Is Hydrogen The Next German Wunderwaffe?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
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Production: Hubert Walas
Research & analysis: Andrzej Krajewski
Video production: Kacper Machniowski
Voiceover: Hubert Walas
Music: Michael Vignola - Mislead
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#Germany #hydrogen
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~"Germany is highly pracmatic" is extrem far from the reality. Germany got over the last 2-3 decades extrem bureaucratic and slowly, in terms of Government implementations and laws.
Globalist using global warming to unify their control is the reason we don’t use nuclear. New age monarchs that don’t have to care about them longevity of their country or a people who know them and will hold them responsible.
Too much irrelevant waffle.
Germany has oil and gas reserves, but refuses to exploit them. United States companies have the advanced technology to extract this wealth through advanced drill technologies and Fracking. German Laws and regulation make this 100% impossible, so Americans are happy to sell our oil and refined Diesel to keep the German economy going. That being said. lots of German companies are relocating their petrochemical dependent businesses to the USA. With Immigration, the Greens, low birthrates, etc., Germany is "Stuck on Stupid" and hopefully decides to fix itself while it still can. Hydrogen is stupid and dangerous and making it from Natural Gas creates more pollution than just burning natural gas. The entire hydrogen narrative is a ploy to save the car and truck companies that can't won't switch to electric cars and also want to sell part and maintenance, as electric cars require very little upkeep.
Thanks for the video and your hard work. If I was to criticise I would say this video is a very polish perspective video of Germany...
But that is what you are❤.
In Poland it's a good day when you have problems with Germany and a bad when you have problems with Russia. I would say you could improve your criticism of Germany (if you wanted the message to resonate more with Germans) if you were to remove some of the historical references because your fact base is very good. But you'll loose them by saying "Germans be Germans". For example why Germans have had this "atom Kraft nein danke" movement for so long is interesting.
Polish man deliver 1 hour, I click
Is he polish?
@@mulmusfistus4128 yes
This fact makes me like him more somehow.
@@The_Joker_1940 Is he a north or south pole? 😅
Poland stronk! Love from Slovakia!
German Scientist here:
Your analysis of German strategic thinking of the past 150 years is stunningly accurate. It isn't very often that you see videos like this, even (or maybe especially) by Germans themselves. Great work on your research and also great work on your presentation style. Keep up he good quality!
Because Germans dont think strategically, only tactically and operationally.
SVR really screwed you guys.
What do you mean by scientist?🤔
@@mrwhips3623 it's the name of a profession. According to the oxford dictionary it refers to "a person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences."
I hope this helps.
/s
@@mrwhips3623 Well, either he's a scientist in an unrelated field and deliberately omits this piece of information in order to use his profession as an appeal to authority , in which case....it means nothing. Or he does posses a relevant degree, in which case I'd have to wonder why he decided to leave out the only relevant information in the lead-in.
Alternatively he's just really happy about his profession and just wanted to share it :D
I heard Wunderwaffe, so i want to see what my country is potentially cooking
Me too, failed Austrian painter here.
Manchmal ist man hier etwas zu einseitig.
Ich bin gespannt und höre trotzdem aufmerksam zu. 🤔
German Wunderwaffe: Self destruction through large scale immigration and energy deprivation
Looks like our führers are betting on hot air. I hope they are on to something.
Another disaster for it self and the rest of Europe. It's kinda your thing!
You know what they say: Third time is a charm.
Germany was blue. Oh what oh what to do. Hitched up my pants. And conquered France. Now Deutschland's smiling through!
*Nervous polish noises*
@@Essah15 _quiet American chuckle_
Or is it, "three strikes and you're out"?
@@Essah15 first time Germany lost 30% of the territory, second time 30% territory lost again, do you really think there might be any more tries? LOL
1 hour video by our beloved polish man?! I immediately click on the like button and grab my popcorn 🍿
yeah but he talks too much shyte!
@@georgewaters6424no he doesn't
This fear of nuclear energy is really frustrating.
It's even more frustrating when I learned about how Green parties across Europe and the UK received support from Putin's Russia. And one can see that the success of the greens has, for now, meant an increase in reliance on natural gas, which increased reliance on Russia. Now it gets shipped across the ocean from the US, which puts out a ton of emissions before it even gets burned.
I wish there was a green party that was worth supporting but I don't know of any I've ever seen once since I started paying attention.
Even moreso the few people advocating for it not also advocating for Thorium usage.
@BiggestCorvid I think at a national level a libdem-conservative coalition combined with left-wing municipalities give the greenest policy. At least, that's how we got so much solar energy and electric cars in the Netherlands the grid can't handle it anymore.
