[miguelazo]

The discussion here is whether replacing the cheap, reliable Russian gas that Europe had access to before the US blew up Nordstream (a de facto attack on Germany) with “renewables” is a REALISTIC solution in the near to medium term. It is certainly not, and I say that as an committed environmentalist. It’s pretty disgusting for Americans to be pontificating this way, when we all know what would happen if their own energy prices had tripled in less than a year.

[Joeri]

Back of the envelope calculations don’t seem to bear out what you are saying.

NS1 carried around 600 twh of energy per year. Current estimated wind energy production in europe is around 380 twh with 236 gw of wind capacity, so it would need to multiply this by a little over 150% to replace NS1. The EU is installing wind around 18 gw per year, or 8%. At this rate it takes around 20 years to replace NS1. However, the EU intends to increase wind installation to 30 gw per year. At that rate it takes 12 years to replace NS1.

That seems a reasonable medium term target.

(This calculation isn’t taking into account that much of that gas is used to create electricity, which loses half the energy in conversion.)

[Gibbon1]

And heat pumps produce 3-4W for every Watt of input. So replacing gas heating with heat pumps only requires 1/3 the total energy.

[miguelazo]

Your calculations also don’t take into account the amount of battery storage needed to make that wind energy a reliable source. Also, if you think German/European citizens and industry can/should wait years to return to reasonable energy prices, I don’t know what to tell you. They’re certainly not going to get there with US LNG arriving by ship (even though that scenario was the main goal of all this to begin with). https://peoplesworld.org/article/pipeline-ploy-how-u-s-natur...

[aaomidi]

What’s your source for saying it’s not?

How do you define short and medium term? To me medium is a decade.

There’s also the short to medium term work of enabling nuclear plants to start up again.

[miguelazo]

Germany was already a leader in solar and wind in Europe. Even in the US which has much better conditions, you would have to cover an absurd and untenable amount of land with solar/wind to effectively displace fossil fuels with current technology. You certainly couldn’t do it in 10 years. I don’t consider nuclear renewable. We are no closer to finding a good solution for the waste. And there are other safety concerns.

“Wind and solar generation require at least 10 times as much land per unit of power produced than coal- or natural gas-fired power plants, including land disturbed to produce and transport the fossil fuels.” https://www.brookings.edu/research/renewables-land-use-and-l...