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Discussion (96 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It reminds me of the Voyager probes that left the solar system half a dozen times, each time taking a different definition of what marks the edge of the solar system.
Anyways, we are now getting to sensible metrics, which is good.
For an entire year, that year being 2025.
Also, yes, absolute generation from fossil fuels is declining quickly. The total generation is changing way more slowly than that share.
The discussion about fossil fuels vs renewables is a bit different within countries which produce fossil fuels than within those that don't.
We have right to roam in nature here, which is quite rare across the world (and even compared to the few other countries that have something similar, the Swedish variant is stronger). I wouldn't trade that for anything.
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/industrial-production-m...
Of course, stable is probably bad here. But it's not declining.
Onshore wind and solar is about £40-50
Offshore wind about £60
Gas about £120
That’s generation cost, before subsidies and levees
But we still haven’t put in an emergency legislation to make it easier to build cheaper energy.
The main reason Germany was so hooked on gas wasn't because Hans Müller needed to run his Bosch washer-dryer and heat his home to a comfortable 24°C.
It was because natural gas is an great source of hydrogen, which in turn serves as feedstock for the production of all kinds of chemicals used in industry.
That was the engine of Germany's industry, not just energy. Energy has a whole spectrum of solutions - not the case with hydrogen.
Every First World country seems to be following the path from industrialisation, through deindustrialisation (which, when I was at school, was still called ‘structural change’), to a service-based society. It seems to be the price we pay for economic prosperity and cheap goods - and it is not the first time in Germany this happens.
Robots are the answer to reindustrialize the developed world, but that necessarily keeps industry smaller than services.
Are you sure? Jobs are no longer in industrial companies, and that isn't where the growth is. However when I look at the numbers I see heavy industry output is still growing.
But low grade heat cannot efficiently drive a heat engine to produce other, more useful and transferable versions of energy, like electricity. For that you need "high grade" heat.
The reason is, heat engines do not operate on heat. They operate on heat flow. You must have a high temperature side and a low temperature side, and you extract energy by taking heat out of the high side and injecting it to the low side, through various processes. By thermodynamics, this process has hard efficiency limits of around 35%, with that efficiency heavily affected by the delta between the hot and cold side.
The "low" heat side is often a great source of low grade heat, for industrial or communal purposes, but cannot be used to run an efficient heat engine. It's already "used up" essentially.
The efficiency of any heat engine is bounded by the Carnot cycle. In simplified form, it depends on the temperature differential between the cold and the hot parts. So if your hot part is at 300C (572 Kelvin), and the cold part is at 30C (300 Kelvin) then the absolutely best possible efficiency is around (572-300)/572*100% = 47%.
You see that it quickly becomes inefficient as the differential goes down. E.g. if you use 90C to store the heat, then the maximum efficiency is just 17%.
The amount of energy needed to test things is just intuitively huge. Boiling one liter of water takes the equivalent amount of energy as lifting 34 metric tons up a meter. Or to translate it to human scale: the same as walking a vertical climb of 1000m with a weight of 34kg.
This undoubtedly explains why the current US administration is openly hostile to it.
Not a long time ago I've seen a post arguing based on the data [1] that renewables are irrelevant and should not be taken seriously and fossils will the main source for the lifetime.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
For instance, if you just go by the number of joules in an electric car's battery versus the number of joules in a gasoline car's tank with the same range, you'll see that a 'normal' electric car gets around 15 kWh/100km whereas even a rather efficient gas car needs something more like 50kWh/100km. That's because gas combusion loses gigantic amounts of energy to heat and sound.
If you want to talk about 'total energy consumption' and compare solar/wind against fossil fuels, you should count the amount of energy in the sunlight that hits the surface of the solar panel, or the amount of wind energy hitting the turbine blade, rather than the amount of energy they deliver to the grid.
Still a long ways to go regardless, but much less bleak. And also, exponentially growing deployments of wind and solar are harder to spot on this 2-year old graph which goes only up to 2024.
Isn't a lot of energy used for heating, not work?
I've seen plans to run an engine in your furnace, thus creating both electric (at 20-30%, and capturing the rest as heat to the house. I've never seen this in the real world and experts who have looked as those systems said they won't enter a building that has one using that design. (it is possible to make a design they would trust, but they haven't seen any)
> Primary energy is based on the substitution method and measured in terawatt-hours.
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-source-bar...
If it's really about protecting fossil fuel wealth, is there a long-term plan or are they just juicing quarterly earnings as long as they can? Is there a serious belief that wind/solar is a fad?
This isn't the kind of thought that begets rational discussion, but if you can avoid cynicism and sarcasm, I am curious to hear what the smart people of HN think.
