When “going green” means an energy drought

 

Mish Shedlock sums up Germany’s energy dilemma.

  • Angela Merkel mothballed nuclear power plants to appease the Greens.
  • The Nord Stream II natural gas pipeline is ready to deliver gas but is totally shut down due to sanctions.
  • Nord Stream I needs repairs but sanctions limited availability of parts.
  • Rather than put the nuclear plants back in production Germany is resorting to more coal but supply constraints hinder getting the coal to the plants.
  • German Greens would rather use more coal than nuclear.
  • Sanctions have driven up the price of natural gas so much that Germany is discussing rationing natural gas.
  • Coal is the single largest method of generating electricity in Germany, 32 percent in the third quarter of 2021 up from 26.4 percent. It’s use is undoubtedly higher today.

Well Done Germany! … This is what happens when you mandate green energy and have no legitimate plan to get there.

There’s more at the link.

One wishes that someone had repeated that last sentence to the Biden administration on the day it took office.  The pressure in and from Washington D.C. to move away from fossil fuels is immense, but it utterly fails to take into account that a replacement infrastructure is not yet in place.  Restricting or shutting down older fuels and systems is all very well if they can be replaced at once;  but if they can’t, the interval between ending one system and ramping up another is undoubtedly going to be painful as hell, for the economy, for business and commerce, and for individuals.

Of course, that doesn’t matter to the Biden administration.  The pain is part of the plan.  They want to crash the American economy – and they’re succeeding.  They’ve followed Germany’s policies, and now they’re reaping the same disastrous harvest that Germany is reaping.

Peter

10 comments

  1. Sooner or later, they WILL have to bring the nuclear plants back on line, or they won't survive… sigh

  2. It's not about the environment, it's about collapsing capitalist society. If you remember that, every single thing on your list above makes perfect sense.

    Nuclear power would offer virtually unlimited clean energy.

    Restricting all forms of energy forces people to a) reduce their expectations and b) depend more on government to provide the minimum needs.

    Restricting energy too much exposes the man behind the curtain so re-introducing coal allows more energy while still allowing climate hysteria.

  3. @old nfo: yeah, they'll have to bring back on the nuclear plants, but that's not that simple or cheap after the shutdown. That's the legacy of appeasing the green idiots! It would have been much better upgrading the plants to V generation technology…

  4. Just finished Zeihans book "End of the world is just the beginning" which was quite um… interesting. But as it was written by a democrat (small d in his words) and a "green"

    The short version, aside from the horror show in just about all of the world in demographic crashing, he made a lot of good info on how bad Germany has F'd this on energy. Nordstream 1 (1 right?) will only be coming back at 20% as of yesterday news.

    Rest of the short version, Germany has done a 2 trillion Euro buildout on solar and wind. Cloudy and calm Germany… and so they are playing "Enron games" with power generation, and starting up lignite coal (the stuff with the most water and least BTU, it's crap) and then turning it off as fast a possible. They've got 200% of capacity for solar and wind… as "For the 8 days in germany in August that it's sunny" rest of the time… They buy it from Franc. Oh and France just re-nationalized their nuke plants.

    Man it's getting interesting.

  5. I have to agree with GCR710. Whenever my company (seismic oil search) shuts down an exploration ship for any extended length of time, it takes months to get the equipment running correctly again; and that's a ship full of primarily off-the-shelf systems.

  6. There are no "official" science organizations like the IPCC, nor any real, serious students of the climate who think the world ends if the global temperature goes up by 1.5 or 2.0 degrees C. It's all activists who chose that number simply because it's memorable and gets the attention of, well, idiots who would plaster themselves to roads or glue themselves to freeway guard rails.

    There are graphs in this article that show we're now in the coldest temperature band of the last 10,000 years, still not fully out of the Little Ice Age, and a global temperature rise of 1.5C wouldn't even get us back to the Roman Warm Period in around 200 AD. Nowhere near the higher temps of what's called the Holocene Climate Optimum 7000 years ago. It's not the end of life on Earth, civilization or anything. There were certainly lots civilizations on Earth in the Roman Warm Period.

    Which leads back to what many others have said. It's a plan to destroy capitalism and the west so that whoever is behind it gets to rule everything.

  7. This is why I'm saving time and effort by continuing to run my car and heat my home using safe, renewable whale oil.

    Oh, quit complaining. At least it isn't baby oil. The harpoons are harder to make.

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