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Germany’s Plan to Nix Nukes: Macht Nichts!

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  July 14th, 2011 at 11:00 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Well, that didn’t take long.

In late May, and in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear crisis, Germany announced that it would phase out nuclear power generation by 2022. Nine active nuclear sites currently supply 22% of German electricity. Another eight are offline.

But there’s a hitch in this well-thought-out plan: it gets cold in northern Europe in the winter, and people need lots of reliable energy to stay warm. Since offshore wind energy’s not working out so hot, the Germans may have to start up one of those mothballed nukes to make it through the winter.

…Germany’s Federal Network Agency insisted on Tuesday that, should a nuclear plant have to be switched back on for this winter and next, it is only a “temporary solution.” After that, a spokesperson added, there should be enough coal-fired plants to fill the gap.

["Temporary solution"?! Must. Not. Go. There.]

Yes, you read that right.

[Chancellor Angela] Merkel and her government have celebrated the phase out of nuclear energy in Germany as an “energy revolution” and vowed to make up for the capacity lost through the reactor shutdowns through billions in investments in renewable energies and energy savings measures. But according to a report in the daily Berliner Zeitung on Wednesday, some of that money has now been earmarked to subsidize the construction of new coal-fired plants.

Citing a statement issued by the Economics Ministry in response to a formal query from the Green Party, the paper reported that over €163 million ($229.3 million) is to go toward subsidizing the construction of coal- and natural gas-fired power plants in both 2013 and 2014. The money, generated by the trade in CO2 emissions certificates, is reportedly to come out of a fund originally earmarked to finance projects aimed at promoting energy efficiency.

Criticism from the Greens has been scathing, with parliamentarian Oliver Krischer telling the paper that “coal-fired power plants are damaging to the climate and are not flexible enough to make up for fluctuations in the supply from renewable sources.”

So that leaves natural gas, which delivers a megawatt of electricity at a little over double the cost of coal.

Dependable, cheap coal. Dependable, clean natural gas. Good old fossil fuels. Personally, I don’t see what was so bad about the nukes; when is the last time you heard about a devastating tsunami in the Baltic?

The moral of this story is that if you leave your energy planning up to a bunch of greenies, you get an unreliable and impractical solution that no one can afford. It might warm the cockles of your heart while but it will freeze the other ones off.

Via The American Thinker. H/T Dave A.T.N.

Cross-posted at stevemaley.com.

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COMMENTS

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  • http://charlemagne-the-hammer.blogspot.com/ DerKrieger

    …this summer when it hits 105 after the EPA has forced the closure of a bunch of coal plants. Somehow the eco-Marxists MUST be made to feel the pain of their policies.

    • YnotNOW

      Or more specifically, the pain of blackouts when the energy is most needed will get the PUBLIC’s attention such that they will ignore and override the greens’ exstremism.

      Sometimes, when pain is required, pain is inevitable.

  • ss396

    Like those temporary plants in the UK to supplement for the vagaries and vicissitudes of wind power? A temporary solution to a temporary situation that somehow never goes away.

    I recall a lot of that sort of thing in Atlas Shrugged…

    • YnotNOW

      as the “goose” the economy “just during the crisis” and permanently grow the government and corresponding drag on the economy.

      Part of maturity is dealing with the ups and downs of life, and keeping a steady perspective in spite of short-term problems.

      • juumanistra

        It’s something that reasonable folks can debate about, at any rate. I shall eternally revile Obama for his making the idea disreputable on the political Right, as there’s much to recommend to it from the economics side of the equation. (Though the Keynesian aspects of it remain as utterly asinine today as they did in the Thirties and Forties.)

        • YnotNOW

          is always the ramp-down after the “cycle” – which in Government never happens. That is the #1 danger in ramping “up” to counter any cycle.

          As such, the government needs to have a slow and steady approach to infrastructure development (and minimial over-reach into private economy, like Broadband).

          • juumanistra

            The primary purpose of doing your infrastructure development countercyclically is to benefit from slack demand to be able to build whatever it is you’re building at lower cost than otherwise would have been possible. That it might have positive short-term effects vis-a-vis the employment picture in tough times is a nice bonus, but is certainly not a reason by itself to do it, for the reasons you succinctly state re: the hazard of an ever-aggrandizing state.

            I’m not disagreeing with you as a matter of infrastructure strategy. Just a bit of a difference of opinion on tactics, though countercyclical building really only works for medium- and large-scale projects, because deferring routine maintenance or smaller-scale projects incentivizes bad bureaucratic behavior during the cyclical good times.

        • YnotNOW

          is always the ramp-down after the “cycle” – which in Government never happens. That is the #1 danger in ramping “up” to counter any cycle.

          As such, the government needs to have a slow and steady approach to infrastructure development (and minimial over-reach into private economy, like Broadband).

