So the problem of skyrocketing oil prices because of the Iranian control of Hormuz will be solved by a blockade, which will prevent even more oil from reaching the market. Nobody is
1) this stupid to do it
2) this stupid to bite on this threat
Indeed, the cold-turkey effects are already starting to be more visible. Until November traffic here had recovered to > the pre COVID levels, but since then it has dropped considerably, enough to notice, and we're only a few weeks into this.
I am big fan of renewables, but I disagree on your conclusion. The main reason is purely financial, the incumbenta do not want to lose their investment so they spend a lot of money on manipulation and lobbying. Another big reason is that politicians simply can't know everything, so they rely on advisors whose opinions are influenced by lobbyists. There is a clear lack of vision in the western hemisphere on how to move forward and see the transformation not as a cost but as an advantage. So they let their opinions and decisions be massaged by people whose intentions are to protect the status quo.
Your point does not stand since you are completely wrong. Germany uses less coal and gas for electricity now than at any point in the 21st century. The majority of the nuclear plants were shutdown in 2011. They produced 230TWh from coal in 2011 and less than 100TWh last year. Talk about verbal gymnastics to call that a shift from nuclear to coal and gas! Outrageous.
Your question was how would the prices be without the nuclear shutdown, talking about emissions now is goalpost shifting. Speaking of politics and not making sense, Poland is still at these levels because they put road blocks into renewables deployment and spend their resources on nuclear plants. If those plans go well they will be at around 35% coal in 2040, which is more than Germany is now.
Those are total energy numbers, which includes fossil fuels, but those are famously misleading because replacing those with electricity reduces the number of Wh needed. An electric car needs roughly 15kWh for 100 kilometers, a gas powered car typically at least 60kWh for the same distance.
Electrifying reduces energy consumption only in selected use cases. Such as EVs yes. However other usescases such as making steel with hydrogen, plastic fromwaste or fuel for planes require vastly more energy when electrified.
Unsurprisingly the use cases where energy consumption is going down lead on electrification (because it's a cost advantage), so it may seem like electrification reduces energy consumption.
But if you really want to leave fossil fuels behind, the electric consumption will go up, up and beyond.
Electricity consumption will go up* but energy consumption will go down. You will not need 2200TWh of energy in Germany when all is said and done. Heating is one of the top reasons we spend energy and heat pumps are just tremendously more efficient than something like gas heating. You can get the same amount of heating for 3-4 times less energy with a heat pump than gas. So obviously you will not need 2200TWh of electricity like you do now with fossil fuels for energy.
* It's also debatable how much electricity use will actually go up. Logic says this must happen, but logic is not science. We have millions of EVs now in the EU and electricity production is less than it was 20 years ago. Efficiency is a source of energy. If you look at the US for example, it uses almost twice as much electricity per capita than Germany, and I would say they both get the same high level if living. If you look at it that way, Americans can cut their use almost in half and live the same standard of living. This can power a lot of EVs and heat pumps without adding a single GW of new capacity.
Energy consumption in total in Germany will only go down if you decide to export your steel and chemical industries to china. The high temperatures needed by industrial processes can't be achieved with heat pumps.
No. If you electrify residential heating and transportation it will obviously go down. If there are sectors where you can't do that, it will still overall go down because those other sectors will not go up to make up for the reduction. Not sure what your argument is.
The number Lxgr gave, 1-2 TWh/year, is simply completely wrong. Germany's annual electricity use alone is around 500 TWh/year. 1-2 THw/year would be the electricity use of 300-600k average German houses.
You're 100% correct, but this is true for the Iranians, Russians and all other "enemies". Most people are however forced into these views because it serves a purpose. You're not afraid of the enemy if they are presented as normal humans with plenty of internal disagreement.
This is complete baloney and revisionist history. I followed that topic at the time pretty in depth. It took months and months and delay upon delay to get the plants back up and running. The spot prices in France at times in 2022 went over 1500 euros per MWh. If it was just "an overreaction" there would've been tremendous political pressure to just put the plants back online. The government and EDF are intertwined to the point any talk of new construction etc. always goes through Macron.
> I followed that topic at the time pretty in depth
You apparently did not. because you are the revisionnist here.
CSC (corrosion sous contrainte) is a well documented topic with accessible reports from the ASN (the french nuclear agency) [1], the court des comptes (French accounting court) and EDF itself.
The source of the problem is a phenomena that affect mainly the N4 (1400MW) series of the French reactor. It has been detected in 2021, so before the 2022.
Some pipe in some specific part of the circuit (secondary circuit) presented some unexpected cracks under inspection in one specific reactor.
And EDF chose the stop all the potentially affected reactor and disassembly all the potentially affected pipe to scan them with X ray and triple check that the corrosion phenomena is not widespread.
