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?
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 emissions, this is probably one of the single worst things you can do.
If you care about energy density, nuclear is the best solution, not coal. I guess Germans don’t care though
That’s true, although I think they decided on coal since it’s cheaper financially (not ecologically and healthwise of course).
It would make sense to just simply move them but the fact that they want to burn coal is just weird.
So that means it will not be cheaper in the medium to long term. Since they will have to deal with the burden on their healthcare system, especially among their ageing population. Plus the scummy carbon offset trades that they have to wiggle themselves into.
Exactly, I prefer gas and oil to coal any day but that’s only because the “better than coal” bar is incredibly low.
Germans literally shut down all thier nuclear power in favour for coal power.
It was meant to be replaced by renewables but our minister of economics dumped the whole solar and wind turbine industry. Additionally his party made up bullshit rules about a minimum distance for turbines to households, which was apparently 10x of the reasonable distance and which made it very hard to find spots in densely populated Germany. And to this day, the federations with a renewable energy surplus have to pay more for electricity than those who give a shit about renewables. -it is discussed to be changed now but idk
Hard not to believe in a conspiracy there
What conspiracy? Sounds like just savage profit maximization.
It’ll be fine, they can just buy nuclear power from France and Sweden.
I didn’t say density is the paramount parameter. Also, once you optimize one drawback, it generally gets less important.
I just wanted to put the image into context, and show that it isn’t a big step backwards, just sideways perhaps. Or in other words, a sigle wind farm isn’t relevant, the sum is
Mining more coal is extremely relevant 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.
