German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia.
I thought renewables were cheaper than coal. How is this possible?
I think this headline is misleading.
A better headline might read: “Coal found beneath wind farm. Turbines dismantled to make room for mining operation.”
Still, its lignite, they should cease all mining operations.
Lignite is the worst coal, most polluting and least energy dense afaik, why would you bother mining it
Because they get subsidies from the govt bc they employ a whole region and are a super big energy company. They need to be dismantled.
Because it’s there and you want a steady supply of cheap electricity, that’s why.
And thus, climate change.
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Shouldn’t they build a new wind farm though? Why aren’t the eco fanatics protesting against this infamy?
They are litteraly replacing a wind farm with a coal mine!
If the turbines are still good, they can just be moved, although it looks like they’re EOL anyway, so I’m guessing they’ll just be scrapped.
Won’t make a huge difference to the general trend in the German energy mix, which is towards more renewables + importing French nuclear energy.
I… I dont think that really helped make the title misleading
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Delete this InfoWars-level bs misinformation meant to smear clean energy.
One small privately owned wind farm is being disassembled, this is not a general new policy or anything signalling a shift away from clean energy.
Oh gosh, thank you.
Oh so you mean most arguments against nuclear energy are that bad too? Thank you for realizing!
Ban straws! (even though disabled people need them and they create negligible pollution)
Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)
Reduce your carbon footprint! (even though its a term we invented ourselves to shift responsibility to you, while we fly our private jets around creating more pollution than you ever could in 10 lifetimes)
Recycle! (even though 90% of it ends up in landfill anyway because we don’t want to pay to actually recycle it)
All equates to
Look the other way while we continue to rape the planet and blame it on you!!!
Never forget - capitalists (and the governments they’re co-dependent on) only want more money, they don’t car about you or me or the planet, only about themsleves and the numbers in their accounts, and they will never willingly stop doing whatever it takes to make more.
or the source of the electricity it uses
Oh, quit this noise. In the same countries where electric cars are becoming common, wind/water/sun-produced energy is also on the rise. Electric cars decouple the energy used from the means of production in ways that gasoline will never have, and the potential outweighs the temporary conditions of power generation in socially backward areas like Darfur and America.
You are literally commenting on an article where one of those countries has shut down a wind farm to go back to miming coal (never mind that my point still stand regardless because renewables are still just a fraction of electricity production, or that it is the wealthy people buying the electric cars who contribute more emissions than the poorest 50% of the population, but good to see the greenwashing has worked so well on you), so which of us is actually making noise, and which is addressing the problems we face?
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Might be a good idea for you to read the article
Do you believe every headline you read on the internet? Looks like it. This isn’t „Germany end all wind farms“, the people who wrote that headline want you to think that. Don’t be such an easy mark.
The title, paired with an expensive paywall and the fact that the quote below is the only part visible for free would certainly suggest that this comment is true.
Here’s the un-paywalled article intro:
"German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia.
One wind turbine has already been dismantled, with a further seven scheduled for removal to excavate an additional 15m to 20m tonnes of so-called ‘brown’ coal, the most polluting energy source."
I think this article from last year is relevant to this story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/26/german-windfarm-coalmine-keyenberg-turbines-climate
What I’m saying is RWE is a privately owned company. The headline says „Germany begins…“ which is objectively untrue.
It is trying to suggest that Germany passed a decree to disassemble all windfarms. Yet the opposite is true.
I agree, that’s what I’m saying. I used “this” ambiguously, I just realized. I edited “this” to “this comment”, and added another clarifying sentence before the quote.
Here’s an excerpt from the older article which isn’t paywalled, that I linked in my comment (before the edit):
"Constructed more than 20 years ago, the turbines at the small Keyenberg wind park are less powerful than modern equivalents, with each producing about 1MW of energy per hour at a wind speed of 15 metres per second, roughly a sixth of the output of a more efficient state of the art turbine.
Since windfarms in Germany are no longer eligible for subsidies after 20 years in operation, the park would probably have been “repowered” with new technology or wound down even if it were not for the nearby mine.
Nonetheless, North-Rhine Westphalia’s ministry for economic and energy affairs on Monday urged RWE to abort its plans to dismantle the windfarm.
“In the current situation, all potential for the use of renewable energy should be exhausted as much as possible and existing turbines should be in operation for as long as possible,” a spokesperson said."
Got ya
Electric cars contribute less emissions than ICE cars even if the grid’s electricity supply is entirely coming from coal. Of course cars in general are a much worse solution to transport than really any form of public transportation, but that’s no reason to spread pro-ICE car propaganda.