    • YnotNOW

      as the “goose” the economy “just during the crisis” and permanently grow the government and corresponding drag on the economy.

      Part of maturity is dealing with the ups and downs of life, and keeping a steady perspective in spite of short-term problems.

  • Common_Cents

    Aren’t there even much more safe new nuke alternatives as well? Unreal.

    • juumanistra

      Because it depends immensely on what your parameters are for determining “cost”. In terms of straight-up generating costs — i.e. the cost to produce electricity once all capital costs are sunk and amortized — nuclear delivers electricity output at ~$0.02/kWh versus ~$0.03/kWh for coal and ~$0.05/kWh for natural gas. (The source is NEI, the nuclear industry’s professional association. This graph nicely illustrates such: http://www.bluecastleproject.com/files/fck_uploaded_files/NEI%20Chart.jpg. It’s a bit prejudiced against gas, because most installed gas-fired generating capacity for the time period in question was for peaking rather than baseload power, though that has been changing in recent years.)

      Of course, nuclear is rather capital intensive, and you cannot simply hand-wave that away. Levelized cost analysis is rather hit-and-miss, given the assumptions that go into such things, especially when comparing nuclear to coal and natural gas, as their costs vary a great depending upon fuel prices. On one end of the spectrum is the Energy Information Agency, which puts its average levelized cost of coal at $109.4/MWh, nuclear at $113.9/MWh, and natural gas at $63.1/MW-installed for a combined cycle facility and $103.5/MWh for a “combustion turbine”. On the other end of the spectrum is SCANA, which owns South Carolina Electric & Gas, which is currently in the process of tripling the size of nuclear generating portfolio by building a pair of AP1000s at its Virgil Summer NPP. Its own estimates put nuclear at a cost of $76/MWh, coal at $81MWh, and combined cycle natural gas at $117/MWh. (A link to the relevant information: http://lh6.ggpht.com/-n1ZyYzIVDlU/TfudRSKRngI/AAAAAAAAAkc/DOXTeFi42tA/s1600-h/image3.png. I love that slide simply because it nicely illustrates both the large variable costs of coal and natural gas, while simultaneously showing just how insanely expensive solar PV is.)

      For what it’s worth, I think SCANA’s closer to the mark on this one one than EIA, because SC&EG’s portfolio includes coal, nuclear, and both species of natural gas-fired generating capacity. Or, at the very least, their number-crunching is based on their own practical experience with operating all of the types of generating capacity in question. And that ought to be worth as much as what the brain trust of statisticians at EIA say.

      And re: newer nuclear designs being safer, the bit of gallows humor that made the rounds following the Touhaku quake was a pining for it to have occurred a hundred miles northwest, so that it was Kashiwazaki-Kariwa NPP rather than Fukushima Daiichi NPP that endured the brunt of the quake and tsunami. This was because the former’s got five BWR…6s, I believe, plus a pair of ABWRs, as compared to Fukushima Daiichi’s BWR-1s. (Or, in more simply put, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa was built in the mid-Eighties through the early Nineties, versus Fukushima Daiichi’s construction in the early Seventies.)

  • http://pocketchangeproductions.net/ anotherindyfilmguy

    well… maybe they can buy the extra electricity they’ll need in the Winter from the French?

    • YnotNOW

      so they might as well throw it away on something in their own country. It is lost either way.

  • spinoneone

    should be guaranteed each and every member of Germany’s Green party. Cut their electricity first. Alternatively, double their electric rates so that they can pay the share of the cost of coal/nuclear power that they should in order for the rest of us to afford “green, planet saving” energy. There are only two sustainable, dependable sources of power anywhere: fossil fuel and nuclear. Even hydro-power is subject to fluctuation and/or loss due to both drought and flood.

    • Ann_W

      nt

  • http://reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com/ reaganiterepublicanresistance

    They get way too much of their oil and NG from the Russians- not the best situation.

    These people need nukes more than anybody… and there the ones you’d think would be able to keep a lid on it, if nobody else- we’re talking about The Germans here!

    Too bad the Left -swelled in ranks from the East- ensures that political lunacy remains the order of the day in an otherwise impressive country

    • YnotNOW

      as fellow communist wannabe’s. Might as well finance the dreams of fellow travelers in totalitarian dreams….

  • johnt

    The leftist mind in action, completely closed to it’s own action, unable and unwilling to check premises, to doubt itself, in a word, to think.
    Nonetheless, quite arrogant. How else to preserve ego?

  • dennism

    I’m in a state of flabbergasticity that a government could finance something with profits from trade in CO2 emission certificates… can anyone es’plane that?

  • dennism

    I’m in a state of flabbergasticity that a government could finance something with profits from trade in CO2 emission certificates… can anyone es’plane that?