Comment on rollin' coal
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 6 months agoIf you close a nuclear power plant before closing a coal one, you are effectively replacing the nuclear with coal.
That’s not how words work.
And coal use has been going up in Germany. So I don’t know where you are getting these ideas from.
Your data source is outdated. You’re looking at data up to 2022, whilst his data shows 2023-2024, which is more recent.
2022 also saw problems like the Ukraine war frustrating gas supply, forcing the use of more coal. And there was covid throwing a wrench into things as well.
Nuclear powerplants in Germany were beyond their lifespan and fixing and modernizing them was not economically feasible. Just too expensive compared to other forms of energy.
Germany certainly hasn’t been “replacing nuclear with coal”.
realitista@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Closing a nuclear plant means you keep a coal plant open. So you are in effect replacing nuclear with coal. If you kept the nuclear plant open you could close the coal plants instead. Idiotic move.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 6 months ago
The nuclear plants in Germany were too old and too expensive to maintain. At some point a reactor is just end-of-life. They get operational issues causing semi-frequent shutdowns. The reliability issues become a problem that skyrockets the costs further.
Closing a nuclear plant like that puts enough money back in the budget to afford a faster transition to renewables, which ultimately closes down the coal plants faster too. It’s about the big picture, it’s not as simple as simply saying “we’ll do less coal” or “we’ll do less nuclear”.
realitista@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I’d like to believe that this is true, but after the revelations of how much Merkel and Schroeder were in bed with the oil industry as well as the green party’s role in this, I’m skeptical to say the least.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 6 months ago
Merkel and Schroeder gambled on Russian gas imports as a holdover to transition from the aging nuclear plants and coal plants towards renewables. They did so because according to Merkel “it made sense at the time” and she did not really see the larger geopolitical picture. When Russian gas suddenly dried up due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they had to delay the closure of several coal plants to keep the power on.
So they’re trying to replace nuclear and coal with gas.