A prime example: JIRA's backlog view. In the self-hosted version, you could easily find the issue you were looking for in the backlog view by just using the browser's search, press Ctrl+F, write some words, you have the issue you were looking for. The cloud version Atlassian forced their users into, OTOH, features their own implementation hijacking Ctrl+F combined with dynamically removing the issues not currently visible from the DOM, to ensure that no-one can have the convenience of the browser's built-in search.
I remember, as a child, attempting to reproduce the BASIC program in one of the MAD magazine issues. Somewhere, I had made a typo, which completely screwed the output. I guessed that the tediousness of the whole exercise was part of the joke, shrugged, and moved on.
It was pretty common to distribute code as "listing" like this. Typically it came with a checksum for every line and a small program to compute and print that for your own program that you had typed over, which you could then use to fairly quickly(-ish) spot any typos.
All of this is how I learned to program by the way. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.
Huh, we used to type in BASIC programs from magazines back in the 1980s and I don’t ever recall seeing any kinds of checksum. We would often resort to printing out the code and visually comparing line by line against the magazine.
We mostly had Family Computing magazine. I looked up an issue from 1985 with one of my favorite type-by-hand games, Hit or Miss [0], and no sight of a helpful checksum.
To be honest, the idea of it would have blown my mind back then; the idea that your BASIC code is just a text file that can be processed by other programs is something that would never have occurred to me.
Checksums became popular at some point in the 80s. I remember when COMPUTE! first added them they were a godsend. Especially for the machine language programs that were just pages of data statements.
> Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.
Maybe it’s rose-colored glasses, but I have much fonder memories of programming basic on a Ti-84 calculator than debugging an import incompatibility between. Es5 and CommonJS modules
In case there are any other Sergio Aragones superfan weirdos like me here, who only click MAD-related stories in order to command-f for "Sergio Aragones" and then move on when inevitably there are no results: today's your lucky day, click that link above!
The Commodore version of the source in the magazine never worked. I probably typed it in at least five times in whole thinking I'd screwed something up. It wasn't until a few years ago (from an HN post, no less) that I found the link above and finally, finally got to see what the code did.
There's also a middle ground: Painstakingly describe the solution first, along with its downside of not being general in the same way as some of the existing features (I guess for example seeking back 10 seconds) are not, and ask whether a patch implementing this solution would be welcome before implementing it.
I wanted to report a big about VLC's extraordinarily badly designed "Magnification/Zoom" user interface, so first I searched the forum to see if there was any other discussion about it, which there naturally was.
So I painstakingly wrote up an extremely detailed description of a bunch of interrelated bugs related to zooming and how it terribly interacted with other features like rotation, in response to the VLC development team brushing off another user complaining about its terrible "Magnification/Zoom" user interface, and they brushed me off too because they were too lazy to read it.
They told me to just submit a bug report, but I pointed out that I was describing a several interrelated bugs, which would require submitting many bug reports, which they would have known if they had actually bothered to read what I painstakingly wrote in great detail with step by step instructions about how to reproduce the bugs and suggestions for improvements, so I obviously wanted to discuss them all first to see if they were even worth my time submitting multiple bug reports about, or if all my efforts reporting bugs and trying to fix them and submit patches would be a waste of time, brushed off and ignored like they did to the other users who described the bugs and usability problems they were experiencing.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf himself replied "If you did shorter posts, maybe people will read them..."
To which I replied "if you did less arrogant responses to long posts, maybe people wouldn't give up on trying to help you."
And of course most of the pathologically terrible bugs I described are still there, a dozen years later. And Jean-Baptiste Kempf still continues to act that way.
HN user KingMob's post perfectly summarized my discouraging experience from a dozen years ago, about a set of bugs and usability problems relating to the horrible "Magnification/Zoom" interface:
>KingMob 5 hours ago | unvote | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform medi...
>It's because the developer is misconstruing a non-technical decision they made as a technical limitation.
