Energy Stupidity

Perhaps stupidity is too strong a word. Perhaps it’s a combination of ignorance, impatience, an inability to foresee all consequences and a tendency to let emotions override critical thinking. This is not an example from America, but a powerful lesson.

 

US News reports, last weekend in Luetzerath, Germany "hundreds of anti-coal activists staged protests in and around a mine in western Germany.” This is part of an ongoing series of demonstrations against coal mining and the use of coal power plants. “Environmental groups oppose the German government's decision to allow the mining and burning of coal in the country until 2038.” They believe that would be too late to meaningfully affect climate change.

 

This activity is just the latest of many protests against both mines and power facilities. Here is a headline that one outlet labeled the top environmental story of 2017: “Thousands protest German coal use.” I also found news items about similar demonstrations from June and December 2019 and earlier this year. There is no doubt that this recent protest will not be the last.

 

So far it seems reasonable. Coal burning pollutes the air. Phasing it out will clean the air and remove greenhouse gases. Maybe they have a point, except…

 

In 2011 in the wake of the Fukushima accident and with 70 percent of the population opposed to nuclear power, Angela Merkel announced that Germany would close all 17 of its nuclear reactors by 2022. At the time a science reporter for Time wondered how Germany would meet “increasing energy demands while also tackling climate change” as they “shun any low-carbon energy sources, no matter how troubling.” (Nuclear energy is not low-carbon; it’s zero-carbon.)

With the plan in place “to curb greenhouse gas emissions but at the same time...shut down all of its nuclear power stations, which in the year 2000 had a 29.5 per cent share of the power generation mix,” Although Germany has been moving heavily toward renewables, where does the power to fill the need between now and 2038 come from?

The Asia Times earlier this year noted, “Germany now generates over 35% of its yearly electricity consumption from wind and solar sources” with thousands of wind turbines and over a million photovoltaic installations. “Unfortunately, most of the time the actual amount of electricity produced is only a fraction of the installed capacity. Worse, on ‘bad days’ it can fall to nearly zero.” That leaves 65% or more unaccounted for.

Forbes lists a few problems with this rapid transition. It imposes increased direct and indirect costs on German businesses and consumers, who already pay “among the highest electricity costs in the world.” The “landscape is being ruined by unsightly wind turbines” virtually everywhere, and the supply from these sources “varies dramatically in the course of a day or week.”

 

Finally, a McKinsey report from last year, that one German newspaper described as “disastrous,” stated that the current “transition to renewables, poses a significant threat to the nation's economy and energy supply.” At times the country’s grid was close to a total blackout and had to be stabilized by short-term imports. The implementation lags its completion goal by eight or more years.

 

Germany has major problems with all aspects of their renewable energy transition, made worse by the added gap from closing their nuclear plants, plus protests against a coal power industry needed to take up the slack. What else are they supposed to do in the interim, attach generators to exercise bikes and ask citizens to generate their own electricity?

 

Unfortunately, instead of learning from the German experience, other European countries, including France, with 58 nuclear power reactors producing nearly 72% of their electricity, plan to follow their lead. 

 

Critical thinking has taken a backseat to emotional reactions. Nuclear power has always been a safe and pollution free energy source. “The risk of accidents in nuclear power plants is low and declining.” Modern technology is superior to the plants built years ago. And engineers in France are recycling spent fuel to avoid the need for massive radioactive waste sites. If fluke accidents drove decision making in other arenas we would be riding horses and be forbidden to have a swimming pool or a bucket of water in the backyard (among many other things).

 

In short, the German people have turned their back on a viable pollution-free alternative and then launched protests against the only industry able to take up the slack during the transition – maybe not stupid, but certainly not smart.