The political movement that's currently leading the Republican party shouldn't be understood as "conservative". At least, certainly not in terms of the conservative values of respect for the rule of law, traditional mores and institutions, or personal integrity. The populist energy that passes for "conservative" is reactionary and much more concerned with scoring points on social media than governing sensibly.
To be fair, the populist left is also ascendant with its own set of bad ideas.
Part of the problem is you think there is unity in any large movement. There is not, only tiny movements with no political power have unity. There are multiple factions is always the right answer and you have to understand each. As a short cut, many (often the majority) are willing to live with those in their midst but don't actually care.
Fossil fuel companies have long supported conservative positions. This is their payback, they get support back.
Many do see renewables as the "left", and so they don't care to think, they just oppose anything the left does. (you often see the reverse)
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/live/fifteen_min... Anyone is free to compare France and Germany here.
Germany has 15.4 GW of hard coal generation, and 14.7 GW of lignite, for a total of 30.1 GW:
* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
In 2010, before the shutdowns started, it had 21.5 GW of nuclear.
So if all the other rollouts (renewables, etc) had stayed the same, but the shutdown of nuclear and coal was swapped, Germany could have reduced its emission generation capacity by an extra 66%. (Focusing mainly on coal, since that is (AIUI) the worst of the carbon emitters.)
Secondly, energy != electricity. Coal is mostly used for central heating (a plant heats water, water is then transported to a whole neighborhood). Electricity is sometimes also produced, but usually not the primary reason for the plant to exist in the first place. Nuclear plants are usually used for generating electricity (in Germany). Germanys carbon problem is the heating infrastructure being dependant on fossil fuels (mostly gas), but it has no lack of electricity sources.
Thanks for stating your openmindedness re/ nuclear discussion, BTW, IME statements like this can really lift the whole level of discourse.
It raised some interesting questions about priorities.
The Greens actually prolonged their life time during Covid, after RWE, EON and EnBW argued that it does not make sense economically to let them run longer.
No insurer wanted to insure nuclear, and no energy company wanted to keep losing money on nuclear.
Since nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation, it makes sense to switch it off first.
Schröder was talking about it in 2000:
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/15/johnhooper
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schröder#Domestic_poli...
Oh, and he was appointed to Gazprom (and other Russian energy companies) after leaving politics:
* https://www.dw.com/en/former-chancellor-schröder-sworn-in-at...
(He did encourage renewables as well.)
> No insurer wanted to insure nuclear, and no energy company wanted to keep losing money on nuclear.
The German government(s) helped kickstart the global solar price drop by their subsidy programs in the early 2000s that allowed for economies of scale, so I'm surprised that—if they're really worried about climate change—they would not subsidize the alleged expenses of running the low-carbon generation of nuclear.
> Since nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation, it makes sense to switch it off first.
It's so expensive that prices in France, which generates >60% of power with nuclear, are at the same levels (or lower) as Germany, while producing less carbon per kWh than Germany (a quarter from some articles I've found).
See perhaps:
> […] Alternatively, Germany could have kept the existing nuclear power in 2002 and possibly invest in new nuclear capacity. The analysis of these two alternatives shows that Germany could have reached its climate gas emission target by achieving a 73% cut in emissions on top of the achievements in 2022 and simultaneously cut the spending in half compared to Energiewende. Thus, Germany should have adopted an energy policy based on keeping and expanding nuclear power.
* https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2...
Very few things in the power grid has insurance against major accidents. It is even doubtful for example if a forest fires caused by transmission lines will be repaid in full by the insurance of the power company, and to the degree that will pay all costs to property and land owners
The german green part certainly isn't perfect, but they had a plan. A plan that included far more renewable energies than currently build. The ones that orchestrated the ultimate end of nuclear energy while shutting down build up of renewables are the conservatives. Blaming someone for a half executed plan is childish. Especially when it is from a party that supposedly had economic competence yet killed tens of thousands of jobs.
Ember Energy: Batteries and demand flexibility are ready to scale across the EU - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/batteries-and-deman... - June 24th, 2026 ("The EU battery fleet is projected to grow fourfold, from 37 GW in 2025 to 178 GW by 2030. As this growth unfolds, batteries reduce the need for regular gas backup. By 2030, EU batteries could deliver in a single hour over 80% of the power that all EU gas power plants combined can generate in the same period, up from about 20% in 2025.")
Largest battery storage in Germany set for partial commissioning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49104584 - July 2026 (0 comments)
Germany's solar installations drop while new battery storage hits record - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019046 - May 2026 (8 comments)
I wonder if they had maintained their nuclear infrastructure, if that would have held back renewable build-out, because of economics.