> "By 2030, installed onshore wind capacity should reach 115 gigawatts (GW), the government says. Annual capacity additions therefore have to reach 10 GW as of 2025. Solar PV installations will amount to 22 GW per year as of 2026 to achieve a total capacity of 215 GW by the end of the decade. Offshore wind additions are increased as well to reach a minimum of 30 GW per 2030 and 40 GW by 2035, and 70 GW by 2045. While the government wants to incentivise the production and use of biomethane in highly flexible plants by increasing tender volumes, the use of biomass for power production will be superseded by its use in transport and industry."
In particular there's an anti-NIMBYism provision in there that makes a lot of sense. This has been a huge problem for rolling out renewables in the USA from California to New York:
> "To ensure that these ambitious growth scenarios are not hampered by lengthy planning procedures, local opposition and contradictions with other protected goals, the government establishes the principle that the use of renewable energies is of overriding public interest and will be given priority over other concerns until greenhouse gas neutrality is achieved."
The benefits are obvious: Germany will be able to escape the need to import Russian gas and oil - although the American fracked LNG exporters who hoped to simply seize that market from Russia are doubtless disappointed.
> "To ensure that these ambitious growth scenarios are not hampered by lengthy planning procedures, local opposition and contradictions with other protected goals, the government establishes the principle that the use of renewable energies is of overriding public interest and will be given priority over other concerns until greenhouse gas neutrality is achieved."
Not exactly as clean as it sounds. They merely want to take away the burden of the developer to get comments and approval from people before they proceed with planning.
Individuals can still sue and block projects.
This is just talk in my opinion. Like when the government declared in 2010 that they want to have 1 million EV on the road in 2020.
Or when they decided to shut off nuclear and replace it with renewables and instead built out coal and gas.
> Or when they decided to shut off nuclear and replace it with renewables and instead built out coal and gas.
The nuclear phase out was signed and ratified in 2002, since then nuclear has mostly replaced with solar
and wind [0], while the share of electricity from coal has has actually gone slightly down.
Germany's 40%+ renewables are an testament to Germany pioneering the sector [1], one that too often gets belittled with straight up misinformation.
> American fracked LNG exporters who hoped to simply seize that market from Russia are doubtless disappointed.
Germany has a huge industry which won't be able to switch away from gas that easily so I'm sure that the LNG suppliers will have a market for the next 20 years.
In 2021, Germany got 55% of its gas from Russia (the rest from other European countries). Depending on how much overall consumption can be reduced, European suppliers might be able to cover most/all of it.
I've read that short and mid term the renewables boost will increase demand for gas in Germany. This is because gas power plants can be ramped up and down very quickly.
Coal and nuclear power is not very dynamic.
The flexibility is needed to compensate for spikes and especially the variable output of renewables.
In addition to that: My rough back of a napkin calculation[1] shows that we'd need almost tanker per day. Is this even realistic at all?
[1] 80E6 m3 / 250E3 m3 = 320. Please correct me if I made a mistake here.
> In particular there's an anti-NIMBYism provision
The best anti-NIMBYism rule is (for example of the building of new houses): "While the number of new dwellings built is below the target X for the region, all privately-funded plans that involve the building of a new house shall be automatically approved and all relevant permits automatically granted without review".
Obviously no city state or local government wants any plans to be unconditionally approved. So they'll go to massive lengths to meet the target.
Allow the targets to be transferable, so that some really NIMBY place can pay someone else to to do the deed they don't want to do.
I think the problem is generally legal, not administrative. Development in germany would typically be held up by people suing the developers to stop it from going ahead, so the city or state itself wouldn't be in a position to speed things along in a majority of cases.
> the principle that the use of renewable energies is of overriding public interest and will be given priority over other concerns until greenhouse gas neutrality is achieved.
would probably be something like a silver bullet, though, because if it is as strong as it sounds, any judge would basically have to agree to any reasonable planning proposal that was intended to increase renewables capacity.
This is how you get 15,000 new 15% profit margin luxury housing units sold to Chinese investors and left empty and 0 new affordable housing units.
