Coal is used for chemical processes, heating (locally and remote) and also generating electrical energy (also locally and remote). From those, only remote electricity can easily be replaced, remote heating might be replaceable, but would take some investments and not sure if this wouldn't be more expensive and quite inefficient. Anything locally working can't be replaced easily, and forget chemical processes.
And yes, coal is also used to compensate for fluctuations, but those are only very little numbers. AFAIK the harm from having nuclear plants idling around is far bigger.
Gosh, is this the level of your understanding? Not everything in the energy-sector is about burning down something and getting electricity from the heat.
Coal is using in chemical processes for smelting, producing steel and other metals, creating concrete and other chemical compounds.
> If coal seems to be special/different, and not replaceable by other generation forms, why is the plan to get rid of it?
Because the plans are about replacing whole processes, fabrics, plants, devices, products... It's not as simple as just switching a cable or making a new contract with a new provider. You basically have to build a new house, and that's time-consuming and expensive.
> Coal is using in chemical processes for smelting, producing steel and other metals, creating concrete and other chemical compounds.
Canada has lots of steel/metal production, and yet Ontario and Quebec (two largest local production centres), have managed to either not have coal in the first place or get rid of it.
Ontario gave a timeline to retire coal, and there's no reason why Germany could not have done the same:
Use of coke in smelting is not energy production and therefore outside of scope for the coal sourced energy discussion. Energy for smelting seems like base load to me since you can't just turn off a smelter randomly and instead they run for years at a time.
The plan was to talk about renewables while buying Russian gas, since solar can't possibly cover the consumption.
It's not a coincidence that the German prime minister from the era when they decided to phase out nuclear now works for Gazprom and Rosneft. He literally said the West caused Russia to invade Georgia in 2008 (what a fucking moron).
In normal countries this is called treason. In Germany it's "developing trade relations".
Germany alone, using PV alone, has the potential to supply the entire planet's electricity demand 3.5 times over, even when using medium efficiency cells and also accounting for their capacity factor.
Also, this ignores the ample German wind resources that currently supplies a bit over twice as much as their PV, with all renewables collectively being 52% of Germany's gross electricity production: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...
Of course, the people doing this might have simply not believed that any of this was possible, and had some villainous scheme in mind that accidentally went wrong in a way that gave everyone else substantial benefits — I've still not seen "The Mouse That Roared", but I'm aware of the plot and have that in mind.
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In normal countries this is called treason. In Germany it's "developing trade relations".
You must not forget that Gerhard Schröder won the 2002 election by promising that Germany won't join the USA in invading the Iraq, a promise that many German citizens venerate him for. For basically everyone in Germany it was obvious that Putin is a criminal, but the mood in German society at that time was that the Iraq invasion of George W. Bush was to be considered a genocide. So, having a choice between continuing being aligned with a nation/president who wants Germans to join a genocide vs seeking alignment with a criminal, Schröder's politics of seeking rapprochement with Russia/Putin was rather well-regarded in the German society.
Nope, it is "problem" of past decisions. The past decision were, that 2022 should be the end date. All companies planed for that. You simply cannot change such decisions in an empty market. BTW the fuel is mostly coming from Kazakhstan. Does that ring a bell?
Scary Kazatomprom as a fuel source is an invented problem.
Nuclear fuel market is global with many producers. Fuel price is a tiny fraction of the nuclear electricity cost. Agree to a long-term contract at double today's price and there will be a line of companies running to sign it.
Cameco (and others) put some of their nuclear mining into conservation because there was not enough buyers. Uranium is one of the most abundant elements, the only reason for the shortage of fuel is the politicians reluctance to make nuclear a pillar of the energy production.
So buy it elsewhere? All I hear are excuses and why the current situation is someone else's fault, either previous governments or other countries because they wouldn't just shut up and die so Germany can have cheaper energy. Which they use to overproduce stuff and dump it in the rest of the EU, while calling everyone else lazy. Here's a hint, if your economy doesn't work unless you have the lowest energy prices in history, it's broken and needs to change.
It doesn't really matter as long as they can deliver what you ordered. Which you have to check regardless. So it's the skill of the buyer that decides the result.
People who can't do basic math and skip prevention are responsible for their own shit outcome.
People in Portugal, where healthcare is "free", i.e. the government pays for it, frequently wait for years before being able to see a specialist due to long waitlists. The obvious outcome is that only poor people use the system and if you can you use private healthcare.
People in Czechia with single payer healthcare system with e.g. average wage of 2000 USD pay from 100 euros a month for health insurance (unemployed) to e.g. 500 euros (with 4000 USD salary) or more if you make more. You get the same shitty service (something like 20 years behid the US), you just pay a lot more if you make anything resembling a US salary.
There's no such thing as free healthcare. Can you make a single payer healthcare system that works better? Sure, it's just hard and even if everything is ideal you get maybe 50% discount. The main way to make healthcare cheaper is to drop coverage for diseases that are expensive to treat.
I'm pretty sure there are places in Europe where the AfD equivalent doesn't get 15%.
Trip to a holocaust museum is nice and all, but it probably fails at making people understand the problem. They'll kind of nod that yeah, Nazis were bad but then happily go and blame others for their bad decisions and vote for populists with easy solutions.
Somehow half of Germany thinks Russia is OK, because they "saved Europe", hammer and sickle symbols are still not treated the same as swastikas and, of course, the main outcome of the kind of education you mention is that Germany is basically freeloading wrt defense and very unwilling to do the only reasonable thing, i.e. help prevent another genocide as it unfolds in Europe.
Hopefully something has changed in the last 2 years, but the preceding decade, spending over 100 million euros daily on Russian natural gas is hard to undo. And that's with pre-war historical minimum prices. Since you all didn't get the memo that you need to stop buying Russian stuff until NS2 got blown up, the flow of money for natural gas from Germany to Russia in 2022 and 2023 is likely several times the pre-war annual number.
And then you have people saying shit like "we have spent enough on Ukraine" or "Ukrainian refugees are coming because of our social safety net", not even from AfD politicians (I think some CDU idiot, lol). Yeah sure, but you gave 100x the money to Russia, who of course spent it on weapons because they don't give two fucks about their own people.
Being sorry about things from the last century, while failing completely to judge the situation in the present doesn't really help. Not to mention Poland still didn't get the war reparations for WW2 last I checked. They probably don't want to shake the boat too much and just hope Germany will at least stop being useless.
Thanks for the tip, just checked it out. I prefer the aesthetics of the current one better. Paper CSS looks like a kid drew those elements. This one has the hand-drawn look of a more professional hand.
You can argue for changes while still recognizing that the current rules make it more optimal to do the things you argue against. There is no contradiction.