I can indeed see the Germans going all-in on policies that don't work or are only working in Putin's favor. Inviting migrants to then spread them across the EU was such a gamble. Clean diesel engines also were a backfiring gamble. And now this silly gambit on green hydrogen. Here in the Netherlands the lobby remains strong enough to continue it while there are several alternatives ready to just make investing into hydrogen a waste of energy. But of course as always Russia has found a way to help Germany out by reusing empty gas fields for underground blue hydrogen generation. That's of course a solution too good for Germany to resist it, leading to the further Ruscistification of Europe.
@@BiggestCorvid The Finnish green's from what I recall happen to be explicitly pro-nuclear after some pro-nuclear scientist joined their ranks and was able to convince the majority of the green party in Finland to drop the nuclear-phobia
Even if hydrogen works out, how are you getting the energy to crack all that water without nuclear?
Q: How do you detect a leak in a hydrogen pipeline?
A: Light a match.
That applies to just about any pipeline that carries flammables.....
@@MajinOthinus Natural gas has an odorant added so you can detect it by smell. You could add an odorant to hydrogen, but the hydrogen could leak where the larger odorant molecules could not escape, so it would not do much good.
@@vulpo That is only really relevant in the theoretical. Any "opening" that is small enough for that to occur is small enough to be entirely irrelevant in context.
Hydrogen also has the problem of making materials brittle. It's reactive and its atoms are so small that they fit into the gaps between the atoms in just about any other material. Expect the hydrogen infrastructure to eventually start having pieces of it break like glass.
💀💀
I just want to point out that Die Welt and Cicero are both right-leaning, at times populist, publications and that the nuclear phase out was decided by the conservative Merkel government.
I’m not trying to defend intransparency and bad timing of the current government but we should try to understand the whole picture.
Yes thank you!
While the current government certainly isn't perfect, they ti easily get all the blame for bad decisions by the previous Merkel Governments which reigned for 16 years.
CDU under Merkel was centrist
Merkel and her gov was maybe right leaning 30 years ago, but not after that. They gradually became more and more left, and today its a center-left party
@@98TrueRocker98 Note that I described the Merkel government merely as conservative.
@@juliansebastian it's discouraging that such liberal policies and mindset can be described as "conservative"
Just like Japan betting on hydrogen, this has nothing to do with a green transition or powering clean cars. That's the propaganda.
Hydrogen is both a form of energy storage and chemical input. If you're just viewing this from an energy perspective it doesn't make much sense--Germany's stubborn abandonment of nuclear energy comes to mind. However, nuclear power doesn't provide the molecules needed for fertilizer or weapons (bullets, artillery, explosives, propellants). Both countries are resource poor and need to maintain and expand industries to maintain their technical edge as much as their sovereignty. Both wish to pursue more independent foreign policy. They're also both threatened by either Russia, China, or both and the world is becoming increasingly fractured and unstable including supply chains. Even if H turns out to be very expensive and complicated, they will eat the cost if it means they are more or less self-sufficient in weapons production.
This. So much this.
Hydrogen allows for substitution of almost all oil and LNG in chemical processing as well as the mentioned energy generation. It also allows one to use overcapacity efficiently to store up energy for later and does not require imports once set up. Once the hydrogen economy is up and running in the first place, almost all of the most important chemical precursors required for modern industry and civilization as well as the energy to run it become completely independent of imports, outside influences and thus effectively of supply. It's almost irrelevant how efficient or inefficient the creation and storage of hydrogen is, because at that point it just becomes a scalable problem; since you can just store up energy and use it however you want, you can effectively just build an infinite amount of production, because the resources you need to fuel it are for all intents and purposes infinite and thus free.
Efficiency only determines the upfront cost you need to pay to get it running in the first place and the slope of your growth curve, once it's running, you can just scale to infinity and not care about the efficiency.
Some time ago I saw information that Germany had developed a method of storing hydrogen in the form of a gel. However, the Japanese Toyota used cartridges to transport this gas.
There may be synergy and a change in the "ecological" approach in the EU ;-). This could help it continue to dominate the car market.
Because the big yellow dragon set about devouring the car market.
There is no dichotomy between hydrogen as an industrial gas and nuclear power. Having nuclear power doesn't stop a country from producing hydrogen. On the contrary.
@@TimJBenham No one is claiming otherwise. That's missing the point though.
Fission reactors are very expensive to build and maintain, require extensive security and have considerable very long term costs, while also being dependent on Uranium imports and geographically concentrated and thus vulnerable.