We just need higher property taxes. This will mean that these store-of-wealth investments eat losses & stop consuming all the good land while city coffers start to fill up with money that can build public housing.
If you want lessons on how to solve an urban housing crisis look to 1950s Singapore not the building developers salivating over 15% margins on newbuild luxury apartments whining about NIMBYs getting in their way.
Switching to LNG requires special infrastructure (harbours attached to the gas-network) - and there is not nearly enough of that in Germany right now, and it takes a long time to build.
So even if Russian gas COULD be replaced by LNG tomorrow, in terms of pure volume, it would still not possible to Germany to consume it.
Germany really screwed the pooch on their energy policy for the past 15 years...
They can't, and even if they could; In terms of climate change it's absolutely counterproductive to ship LNG across the Atlantic.
The amount of extra energy that needs, the extra emission it creates, its a complete enviornmental disaster.
One that's mostly ignored, as it gets into the way of certain foreign policy narratives, where neither "climate change" nor the "enviornment" are even recognized concepts of any kind of priority.
Current LNG facilities are already saturated as I understand it. It's an energetically expensive process: gas from production in the USA has to be piped to an export terminal, and then has to be liquified (large energy investment), shipped across the ocean, then gasified (another large energy investment) and fed into the European pipeline system. Suddenly expanding all that would require, well, a decade of investment and planning.
Wind energy is nice and stuff but the moment there’s no wind you have no electricity, it’s not a good energy source if you want to actually remove gas from your grid.
Isn't it a bit naive to assume the planers of these expansions didn't at one point or another had that exact thought themselves? I mean it is certainly not the most far out there idea when it comes to wind power..
Most of western Europe has an electricity grid to distribute power. When the wind is blowing it covers domestic needs or exports, when it's not blowing it imports nuclear power, or Solar etc.
Denmark (~1% of the world population) has been doing quite well with it's 2GW of wind, powered by "modest average wind speeds in the range of 4.9–5.6 m/s measured at 10 m height." With a mean January temp of 1.5 °C (34.7 °F), wind covered 47% of yearly electric in 2019. (71% yesterday). Plans on 84% by 2035. It also has 1GW of solar. They got started early, and it shows. Too bad for heel-dragging Texans.
Is this a joke? Throttling gas plants is much easier than throttling coal plants. If the wind blows you consume less gas. With coal you have to turn the wind plant off.
Also, fossil fuels appear to be highly unreliable. The moment there’s no gas you have no electricity, it’s not a good energy source.
In general, when politicians promise something will be done by the different set of politicians in office 10+ years in the future, it mostly means "we're not going to do anything right now".
Parliamentarians usually stay in office a long time ( sometimes into the decades). Germany being a parliamentary democracy, there's no limit on chancellor terms.
Also, for such a thing to happen, actions need to be undertaken soon ( invest in building new power plants, ramp up the supply chain, etc.). It's not a vague "in ten years we'll do X", it's "in 10 years we'll have X".
> Germany being a parliamentary democracy, there's no limit on chancellor terms.
Average CDU (conservative) Chancellor Term: 10.4 years - with three of them around the three-term mark.
Average SPD (socialdemocrat, including the current one) Chancellor Term: 6.7 years (not including the current one)
Germany is a conservative country, things take time, actions take decades, and chances are the next, conservative government will gut them (look up what happened to Germany's solar panel industry).
In Germany, post-war there were three chancellors (prime ministers) that were over 10 years in office - Adenauer with 14 years, Kohl and Merkel with 16 years.
The question when evaluating long-term claims is whether there are shorter-term benchmarks specified. I'm not an expert so I don't know what specific short-term benchmarks make sense. "70% by 2030"? "Implementation underway by 2025?"
I do think it's best for the law to be a broad "this is the target" with the nitty-gritty "how to" being figured out by experts. The target should have been established by asking those experts, but I want the people tasks with implementing it to have flexibility to update the plan if things change.
