It’s not 100% “instead”, but equally it’s not 0%. A grid with more distributed generation (and storage and load flexibility) can be smaller and cheaper.
The framing in the article is that Germany made a purely technical decarbonization policy choice between renewable energy and nuclear power and chose incorrectly, but this is too reductive.
Germany has a long history of public opposition to nuclear power, going back over 50 years, and this is related to environmental concerns, safety concerns, and the association with nuclear weapons.
Both the USA and the Soviets had nuclear weapons deployed on German soil with the potential to be directed at the German people and this cultural and historical context is important to understand the current policy landscape.
The origin of the popular Green party in Germany is deeply connected to the peace movement and anti-nuclear activism that pre-dates concerns about climate change.
It’s fine to disagree with the policy decisions the German people made, but it’s good to understand the reasons why they made them.
The phrase "green energy transition" is mentioned only in the headline, and is completely irrelavent to the point being made in article, which is that unregulated mining in poor developing countries is bad.
As a point of order, and especially with most (not all) rare earth elements it's not the
> unregulated mining in poor developing countries
that's the worst part of the chain, it's the processing of concentrates.
With, say, lithium for batteries a great deal of the mining takes place in Australia and that mining produces a spodumene concentrate which is shipped onwards for processing - which creates acid lakes in holding dams and low level radioactive waste as a by product.
This has recently occured on location in countries such as China and Malaysia :
OP here, I thought it was relevant as alot of the output goes to production of windmills and electric cars (motors).
I am genuinely worried about the squeeze we are in now between conserving and protecting nature and transitioning away from fossil fules. I am active in the green party i Norway where we are fighting to wind down our oil production in a responsible and controlled maner.
But alot of the new non-fossil energy production is now added to the existing energy mix, not replacing fossil fuels.
Close by where I live (45 min drive), Google is building a huge server park that will require approximately 5% of Norways total electricity production. The region does not have enough power and energy companies are now in a frenzy to build solar parks along the delicate norwegian coastline in the south. This will mostly go to cover the needs of Googles new datacenter, not replace fossil fuels in any way.
Just because someone calls something "green" does not automatically make it so.
>But alot of the new non-fossil energy production is now added to the existing energy mix, not replacing fossil fuels.
This is a really good point that worries me quite a bit as well. Energy is essentially fungible so any energy used by wasteful and pointless endeavors such as cryptocurrency mining or model training is energy that's not going toward reducing our use of fossil fuels. Worse it's energy that still has externalities associated with production and storage such as mining for solar/batteries destroying natural areas and hydroelectric impacting river ecosystems.
Fossil fuels should be phased out ASAP and the way to do that is to stop increasing energy usage and to ensure renewable energy is used only for activities that are actually necessary such as food production and heating/cooling.
As someone working in the "cloud computing" industry I see companies spending huge amounts of energy to index non-production logs they'll never look at. I see developers wasting huge amounts of energy to create useless models for generating content nobody will ever look at. I see companies leaving huge infrastructures running 24/7 just in case someone might want to get an Ad served at 3am. And I see the enormous grey data center housing all that junk that now sits nearby where there used to be a pristine forest full of wildlife.
>Close by where I live (45 min drive), Google is building a huge server park that will require approximately 5% of Norways total electricity production.
It's amazing how much these things consume and at the end of the day they aren't doing anything of value. Communities really need to come together to prevent new data centers and remove existing ones.
>But alot of the new non-fossil energy production is now added to the existing energy mix, not replacing fossil fuels.
Do you know how replacement and phase out works in the real world? Hint, you don't just immediately install 100% new capacity and then rip out the still working old capacity.
I know too little, that much is clear to me after I have started to look into this.
The situation may be somewhat unusual here in Norway, since basically all electricity is generated by hydro dams (~90%). We have made large strides the last two decades regarding energy savings (LED lighting, heat pumps and better insulation), and this has largely made it possible for us to transition rapidly from fossil cars to EVs while keeping our use of electricity quite stable.
What we are seeing now is a rapid expansion of mega datacenters that lays claim to extreme amount of electricity, more than these regions can steadily supply. This means that we need even more electricity on top of the hydro we have. This again means rapid expansion of solar parks and the destruction of vulnerable nature. Just the one Google datacenter now being built in my region will lay claim to ~5% of Norways energy use!
This worries me, and makes me doubt the "green" label on these projects.
