CleanTechnica Watch will be an ongoing series of articles
that discuss their antinuclear energy
articles, which are typically either republished from other antinuclear energy
sources or written by an assortment of antinuclear guests.
You can think of these articles as a form of public peer
review.
Their policy of hoovering up antinuclear pieces to put on
their website is a convenience for me in that they have become my go-to source
for nuclear energy misinformation material.
In a nutshell, CleanTechnica promotes the belief that the planet can decarbonize without help from nuclear.
Reality Check
The German Energy
Transition
Studies, and there is no shortage of them, have limited
value. As any experienced engineer knows, real world data trumps theoretical
calculation.
Luckily we have the German experiment (often referred to as
the Energiewende or Energy Transition) which has been testing the hypothesis
that a highly motivated, wealthy, industrialized nation can rapidly decarbonize
its electrical grid by displacing nuclear energy with wind and solar.
The experiment isn't complete, but it has already provided a wealth of
real-world data.
Putting the cost into
perspective
The roughly $30 billion dollars being spent annually to
expand wind and solar in Germany could build enough third generation AP 1000
nuclear reactors to fully decarbonize their grid over a ten year period
(similar to what France did decades ago).
$30 billion a year would pay for forty custom built $7.5
billion Generation III AP1000 reactors over ten years.
$30B/year x 10years =
$300B
$300B/$7.5B = 40 AP1000 reactors
Add those to existing reactors and they could supply about
97% of Germany's electricity by 2025.
From the German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy,
second in command to Merkel, who was also the Federal Minister for the
Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety from 2005 to 2009:
I
don’t know any other economy that can bear this burden [$30billion a year]...We
have to make sure that we connect the energy switch to economic success, or at
least not endanger it. Germany must focus on the cheapest clean-energy sources
as well as efficient fossil-fuel-fired plants to stop spiraling power
prices."
While
renewable aid costs are at the “limit” of what the economy can bear, Germany
will keep pushing wind and solar power, the most cost-effective renewable
sources, Gabriel said. Biomass energy is too expensive and its cost structure
hasn’t improved, he said.
Biomass
Growth of biomass essentially stopped when its subsidies were truncated. It
currently provides roughly four percent of Germany's total energy (electricity,
heat, transport) consumption.
Given
the discussion about the sustainability of biomass, the question is therefore
whether the Energiewende itself is sustainable. That’s one reason why the
German government has slammed the brakes on biomass.