While I partly agree with your argument at the end of your comment, I think your examples are really unfitting.
Only single-use plastic straws are banned. There is also an exemption for straws that are necessary for medical reasons. The needs of disabled people are included in the exemption. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2021-003536-ASW_EN.html
If people buy a new car, the old one (if still functional) typically enters the second-hand market, not the landfill. There is no reason why this would be different if the new car is an electric vehicle.
The carbon footprint is a perfectly fine concept on its own, the problem is just that some people shit on it with their private jets, which are a legitimate concern. Some people also argue that “most of the pollution is done by corporations, not individuals”, completely ignoring the fact that these corporations only do it while producing goods for the people. That does not mean that we can just blame the people for it, but everybody has the responsibility to vote for policies that keep the corporations in check.
Recycling is really bad in some countries, but works pretty well in others. For example in Germany 56% of plastic waste is recycled, 44% burned. 90% of paper is recycled. https://www.quarks.de/umwelt/muell/das-solltest-du-ueber-recycling-wissen/#lösung4
We’ve made electric powered airplane jet turbines. If the rich want private jets, we should require those to be EVs. I don’t give a shit that the tech is untested, and neither do they judging by that “submarine.”
The problem is we are only talking about a small fraction of the trash. >90% of waste is industrial waste, of that a third is just from Construction/Demolition.
Consumers can recycle everything, but it won’t make more than a 10% impact. We need to start forcing industry to recycle and we can start with concrete. 8% of all global emissions are from concrete production, that’s not even accounting the energy to haul it around. We have the ability today to use concrete to make down cycled products on site (road base, filler, non structural blocks, etc) eliminating transportation and other impacts. But few even consider it, companies and customers don’t want to wait the extra day that it takes, and it’s not always profitable either.
I doubt your numbers are factual. Depending on the industry, you’ll have very specific, non mixed waste materials, which would be way easier to recycle than mixed trash from households.
I just had to do a project on this for work and almost if not all of those numbers most likely came from the EPA’s site from the studies they reference. Other sources, including international sources are similar, I have no reason to doubt the veracity or the figures.
When rereading your comment I get the impression you think I am saying only 10% of industrial waste is recycled. That is not that statement, the statement is simply 90% of waste in landfill is industrial.
Do you think cars are immortal, and are just passed on from owner to owner for all eternity?
All hail CarLord The Eternal
Only East German ones. Then the pigs eat some rotten parts off of them, and the remainder is reassembled into fewer cars. The circle of life. The last people on this planet will still be driving a Trabi.
No? Nobody thinks that?
My comment was just a response to the following:
Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)
…which for some reason suggests that the introduction of electric cars leads to premature scrapping of existing cars - which is bullshit.
Cuban cars are
That’s a lot of words to say “I lick boot”.
But just to address my pet peeve (mostly because I can copy pasta my own comment, and no I’m not going to edit out the “ableist” because even if you don’t mean t, advocating and making excuses for the straw ban is ableist)
There are many reasons people can’t use different alternatives.
Never mind that to deny access to a literal lifeline for the sake of 0.003% of the plastics in the ocean (literally a drop in an ocean) because it makes you feel better and requires zero effort or sacrifice (from you), instead of actually acting to resolve the problem (like being anti-capitalist rather than just trying to apply band aids to its symptoms) is not only gross and ableist, but also a colossal counterproductive waste of time.
As for medical exemptions - disabled people shouldn’t need to ask for basic accessibility, nor should they have to disclose personal medical information to get it, but now that ableists like you have forced this situation to boost your own egos, they do, and are often denied, because wait staff are not medically trained, and are often abelists like you (or have bosses that would fire them for “handing out straws willy nilly” if they even have straws available which now many places don’t), so they get refused and called liars and accused of destroying the environment.
Never mind that expecting people to always have their own accessibility aids, rather than have them freely available creates an inaccessible society.Which is exactly what ableists like you are fighting for.
I was exclusively talking about the EU ban, not about some random US cities’ bans (This is a thread about Germany after all). None of your points really apply to the EU ban.
It does not ban the distribution (you can still legally buy leftover stock - my local cinema seems to have a century’s worth of supply), just the first-time sale of newly produced non-medical single-use plastic straws.
The “medical exemption” is not on an individual basis, but an exemption for a production line of straws. Everybody can buy the straws afterwards. The EU ban is not cutting a “lifeline” for disabled people.