Solar and wind power have none of those drawbacks; their chief and main drawback is the mismatch between supply and demand, which is solved by hydrogen.
@@TimJBenham I never said or implied any dichotomy between hydrogen and nuclear power, let alone hydrogen as 'an industrial gas' as you mention in one of its specific states. Perhaps you're answering another comment. I merely stated that hydrogen is not a source of energy but a vector/means of storage of energy with chemical/industrial properties that will be useful no matter the cost and that as a means of storage it has concomitant inefficiencies and energy losses at every stage of conversion and storage.
Came here for geopolitics but learned some chemistry too. Great fun! :)
This is one of the better episodes on this channel. It's nice that the historical context was shown so accurately.
As far as hydrogen is concerned, I would be happy if the Germans managed to perfect this technology so that it makes economic sense. Then the fossil fuel monopoly would no longer be relevant.
A small correction; the Marne Taxis is more of a propaganda gimmick as they transported at most 6000 troops total, a fraction of one division.
Yeah exactly they had massive failures.
Btw the german powerplants are old. The newest one was build from 1983-1988. Maybe we could have used them longer, but only for some years.
Most nuclear plants of that era can have their lifespan extended to at least 80 years. Possibly beyond. You've just heard anti nuclear propaganda, like 90% of Germans.
I dont think that was a big issue, in Sweden we have equally old plants and they will continue to run for decades. Germany hade the best maintained nuclear fleet in the world.
Europe : you know Germany, nuclear is simplier and reliable.
Germany : i will not do nuclear.
Europe : ok but it's also cheaper.
Germany : I will not do nuclear !
Europe : But...developing new technologies will need time and a lot of money.
Germany : I WILL NOT DO NUCLEAR !
They'd rather burn wood 😂
Nuclear power is mamy things, but ceap it is not. Not at all.
@@janekbrat6951 Expensive to build but cheap in the long run, as shown at 3:15 in the video. It's an investment, for sure.
@@jackdoesstuff9033 Some of those numbers are from 2018 and thats an entirety for renewables. Between 2017 and now PV Panel prices dropped by 75%.
@@jackdoesstuff9033 Gas is the most expensive one by a long shot (oil isn't really relevant but even higher), renewables are the cheapest. Nuclear is somewhere in the middle. Some studies even quote it at 5x the price of onshore wind and 1.5x coal.
Just look at diagrams for merit order and market clearing price for germany, actual prices.
Nuclear power plants also emit far more lifetime CO2 emissions than renewables.
Holy crap I have never found anything in my life that makes me get sleepy like this video. Not complaining this is amazing, thank you.
This video should be called "How Germany tries and fails to engineer its way out of problems." Hydrogen is a way to store and use energy. It is not a source of energy. They still have to mine for coal, oil, and uranium to power the reactors to create the hydrogen.
Honestly, if the Germans were thinking straight, they would be investing in 4th generation fission reactors to hold them over while the engineers finish ironing out the kinks in fusion.
Funnily enough an option that is highly fesable would be to subsidize hydrogen or ammonia production in the maghreb, levant or arabian peninsula and then import it. Most of those countries are some kind of authoritarian though, making this politically spicy.
@@cahdoge Atacama desert in Chile has more solar irradiation than all those countries combined, Chile is a highly democratic, stable country with free trade agreements with most of the world
Germany is producing exceess renewables very often and currently have to shut the wind turbines down very often, since they cannot dliver the energy to the consumers properly. Here comes the idea to store that into hydrogen which then can later be used to produce energy in gas power plants when there is neither wind or sun.
@@mla2385 That is stupid logic. You could do the same thing much cheaper with HTC or pyrolysis. It is cheaper and easier to store.
Germans are being stupid for the sake of an anti-humanist Gaia cult.
@@mla2385 Yeah that is the idea I guess, to use Hydrogen as a form of storing access green electricity produced in times of abundance.
really likes the cultural historic analysis , gave me a new perspective on Germans
Brilliant analysis, a completely unique angle to historical perspective on technology and its influence on energy transition.
You must do similar analysis on other EU states, but not necessarily on energy alone though.👍
Never has a channel earned my sub faster than this one.
Even though I've been through German history in school a good half dozen times this perspective and analysis was still fresh and helped me understand my country's history on a level which I simply hadn't considered prior.
Thank you for your amazing work!