The commenters are trying to point this out, which misses the reality that the developer probably isn't going to budge from their requirement of universal support.
>That dev's rationalization also sends a signal to any commenter with the technical chops to submit a PR, that it will probably be rejected for not supporting 100% of the codecs. I have no doubt people who could do it, over the years looked at that thread and concluded it would be a waste of their time.
Jean-Baptiste Kempf still continues to act that way, and still hasn't even admitted to those bugs and usability problems, let alone fixed them or accepted patches from anyone else who did. He just discourages qualified developers from collaborating, and brushes off legitimate requests from users who can't code but fucking well know other video players don't suffer from those problems.
To be fair, as a maintainer I also dread walls of text from super motivated people about details to which I assign very low priority. I’m never an asshole about it, though.
To also be fair, to "Painstakingly describe the solution first" absolutely requires a wall of text to enumerate all the multiple layers of interacting bugs, and give step-by-step instructions for reproducing them.
At least I put in the effort to search the discussion group for an existing thread about the problems I had, and contributed to that thread by supporting other users and validating their complaints, instead of opening yet another redundant thread.
The reason I went into so much detail was that the VLC developers were ALREADY acting like assholes by brushing off other people's shorter less detailed descriptions of the same problems, with glib quips like "The holy grail already exists... built in to OS X."
The zooming built into OS X definitely doesn't solve the problems that they refuse to admit exist with their astoundingly terrible "Magnification/Zoom" interface, so I described the problems for their benefit in the same detail I would appreciate in bug reports on my own open source software, in response to their rudely and curtly brushing off other users with the same problems, who don't all have a background in user interface design and software development and writing bug reports.
If the holy grail already exists and solves the problem, then they should REMOVE the horrible unusable "Magnification/Zoom" feature that breaks even worse when you dare to rotate or flip the video, or better yet they should have never allowed that broken "feature" to be merged into VLC in the first place, because of its ridiculously poor design and implementation quality (like drawing and tracking the gui with gigantic fat pixels in un-scaled, un-rotated video pixel coordinates, instead of full resolution screen overlay coordinates, and ignoring the flip/rotation for mouse tracking so you can't see what you're pointing at, which is negligent and insane).
Ironically, VLC accepting and distributing features like the "Magnification/Zoom" interface certainly undermines their arguments that they don't want to accept other patches because of quality and reliability and usability issues. If they refuse to fix it, they should remove it instead, it's just so bad.
And if I didn't bother going to the effort of describing the problems in detail with step-by-step instructions to reproduce them, I'm afraid that Jean-Baptiste Kempf is so thin skinned and arrogant that he would have brushed off my bug report for that reason too. Just like he CONTINUES to rudely and passive-aggressively brush off and ignore other people's perfectly valid bug reports to this day, 12 years later. He's not going to suddenly change.
Optimally, next to a source of water that can be split into hydrogen, ready to be used for the chemical process producing the pure iron. (Not the process in TFA.)
An array of SMRs (small modular reactors) located at the steel factory could be used – and would be sufficient – both for heating and producing the electricity without interruptions caused by fluctuating prices or blackouts.
Currently, birding. Got really into it in 2021 since it pretty much runs in the family. I feel that observing the lives of our fellow creatures helps me really destress and put my mind off work. Interestingly, I find that birding while walking in the nature works better in this regard than just walking in the nature.
Get a good pair of binoculars, a bird sound recognition app for your mobile[1], and a bird field guide (as a European, I prefer [2]), and you're good to go.
Nice, i'm an amateur birder, meaning i'm just standing in front of the office building and ..watch the birds. But lately i have been thinking more and more about professionalizing it.
It's so calm and fascinating.
I love to spot any raptor - I'm even a little superstitious about them and tend to take sighting a hawk as a good omen. I also always love to watch a heron/crane - they just seem so dinosaur-ish. Very interesting birds.
