Germany’s new Economy Minister Katherina Reiche on Friday called for the rapid construction of new gas-fired power plants in the country to support the country’s energy supply when renewable sources are unavailable
She said it was important to “quickly move to tender at least 20 gigawatts of gas-fired power plants to maintain energy security.”
Reiche ruled out a return to nuclear energy
"This means we need to conclude the relevant free trade agreements with Chile, Mercosur, India, Australia and Mexico. And I explicitly say, we also need the United States of America," Reiche said.
This sounds insane.
I would disagree vigorously if the minister said they wanted to build coal power plants, but at least you can make the case for it under the guise of domestic energy security. But methane gas power plants? It doesn’t help with climate goals, it’s not cheap to purchase LNG and it doesn’t help with energy security either.
Is she double dipping from US and Russian oil lobby?
She’s continuing the policy of her Green predecessor. Who was continuing a policy drawn up around the turn of the millennium by Fraunhofer: Balance renewables with gas peaker plants which then at one point can be weaned off fossil gas and switched over to synthetic gas. There’s other forms of grid storage, but Germany can store three months worth of total (!) energy consumption in its pipeline network so it’s ideal for long term, seasonal, storage.
Also see the deals Germany made with Namibia and Canada to supply green hydrogen (in the form of ammonia because easier to transport). Much of the German pipeline network is built to a standard that allows it to transport pure hydrogen (it started out as a hydrogen network) and re-declaring some pipes and building new ones is an ongoing process, there’s going to be a full separate network before long.
Why not batteries? First off, those were nowhere near ready when Fraunhofer drew up the plan, secondly, they still don’t have the same tradeoffs as synthesising fuel: They generally have higher round-trip efficiency, but also lose energy over time. Synthetic fuel is less efficient, but doesn’t lose appreciable amounts of energy over time and it’s much easier to store large amounts of it so that’s what you want for long-term storage.
Not to mention that we’ll need synthetic fuel for some applications anyway, e.g. catastrophe relief: You don’t want to rely on electric field kitchens when the grid is down. The current ones run on diesel, just as all the vehicles, and you don’t want to be in a situation where you can’t use that 70yold semi-mothballed Unimog. The reserves are deep and push come to shove, you want to field them.
Let’s not only go back to increasing reliance on fossil fuels but also increasing reliance on some unstable geopolitical actors. A double whammy.
20 GW? This is crazy.
No, that’s a rather conservative estimate. My federal state alone has more than 20GW in total capacities. And the backup for the rare days when neither solar nor wind produce relevant amounts needs to be able to cover the demand.
The actual point is having those power plants yet in the end never using them aside from those few days a year. And then producing the gas for them climate-neutrally with reneawable overproduction from the remaining 98% of the year.
PS: That the positive thing about solar and wind prices nowadays. They are actually so low that other production methods simply can’t compete and won’t be used more than actually needed.
PPS: That also the actual economic reason why nuclear is a bad idea. You also need enough production capacities for a cold winter night without solar and wind… but then producing less the remaining time of the year doesn’t actually save you money because fuel is a miniscule part of nuclear costs. Have you never wondered why the two countries in the EU pushing for a properly scaled green hydrogen market are Germany and France? Because both models only work economically with peak-burners based on greenly produced gas.
But there are a lot of gas power plants in Germany already. If you want them just as back up, it would be easier to just convert coal power plants to biomass. For 2% it should be fine.
That’s the point. The backup needs to produce (close to) 100% of the demand 2% of the time.
And coal plants are incredibly bad at quickly reacting. It takes a day just from ignition to working temperature, several days to establish the transport chain constantly providing the huge amounts of fuel needed (bonus points for a lot of them being ship-based and possibly suffering from low water levels).
Also there is a lot of industry that will already need climate-neutral gas produced by green energy as their only valid way for electrification. And in the end it’s also a cost issue. If the industry already needs huge amounts of gas and the transport network anyway (of which a lot already exists - refitting natural gas networks for hydrogen has already started) the state doesn’t need to pay much than just the power plants. And they are comparably cheap (the exact opposite of nuclear where constrution is expensive but fuel and operation are cheap).
20GW is way too much. Peak coal this year was 22GW and there is a huge wave of battery power plants coming as well. Seriously if you have to, just keep coal plants connected to the grid, in case of an emergency.
Fuck the US. We should buy from anyone but them. Canada would be the next best option from that direction.
Canada has no capacity to liquify natural gas. There’s a shared Canada-US natural gas pipeline system, so some molecules one gets may be coming from Canadian extraction, but it’ll pass through a US-based liquification plant, so from Germany’s standpoint, that’d be where an export would come from, as that’s where it’d be loaded onto a ship.
EDIT: Warren Buffett spent years trying to build one Canada-based LNG plant and fighting environmentalists opposed to it in Canada. He eventually threw in the towel.