If a highly-prescriptive law has been passed and suddenly we have a major breakthrough in fusion/batteries/etc., or a geopolitical event suddenly changes the availability of certain resources, the implementation details should be adjusted without having to run back to the politicians for an updated law.
Germany has passed a series of laws over the past ~30 years under the umbrella of the Renewable Energy Act (EEG), and decade by decade, that's resulted in strong renewable energy growth in Germany:
Big energy projects of all kinds generally have at least a decade of preparation going into them before they come on-line. For solar and wind, this means everything from building more factories for solar PV and wind turbines, to devising and building better grid distribution systems, to incorporating large-scale storage into the system to account for intermittency.
One way to deal with volatility is dynamic minute-by-minute adjustment of prices, and appliances (like car chargers, water heaters, HVAC systems, etc.) that turn themselves on and off based on the price.
storage in hydrogen and allow a 80% devaluation of the energy that was used. That doesn't matter because the energy would be thown away otherwise like it is today.
Yeah, but this is actually not at all what is happing right now in the German government.
Instead of kicking it down the road (and systematically destroying renewables) like 16 years of Merkel did, they actually started to accellerate and do immediate packages, this article talks about one that will be accepted before easter.
At least Germany is reasonably stable politically, not quite on the level of China but far better then the revolving door style governments seen in southern Europe.
It's astonishing how democracies can get anything done at all, right?
As if there was an underlying force, something beyond the person in charge, signing laws and making speeches.
Something like, you know a society, that can make things happen (or not).
A modern democracy is not just the ability to change leaders once in a while. It's also the fact that you get a society with clear rules, that empower people to make things happen and empower other people to back the things they like.
If enough Germans are pissed at the situation they let themselves into, they will back attempts to solve this problem, whether they come from some hand-wavy politician or by an utility company offering a green energy plan (even if it costs a bit more)
Like a lot of articles about power or energy as related to 'green' or renewables, this article is about electricity and not total power. Only a fraction of energy consumption is from electricity.
From [1], total energy consumption in Germany in 2021 was 3364 TWh. Total electricity consumption was 581 TWh. That's quite a difference. Electricity at around 20-30% of total energy consumption is in the ball park for developed/industrial economies.
I've just assumed Germany is working towards electrification for heating. From a cursory search, this appears to be both de-facto the case[0] and an official policy goal[1].
I agree this should be explicitly mentioned when talking about renewable electricity generation targets, but the good news is that it is being addressed. (I mostly looked at heating, but I'm sure industry is also a huge portion. Presumably that's also being worked on.)
Additional anecdata, my landlord will replace the old oil-based boiler with a gas-powered one in ~ two months. Gas is sadly not dead, even in "new" installs. :D
(And jacks the rent up 30 euros per month because of it, while the "official" estimated monthly savings on the heating bill are 0.1 cent (yes, cent, not euros) per month per m², probably negative now, amazing ^^')
I dunno about de-facto, my anecdata is my heating is in the process switching from L-Gas to H-Gas, have not heard any mention of replacing gas in the near future for existing properties
Wonder what the stats are for new builds being with gas heating vs without
Am not optimistic about German electricity handling the switching of heating and transport (cars) on top of existing usage+growth as long as we're antinuke (:
The year Germany reaches ~100% renewable energy for electricity, will also be the year they install the most renewable capacity in history. It is very unlikely that the year after will see 0 renewable capacity installed. Instead, prices will start to fall steadily, dramatically accelerating the electrification of remaining sectors.
Remember that both wind and solar follow very predictably cost-reduction curves. Starting a few years before 2030, electricity consumers will start to see reduced energy bills because of this.
Looks like the translation is "sector coupling" or "integrated energy", but I think the real key in translating this is that we typically use a different framing in English.
German "Sektorenkopplung": We're explicitly unifying all sectors to a single source of energy, and it's implicit that this source is electricity.
English "electrification": We're explicitly switching sectors to electricity, and it's implicit that this will ultimately tie every sector to a single source of energy.
I could be wrong, but I thought the point of the GP comment was that there are many industrial processes like smelting that don't have good electric replacements. For example, it's nigh-impossible to maintain the temperatures required to run a steel plant with no combustion and only resistive heating elements.