No mentions in this thread of biodiversity loss[1], which I've always considered one of the main reasons for vertical farming. We are (and have been) destroying immense swathes of land to make more room for human activities, killing numerous species to their extinction[2] in the process. This increased human land use includes farming.
Now, there are of course other solutions such as reducing meat consumption. I think those should be applied as well. However, the theory of vertical farming is simple: with land area A, you actually get the output of A multiplied by the number of floors, saving the number of floor minus one times A land elsewhere.
Maybe we should tax the externalities, i.e. land use, more, in the same way we tax carbon emissions (at least here in EU). With the externalities properly taken into account, vertical farming could prove to be more economically viable when compared against the highly-tuned competition. Of course, food prices would become higher, but maybe that's required in order to avoid doom.
> On top of that we see articles (this isn't the first) who try to reframe the question of energy consumption around land use, which is a complete red hering, designed to make nuclear look more advantageous.
I wonder, what's your opinion on these two matters:
- the sixth mass extinction
- carbon sinks
In my opinion as a concerned environmentalist, they are both extremely important and need immediate actions to have even a small chance of being somewhat remedied. Land use is an important facet of how exactly we are destroying the environment and as such it does make sense to consider it as one of the dimensions when planning energy production.
And to be clear, there are lots of species that don't just accept any "close enough" environment as their living place. For example, willow tits in Finland are endangered because here they mainly live in old forests that include dead trees – unacceptable for timber and pulp industry.
Edit: I want to emphasize that I don't see land use concerns as an attempt to reframe the question, limiting the dimensions the energy sector is thought of. Rather, IMO it's a welcome important additional feature to think of.
>> On top of that we see articles (this isn't the first) who try to reframe the question of energy consumption around land use, which is a complete red hering, designed to make nuclear look more advantageous.
> I wonder, what's your opinion on these two matters:
> - the sixth mass extinction
> - carbon sinks
> In my opinion as a concerned environmentalist, they are both extremely important and need immediate actions to have even a small chance of being somewhat remedied. Land use is an important facet of how exactly we are destroying the environment and as such it does make sense to consider it as one of the dimensions when planning energy production.
I agree that these are important issues to consider, however I disagree that this is important in the context of energy production. Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads (in another post someone mentioned that the space parking lots occupy in the US is 5 times larger than the area needed to power the whole country with solar).
These discussions are essentially aimed to distract from the important goal of reorienting our energy production toward renewables. It is telling that almost all pro-nuclear articles that we have seen recently argue which should put more money into nuclear vs renewables, not arguing about what is the quickest way to turn of coal plants. The reason I suspect is that the companies that run and build large nuclear power plants are to a large degree the same companies that are involved in running fossil fuel plants. Renewables essentially threaten the business model of building large power plants that will run and provide guaranteed profits for decades, while renewables which are much more decentralised threaten their business model.
> The reason I suspect is that the companies that run and build large nuclear power plants are to a large degree the same companies that are involved in running fossil fuel plants. Renewables essentially threaten the business model of building large power plants that will run and provide guaranteed profits for decades, while renewables which are much more decentralised threaten their business model.
Citation needed, citation needed, and citation needed. Large wind farms are mega corporate and there's a zillion corporations competing to create big solar installations or to corner the market on solar installs.
> These discussions are essentially aimed to distract from the important goal of reorienting our energy production toward renewables.
And many argue "renewables" should include nuclear, because of how much nuclear fuel there is on this planet. We are in the current carbon bind because economies followed the cheapest, most incremental solution to adding energy production, greased by political corruption and gaslighting. Short-sighted, focused only on solving the problems of the present. Renewals with huge footprint like big solar installs and wind farms are exactly the same kind of short-sighted thinking that will gift us another pile of problems in 30 years. Nuclear power, particulary with small modular reactors, is the best long-term bet. Coupled with residential solar installations, which basically don't mean any new land use, this is a future that is sustainable. Not vast deadlands anywhere.