The links you provided talk about bans by local city councils in the USA, which have their own (apparantly stupid) rules.
Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)
A new EV breaks even with a used car in less than a decade. It does not matter if it is getting its energy from coal, it still will emit less carbon within a decade.
Recycle! (even though 90% of it ends up in landfill anyway because we don’t want to pay to actually recycle it)
90% of plastic recycling. That is thanks to the oil companies who saw backlash against the ridiculous amount of plastic in the 70s and decided to invent a resin code whose symbol mimicked the recycling symbol. Recycling centers were flooded with a ton of plastic which they did not have infrastructure to actually recycle. China took it for a couple decades and then it became unprofitable for them. Basically only resin codes 1 and 2 are recyclable. But most people think all of it is. Absolutely recycle metals. If your city has recycling pickup and you are not recycling stuff like aluminum, you kind of suck.
I’m from Sweden, we’re among the best in the world at recycling. We have closed all our landfills and even import combustible trash to burn for energy (we clean the fumes extremely well).
Every time I see a discussion about trash anywhere in the world I get sad that people are so uninformed about what’s possible.
One Swedish company, Swedish Plastic Recycling, is currently building a recycling plant that will be able to handle ALL of the country’s plastic waste and automatically recycle almost all of the kinds of plastic there are.
This is even profitable if done right.
Sources upon request.
Absolutely recycle metals
You don’t need to; all trash, no matter the bin, goes under a magnet that will pick out anything ferromagnetic, and through an induction trap that will pick out non-ferromagnetic metals. Even if for some reason it gets dumped in a landfill, it’s still possible to mine it out.
Aluminum in particular is more expensive to mine+refine than to recycle. Some places you can even throw it on the ground, and someone will pick it up to sell for recycling. Copper you can get even stolen from you, and don’t start me on Palladium, some people will “recycle” the catalytic converter from your car if you don’t park it in a safe place.
Basically only resin codes 1 and 2 are recyclable. But most people think all of it is
I read somewhere that this is false and all of them are recyclable. Don’t quote me on it though.
I think you can technically recycle probably almost any plastic, perhaps almost any material in general. It’s just a question of if the recycling process is affordable and competes in price with just buying the unrecycled version of that plastic. So other plastics besides PET and HDPE I’m sure you can recycle, it’s just that the cost is prohibitive.
Technically yes but there has to be the infrastructure to do it. Most cities cannot process them. It’s also generally not profitable and does not save much from an emissions standpoint either.
Luckily many people live in democracies where they can simply vote to enact climate policies.
Sadly most people living in those democracies choose to continue enabling climate change.
The reason nothing is being done against climate change isn’t corrupt politicians. It’s the millions of people voting for them.
Your first link is US only, your second link is about a completely seperate issue. You don’t need to dismantle capitalism to protect the climate.
In Germany, where I live, the voters could easily vote for the greens “Grüne” and the left “Linke”.
If those two parties had a majority in government, we’d have a climate friendly system in no time.
But they don’t. We had a conservative government for 16 years. Now we have a center government, which sadly includes the small government / free market party “FDP”, blocking all significant progress.
No systemic oppression stops people from voting Left/Greens. But they never did, and never will.
There’s now an uprise of the far right party “AfD” in Germany, to the point it’s becoming one of the major parties.
In Germany people have the choice readily available to stop actively damaging the climate.
But every couple of years, they freely choose to not do that.
I feel like many left-wing people regularly forget about the billions of people who genuinely do not care to do anything about climate change.
Under capitalism, the capitalist class controls the media, and can use their wealth to control the political class.
A democracy can only make choices so far as it’s voters are informed, and when a group controls most sources of information, it can control the democracy as a whole.
Under a capitalist democracy with antitrust laws… the “capitalist class” will create all sorts of media sources to earn money from whatever sort of information any voters will eat up. A single group can’t control most sources of information, because it will be eaten alive by all the competing groups at once.
It’s up to each voter to decide whether they want to religiously follow a single source, or contrast it with others, and which ones.
There will of course be different sources of information, but that does not mean that they will present a fair and balanced spread of ideas. The capitalist class will push their own interests. A single owner is not required for that to occur
does not mean that they will present a fair and balanced spread of ideas
Not fair, and not balanced, just full spread.
The “capitalist class” interest is to earn money, which necessarily makes it fill ALL possible revenue niches: from state sponsored propaganda, through different interest group propaganda, all the way to anti-system, extremist, and a large variety of scams. If nobody else is doing it, someone will, no exceptions.
