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by throwaway60742 982 days ago
No way they are misinformed, look at German power mix. Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU.

> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.

That did not happen anywhere in Europe. New gas plants are being constructed right now, and coal powerplants had to be restarted when Germans dropped nuclear.

> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.

We need to decarbonize today though. People don't want to pay the high prices, so how does the drop happen?

> And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes.

Again, ask Germans about that. Their universal healthcare is going to get expensive soon if they continue on their "green" path.

> Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.

Completely orthogonal, people mostly agree on that, but they (where I live) want to charge the electric cars from nuclear energy.

4 comments

> Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU.

Are they? Looks like it's Poland who is generating the most CO2 for electricity production.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...

I frequently hear that talking point (about Germany) from my fellow Czechs, and it's incredible, because we need more fossil fuels than Germans and also are poorer. (Even more paradoxically, more than a decade back, Czechia was ahead of Germany in solar power.) The conservatives have just taken over.
> Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar

According to whom. There is lots of pushback against renewables - in particular wind- in Germany. It takes something crazy like 7 years to approve a wind farm here. The current government is trying to improve the situation. But I would strongly question the premise of your comment e.g. Denmark seems a lot more successful.

Germany’s repeated renewables efforts were long subject to the fact that Germany was Russia’s European project to keep fossil fuels going as long as possible.

No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over.

Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.

Can you elaborate, to a fellow (?) German, about just how a "green" political agenda will increase public health care costs? Or a re you just mixing multiple talking points (renewables bad, nuclear good, public health care bad, private health care good) without making any sense at all?