> > The reason I suspect is that the companies that run and build large nuclear power plants are to a large degree the same companies that are involved in running fossil fuel plants. Renewables essentially threaten the business model of building large power plants that will run and provide guaranteed profits for decades, while renewables which are much more decentralised threaten their business model.
> Citation needed, citation needed, and citation needed. Large wind farms are mega corporate and there's a zillion corporations competing to create big solar installations or to corner the market on solar installs.
I did say suspect, so I don't have proof. However traditionally the nuclear and coal lobby have been working very closely together at least in Germany. Regarding the size of corporations i think we can agree that nuclear projects are much bigger than solar? The biggest builder of solar parks in Germany has a a revenue of 1-1.5 Billion euros, so not small fish, but also not a huge corporation. Moreover, if we look at the distribution of solar capacity Germany had 20 GW of solar capacity in 2016 (could not find a more recent number), of those the large >20 MW installations are less than 2 GW (2022 numbers, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany) so solar is definitely much more decentralised than nuclear or coal.
> > These discussions are essentially aimed to distract from the important goal of reorienting our energy production toward renewables.
> And many argue "renewables" should include nuclear, because of how much nuclear fuel there is on this planet.
First that is not an argument that follows. Second unless we talk about currently viable technology we have about 40 years of uranium left in the world. I know you now come with all sorts of recycling solutions that might work in the future. That might be true, but we need solutions now and renewables are already cheaper so why go for nuclear.
>We are in the current carbon bind because economies followed the cheapest, most incremental solution to adding energy production, greased by political corruption and gaslighting.
Citation needed, because I'm not sure what you are talking about, but nuclear has received many multiples of subsidies compared to solar/wind (mind you coal is still much more).
>Short-sighted, focused only on solving the problems of the present. Renewals with huge footprint like big solar installs and wind farms are exactly the same kind of short-sighted thinking that will gift us another pile of problems in 30 years.
We already established that the land requirements for solar and wind are miniscule compared to other land uses. We could meet capacity needs likely by just putting solar on roofs, roads and parking lots. It's also quite rich to argue against renewables as short sighted while ignoring the nuclear storage elefant in the room. Again recycling is not economically viable and produces large amounts of mid and low grade waste which also needs to be stored. But let's just push that problem to future generations.
> Nuclear power, particulary with small modular reactors, is the best long-term bet.
We see in Ukraine just now how distributing nuclear reactors all over the place is maybe not a good idea. Moreover, that small modular reactors will result in any savings from "economies of scale", generally construction in contrast to fabrication does not benefit much. There was also an article here recently which showed that a significant portion of the nuclear plant cost is the same as any other thermal plant.
> Coupled with residential solar installations, which basically don't mean any new land use, this is a future that is sustainable. Not vast deadlands anywhere.
> Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads
Because until now we've been using power sources with high density.
The largest wind farm to date is Gansu Wind Farwm with planned capacity of 20 GW. I can't find it's total area, but it will have 7000 turbines. Wind turbines need to be about 5 rotor diameters apart, so... That's definitely more than the total area of all nuclear power plants powering France (at 60 GW).
Alta Wind Farm, is the largest in the US and produces 1GW of electricity. It covers an area of 130 square kilometers. Chooz, in France, produces 3GW of electricity, and covers... 2 square kilometers.
Same goes for solar.
If you want to convert all of the world to renewables, the are they will cover will be anything but minuscule.
EDIT: and that's before we go into the problems of:
- base load for solar and wind is 0, and the amount of batteries you need to sustain the load is mind-boggling, to say the least
> > Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads
> Because until now we've been using power sources with high density.
> The largest wind farm to date is Gansu Wind Farwm with planned capacity of 20 GW. I can't find it's total area, but it will have 7000 turbines. Wind turbines need to be about 5 rotor diameters apart, so... That's definitely more than the total area of all nuclear power plants powering France (at 60 GW).
> Alta Wind Farm, is the largest in the US and produces 1GW of electricity. It covers an area of 130 square kilometers. Chooz, in France, produces 3GW of electricity, and covers... 2 square kilometers.