Japan is also pushing for a hydrogen (+ ammonia) economy. They're a bit more accepting of nuclear energy though
Another long term infrastructure plan Germany should be celebrated is the electric highway. They have thousands of Km of what are basically trolley/street car overhead wires planned aling highways so the Transport Trucks can operate electrically. That would allow not just long distance electric trucking, but allow it with a small battery that only has to cover 50km to the hoghway, where it van charge as you drive, and then power you 50km to a destination.
Eh, there's a lot of concern about how practical those will be to maintain. Those overhead lines can wear out frightfully quickly if the ...pickups? on the vehicles aren't kept in good condition. They're also pretty expensive to construct. I'm not saying the concept it doomed, but it's a lot more difficult to electrify highways than rail lines. It might prove more practical to minimize the reliance on long haul road transport rather than going to such great lengths to make it green.
You know electric trains have been doing that for over 100 years. Ditch the gadget bahns and just build what's worked for over a century
@@mathewferstl7042 I do, and Germany has great trains. Unfortunately, not everything is a train. Sometimes innovation is actually good.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 "electricifying" freeways and spending billions and billions to do so isn't a good use of limited money when you could get much more milage with the same amount of money electrifying railways.
The discovery of gigantic underground supplies of pure energy solves the supply problem. All we have to do is to complete a re-fueling system that draws on these, as well as other, forms of hydrogen production. That means that H is the ` magic bullet ' to climate change
There is misinformation in this video.
1) Cost of energy currently is not higher than before the ukraine war (so not especially high for german standards)
2) Nuclear power was only that cheap because of massive subsidies (current example being france)
3) The decision to move out of nuclear was NOT made by the greens (although they strongly supported the position) but by the more conservative Union after the Fukushima disaster.
Well, as a German, the nuclear energy part was explained a bit hard from the view of right wing media as Welt or Cicero. No mention of the fact that building new nuclear plants is hellishly expensive(i.e. the new one in GB) and it is missing out that nuclear energy is heavily subsidized.
Cool story. Now go do some fact-check.
@@sergiysergiy That is the fact check.
@@MajinOthinus You wish.
@@sergiysergiy No need for wishing.
@@MajinOthinus You just confirm that you greens live in some kind of parallel reality. Sad.
“Not a fork or a spoon, but a fipoon. What will you think of next Germany?”
-Jordan Peele
this is kinda missleading. nuclear power/energy is one of the most expensive.
Love this long form!
Never Underestimate Germany… A Historic Fact! 🇪🇺
You clearly missed the point about these companies operating those plants refused to keep these plants running 6:56
Yes, our big industrial sector needs a lot of energy. Other than you show, nuclear power is not cheap enough for that.
Then why do we buy it from
France and Belgium now?
@@john.8805 Most of the energy we buy is from scandinavia and that is mostly green. Sweden has nuclear power but that is for domestic use. Foreign demand is satisfied with mainly hydroelectric power. 2023 France was the country germany exported the most electricity to. Also Belgium was importing german electricity in 2023. Ah that table from statista was from first 6 months only. In general we export electricity in winter and import in summer. We could have produced our own power, but that time the green energy from outside was cheaper than from our coal and gas power plants. In winter we have enough own green power and can sell it to the french. France has a higher electricity generation costs than germany. Germany is actually below EU average. France has lots of tax money in the electricity price. They even governized the EDF and took over the 60 bio Euro debt the company had and also the hundreds of billions that are required to renovate old nuclear plants and rebuild some of the oldest ruins.
@@john.8805 Daily electricity trading is another thing. That is a very complex kind of thing and electricity goes back and forth all the time.
On point.
I would already be greatly amazed if it won't turn out to be the next German Wunder-gaffe...
You have to differentiate between electrical energy and hydrogen. Most processes that need energy now can use electrical energy with more efficiency (think heat pumps and electric cars) then with the fosil counterparts. Replacing those with hydrogen would be really dump. But there are processes that need very dense energy (planes) or the act of redoxing something (steel). those processes need hydrogen.
You also have to consider that we already have a surplus of green energy when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. This will become even more. Using this energy to produce hydrogen is practically free, you can even earn money when you take that energy of the grid.
So it's actually a pretty good plan, imho.
Hydrogen is just one piece of the puzzle. The german industrie has currently a demand of 70TWh of H2 per year that is currently generated from hydrocarbons, mainly natural gas or propane as in my local refinery. In the foreseeable future that demand might double. That hydrocarbons can be replaced by Hydrogen generated from surplus renewable power when windmills or solar cells need to be shutdown when they need to pay other countries to take it. That wont make much sense. There are already some pipeline nets of Hydrogen, in the Ruhr area f.e. where refineries supply industries with Hydrogen. In my city the refinery is currently constructing a 100MW electrolysis to replace part of their Hydrogen from propane production. max need would be 600MW. At the site of the power plants on the other side of the city they build a 200MW electrolysis connected to a salt cavern buffer and to the H2 pipeline net in the Ruhr area. Max capacity there would be 2GW electrolysis There are other places too.