Hint, electric companies boast about building new green infrastructure when its sole purpose is to satisfy growing demand rather than reducing existing reliance on classical electric sources. Which is misleading to the average person. I think you and the GP would probably agree on this point.
I'm a fan of efficiency, but don't think "using less energy" is a particularly useful metric when that energy can come from sources with radically different costs and downsides.
Happily, the most effective way to use less energy is to electrify with renewables, which is a major part of the green transition
> I'm a fan of efficiency, but don't think "using less energy" is a particularly useful metric when that energy can come from sources with radically different costs and downsides.
That are often somewhat fungible. Using less is always good.
> We need much more emphasis on using less energy.
This might be self-sabotaging in that it helps climate change deniers get elected. Politicians have finite political capital and degrowth is unpopular. Better use political capital for sustainable growth and accelerating renewables. Win-win narratives are the only thing that work politically.
Plus I don't think degrowth is even necessary. There isn't a zero-sum tradeoff between growth and emissions.
"Windmills" and electric cars do not, in fact, rely heavily on rare earth materials. Enormously more are used, e.g., in quadcopters. Even in places where powerful rare-earth permanent magnets are now important, they will soon be largely displaced by nitrogen-iron magnets, which are both radically cheaper and more powerful.
Google data centers are not examples of a "green energy transition".
There are so many years since commercial iron nitride magnets have been promised, but none have appeared, that I doubt that they would appear any time soon.
Like for many other inventions, it is likely that commercial iron nitride magnets would have appeared only if the original patent holders, who do not seem able to solve whatever technological problems exist that prevent their use, would have published which are the problems that block them and would have been willing to license the patents in advantageous terms to those able to solve such problems.
From the little published information it is not clear whether the iron nitride material is too difficult to produce or whether the crystalline structure is unstable in time, leading to a short lifetime.
> I am genuinely worried about the squeeze we are in now between conserving and protecting nature and transitioning away from fossil fules.
You shouldn't be, as pretty much the biggest thing you can do to conserve and protect nature is to transition away from fossil fuels.
Which you maybe already know since your example of a new data center has nothing to do with the transition from fossil fuels, and would only be much, much worse if their plan to power it was to burn fossil fuels.
Exactly, it needs to be about the relative impacts of each. Extracting oil and gas produces lots of toxic and carcinogens for every unit which is used just once. In theory rare earth metals produce toxic waste but have a longer lifetime and smaller concentrations even then. Not to mention the rise in recycling of these materials.
>unregulated mining in poor developing countries is bad
But we all know that will never stop :( Bribe a few pols and off we go. For context look at e-waste which is being dumped into poor countries. People there are working in the dumps striping the waste for valuable items like gold and living on the edge of starvation.
Until there is a worldwide enforceable environmental laws, we will see these mines popping up all over the place.
Dog whistle is a facile retort without substance. It’s like when someone says back to you “greenwashing” it doesn’t mean anything. Dogwhistling doesn’t mean anything.
What OP is talking about is total impact of renewables. Just because renewables are the future and on paper are less polluting does not mean they are currently less polluting when everything is taken into account and people need to realize that. Transitions are messy, disrupting and during a period are less efficient than what they replace.
Every power generation technology needs ‘backup capacity’ and energy storage.
If your transmission line to your nuclear power station trips, you need reserve capacity elsewhere to serve the load.
Gas and coal generation all need storage to run reliably.
If you are going to be an armchair power system designer and you want to ‘gross up’ the cost of capacity and storage into the cost of renewable generation, then be consistent.
Solar is unique in that it reliably "trips" for extensive periods every day and seasonally. It is also unique in that it does not take fuel that can be stored.
Solar cannot act as the backup to a nuclear power plant. Whereas a nuclear power plant can (and does) act as the backup to solar.
I'm grossing up to make the point that after about 60-70% solar penetration, the circle cannot be squared without massive investment either in batteries or in distribution, a fact which seems to never quite fully make it into cost comparisons between nuclear and solar such as those being made in this thread.
The usual dishonest argument nuclear advocates make is to assume batteries are used to get renewables to 100% of the grid. You are doing it there.
But batteries are not the ideal storage technology for all storage use cases. It turns out that e-fuels like hydrogen are much, MUCH better for some cases, like seasonal leveling, even though the round trip efficiency isn't great.
It will likely be the case that a 100% RE grid ends up being considerably cheaper than a nuclear powered grid.
Nuclear backing up solar is a completely stupid idea, btw. The economics don't work at all.
