and south of Germany. Hamburg’s industry alone consumes an unbelievably large amount of 11 million megawatt hours of electricity every year. The jug goes to water until it breaks.
…
Read more (German): https://kaltesonne.de/claudia-kemferts-rechenschwaeche/ (Translated)
I feel sorry for the workers in Hamburg, and all the heavy industry entrepreneurs in Hamburg who over the years have given everything to provide jobs and opportunities to Hamburg’s people, with a misplaced confidence that German authorities would take care of them.
Trust building is a slow process. Once lost, trust is not easily restored.
So Griff unreliables sometimes supply up to 50% of Germany’s electricity and some 5 million people in Germany regularly say they struggle to pay their bills and every year hundreds of thousands are cut off for not paying theirs.
Meanwhile in the UK a recent survey found 3 in 10 households (29%) were probably not in a position to be able to meet the cost of higher energy bills caused largely by the use of unreliables,
But this doesn’t bother you one bit.
It does not bother him because he is, so far, unaffected by these crazy energy policies. Only those who are making money out of it or are totally unaffected support this madness.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/first-phase-out-auction-german-hard-coal-deemed-success-modern-plants-go-offline
‘The first auction for the decommissioning of hard coal plants in Germany has been hailed as a success both by coal plant operators and climate activists, as it ensures that plants with a capacity of almost 5 gigawatts will be off the market by the end of the year as planned. The successful bid by operators of plants inaugurated as recently as 2015 is seen as confirmation of coal power’s increasingly difficult market situation. ‘
Once again, green politics triumphs over reality.
Trolls celebrate.
Perhaps with the Netherlands goes the right direction. Three Mile Island still haunts the U.S.A.
I can’t help but wonder how far this madness will go before people start to understand how crazy it is. How many brownouts and blackouts, how many grid failures, how much “rationing” before there is finally a connection between the policy and the result?
Given what I see across the “western” world in other areas of policy vs result, I’m not sure there IS a limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink
When I read things like this, part of me is scratching my head, and part of me is thinking, people are not crazy. So, I’m left wondering, where are the plans to show how this is going to actually work (there must be some). Long term can we build enough utility scale batteries to make wind and solar reliable? Are the constraints mainly economic or technical? Is there enough lithium in the world to do all this?
It isn’t just lithium, there are several other relatively rare elements you need for batteries. And no, there is not enough “known reserves” of these metals to build the car and storage batteries required to shut down using fossil fuels.
That is just one aspect of the problem…more threatening is where these elements come from. How do we secure adequate resources, what extent do we go to protect them from countries that have no qualms about taking them (i.e. China). Where do we build all of these intermittent power collectors and storage facilities? In YOUR backyard? On Federal lands that are currently protected? The land requirements are HUGE. Simply off the scale.
The entire idea that we can replace all of the world’s electrical power with intermittent sources and storage is insane – beyond just not practical. Can we get to the point of only electric cars? Sure, given a reasonable amount of time to change infrastructure (like another 40 to 50 years) and a few breakthroughs in technology, but the power needs to come from stable dependable sources.
The ONLY reasonable technology that comes after fossil fuels is nuclear power. It has a high power density, can operate very efficiently, and is the safest form of power (look the numbers up). We need to be building and testing Molten Salt Reactors because of their inherent safety and because they can burn most of the so-called nuclear wastes – therefore the problem of storing wastes is reduced by a factor of 20 or more.
I hear you RoT, but hasn’t anyone put a pencil to all of this and come up with the answer? I hope at his first presser, someone asks Biden where is plan is for curbing climate change. Saying you’re going to do something is not a plan.
But they just opened a new one..
https://www.power-technology.com/projects/datteln-4-coal-fired-power-plant/