A Joint Declaration of Intent on cooperation in the field of green hydrogen was signed on 31 May 2023 between Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Eamon Ryan, and the German Federal Research Ministry. Ireland have some the worlds greatest wind energy potential. Lets hope a few timely material science breakthroughs aline in the next decade. My bet...is that the germans will pull it off.
Speaking of Ammonia, there is a Danish company which has produced an electrolysis cell which uses less energy in KW than a state of the art NG to ammonia plant uses in KW (electrical amd thermal) to produce ammonia while producing oxygen. Very interesting
It is striking that only countries with plenty of tax money invest in new nuclear power plants - not private companies at all. Even in Germany, energy executives show no interest. Because they are already aware: Nuclear power plants are much too expensive. No kilowatt-hour from a newly built nuclear power plant can compete with one from a wind turbine or solar panel. The IPCC made this clear in a statement: “Newly constructed nuclear power plants were never competitive and will not be on the foreseeable future.
Each nation on the planet needs to try to master different types of alternative renewable energy resources. One location may have thermal vents for example, one can do safer nuclear, Germany gets Hydrogen. Every system should have a few twin competitor nations. This is all the planet should be focusing on right now, not wars, not great power struggles, because it may already be too late to save the planet from runaway heating where it'll be common place around the globe for it to be 120 degrees in the shade, and we're all forced to become nocturnal & live underground just to survive.
Thank you for another excellent video!
This video did not need to be so damn long.
All modern technologies have been a "gamble " at some point but the ones at the forefront of them have greatly benefit from them.
Hydrogen economy has always been an attractive energy source. Main problem has been economical production and storage, with an additional headache of being highly corrosive if used directly as a combustion source. Fuel cells are still way too expensive, but the hope is there will be a breakthrough at some point. Missing from this great overview is the very interesting technology that produced Hydrogen using high temperature chemical reactions, some of which are very cheap and actually recycle the chemicals making a closed loop system. Pairing this with high temperature focused solar arrays to produce Hydrogen would be the ideal solution.
Very informative, thank you
I am only 5 minutes in and i already am questioning your video. For the statistics, where the hell did you dug those out? Electricity prices are back to normal again. The fear of industtry leaving turns out to be a ghost (i only say intel as one example). Yes gas prices are still high, so heavy industries struggle, but nuclear energy would not have helped with that, as e.g. steelplants do use gas or coal directly. The switching off of the last nuclear power plants was easily caught by other means, mostly green energy and coal. Yes the later is dumb. On the other hand a third of our electricity comes now from windpower. Another 20% from solar. The nuclear plant never had issues in their livetime, but were now long overdue for safety inspections. Also they did not order new fuelrods, which most of the time come from russia (Thats why the french did not want sanctions for Russia on nuklear technologies). But then i see you quoting cicero, a right wing propaganda paper, known for spreading missinformation...
Yes I know, the first minutes are for a dramatic start and a bit of dramatisation has to be. But to say Germany is in a super bad place because they phased out nuclear energy is simply wrong.
However, otherwise this is an amazing video. 👍
i just watched a video, german science woman, dont know her channel, who literally just said hydrogen is the worst thing to rely on. i think I'll take a scientists' word over this
I don’t know, ask the Iron Chancellor.
Please do not cite Cicero's article: Omit some information from your original sources to fit your narrative (see, for example, your quote from Habeck about his exam task; it reads differently in the original compared to your source). It was already too late to continue operating the nuclear power plants, as they had already been running in extended operation longer than planned. The article completely omitted the conclusion of the RWE CEO regarding the phase-out of nuclear power plants.
I'm not too optimistic that the properties of hydrogen can be harnessed to the point of being a commodity. It's a grand goal, though!
If Germany went ALL IN on Nuclear 10-20 years ago, you can bet their GDP would have benefited A LOT!
This is just wrong, plans to stop using nuclear power started in the 2000s. Changes to the atomic energy act in 2002 and so on
No, nuclear is fundamentally supply and demand constrained, just as any other kind of powerplant that directly produces electricity. Hydrogen is not.
Incredible video
China has begun making popular H2 bicycles using a fuel cell and I belive solid state ambient pressure H2 storage. A few seonds to refuel. Check it out.