It's funny how you use some anecdotes while several people have made the calculations for how much percentage one would need. Also if you look at the pictures from Alta Wind Farm for example, it's not like the land between the turbines is somehow lost, there is bushes and trees growing in between (not big ones though as the area seems somewhat like a desert.). Similar if you look at many of the turbines in Denmark or Germany they are on fields with cattle grazing in between.
> Same goes for solar.
> If you want to convert all of the world to renewables, the are they will cover will be anything but minuscule.
> EDIT: and that's before we go into the problems of:
> - base load for solar and wind is 0, and the amount of batteries you need to sustain the load is mind-boggling, to say the least
The baseload myth again. Can we please just stop it? Yes we need overcapacity or storage, guess what this also applies to nuclear. This summer France had 40%-100% (the numbers differ I saw 40% in writing but 100% on a French TV channel) of their nuclear power plants down due to heat and maintance. The problem of building overcapacity with nuclear is, they are capex driven, so if you don't have them run at max possible prices will be much higher, making nuclear even less viable.
> - neither solar nor wind can be load-following
Yes and neither can nuclear in any economically feasible way. With the current costs (and even more with future trends), it is much cheaper to build double the amount of renewables than to use nuclear running on some fraction of it's capacity.
> The baseload myth again. Can we please just stop it?
We'll stop it the moment it stops being reality.
> Yes we need overcapacity or storage,
Yes, yes we do. And I've yet to see anyone calculate how much we need of that overcapacity.
When there's no sun, the base load of solar is zero. When there's no wind, the base load of wind is zero.
Worse than that is that it's not an either/or situation. It's not an "either 100% or 0%". It's any value in between. If your wind farm is generating just 20%, it's almost as bad as 0%.
So, you need to have overcapacity for solar (to compensate for no wind). And and overcapacity for wind (to compensate for no solar). And an overcapacity of batteries to compensate for both.
And literally no one is talking about this, and just brushes this aside with "yeah no it's fine".
> This summer France had 40%-100% (the numbers differ I saw 40% in writing but 100% on a French TV channel) of their nuclear power plants down due to heat and mainteance.
Key word: maintenance. This is something you can plan well beforehand (unlike the drops in wind and solar).
Will there be screwups in planning? Yes. Nuclear reactors being down due to heat is not too dissimilar to a hypothetical 10GW battery storage melting from the same heat
> > - neither solar nor wind can be load-following
> Yes and neither can nuclear in any economically feasible way.
I don't think you understand what load following means
> it is much cheaper to build double the amount of renewables than to use nuclear running on some fraction of it's capacity.
Double amount compared to what? Compared to what we have now or compared to the number required to cover all our rising energy needs?
> I agree that these are important issues to consider, however I disagree that this is important in the context of energy production. Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads (in another post someone mentioned that the space parking lots occupy in the US is 5 times larger than the area needed to power the whole country with solar).
Thanks for bringing up the point about comparing energy production's land use against the area taken by other human activity. Agriculture, particularly meat consumption and the required farm fields to feed livestock, is certainly one of the worst offenders in this context. As far as I can tell, the generally car-based city planning with the parking lots, roads and urban sprawl are also a problem in this regard especially in the US. So, I agree that certainly fixing these should have a higher priority from the viewpoint of improving land use.
However, I don't think the land use by electricity production can be completely disregarded. I was unsure about it being minuscule, so just as a quick calculation:
- Electricity from coal requires a median of 15 m² for 1 MWh of energy.
- In 2021, electricity use in Finland was about 86 775 000 MWh. As heavy industry (including steel production) and traffic are going electric, that number is bound to go upwards.
- The total area of Finland is 338 472 km² with about 34 524 km² of that being inland water, resulting in 303 948 km² of land area.
