[Gargamel]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Sorry, Gargamel, but in Germany we have the absurd situaiton that the electricity becomes the more coslty for the end consumer the more renewable energy gets rpodcued. That is thanks to the absurd, even selfdamaging subsidies for it. Producers get the more subvention per Wh the more of it they produce.

This also has another implication. Take away the subsidies, and you have an energy system that is not only more unstable and causes problems beyond Geraman border in all of Europe, but that also is not comptetitve. It cannot live without subsidies. Additonally we need to buy electricty from neighbourign country who produce it in these nasty nuclear blocks that Gemans hate so much. Nuclear blocks that are older and more dnageorus than the ones in Germany that we took off the grid becasue the Fukushima flooding was spilling through our German streets.

I had a paragraph written out explaining my ignorance of German Energy Policy, but I deleted it as anything I presented was no more than an assumption, and I knew would get tore apart. Your statements confirmed what I did know, and expanded upon the rest I did not. It does give the authors point of view a bit more clarity that was not there before.

So the German point of view is understandable then. I think some serious changes need to be made to bring solidity to your energy market, but I still don't know enough to offer any suggestions.

I do think that the aversion to Nuclear is not a good idea. First off, nuclear energy has the highest energy density of any non-renewable fuel source known to man. On a magnitude of tens of millions of times greater than anything else we currently have. I'd be curious to your personal opinions on nuclear, and to the opinions the average German has towards it.

Lats time I checked, oil prices was low and falling, btw.

Periodic fluctuations. Just like after the '08 crash, Oil prices were cut in half almost overnight because they were being traded on the markets. Just like the stock market, over time it will always climb.

Ethanol from plants: farmign soil globally is in decline, need for food production is raising however, due to exploding global population levels. It may work nationalyl in a big country like Brazil - for Europe, it is no alternative. Also it needs a huge effort in right the opposite of ecologic/bio farming: you need industrial intensive farming and the ethical willingness to see many people straving to death who cannot eat the food that gets not planted and harvested on these fields.

Very true. But here in the US, we pay farmers to produce less (whole argument on farm subsidies here, but that's not the point). There is still plenty of farm land to go around, just not enough money to pay for it to be successful. If there was enough demand from the oil companies to make ethanol (and who else is better suited to make it?), then there would be enough demand to cover farmers costs and keep the price from crashing on the various crops used. A transition from petroleum to ethanol would require a global effort, not just a local one.



The bottom line is though, within the foreseeable future, without the invention of fusion power, we will have to start relying more and more on renewable power supplies. There is no way around it. There is a finite amount of fossil fuels available to us, it will not be renewed in the time frame we need. While I do care about climate change and the like, finding long term solutions to our energy problems is a much bigger issue than just curbing emissions. They will typically go hand in hand, so working for one usually gets swept in with the other.