It is not a political gamble. It is simply our car lobby trying to prevent e-mobility.
"will drag everyone around it down as well" maybe that is the plan, and the bet is Germany will recover faster
Doesnt make one bit of sense
Hydrogen has to be explored. Who is going to pay for it?
Hydrogen has a negative net energy.
Location matters for where new build nuclear is cheaper than alternatives. Existing nuclear is a good bet, but new nuclear is very vulnerable to cost overruns and delays. Europe has pretty poor solar resources and high land costs, but that's not true in other countries.
Thats true in Europe and North America right now. In Asia and the middle east they build in budget and on time. Historically we could build on time in na and Europea too
Dood I thought I told you the u is silent! A gwar-ante is not a gaaraantee!
Good
I love your videos but this was like 90% history and 10% hydrogen
Was für ein McDonald german historic cheeseburger !
To everyone saying that increased natural gas imports make Germany dependant on authoritarian countries:
It's the same with nuclear!
Germany doesn't have massive uranium rescources. U know who has those: RUSSIA!
Before moving off nuclear, most of germany's nuclear rods were imported from Russia, which brings us back to the start
Kazakhstan is the leading producer of uranium. Canada and Australia are significant producers as well.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves
The wiki link is reserves, not production. With investment, russia is only a middling uranium player.
Australia is by far the biggest player. Largest reserves in the world and hey ho, a friendly democratic country to Germany.
The difference is, fuel rod costs are only a small part of nuclear power cost. Natural gas is the largest cost for gas power plants, 4x more cost-dependence than with nuclear fuel.
I always thought that the decision of Germany to get rid of nuclear power after the Fukoshima incident was idiotic. Germany is not on a geological fault line, there are no earth quakes, or threats of Tsunami's. There was absolutely no reason to overreact like that, except for green fear mongering. It seems like societies needs problems to fix. If things are going _too_ well, they'll start breaking things intentionally just so they'd have a problem to fix.
where did the enriched Uranium for the German nuclear power plants come from?
Propably africa or russia or china
@@noheadgaming7393 mostly russia
Again the hydrogen fairytale is mentioned. Hydrogen requires complicated and very expensive infrastructure, it is inefficient and dangerous and does not have any advantage as an energy carrier for household and industrial applications. As a transportation fuel it is ridiculous. It is hard enough to improve the current electricity infrastructure and it is not easy to find enough professionals for maintenance, in many countries. With hydrogen, we just increase the costs, dangers, difficulties and lack of competent workforce to deal with the issues. And there will be more victims.
We as a society are arrogant enough to place unrealistic expectations on the things we create . We expected the titanic to never sink. We filled the hendenberg with hydrogen and expected it to never fall from the sky in flames.
To be clear, because GOOD TIMES BAD TIMES is working with WRONG numbers here:
Electricity production costs of nuclear is over 30 cent/kWh.
Electricity production costs of nuclear is under 10 cent/kWh.
You can go with every serious calculation matrix by these cost and may come to different results (15 cent/kWh nuclear and 3 cent/kWh renewables for example):
But all of them got one thing in common ...Nuclear is at least 3x more expensive than renewables. Not only for Germany, but globally.
Electricity production costs (Stromgestehungskosten in German) are including efforts to build the plant and to operate it till EOL and are excluding the costs of build back and disposal.
Yes but they do not include Cost od fosil backup powerlant tahat Have to be running As backup fór renewables. And sinice spinning IT up takes 18 to 24 Hours IT Have to run nonstop
@@petrhrabal128 Your statement is questionable too:
1. At the beginning (1970/80) of using nuclear plants, these were not adjustable at all.
To deal with this, the government didn't work on to moderate the output of nuclear plants. Instead, they worked very hard to adjust the electric consumption of the people. In example, Belgium build bright lights (no LEDS at this time) for all interstate highways, to drive up electric demand at night. Heating with electricity (France) is another example. And so on...
2. You don't need backup plants for renewables, when there is energy storage. Especially short time storage is much easier to realize nowerdays. Energy storage doesn't need 2 days to start up like a plant.
3. You might discuss, if the capacities for storage has to be added to renewables cost. But the storage costs are not the costs of renewables * 2 (and so it is still cheaper than the renewables/nuclear 1 to 3 ratio).
But energy storage (...which is going to have massive price drops like the renewables got) + renewables got much more benefit (intelligent nets, intelligent energy distribution, stability, ...), than nuclear plants can ever provide.