Assembling a “fair and balanced” set of sources, is left as a task for each voter; that’s where each one’s ability to contrast sources comes into play.
You don’t need to dismantle capitalism to protect the climate.
You absolutely do. If it was profitable to destroy the envrionment capitalism would do it in a heartbeat. And guess what it IS profitable to destroy the environment, that is why it is happening! You cannot protect the environment under capitalism.
When you try to dismantle capitalism… you get capitalism under a different name, with a dictator on top of it. Better hope the dictator wants to protect the environment, and that he knows how to! (see: Great Chinese Famine)
You can limit capitalism without abolishing it.
In Germany people are guaranteed 20/24 paid vacation days. That’s not profitable.
That’s a limit imposed on capitalism. It can be done and has been done without abolishing capitalism.
That’s just one of the thousands of policies that limit capitalism.
You can limit capitalism (as literally every capitalist nation does) without abolishing it.
Enforcing climate friendlyness would be just another limit.
When you try to limit capitalism you get nuclear plants being shut down and coal plants being opened and the environment still being destroyed.
Most people don’t have a ‘green’ option for which they can vote.
We won’t touch the Greenbelt.
-Doug Ford, 2018
Ford says he’s confident nothing criminal took place in Greenbelt land swap amid RCMP probe.
-CBC news, 2023
Not that he was a green leaning politician to begin with but this is just another example of blatant lies used by politicians to get elected and totally fuckover their country.
But the millions of people have been denied education, mislead, and propagandized by the corrupt politicians, it’s probably not productive to blame victims here.
I do not believe the majority of people don’t know about the effects of climate change. I believe that the majority of people voting against climate friendly policies simply choose to not think long term.
Someone who votes to continue the status quo is to be blamed for the status quo.
I get you, and I probably went a bit too far in my statement as I don’t think they’re completely blameless, just don’t think they’re the primary party deserving of blame, that goes to the powerful.
We must elect a Supreme Chancellor to get us through these tough times.
No they can’t? If it was as simple as voting for green policies we’d see more of them. The only thing people can do is vote for greenwashed policies that do not impact the bottom line of industry.
I live next to this coal mine and the wind farm is on my monthly Autobahn trip right next to me. Maybe to shed some light on the “why”:
The coal mine was scheduled to be mined until 2038. The plan was to extend the mine to the west, the wind farm is to the east of the coal mine. RWE of course has big investments into mining this lignite until the very last possible day. There are problems with extending to the west though: old towns still exist there and the residents would of course love to stay in their homes the family had for generations. To the east, where the wind farm is, there is nothing but fields and some wind turbines. There are about 150 turbines in the wind farm and ~15 of them are standing where the mine is extending to now. Those 15 also were the first to be built for the wind farm and they are nearly at the end of their lifespan, some of them are even deemed structurally unsafe.
Of course it would be better to stop mining the lignite but decades ago the contracts with RWE were made and just forcing a company out of a contract that is worth billions of Euros is extremely bad precedent and would hinder future investions. Buying out the contract to cease mining faster also was not possible, because RWE was unwilling to settle for a reasonable sum of money.
What a beautiful society where companies have more powers than an state…
Ofc theses companies have our futurs in mind, right ?
Capitalism.
They don’t have more power - the government was just stupid to give them contracts this longlasting
Thinking of that one us city that sold its parking rights for a century for just millions
Also the many private-partnered public infrastructure projects built in Turkey with billing rights given to the companies that will let Erdoğans friends leech off the public for decades even if he loses political power
They don’t have more power than the state. The state could easily legislate any demands they want. Do so though and you end up rapidly like Venezuela. Contacts matter. Unless you think the state should be able to take your house with little to no compensation as well? That is not capitalism. Don’t be obtuse.
It’s really bad for $$ to do the responsible thing, so we’re going to proceed with existential environmental degradation. Because $.
To be completely honest (and I am a huge anti-coal-mining dude), currently I’m happy that we still have the coalmines running. It would not have been possible to build solar and wind power fast enough to compensate for the coalmines, the only feasible alternative would have been gas and that comes from russia
Or to have kept your nuclear running and not freaked out after the fukushima disaster…
Just saying
Correct. You can add the vastly underestimated methane emissions of natural gas to that. (They are hard to measure but nobody seems toooo interested)
Maybe nuclear could’ve been better than coal?
