Germany begins dismantling wind farm for coal
Germany begins dismantling wind farm for coal
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.”
i don't think that's any better
I originally read it as “Germany says ‘Fuck wind as an alternative energy source’ and begins reverting back to coal”, so I figured I’d clarify in case anyone end thought the same thing.
Doesn’t seem like this article indicates that Germans is giving up on alternative energy.
Edit: corrected dumb spelling mistake.
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
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?
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/#l%C3%B6sung4
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought renewables were cheaper than coal. How is this possible?
Renewables are cheaper than coal.
What you've misunderstood about capitalism is it's not the thing that is cheapest that gets investment. The investment goes to the thing that gives you the highest ROI, return on investment.
If it produces a better ROI per square meter, it gets the investment.
The problem is capitalism.
It always was.
And most often high costs mean higher ROI. The wind farm doesn't get continued funding precisely because it produces electricity when supply is high and hence prices are low. Electricity is not worth the same at all times; you can sell your coal fired watts when the wind speeds are low and the unit price jumps up. Instead of trying to solve the hard problem of storing electricity to fill the intermittency gap, capitalism takes the easy way out of burning fossil fuels unless you force it not to by regulating.
Yeah that's another issue. This video gives another generally good overview on the topic: https://youtu.be/3gSzzuY1Yw0
Germany is basically what happens when an entire country embraces greenwashing as its ideology.
Dig it up locally. Burn into electricity in a neighboring country. A low emissions success story 😥
Can you elaborate on this?
Germany has been rejecting practical solutions for moving off fossil fuels, such as nuclear. Current government is also pursuing a policy of pretending to reduce emissions through deindustrialization which only moves emissions to other countries since people in Germany still need the goods that were produced. This way Germany can claim to be lowering emissions simply by externalizing them. Finally, we see return to coal which is one of the dirtiest fuels around because wind and solar evidently can't keep up even with the energy demands.
Germany has been anti-nuclear for some time, unfortunately. That could be what the above poster was referring to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germany
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.
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
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.
Germany's green energy push was secretly propped up by outsourcing fossil fuel needs to Russian natural gas. The war in Ukraine and America subsequently blowing up the Nordstream 2 pipeline means Germany will need to find new alternatives to feeding their energy needs. One could hope this results in a speed up of green tech development as it becomes more of a pressing necessity than just, you know, the right thing to do. And hey speaking of knowing the right thing to do and then not doing it because of the perverse economic incentives for ignoring it, it's funny to note that the global leader in green tech is China but due to this new cold war the US is brewing and due to Germany's newly-humbled-into role as Jr Junior partner to the US there's no way there will be the necessary cooperation there between national tech sectors
America subsequently blowing up the Nordstream 2 pipeline
?
Seymour Hersh broke the story on this. He's famous for breaking the My Lai massacre. The article he wrote is behind a pay wall, but this is a very lengthy interview with from democracy now https://www.democracynow.org/2023/2/15/nord_stream_sy_hersh
Here's a Washington post article including statements from the pentagon claiming that they've been aware for over a year that the Ukrainian military had plans to destroy Nord Stream 2 and then subsequently did: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/06/nord-stream-pipeline-explosion-ukraine-russia/
Three months before saboteurs bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, the Biden administration learned from a close ally that the Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June 2022. They provide some of the most specific evidence to date linking the government of Ukraine to the eventual attack in the Baltic Sea, which U.S. and Western officials have called a brazen and dangerous act of sabotage on Europe’s energy infrastructure.
...
The highly specific details, which include numbers of operatives and methods of attack, show that for nearly a year, Western allies have had a basis to suspect Kyiv in the sabotage. That assessment has only strengthened in recent months as German law enforcement investigators uncovered evidence about the bombing that bears striking similarities to what the European service said Ukraine was planning.
...
Ukrainian officials, who have previously denied the country was involved in the Nord Stream attack, did not respond to requests for comment.
The White House declined to comment on a detailed set of questions about the European report and the alleged Ukrainian military plot, including whether U.S. officials tried to stop the mission from proceeding.
The CIA also declined to comment.
...
The European intelligence made clear that the would-be attackers were not rogue operatives. All those involved reported directly to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s highest-ranking military officer, who was put in charge so that the nation’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, wouldn’t know about the operation, the intelligence report said.
imo this is just bullshit and the pentagon is just trying to throw the Ukrainian government under the bus to save face that the US committed an act of war against a fellow NATO member - the Hersh theory seems a lot more likely since it's not just uncritically repeating the current public line of the Pentagon. Still the article illustrates how it was very definitely either the US or a close US ally who did the bombing
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.
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.
The green party ruled my state for decades. Their commitment to “green” politics was always very surface-level and they catered to the erewhon customer type of voting base.
The Green parties are simply a way in which the capitalist superstructure ensures the security of the base by ensuring electoral support of the pearl-clutching petit-bourgeois.
they're on fire!
Just shows how green capitalism is just a waste of time. You'd think a country as geographically small and vulnerable as Germany would take this into account but guess not.
Maybe they should support more
nazis, sanctions against other fuel resources and further terrorist attacks against peaceful infrastructure by their so called "allies".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.
Naturally, they will inevitably pin the blame on China so :germany-cool: can build more coal guilt-free
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?
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.
Germany, are you on the drugs?
Coal-aine all through those nostrils.
Hwhat they need is clean burning propane and propane accessories.
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
China bad
city of Chinabad, capital of the union territory of Chinawar
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 mile at a time" - RWE probably
I 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.
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.
Coal is more profitable.
