Fukushima residents tour German renewable village

Soylent Green is the best example of renewable technology

Green is good, but I really don't know if green can keep the lights on????? It's a start anyway! Good luck!

Sounds great for the farmers...but would it work for larger cities and townships?

Germans are definitely not the right people to learn about renewable energy from. My fellow Germans may easily be the most misinformed and therefore fearful group of people concerning nuclear energy on this whole planet. In Germany, the Renewable Energy lobby is much more powerful than the Nuclear lobby. They did a good job in the last 20 years to instill ungrounded fear in the Germans, and made good money selling them solar panels. Only that Germany has about as many sunny days as the UK. It's a big scam.

@HansNFranz:

Our fellow Germans are as gullible about renewable energy as they were about nuclear. However, renewable is cheaper in the long run, which had been proved with the new plant in Finland. Ask the residents of Fukushima about it. Ask those who have to take care of nuclear waste for millennia about it. Or ask those who bare the burden of decontamination...

Solar power is efficient for houses outside of urban areas. That's why it is very popular in the southern mountain ranges. Wind and hydro power are the most cost effective energy sources available up to now. A honest calculation brings up costs for nuclear power which are a multiple of the cost of hydro or wind power.

Furthermore, there is research going on to use solar plants even in times without sunshine to regulate the voltage in the grid to absorb voltage peaks. Something that works on small scales already. Something where pro-nuclear people say that only nuclear plants can do that job. Actually, even if solar plants couldn't, natural gas plants would still be more flexible than nuclear plants, because they can be fired up and shut down in seconds.

Lastly, in contrast to nuclear power, there is a lot of R&D done on solar cells (and other renewables). They get continuously cheaper and better. They will a some point in the next decade become profitable in Germany even without subsidies. They do not necessarily need sunny days, it just increases the power output. Nuclear plants don't get cheaper or (significantly) better, except if You pay incredible sums (like the plant in Finland). They received a lot of subsidies and still do. Ask Fukushima residents...

Johannes WeberDec. 01, 2011 - 02:32PM JST

Ask those who have to take care of nuclear waste for millennia about it.

Or just build the 4th Gen Reactors which could potentially use nuclear waste as fuel...

Solar power is efficient for houses outside of urban areas. That's why it is very popular in the southern mountain ranges. Wind and hydro power are the most cost effective energy sources available up to now. A honest calculation brings up costs for nuclear power which are a multiple of the cost of hydro or wind power.

Wind is intermittent, as is solar. An honest calculation adds in the storage systems needed for these power sources, adds in their maintenance costs an how they are damaged/degraded over the years.

Furthermore, there is research going on to use solar plants even in times without sunshine to regulate the voltage in the grid to absorb voltage peaks. Something that works on small scales already. Something where pro-nuclear people say that only nuclear plants can do that job. Actually, even if solar plants couldn't, natural gas plants would still be more flexible than nuclear plants, because they can be fired up and shut down in seconds.

The problems is you can't rely on solar having capacity at any given time. The TEPCO plant recently announced has an availability rate of 12.5% over the year. As for the natural gas plants - so what? Why not adopt a system like pumped storage, nukes use spare capacity to store the energy in hydro plants. If that doesn't have the responsiveness then add some gas turbines to the nukes - that is what the wind turbine systems have to do in order to iron out the power they supply.

Lastly, in contrast to nuclear power, there is a lot of R&D done on solar cells (and other renewables). They get continuously cheaper and better. They will a some point in the next decade become profitable in Germany even without subsidies. They do not necessarily need sunny days, it just increases the power output. Nuclear plants don't get cheaper or (significantly) better, except if You pay incredible sums (like the plant in Finland). They received a lot of subsidies and still do. Ask Fukushima residents...

Large scale solar needs large scale power storage, and large areas of land covered. As for subsidies - well, if we had more R&D on them (like proceeding with some 4th Gen plans) then maybe they wouldn't need subsidies - which are what, outside of Japan?

@Johannes The problem is that Germans are too positive about renewables, and too negative about nuclear. They can't seem to have a balanced opinion about it. The decision to switch off all nuclear plants this year has been based solely on the Fukushima accident, even though the likeliness of a Tsunami of that size in Germany is near zero due. If anything, they should have made that decision after the multiple small accidents in the previous years, but not because of what happened in Fukushima. As for solar panels in Germany, I think the fact that in order to sell them, their proponents have to come up with a lot of complicated calculations about sun hours is very telling - it is the same obfuscating strategy that is used by banks to sell risky investments. I lived in Germany long enough to just know that solar power is not the way to go there, unless there will be a revolutionary (not evolutionary, that won't do) technical discovery in effectiveness and storage costs.

HansNFranz,

very true. The climatologist James Hansen has said that he thinks Merkel has made the decision to abandon Nuclear due to politics rather than from any insights her education as a physicist has given her.

@Star-viking Definitely - and the majority of Germans still think it was the right thing to do, even though Germany will need to build a lot of new coal power plants to generate the needed energy, and the already very high energy costs for the private sector in Germany (which are also due to a de-facto cartel of the energy companies) will climb much higher due to the costs. After all, we all want to (and must) drive electric cars in a couple of years?

I wonder if in 10-20 years, Germans will realize that the contamination through more coal-burning is going to lead to a lot more health problems than the Fukushima accident is able to cause, in the worst possible case. Don't even get me started that through this decision, all efforts to reduce CO2 will be rendered pointless, which all over sudden doesn't seem to be such a problem.

Germans are definitely not the right people to ask for advice in energy questions. They are led by irrational fears towards nuclear, and irrational believe in renewables.