Germany's Energiewende: The Future? A Failure? Both?

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LeftieBiker said:
Clearly Reg has never seen pictures of Los Angeles smog, or smelled the stuff.
I've seen it in old Columbo movies, but I've never smelled it. The many times I've visited Los Angeles in the past 20 years, there has been little-to-no smog. Since wind generators were a vanishingly-small portion of the electricity production in CA during that period, I'll assume that they played no part in the virtual elimination of smog from LA.

Since you brought up smog in a thread on Germany's Energiewende, you might be interested to learn that Germany's energy policies has been recently blamed (at least in part) for smog in Paris:
The Local said:
Suggestions have been made that the poor air could be linked to Germany's increased use of coal power stations after Berlin decided to phase out the use of nuclear energy in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster.
The Local said:
Writing in the financial newspaper Les Echos this week, Didier Julienne, a specialist in natural resources, said: “On European maps of particle pollution this week, the winds from the east, coming from Germany, are heavily laden with particles."

The writer pointed to the "unfavourable environmental situation" in Germany because of the increased use of coal powered stations, especially those in the west, near the borders with France, the Netherlands and Belgium.

“Effectively Germany is smoking us out,” Julienne said, adding that the last few days could be an ominous sign of what was to come.
LeftieBiker said:
I'd be more concerned with bird deaths and noise than having to *look at* what it takes to feed our appetite for energy.
I am concerned with those things also, as I've posted elsewhere. Here's a good YouTube video on the issue of infrasound:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJh03-BpG4[/youtube]

Plastering every square kilometer of Germany with those machines is not an answer to any problems but it WILL create many new problems. The people are starting to push back on the ridiculously-high electricity prices and in Denmark, which had similar policies, they have replaced their government to effect a major shift in energy policies. Don't be surprised to see similar things occur in Germany as more experts speak out on the subject:

Renewables Flop: Former Harvard Professor Gives Germany's Energiewende A Grade of "D": ...In A "Deadend"!
 
Wind generators have been in the news in Germany lately:

Surprise! Most Germany Wind Park Generators Losing Money: Duped By Exaggerated Wind Projections
Werner Doldorf said:
About two thirds of the investments are not paying out as expected. The capital that the investors paid is at risk and possibly will not be recovered.”

I've linked to issues with offshore wind, but the situation in the North and Baltic Seas is far worse than I had imagined:
Offshore Wind Turbine Maintenance Cost Fiasco: "100 Times More Expensive Than A New Turbine Itself"!
NoTricksZone said:
100 times the cost of a new turbine

The figure that is especially astonishing about offshore wind power turbines is that the “maintenance and repair costs of offshore wind turbines over the years add up to be a hundred times the cost of the new turbine itself,” says Peter Plagemann of the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology and Applied Material Science (IFAM) in Bremen.

Grid interventions continue to increase as more-and-more renewable generators are added with very little additional storage:
Germany Renewable Energy Woes Mount: Costly Battle Against Blackouts "More Expensive Than Ever"

It seems the opponents of wind generators in Germany are not being heard:
Rapidly Evolving Protest: German Wind Energy Opponents Form Political Party In Response To A Deaf System
 
Wow! An article in the Guardian by George Monbiot that I can wholeheartedly agree with! Quote:
George Monbiot in the Guardian said:
Merkel and the European commission ignored repeated warnings that the likely consequences would include malnutrition and massive environmental destruction, as land was converted from forests or food crops to fuel production. The European biofuel rule is now a major driver of one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters: the razing of the Indonesian rainforests and their replacement with oil palm.

Not only has this wiped out vast and magnificent ecosystems, and the orangutans, tigers, rhinos, gibbons and thousands of other species they supported; but it has also, by burning trees and oxidising peat, caused emissions far higher than those produced by fossil fuels. What makes this history especially bitter is that the target she derailed in 2007 was the one that had first been proposed, in 1994, by a German environment minister called – let me think – ah yes, Angela Merkel.
But Monbiot didn't go far enough. He doesn't detail the massive environmental disaster that results from razing pristine German forests to build wind turbines that kill endangered wildlife in her homeland. But that doesn't come close to the damage which results from putting wind turbines in the North Sea and then servicing them using diesel-powered ships for decades.

Hopefully Monbiot's essay will help others to begin to see the massive environmental damage which results from politically-motivated actions which are ill-conceived and overly-aggressive. It only makes sense to make changes to new technologies if and when they offer benefits to the environment - not a moment before.
 
RegGuheert said:
It only makes sense to make changes to new technologies if and when they offer benefits to the environment - not a moment before.
And you know that, how ? You also miss the point the tech is iterative. Progress will have bumps in the road, count on it.
 
SageBrush said:
RegGuheert said:
It only makes sense to make changes to new technologies if and when they offer benefits to the environment - not a moment before.
And you know that, how ? You also miss the point the tech is iterative. Progress will have bumps in the road, count on it.
Perhaps you are misreading me (or I am not writing clearly). I have no beef with advancing technology. I have a beef with politicians pushing technology which causes more damage than it eliminates. Merkel has done this in spades and has done massive damage to the global environment as a result.
 
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