By year 2050 counting from today, using the numbers above I get that 11,67 % of Finland's total land area would be ruined by coal production if all the electricity was produced with coal (luckily it's not), mined locally. Also note that the chart in TFA is about electricity production. Countries with cold winters, such as Finland, also require heating. With a cleaner source, such as 100 % nuclear or roof installed silicon PV that figure would be around 1–2 %.
> It is telling that almost all pro-nuclear articles that we have seen recently argue which should put more money into nuclear vs renewables, not arguing about what is the quickest way to turn of coal plants.
On the forums where I find most of the environmentalist discussion I read, the generally held view is that both nuclear and renewables are required. It's not about either-or. The goal is decarbonizing ASAP while respecting nature in other ways as well and supporting the notion of humankind's prosperity.
Ok I think I misunderstood. You were talking about the land use for coal, which I guess you're right would need some accumulation factor (although I suspect it doesn't grow linearly). But if you would use solar or wind you would not, which was the context of the discussion and hence I misunderstood.
> in another post someone mentioned that the space parking lots occupy in the US is 5 times larger than the area needed to power the whole country with solar
Does the calculation also take into account battery installations?
>Land use is an important facet of how exactly we are destroying the environment and as such it does make sense to consider it as one of the dimensions when planning energy production.
It makes sense to consider it but the overriding dominant factor is still cost which is where nuclear power falls flat on its face.
That's why you'll almost never see an article submitted to hacker news that discusses it.
Land use throughout the globe is at an unsustainable level, causing habitat loss for species and reduction in carbon sinks. Getting farmland to produce more per square meter would be very important, and the results presented in the article seem like a possibility in that regard.
I wonder how this would combine with the effort[1] to modify rice to use the C4 kind of photosynthesis, if realized.
It's a shame UK left EU. All help would be welcome against Germany's lobby to continue burning fossil fuels and spewing the resulting GHGs into atmosphere. If they had been still in, I'm sure UK would have stood with France, nine other EU countries, and the various expert groups' assessments for classifying nuclear power in the EU sustainable taxonomy.
This development is probably only feasible because UK left EU. EU has too much debate going on to be pragmatic about solving the climate challenge. They are blind with renewables (which are all good, but will take 3x or 4x more decades to develop) to actually fix the climate.
Oh yeah, blame "nuclear", the science, for a mistake of a socialist regime.
* One one side no regulation, people living in fear of their superiors, money being drawn and sent to compete on the race to the moon and other reasons.
* On the other side "nuclear", which is based on science, and had about 6 decades of evolution in safety, regulations, etc. since Chernobyl was first built.
That was exactly what I was referring to when I said the EU is blind to science. And, yes, I read 2 papers and watched many videos, as well as follow the news for about the last 5 years of the safe confinement construction. I still hold the same opinion as my original comment.
On a trip to a school in Bristol, southwest England, Johnson told baffled schoolchildren: "I promise to get world leaders to cut greenhouse gases and save the planet."
He later held up a signed, leaf-shaped piece of paper on which he had written his pledge.
Whatever the outcome, I'll be very happy to hear about Johnson's pledge after the COP...
I'm pretty sure parent is being sarcastic. Boris Johnson is the guy who literally goes 'uh, I think' when asked how many children he has[0]. He's not big on commitments of any kind.
[0]: for the record, it's supposed to be six, but some people say seven.
this is for me is a net plus. children of politicians (even how many) should not be a thing, and i’m actually very impressed that when faced with so many questions regarding his children, over so many years, this politician chose the high road. very few choose this route (see basically the whole US establishment).
I sympathise with your desire to separate the private and the public, but where somebody is a deadbeat dad to the point that they seem genuinely unsure how many kids they have, you would question whether they are responsible enough for the job, even if they weren't as feckless and flippant as Boris Johnson.
As conservative prime ministers go, he'd be one of the better ones in recent memory if it wasn't for awful timing. The UK had about twice the death toll as france and germany in the last couple of years, and it's hard not to blame that on Boris, and those around Boris, essentially being the wrong guys for the job. When it's serious, you need serious people making the decisions, and I don't think anybody, Boris included, genuinely thinks he's a serious person.