There are a lot of things which in hindsight were better than coal. But when the decision was made to dig where the wind farm is, there wouldn’t have been any time to build a nuclear power plant anymore
Nuclear was already better than coal 50 years ago… the whole anti-nuclear movement was predicated on the Chernobyl disaster, making “natural gas” and renewables better than nuclear, with a supposed phase-out of natural gas. Coal was always the worst option, both in emissions, and in the impact of open pit mining, when it was already known that deep shaft black coals mines had been getting depleted for decades.
It was highly irresponsible to not renew the nuclear plants before there was at least enough renewables to replace them, and instead increase reliance on natural gas… from Russia from all places. Particularly after Crimea, there should have been a reassessment and a push to fast-track nuclear.
It takes only 5 years to build a nuclear power plant, Crimea was 9 years ago; Germany had plenty of time to prepare itself, instead of investing in increasing NordStream capacity.
It takes only 5 years to build a nuclear power plant, (…)
I agree with most of the comment, but this is just an oversimplification. I’m sure that you can build a nuclear power plant in 5 years, if you have the requisite infrastructure, engineers and knowledge. Germany did not have any of those in sufficient amount to build anywhere near enough nuclear reactors between the decision to switch to coal & gas in around 2011 and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Even France wouldn’t be capable of that in such a short amount of time.
Had they made that decision 30 years ago, sure, but in such short time? No way.
infrastructure, engineers and knowledge. Germany did not have any of those in sufficient amount
Germany had 17 nuclear power plants in 2011, when they decided to close half of them after Fukushima. Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. Last nuclear power plant closed in April 2023. I find it hard to believe that there was not enough expertise to build some new ones in all this time.
the decision to switch to coal & gas
This is what really rubs me the wrong way: coal should have been phased out before nuclear, not used to replace nuclear.
It all seems like a grift and a knee jerk reaction under the guise of “look how green we are”, while actually doing all the opposite.
Germany is still going to use the same amount of coal whether this runs or not, they’d just import it from another country or have another mine go faster if there’s one that still can
The way to reduce coal is to increase low carbon sources of energy and to reduce consumption
Nope. Dont import and scarsity will drive prices up and people use less. It’s pretty simple really.
We need to keep all fossil fuels in the ground. The way we do this is reduce energy usage.
Do you really think it’s more responsible to force the families out of their homes and demolish several villages/towns over some old wind turbines? Or did you mean the responsible thing being investing in renewables? I really can’t tell, sorry 😅
Obviously the latter
It’s more responsible to stop mining fossil fuels.
Why was the plan to ever extent to the wist if there is a town?
A lot of towns have been dug away for the lignite. The town now not digged away is just one of the few surviving ones. Also a lot of towns have been drowned for water storage lakes and Hydropower. Europe is populated way too densely to do any large infrastructure project without destroying towns in some ways. The residents are compensated with huge amounts of money, but for some they would still rather stay in the homes they have lived in for 50-80 years.
In this case the original plan was to move westwards because that’s where the coal lies in the ground. The lignite in the west is enough to keep the power plants running until 2050, the lignite in the east only until 2030. Because the date is now pushed forwards, it’s feasible to dig to the east. Also advanced technology plays a role: the original plans destroying the westwards towns were made when there was no technology to efficiently burn the lignite on the east, which is way less dense.
Thanks for your insight.
So, if I’m reading this correctly, this is the Konigshovener Hohe wind farm which is built on the site of the Garzweiler open-pit lignite mine. According to this article, the site was inaugurated in 2015 with 21 Senvion turbines.
The problem is, Senvion went out of business in 2019, and customers have been struggling to support their turbines. Apparently the Senvion design is exceptionally dependent on software access. Siemens and others have stepped in to offer support contracts to Senvion turbines in good working order, but with the opportunity to mine more lignite at the site, maybe RWE felt that it was time to spin down the Senvion turbines.
It seems like there may be many factors in this decision.
Thanks for providing this context. From what you say it sounds like a bad initial decision from RWE - tieing themselves in to 'wind turbine as a service’doesn’t seem sensible.
We should be using open source solutions for things like energy security. It’s not like our civilization can run without energy generation. The control ought to be in the hands of people, not corporations.
Yeah the Senvion situation is an object lesson in the dangers of proprietary systems.
I’m not sure that’s the right wind farm. According to this guardian article, it’s actually the Keyenberg wind farm that’s being dismantled, a retired site from 2001.
Apparently the site is retired because the operator’s permit ends in 2023. Making way eventually for the mine expansion was part of the original deal allowing the land to be used for wind turbines, and so it’s not indicative of any change in climate policy from the German government. Additionally the turbines are somewhat outdated, having only a sixth of the power output of a modern one. They would have to tear down and modernise the turbines anyway even if not for the mine.