4. Renewables disrupted and took over the markets and never will go away again. And nuclear plants are highly incompatible with renewables. These are no backup plants.
The answer is: No
As a German historian I commend your analysis! Very well done. I‘ll recommend it to my students.
The bombing of the German fuel industry and the lend-lease programme always reminds me of Ukraines drone warfare and the US/EU support. It will be interesting to see if the Russians made the same mistake as us Germans in attacking Ukraine…
The problem with humanity is that it often has trouble seeing the forest through the trees & all agreeing on something until it's far too late to do anything about it. If we mess up global warming in this century, for the most part our beautiful planet will irreversibly go extinct, or we'll blow ourselves all up trying to learn how in the process, taking us & most other species life on Earth with it on its way out the door.
Whatever we do to the climate, life on earth wouldn't go extinct ...
Excellent video. Germans as perennially losing gamblers. That about sums it up.
It’s a bit ironic to portray nuclear reactors as the provider for future energy needs while criticizing a misguided belief in new technology as some kind of “saving power”
If hydrogen is burnt in a gas furnace, can it reconstitute back into water? If not, should we really be burning the world's water at an industrial scale?
H2 + O2 = H2O
Natural resources cannot be destroyed, only changed, split apart and recombined into different forms. Hydrogen is produced by splitting water into Hydrogen and Oxygen through electrolysis. If you combine them back together again you get water.
(this is high school physics btw)
@@Essah15 Yes I know if you run it through a fuel cell it recombines to form water. I'm talking about if we replace natural gas with it to burn so that they can refine metals, etc. If it combusts, does it really turn back into water?
@@mrmoneyhacks5480yes, yes it does
43:05
I disagree. All countries take massive gambles, constantly. Russia gambled that Ukraine would fall within a week, the US gambles that China wont start a war soon and use the massive advantage in industrial output etc. Such is the life of a nation
Again, you are approaching very political topics. First, you should make the appropriate disclaimers about your own biases and political stand, and then the political stands of the magazines you have used as references. Otherwise, even when potentially with good arguments, you just sound like opposition/party hacks, driven by ideology.
Russia blackmailed Germany? Are you stoned?
So try to answer this question. What fuel in this planet can replace fossil fuels? The only answer is Hydrogen. And when Hydrogen when derived from water goes right back to water when used to generate heat or electricity. No other fuel on earth does this. That’s a fact. Now figure out what the implications of that fact are.
Germany abandoning nuclear energy was such a senseless mistake to make. Who could have known that knocking down all the nuclear reactors in favor of windmills and solar panels that are unreliable and produce a pittance of power in comparison, would cause energy prices to increase dramatically... aren't Germans supposed to be a practical and efficient people? What gives?
They are supposed to be logical, except woke liberalism has dominated their political elites for a while now, and woke liberalism is not pragmatic.
Litterly wrong statistics, nothing is more expenisve then nuclear energy.
Besides the risks everyone tends to forget 2 weeks after every catastrophic event. The immense costs the citizens have to pay by taxes for the plants to be build or maintained..
One of the main reasons is simply the final storage of those rods.. even after decades there is no answer to that question, and betting on a technology to convert those rods into something else is risky at the very best.
@@Gisbert-12843 1. Germany has never had a catastrophic nuclear disaster - not to mention nuclear disasters of any kind are extremely rare. Just don't build nuclear power where earthquakes and tsunamis happen (looking at you Japan).
2. Nuclear power is expensive to get up and running, granted. The massive amount of cheap energy produced offsets that over time, making nuclear power one of the cheapest energy sources (even with construction costs and maintenance considered). I'm sure dismantling over a dozen working nuclear power plants wasn't exactly a taxpayer-friendly endeavor either.
3. Contrary to what you have said, the safety of waste storage has greatly improved over the decades. The waste produced is not large in quantity, is a solid that will not leak, and is rather easily stored on-site at nuclear stations within dry casks.
Even if there are some downsides to nuclear, there are plenty of drawbacks associated with other energy sources that makes nuclear power a viable (and even safer) source when compared to the other options. I firmly believe that most who oppose nuclear power do so for emotional reasons however; they are simply irrationally afraid of it because they think of glowing green barrels from the Simpsons.
Another based Polish man upload 😻
I really appreciate your contributions, but please stop rolling out a huge German historical context in the future, it is completely unnecessary when it comes to hydrogen. Thank you.
German history is the key to understand this story. Unfortunately, history repeats itself
@@michasiedlecki8279 Bullshit this again demagogy against germany and his politics. About hydrogen strategy is this the wrong story, the right one is comparing market and technial aspects as the rule. But the author only wanted to make Germany look bad, so why the constant comparisons with the Nazi era? Germany is a completely different country today and the Nazi era is history. Period.