Where they over-reacted, is that they also disassembled the different serie 900Mw reactor 'just in case', at the worst time.... meaning right before Vladmir Putin attacked Ukrain.
> If it was just "an overreaction" there would've been tremendous political pressure to just put the plants back online
Sure. They should have just emergency duck tape the pipe without following any safety protocol, in a nuclear installation, just to please some politicians and because Putin dreamed of cold war again #sarcasm.
You seem to have very little clue of about the nuclear industry internals and its associated safety processes.... It of course took time.
The only thing you are correct on is that, indeed, it took longer than expected and caused delays.
You said the problems were overblown, not me. I don't think they were overblown, so I am not sure you should be lecturing me on duct tape and nuclear plants. The EDF had scheduled a quarter of the fleet for maintenance and then at the peak of the crisis pulled another quarter offline unplanned. This simply wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been necessary, the government wouldn't have allowed it at the time. The problem was not known in 2021, but at the time when they were built. Here is an interview from 1979 (!) with the president of the EDF at the time Marcel Boiteux, who said that this will happen, but it's not a big deal because it will happen after the plants had reached their EOL in 30 years [1]. Additionally there was a government commission or something like that in the early 2010s that basically concluded "we can't afford to build new ones, let's kick the can down the road and try to fix what we have now". And then 10 years later the biggest energy crisis since the 70s comes along, the very reason they were built and you end up relying on the weather forecast and German coal plants. A few years pass again and some people are talking themselves again into this technology being anything except useless.
> with the president of the EDF at the time Marcel Boiteux, who said that this will happen, but it's not a big deal because it will happen after the plants had reached their EOL in 30 years.
That's not what he said. He said this is the scenario in case of full cycle up and down every day. Which is obviously not how a central is operated.
Consensus today is that nuclear powerplant can live for around 60-80y without issues if the maintenance is done properly.
The US park is getting there.
> This simply wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been necessary, the government wouldn't have allowed it at the time.
The government has no word to say over an ASN decision, specially when Nuclear safety is at stake.
It is France we are talking about, not the USSR.
Again, it is commonly admitted today, after the facts, that it was over-reacting. Thats said: It is bad economically as it cost EDF few billions. But it is exactly what you want to see for safety: Better overreacting than having an incident.
> A few years pass again and some people are talking themselves again into this technology being anything except useless.
So. You are taking one single year failure as a representative example of a technology that has given cheap, abundant and low carbon electricity for the entire Europeean continent for 3 decades ?
Do you have not the impression of being of slightly bad faith here ?
You can pretend to be meticulous about it but the president of the EDF doesn't go on TV to speak to the general public to say 30 years if he meant something else. He would've said 80 years because it just sounds better. Sorry, it's pretty obvious that stress corrosion was a known issue, so there were no surprises.
It's France, not USSR. Is this why the EDF was involved in rescuing Areva from bankruptcy -- a sound business decision? Is this why the government is giving basically interest free loans to the EDF that will be repaid starting from maybe in 15 years? If you really believe that you are delusional. It's all just backroom wheeling and dealing. There is a good saying "don't get high on your own supply". The delusion of order in the western world will be its end, especially now considering it's crumbling before our eyes. Clinging to this idea is not healthy.
Abundant and low carbon, all nice things, but it's not why they were built. They were built for energy independence, and at this task it failed at the exact point in time when it was supposed to shine. Speaking of which, being built for one purpose doesn't necessarily make it useful for another purpose. It was built at a time when things like carbon emissions, climate change and overall sustainability were not a topic. Since sustainability is a topic today, it requires obviously different considerations. My only gripe with the German shutdown is that they didn't force the operators to pay for the decommissioning and waste disposal in full. That would've ended any debate about how realistic and useful this technology is because the companies would've been insolvent.
He packages things to present them as analytical, but it's really just click bait for people to hear something they want to hear. He did a take over a year ago on why the EV revolution crashed with such gems as presenting less growth (but still growth) as lower sales. The comment section was full of never EV crowd who got their fix that everything will be alright and that nothing will change. Of course a year later there were booming sales worldwide.
The sad reality I'm coming to realize is that there is very little real and quality analysis, critical but with open eyes on the future. Most of it is just pandering to crowds. The war in Iran is the latest example - you have one side saying Iran is almost done, and the other that they're winning. Who's right? Doesn't matter, being correct is not the point.
Yea. It's hard to tell what's true anymore. I thought Russia would be out of resources in 3 months. It's been 4 years. I thought Rafah would survive. It's completely flattened. Thought global markets would crash after tariffs. It has survived.
I'm convinced we're in some kind of propaganda machine right now.
Propaganda aside (which exists), the world is just an extremely complex place and the people writing these things are taking guesses a lot of the time. That’s it.
wow. usually don't expect that the people i'm writing with are proudly and openly pro-genocide, my bad. we're talking about over a million people, you know.
reply