The bombing of the Nordstream pipeline upended
's energy plan and necessitated a quick replacement because Europe doesn't have much other sources of fuel in itself.It really isn't Germany is subsidizing coal by 1.7bn € every year. Like all currently coal producing countries give huge subsidies to their coal industry because they'd just immediately shut down.
RWE has no conscience left at all (doubt they ever had one). Coal is scheduled to be faded out by 2030 (recently rescheduled from 2038) and I do wonder if there really was no other option than to demolish those 8 windmills (and the nearby village).
That being said: This is a singular incident caused by long-time contracts of the fading industry. It’s not some paradigm shift in Germany. Coal will be gone soon and new windmills will be build.
Realistically speaking they need to get coal another 5 years. Which means either widening the pit or digging deeper. And the latter is massively more damaging, just for the management of ground water levels needed (also more expensive).
is it just me or have these past few weeks just been one after another of announcements claiming people have given up on climate change? what gives?
I don't think we've ever really tried to address it in the first place
https://lemm.ee/comment/3033256
I had the same dire thought, but this comment really made me take a breath.
This is infowars Level dumb and misleading
Cmon Germany I wanna root for you so bad because of your pro-consumer laws but blunders like this and the nuke plants keep making it so damn hard.
your pro-consumer laws
Don't those actually come from the EU?
They're implemented on the EU level but Germany isn't exactly unknown for pushing for them. The EP also likes to do it, the commission has more an eye on competition, sometimes those things overlap e.g. pushing train operators to finally implement a unified ticket shop (buying a trip from a single provider, even if the trains are run by different ones, has the consumer benefit that if a train is delayed and you miss a connection you can then take pretty much whatever train to reach your goal. And from the commission's perspective they want train operators to compete, but not by building walled gardens)
The contract for RWE to expand the mine there goes back decades and the wind farm operator knew it would be demolished before they build it. It's at the end of its life cycle now and had to be demolished one way or another.
German government could either breach their contract with RWE and pay them compensation or allow the destruction of a derelict wind park in exchange of RWE stopping coal extraction 8 years earlier then planned. It's a job well done by the government.
Bro, the last 3 nuclear power plant in Germany have already been shut down in April... You been to France yet?
What a shame. One step forward, two steps back.
Where's the step forward though? All I see is two steps back. First they close nuclear power plants, then they mine coal because of some weird bureaucracy. What's next? Rebuild nordstream?.. Germany sucks, its leaders suck and its businessmen suck. Spineless profiteering bureaucrats the lot of them. I dunno why aren't there people on the streets trashing up the place.
Yay lets increase pollution production!!!
Eco fanatics when they read this: "this is info war bullshit!" ; meanwhile the same eco fanatics : "chernobyl is still killing thousands of people and will do for millenia!"
When you shut down nuclear and start relying more on renewables (which are costly and suck) you end up using more coal. Green politics, FTW!
You fell for misinformation.
This is a small site. The owner of the wind turbines had to phase them out due to them being at the end of their lifespan. As there is coal under them. A deal was stipulated a VERY long time ago where when the wind turbines would have had to be removed, an expansion of a coal mine would be built there at the agreement that it will be dismantled by 2030. We are talking about "multiple years" time ago, before the 2030 deadline.
The "costly" renewables that are actually so dirt cheap that nothing else can really compete and so lobbyists pay a lot of money to push a lie? Those renewables?
Onshore wind is pretty much the cheapest energy source.
Literally fucking why.
The energy consumption of Germany is hanging by this like geopolitical shoestring. Renewables could make next winter or the winter after mildly affordable for Germans. Yet instead, the German state is expanding this dystopian arm that digs a massive pit in the earth... to burn the most pollutant fuel that we have. Like what? What an incredible act of defiance against the wishes and needs of its people. And that's coming from an American.
I've been schooled as to why this article is a misdirection and propoganda rather than serious need for concern.
Why? Because you all want to hear that lie. That's the whole reason they tell it. Because you pay in clicks for it. Germany bad always sells no matter how braindead the desinformation being poushed is.
Because the entire economy of that region depends on coal mining and coal miners. You are aware that closing the mine down tomorrow would instantly land a fairly large group of people into poverty because they have no other marketable job skills other than coal mining, right?
That's not wrong but really just a pretense.
The former government killed 100k jobs in the solar industry when solar power became too cheap for others to compete while whining non-stop about the poor 10k workers in coal mining. They did the same later for wind power and so even now some companies are in trouble as they had to size down so heavily that they can't even get full use out of the boom in wind power now.
Jobs in coal mining are basically an issue for 2-3 local politicians, for everyone else of that former government it's corruption lobbyism and jobs as board members and advisors.
As for why they keep increasing the dig site: It's actually jsut logical. They need coal for another few years and can either increase the area or dig deeper. And the latter is massively more damaging for the environment as it involves a lot of ground water manipulation.
I think the problem is that people really don't like freezing to death in winter when there just happens to not be enough sun or wind. So you need something as a backup. But we're afraid of nuclear and just happen to have all this coal lying around. That's the sad why.
Fair. Very fair.
The contract to expand the coal mine was signed a long time ago, it wouldnt be signed now. RWE, who mines the coal there, would have to be compensated if they werent allowed to mine there.
The compensation would probably be so high that its cheaper to just build renewable energy elsewhere, and the wind turbines are at the end of their lifespan anyway.
I just hope that we dont get a right wing government anytime soon that gives out the next stupid contract to mine even more coal there.
Because, in the end we have more coal underground than we ever need or should use, its not a question of finding coal, but instead of how or if we should mine it.
Ah, Germany, please never change. Those are the guys who claim nuclear is not clean enough.
Edit: Thanks guys, I can finally feel like Jesus - downvoted because I was telling the truth.
Who needs nuclear, we have all this clean lignite.