If one assumes the current trend [1] of the last 13 years, Germany should be at 84% in 2035 by simply not slowing down the transition. So honestly not overly ambitious
Contrary to popular belief and assumptions in many papers, adoption of a technology doesn’t follow an exponential curve but often follows an s curve and we can reasonably assume that Germany is in the spot where growth accelerates at the strongest. Massive efforts might be needed to not see the growth rate of the transition to slow down.
I think the last 2-3 years it has somewhat stagnated (for example [1]), driven by conservative politicians fishing for votes with NIMBY policies (while at the same time increasing dependence on Russian imports). Hopefully the new government can pick it back up, though.
I don't know of it was NIMBYism, but a few years ago the relatively simple feed in tariff system was replaced by a kind of a bidding system designed to allow new capacity addition to the most efficient producer. But by design they tried to limit the amount of new capacity added. Honestly I don't know all the details, but it's not very far fetched that there was a fair bit of politics involved, and protection of interests of a lot of non renewable energy producers.
The FDP is not libertarian by any measure. Much like the CDU they claim the social market economy of Germany as one of their achievements, which would be called outright socialist in some American circles. From an American perspective they can be compared with the Democrats in the US. Of course the whole political spectrum of America is further right than that of Germany.
Transportation and heating will be electrified. Electric car share in new cars is 15% and climbing fast. New gas/oil heating installations will be (almost) forbidden from 2024 on (65% of heating energy must come from renewable energies).
So electric energy is what is relevant for the future.
That is huge, heating with gas seems to be very very common, on the order of 50% of all households use it, or about 460TWh per year. The electricity production is 580 TWh per year, so its a sizeable proportion of that. Now heatpumps are efficent so not sure how much electricity will be needed, but it will be a lot.
There is no passed law. There is a proposal for a new law that has not been presented to parliament yet, so "German parliament passes law" is just flat out wrong.
The only mention of parliament in the article is one of the government parties stating that it in its current shape won't be able to pass parliament.
Flagging this, you can't distort content like that, especially if the majority of readers has to rely on machine translation. But congrats, you now have a clear falsehood top of the front page, well done.
That too, but I'm not 100% sure if there is an explicit rule about foreign language content or not. But especially if most readers need to rely on machine translation it has to be precise.
> We have deep respect for languages, but HN is an English-language site, so posts here need to be in English.
> That may require waiting until a good English-language article appears, but the more significant the topic is, the more (and sooner) this is likely to happen.
Germany is going to need nuclear weapons soon as well. The U.S. is not a long term stable partner, the UK is out of the EU so now they can only depend on France for deterrent. That’s probably not enough with a hostile neighbor in the east.
Title is wrong. The parliament doesn't have passed anything. And the article states that immediately at top!
The administration (Bundeskabinett) formed by SPD, GREEN, and FDP has decided they want to follow the draft plans worked out the ministry of economy and need to request the parliament to pass it. Furthermore Die Zeit is a recognized newspaper but with strong bounds into the SPD.
Readit News
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-boosts-renewabl...
> "By 2030, installed onshore wind capacity should reach 115 gigawatts (GW), the government says. Annual capacity additions therefore have to reach 10 GW as of 2025. Solar PV installations will amount to 22 GW per year as of 2026 to achieve a total capacity of 215 GW by the end of the decade. Offshore wind additions are increased as well to reach a minimum of 30 GW per 2030 and 40 GW by 2035, and 70 GW by 2045. While the government wants to incentivise the production and use of biomethane in highly flexible plants by increasing tender volumes, the use of biomass for power production will be superseded by its use in transport and industry."
In particular there's an anti-NIMBYism provision in there that makes a lot of sense. This has been a huge problem for rolling out renewables in the USA from California to New York:
> "To ensure that these ambitious growth scenarios are not hampered by lengthy planning procedures, local opposition and contradictions with other protected goals, the government establishes the principle that the use of renewable energies is of overriding public interest and will be given priority over other concerns until greenhouse gas neutrality is achieved."