However from a publicity standpoint it’s not an ideal move. Could have given up on the lignite and put new wind turbines in instead, perhaps.
I’m not sure if that is the wind farm. Looking at the article photos, there are a lot of turbines in the area, so there is probably more than one wind farm adjacent to the coal mine. Even with Senvion out of business, it still feels far too early for them to be pulling down turbines - normally they have about 30 years’ life in them before they’re sold on to another country. However, the article also says they’re only pulling down 7 turbines, so even if it is the same wind farm they’re not fully dismantling it.
Edit: Actually I think you’re right about the site. It looks like it might be these turbines they’re pulling down, and I imagine the motorcross site could be included in the project also.
Yeah, but look up the story on the Senvion turbines. Basically, Senvion operators have had to pay big money for service contracts with 3rd parties since Senvion went out of business.
It’s about density. Renewables Are great, but not on terms of value add per square foot. The coal under the wind mill is worth orders of magnitude more than the windmill.
And, it’s not as bad as it sounds. In general, the number of windmills keeps increasing.
If you care about energy density, nuclear is the best solution, not coal. I guess Germans don’t care though
Germans literally shut down all thier nuclear power in favour for coal power.
It was meant to be replaced by renewables but our minister of economics dumped the whole solar and wind turbine industry. Additionally his party made up bullshit rules about a minimum distance for turbines to households, which was apparently 10x of the reasonable distance and which made it very hard to find spots in densely populated Germany. And to this day, the federations with a renewable energy surplus have to pay more for electricity than those who give a shit about renewables. -it is discussed to be changed now but idk
Hard not to believe in a conspiracy there
What conspiracy? Sounds like just savage profit maximization.
It’ll be fine, they can just buy nuclear power from France and Sweden.
I didn’t say density is the paramount parameter. Also, once you optimize one drawback, it generally gets less important.
I just wanted to put the image into context, and show that it isn’t a big step backwards, just sideways perhaps. Or in other words, a sigle wind farm isn’t relevant, the sum is
Mining more coal is extremely relevant though.
That’s true, although I think they decided on coal since it’s cheaper financially (not ecologically and healthwise of course).
It would make sense to just simply move them but the fact that they want to burn coal is just weird.
So that means it will not be cheaper in the medium to long term. Since they will have to deal with the burden on their healthcare system, especially among their ageing population. Plus the scummy carbon offset trades that they have to wiggle themselves into.
Exactly, I prefer gas and oil to coal any day but that’s only because the “better than coal” bar is incredibly low.
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Man, talk about bad optics, though!
I agree
Yeah, wind works fine in places like Texas (where I’m from) because there are thousands of square miles full of just turbines. The land is flat and expensive, essentially the opposite of Germany. Something kind of related that I found out while googling about this is that Texas is 1.9 times as large as Germany.
Isn’t cheap land good for anything that involves land use?
We have the north sea, quite windy and shallow enough to build tall wind Mills.
Currently the power rating is up to 10 MW and the blades are over 100m (300ft) long.
That’s an old wind farm that would be due being taken down. Wind turbines have a finite life span, they oscillate slightly and this loosens the ground around the base, so after around 30 years they’re taken down. Typically they end up being sold to poorer countries where they’re installed on a new base.
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The linked article is two sentences long and offers no context or understanding of the situation. It might as well be a headline. The only useful part of it is the photo of the wind farm being dismantled, which also shows a completely different wind farm in the background, on the other side of the expanding mine, that is not being dismantled:
But you wouldn’t realize that just from reading the article.
My understanding based on this much better article from Recharge News is that the following information is critical to understanding this decision:
First, the wind farm being dismantled is the Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm, which consists of 8 turbines built over 20 years ago in 2001, totaling just over 10 MW of capacity (1.3 MW each). Recently constructed wind turbine power outputs are estimated at a 42% capacity factor, which is to say they generate about 42% of the peak power they’re rated for because wind isn’t always blowing; this would likely be lower for the older wind farm, but we’ll use the current amount. The 10 MW wind farm would have made 3 GWh per month, which based on an average of 893 kWh per month per household is enough to power… 3386 homes [edit: corrected my horrible math]. Not nothing, but not a lot by modern standards considering the Chinese just built a single wind turbine that outdoes the entire Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm by half and then some.
Furthermore, as the turbines were built 20 years ago, they were always going to be decommissioned around this time, and that’s documented in the agreements back then under which the turbines were built. RWE continues to construct many turbines elsewhere, claiming 7.2 GW of turbines are currently under construction, 720 times the rated output of the Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm. They’ve also built 200 MW of wind capacity in that locality, likely what we see in the background of that image.
