this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
50 points (68.4% liked)

Europe

8324 readers
1 users here now

News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ

(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, ๐Ÿ‡ฉ๐Ÿ‡ช ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures

Rules

(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)

  1. Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
  2. No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
  3. No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.

Also check out [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes and we absolutely should, but Germany is going to have to build a shit ton more storage and generation capacity to make that work. Also different storage technologies have different discharge rates, while traditional batteries can provide instant, short lasting and much needed frequency regulation, heat-based batteries take time to respond but can operate for prolonged periods. This is also a really complex balance to reach.

Again, not saying there isn't space for renewables: my ideal grid is 40% nuclear 60% renewable.

but I'm not certain we can grow storage and production with the rate of increase in demand by purely using renewables. Especially given the future need for air conditioning, and green hydrogen production for industrial processes like steelmaking.

We're in the midst of a climate crisis, and my only and primary goal is to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions. The statistics show clearly that Germany's phase out of nuclear had done the opposite. The wrong decision was made: these plants should have at least been maintained, and, in my opinion, moderately expanded. The EU should have developed an EU-wide nuclear fuel reprocessing and storage programme, and we could be much closer to climate neutrality and relative energy independence today.