The benefits are obvious: Germany will be able to escape the need to import Russian gas and oil - although the American fracked LNG exporters who hoped to simply seize that market from Russia are doubtless disappointed.
Not exactly as clean as it sounds. They merely want to take away the burden of the developer to get comments and approval from people before they proceed with planning.
Individuals can still sue and block projects.
This is just talk in my opinion. Like when the government declared in 2010 that they want to have 1 million EV on the road in 2020.
Or when they decided to shut off nuclear and replace it with renewables and instead built out coal and gas.
Or when they decided to phase out coal by 2035…
The nuclear phase out was signed and ratified in 2002, since then nuclear has mostly replaced with solar and wind [0], while the share of electricity from coal has has actually gone slightly down.
Germany's 40%+ renewables are an testament to Germany pioneering the sector [1], one that too often gets belittled with straight up misinformation.
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
[1] https://www.trade.gov/energy-resource-guide-germany-renewabl...
Germany has a huge industry which won't be able to switch away from gas that easily so I'm sure that the LNG suppliers will have a market for the next 20 years.
The flexibility is needed to compensate for spikes and especially the variable output of renewables.
In addition to that: My rough back of a napkin calculation[1] shows that we'd need almost tanker per day. Is this even realistic at all?
[1] 80E6 m3 / 250E3 m3 = 320. Please correct me if I made a mistake here.
Deleted Comment
The best anti-NIMBYism rule is (for example of the building of new houses): "While the number of new dwellings built is below the target X for the region, all privately-funded plans that involve the building of a new house shall be automatically approved and all relevant permits automatically granted without review".
Obviously no city state or local government wants any plans to be unconditionally approved. So they'll go to massive lengths to meet the target.
Allow the targets to be transferable, so that some really NIMBY place can pay someone else to to do the deed they don't want to do.
> the principle that the use of renewable energies is of overriding public interest and will be given priority over other concerns until greenhouse gas neutrality is achieved.
would probably be something like a silver bullet, though, because if it is as strong as it sounds, any judge would basically have to agree to any reasonable planning proposal that was intended to increase renewables capacity.
We just need higher property taxes. This will mean that these store-of-wealth investments eat losses & stop consuming all the good land while city coffers start to fill up with money that can build public housing.
If you want lessons on how to solve an urban housing crisis look to 1950s Singapore not the building developers salivating over 15% margins on newbuild luxury apartments whining about NIMBYs getting in their way.
So even if Russian gas COULD be replaced by LNG tomorrow, in terms of pure volume, it would still not possible to Germany to consume it.
Germany really screwed the pooch on their energy policy for the past 15 years...
The amount of extra energy that needs, the extra emission it creates, its a complete enviornmental disaster.
One that's mostly ignored, as it gets into the way of certain foreign policy narratives, where neither "climate change" nor the "enviornment" are even recognized concepts of any kind of priority.
Dead Comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark
https://en.winddenmark.dk/wind-in-denmark/current-energy-pro...
Also, fossil fuels appear to be highly unreliable. The moment there’s no gas you have no electricity, it’s not a good energy source.
Also, for such a thing to happen, actions need to be undertaken soon ( invest in building new power plants, ramp up the supply chain, etc.). It's not a vague "in ten years we'll do X", it's "in 10 years we'll have X".
It absolutely is. Nothing will happen. I know Germany, I live here.
Average CDU (conservative) Chancellor Term: 10.4 years - with three of them around the three-term mark.
Average SPD (socialdemocrat, including the current one) Chancellor Term: 6.7 years (not including the current one)
Germany is a conservative country, things take time, actions take decades, and chances are the next, conservative government will gut them (look up what happened to Germany's solar panel industry).
I do think it's best for the law to be a broad "this is the target" with the nitty-gritty "how to" being figured out by experts. The target should have been established by asking those experts, but I want the people tasks with implementing it to have flexibility to update the plan if things change.