Failing to turn up to 5 COBRA meetings on the bounce could account for Johnson's failure to grasp the seriousness of the situation he was dealing with. Preferring to be spoonfed reassuring pap armchair experts like like Cummings show a clear lack of judgement.
Well, yeah. He's clearly not a particularly technically-minded or diligent kind of person. I don't think anybody thinks he is, Dominic Cummings said that BJ is actually pretty conscious and self-aware about this.
I think the UK was kind of a perfect storm where Boris was both the least suited prime minister for a crisis in recent history, and the british state resources were really depleted after a decade of austerity - which also wasn't particularly good for the health of vulnerable people in general.
I'm not really particularly anti-Boris specifically, though. The nice thing about him is he clearly doesn't really care about politics. He's not a hardcore ideologue like Osbourne, or Javid, or even Blair. He's just interested in ratings, polling, and power. So I think his political program is probably better than Cameron's was, for instance, just because he's a populist, and the british public generally has more common sense than the british elite.
In general, a useless head of state isn't too bad, if you have a good state apparatus that gets all the real work done while they basically entertain the public. That's what Boris was supposed to be. Unfortunately, the pandemic happened, and a majority of the people surrounding him turned out to be morons.
More recently Germany has become a NIMBY country when it comes to building more wind power. From the outside it appears a lot of the easy wins have already taken place for wind in Germany, and once they began building closer to residential areas, people have gotten increasingly upset about it:
"Wind power is Germany's most important source of clean energy. But wind turbines have become contentious here, as more and more people protest against them being built near where they live."
"Germany has set some of the most ambitious goals of any nation for shifting from fossil fuels to greener energy. Now the centerpiece of that push—onshore wind power—is slumping, prompting the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and the bankruptcies of wind-power developers and turbine manufacturers. Wind power, often seen as a clean, abundant energy source, has faced growing bureaucratic hurdles and acrimony in communities out to block the erection of new turbines. "
renewables are not big enough in a huge industrial and developed country like Germany
Hysterical shutdown of nuclear plants following Fukushima lead to the gap being covered by fossil fuels
also while US have very cheap gas from the domestic industry, Europe is constrained by a couple of pipelines and shipments and market fluctuations, so it didn't replace coal
Your charts show lignite holding stable, hard coal declining, nuclear declining, natural gas increasing slightly, and renewables expanding tremendously.
Renewables provided 45% of Germany's power production in 2020, and 41% in 2021 H1.
No, but people love their misinformation (in both directions). Coal and gas are slowly going down in Germany. Germany built a new coal plant 6 years ago only to shut it down this year. The real problem is that renewables aren't being built fast enough.
They are compared to all the countries bigger than them. But compared to other Western European countries, not so much.
Merkel’s CDU has been popular because they offered stability, but there’s an understanding in Germany now that the country has fallen behind in critical areas like car electrification and grid storage technologies.
And that'll make Europe dependent on Russia. Doesn't sound much of a problem to me but down here, Putin is seen as a somewhat bad person. So, Europe will have to bow to him to have not too expensive gas, I'll have a lot of fun hearing our politicians telling that, poor them, they have to negotiate with him :-)
On the other hand, making Europe economically dependent on Russia lowers the likelihood of war between them and fosters cooperation in other areas. Germany doesn't buy the US narrative that Russia should be treated with hostility at all costs.
> On the other hand, making Europe economically dependent on Russia lowers the likelihood of war between them
No, it doesn't.
Attempting to break economic dependence, or to preempt such attempts in the anticipated future, is at least as common a cause of war as geopolitical competition between powers that aren’t in a dependency relationship.
The CDU has a wing that still depends on old coal-burners for their jobs. Shutting down nuclear was their idea of keeping those folks “working” for longer while solar and (especially) wind were spooled up.
To that end, it’s looking better now that the Greens are in the ruling coalition.