If RWE were to replace the turbines that are being decommissioned, the coal underneath them will be worthless by the time the new turbines are decommissioned, and it’s supposedly the last of the coal they will be allowed to dig up. They’ve clearly made huge investments in building out wind power, so this represents the last vestiges of cleaning up their act.
I could not advocate more strongly that coal should be left in the ground, but this all comes down to corporate investors who care more about money than the environment, and agreements made 20 years ago, as well as the fact Germany and much of the EU is still desperate for any source of energy to maintain their current level of industry right now while they’re still building out carbon-free generation to fully replace coal/oil/gas. Reality is complex, and to me this isn’t as big of an insult to clean energy advocacy as the microscopic EUObserver “article” could lead one to think it is.
Coal is still dying in the West, so let’s not go thinking this one last gasp means that trend has changed. If we’re lucky, and demand for coal falls quickly enough, they might even scrap this mine before they’ve gotten everything out of it. Keep pushing!
Literally doing Gods work with comments like these. Thanks for the context and insight.
I thought renewables were cheaper than coal. How is this possible?
The value is simply more densely packed in the coal under the wind farm than in the surface area of the wind farm.
Expanding on this: OP seems to be conflating wind power being cheaper than coal power, with… What? A wind farm being more profitable per unit area than a coal mine?
Didn’t the green party in Germany have power in government right now? And weren’t they the same guys who dismantled their nuclear plants?
I’m not very informed on German politics but if the answer to both was yes they should really rename their green party to the coal party.
The original contract with the company RWE was made in the 1990s and included destroying whole towns for the coal mine, which was planned to be in use until 2038.
What we see now is a compromise between RWE, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the federal government to save the remaining towns and close the mine earlier (in 2030). The wind turbines are from 2001 and are nearing the end of their lifecycle.
Why not introduce a coal tax of 1million per ton, no need to modify the contract at all. If they want to pay 1million per ton to mine the coal, RWE is more then welcome to do so. It is their legal right after all.
This would likely end up hurting consumers more than RWE, because the “merit order” pricing system sets electricity prices depending on the production cost of the most expensive unit of electricity that is being consumed at a given time (usually coal). So raising the production cost of coal-based electricity sadly will also raise electricity prices, so long as renewables don’t take over a larger share of the market.
I mean of course it would hurt consumer absent government intervention, that is the design of the market system. Socialize costs, privatize the profits. But it doesn’t HAVE to be that way if Germany actually wanted to go green.
the force is strong with you
The greens sadly are forced to form a coalition with the social democrats and the neo-liberals, the latter of which are trying to hold every progress back
Why not step out if the coalition then? Seems better to not be in power if your coalition partners stand against everything your party should stand for.
That happened here when our centrist, nationalist and far-right parties made a coalition. The far-right one was messing everything up so the centrists just went yeet and broke the coalition resulting in their coalition being in the minority.
We still live in reality, you have to be pragmatic. The greens are the second most leftist party in the Bundestag and the most leftist party in the government coalition. Them leaving the coalition would mean the social democrats and neo-libs wouldn’t get any majority anymore which would result in a conservative government. We had that the last 16 years, there’s a reason why we elected someone different this time.
That’s fair thoughI feel like that’s a position they could easily use to get actual green policies through. But again I know very little about German politics so that is a purely feels based idea.
They do what they can. In the beginning, all over media this coalition has been praised to have done more for the people in 100 days than the previous government has done in 16 years. Thing is, the yellows are actively trying to sabotage everything the greens put forth. Our green ministry for family and social affairs wanted to pass a “basic child social security”-law, for which they planned to allocate 12 billion euros, like previously agreed upon. The yellows however have control over the ministry for financial affairs, being able to determine which ministry gets how much resources. That’s why said law only ended up getting 2.4 billion euros. It was an absolute shitshow.
No. They are this close to legalising weed in Germany. Should be end of this year. After that, whatever.
they’re on fire!
The tile is dangerously misleading. OP, please…
It’s the title of the article.
There is no rule that forces you to copy the real article’s name. In this cases you want to make your own title to spark better debate.
This should be all that’s needed to invalidate the comment you’re replying to, but it seems people are dumb.