If a highly-prescriptive law has been passed and suddenly we have a major breakthrough in fusion/batteries/etc., or a geopolitical event suddenly changes the availability of certain resources, the implementation details should be adjusted without having to run back to the politicians for an updated law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
Big energy projects of all kinds generally have at least a decade of preparation going into them before they come on-line. For solar and wind, this means everything from building more factories for solar PV and wind turbines, to devising and building better grid distribution systems, to incorporating large-scale storage into the system to account for intermittency.
- over provisioning
- geographic distribution
- biomethane
- international grid ties
Instead of kicking it down the road (and systematically destroying renewables) like 16 years of Merkel did, they actually started to accellerate and do immediate packages, this article talks about one that will be accepted before easter.
At least Germany is reasonably stable politically, not quite on the level of China but far better then the revolving door style governments seen in southern Europe.
Deleted Comment
As if there was an underlying force, something beyond the person in charge, signing laws and making speeches.
Something like, you know a society, that can make things happen (or not).
A modern democracy is not just the ability to change leaders once in a while. It's also the fact that you get a society with clear rules, that empower people to make things happen and empower other people to back the things they like.
If enough Germans are pissed at the situation they let themselves into, they will back attempts to solve this problem, whether they come from some hand-wavy politician or by an utility company offering a green energy plan (even if it costs a bit more)
But the title is misleading, the article talks about how the libertarians (FDP) plan to water down the target from 100% renewables till 2035 to 80%.
From [1], total energy consumption in Germany in 2021 was 3364 TWh. Total electricity consumption was 581 TWh. That's quite a difference. Electricity at around 20-30% of total energy consumption is in the ball park for developed/industrial economies.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany
I agree this should be explicitly mentioned when talking about renewable electricity generation targets, but the good news is that it is being addressed. (I mostly looked at heating, but I'm sure industry is also a huge portion. Presumably that's also being worked on.)
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/heat-make-german-buildi...
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-launch-emergenc...
(And jacks the rent up 30 euros per month because of it, while the "official" estimated monthly savings on the heating bill are 0.1 cent (yes, cent, not euros) per month per m², probably negative now, amazing ^^')
Wonder what the stats are for new builds being with gas heating vs without
Am not optimistic about German electricity handling the switching of heating and transport (cars) on top of existing usage+growth as long as we're antinuke (:
Remember that both wind and solar follow very predictably cost-reduction curves. Starting a few years before 2030, electricity consumers will start to see reduced energy bills because of this.
Basically everything is switched over to electric. Transportation, Heating, …
German "Sektorenkopplung": We're explicitly unifying all sectors to a single source of energy, and it's implicit that this source is electricity.
English "electrification": We're explicitly switching sectors to electricity, and it's implicit that this will ultimately tie every sector to a single source of energy.
Disclaimer: I don't speak German.
Deleted Comment
[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00863-0.epdf?shar...
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-build-no-new-of...
Some details here https://m.dw.com/en/german-cabinet-puts-brakes-on-clean-ener...
Given your projection, I don't wonder why
So electric energy is what is relevant for the future.
The FDP will surely want some (more) help for the industry but the point made by the parliament stands.
The only mention of parliament in the article is one of the government parties stating that it in its current shape won't be able to pass parliament.
Flagging this, you can't distort content like that, especially if the majority of readers has to rely on machine translation. But congrats, you now have a clear falsehood top of the front page, well done.
EDIT: per dang 23 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30663877
> We have deep respect for languages, but HN is an English-language site, so posts here need to be in English.
> That may require waiting until a good English-language article appears, but the more significant the topic is, the more (and sooner) this is likely to happen.
The plants still running are very old and have become hard to maintain as they have reached EOL.
It's not like we are shutting down perfectly good new plants.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
https://youtu.be/WUVZbBBHrI4
Wouldn't NATO be more relevant in terms of defence?
Deleted Comment
The administration (Bundeskabinett) formed by SPD, GREEN, and FDP has decided they want to follow the draft plans worked out the ministry of economy and need to request the parliament to pass it. Furthermore Die Zeit is a recognized newspaper but with strong bounds into the SPD.