One on those wind turbines can provide about 16.000 households with energy. This coal thing is RWE pushing for rights to tap more fossil resources in Germany. Way to go boomers
I don’t think any of what you’ve said there is true? By my estimation, and based on numbers from USGS.gov, given the average household energy use of 893 kWh per month, and the Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm’s total capacity of 10 MW (each turbine was only 1.3 MW) which translates to 3 GWh per month, the entire wind farm powered less than 3400 homes. To say that each turbine powered 16,000 households (and thus the entire farm powers 128,000) is off by nearly two orders of magnitude.
Furthermore, RWE says they have 7.2 GW of wind turbines under construction, which if true you’ll note is hundreds of times more power generation than the wind farm they’re tearing down, and definitely not a sign of a company that’s trying to get more fossil fuels. This coal mine they’re expanding is apparently the last bit of coal they’ll be allowed to dig up, and their ability to do so upon decommissioning of the wind farm was negotiated 20 years ago. This is not a recent decision, nor is it a reversal of the general trend to build up wind power and cycle down coal.
I thought renewables were cheaper than coal. How is this possible?
This is one of those in general vs in particular things.
In general, yes coal is way more expensive versus renewable energy. In this particular instance, they’re just expanding the site, all of the really expensive stuff like logistics and transportation are already paid.
This is the same reason just keeping old nuclear plants running is cheaper than building a new one. Each industry has expensive parts and cheap parts. If you’re doing something that only expands the cheap parts then you’ll be able to beat out competitors.
Additionally those turbines are at the end of their lifespan. They would need to be dismantled and rebuilt anyways, since they became structurally unsafe
Germany, are you on the drugs?
Coal-aine all through those nostrils.
Hwhat they need is clean burning propane and propane accessories.
The demolitions are part of a deal brokered last year between Robert Habeck, the Green party’s minister for economy and climate action and Mona Neubaur, who is the economy minister for North Rhine Westphalia, to allow the expansion of the mine.
In return, RWE had to agree to phase out coal in 2030, eight years before the previous deadline. “It’s a good day for climate protection,” Habeck said at the time.
What’s the timeline for getting this expansion built? And what’s the lifecycle of the plant? I understand there are energy scarcity concerns, but how is this the most economical option when it’s ~7 years until they’re supposed to phase out coal?
The wind turbines are already at the end of their lifespan and they knew RWE had the license to expand the mine there when the wind turbines where build.
Of course it’s economical for RWE, they are not building a new mine. Just continuing their mining operation there for another 7 years.
“We live our life one quarter
mileat a time” - RWE probablyI mean, that’s probably actually it. Short term profits are all shareholders care about. We’ve seen that time and time again where businesses will absolutely mutilate themselves just so shareholders can enjoy a short term price spike. This is just a pump and dump but for the energy industry.
Most likely they have no intention of stopping coal production and will just move the deadline again in 2030 and no one will do anything about it.
That’s possible, particularly if different parties are in power at that time. However the article also notes that lignite is becoming less economically viable and may need to be wound up anyway in 2030.
I’m guessing their bracing for winter without Russian oil. Which will hopefully be transitory, but also sort of delays the inevitable. If they can’t survive a winter without fossil fuels they need to figure it out quick.
This expansion is the last one although actually many more in the next decades were already approved and contracted, which got renegotiated with the energy companies. But of course this was already mispresented earlier this year when everyone reported on Germany destroying the village of Lützerath for their newly started coal digging when it was actually the last one (with half a dozen more similiar small villages originally scheduled for destruction more than a decade ago). But lobbyists pay to push lies and publications love the clicks for the popular outrage about evil Germans. Who cares for facts, anyway…
Those wind power plants were originally build with the knowledge that they have to be disassembeled in less than a decade again. Also those models proved to be very problematic and the company building them went out of business after only 4 years (since then there was only some auxiliary technical support from other companies).
Counter question: How economical is it to stop digging up coal today when the phase-out is 7 years away. They can either increase the pit or dig deeper. The latter is not only more expensive but also more damaging (pumping groundwater away from the hole etc.).
PS: A decade is also the usual life time of a wind power plant nowadays… After that time the gear boxes and blades need to be replaced and the foundation needs to be checked because of constant micro vibrations… In theory the installation itself could run up to 30 years but the technical development is still moving ahead so fast that replacing the whole thing with a newer and more efficient (also often bigger) model usually makes more sense than replacing parts to keep them running. So for now wind turbines are rather short-lived as their replacements see constant substantial improvements.
I suspect that they have no intention of phasing out coal, or there are certain unrealistic requirements that have to be met before the “agreement” to end coal is enforced. It’s just pageantry, Germany has no intention of ending coal dependence.