Hydrogen is an undeniable part of the green future and the faster the world embrace it the better. By the way, there are other green sources of Hydrogen far cheaper than those of solar and wind energy. For engineers the mix of green energies shows already today the path to a clean new world and is no gamble at all.
Green future? Lol
i think its just a fad like ww2 synthetic diesel
The gamble is already lost. The costs of "Energiewnde" are already unsustainable. The state can only produce any advance (networks, infrastructure etc.) with subsidies in hundreds of billions EUR. The project fails right now since the money runs out and the prcoess of transition to wind & solar is still only at less than 20% (of primary energy needs) and the low hanging fruits are already eaten (e.g. locations for solar & wind farms). The harder part lies in front of us.
With EEG & network costs alone, at least a trillion EUR of costs are to expect in next one or two decades.
Meanwhile we still use the worst energy sources lignite and LNG.
Our industry is leaving the country (record high investment loss in 2023). The gamble is already lost.
I only hope the political fallout is not leading to more instability in Germany or Europe again.
The bet is on the R&D dumped into hydrogen. The tech is nowhere near maturity so it's not entirely unreasonable of them to expect the double or even triple the current day efficiency of electrolysis. Let's also not forget that tomorrow's raw resource extraction is going to powered by self driving hydrogen vehicles. Even military vehicles are going to rely on hydrogen, so the Germans and the Japanese are quite wise to enter the hydrogen game head first.
Polish man makes an 1 hour deep dive documentary on german industrial history what a gigachad
The ending of the nuclear power in germany when they already had plants working safely is a tragedy. The dangers of nuclear power are overblown, it resulted in higher emissions. The anti-nuclear element is one of the greens I resent the most.
And the anti house building, forcing young people to rent, which is essentially another subsidy for the old.
Green politics is just fear mongering without any semblance of logic. They fear nuclear energy because 'Muh Chernobyl, muh Fukushima'. Then they get their way nuclear energy is off the table. Then they start panicking because of climate change and co2 emissions. When presented with the fact that nuclear energy is on the low side of co2 emissions, they cry again 'Muh Chernobyl, muh Fukushima' and then proceed to ramp up the use of coal and Russian gas. Then they destroy untouched lands and eco systems to build their wind parks. Funding solar energy in this oh so sunny country is just the icing on the cake...
To be fair only about 10% of Germany's power came from nuclear when the shut off. And 3 of the 6 reactors was to be shut down anyways due to old age. So Germany only lost about 5% of its totalt energy needs.
Fake greens. same way stalin is fake communist
Germany had already spent billions building a new nuclear plant in the 2000's.
It now a theme park.
Germans like hurting themselves
One thing everyone should take into account is that hydrogen is not an energy source, is an energy storage method. Due to conservation of energy it is impossible to recover more (or the same) energy from transforming H into H2O than it takes to transform H2O into H.
Yes, but you can say the same for batteries, electricity is converted to chemical energy and convert back to electricity again, you don’t get the same watts used to charge the battery. They are not as power dense. Burning fossil fuel convert chemicals to heat, turning turbines (kinetic) to dynamo(electricity) lost much more energy. Even combustion engine vehicles lost most of the fuel burned.
Hydrogen is energy intensive to produce, but the fuel cells are very efficient in electricity conversion. That means the H2 can pack more energy than other forms of storage.
To skip the history lesson go to 50 minutes for the hydrogen part. Your should really start using the YT feature to mark video parts for longer videos like this.
THANKS
History is what actually happened, what’s wrong with that?
It's context
One important thing to note is that the initial exit from nuclear power energy in germany was already agreed upon in 2000 under Schröder (SPD/Greens) and then later sped up in 2011 under Merkel (CDU/CSU/FDP).
Edit: This is mentioned later on in the video, but at the start it is emitted, which confused me.
Greens and collaborators are criminals. Bring back GDR anti-wrecking laws.
Also called the Exit of the exit of the exit. As Schröder wanted to phase it out. Merkel reversed that decision, just to reverse back after Fukushima happened.
*omitted
Insane amount of work, love your long vids, thanks man
Love this long form content.
The Hydrogen-Story is not so simple. First: The really big potential in green hydrogen is the possibility to store specifically photovoltaic power, PV is very efficient but has the major flaw of reaching its highest capacity in summer, when the least amount of energy is needed and almost zero in the winter, when energy consumption is highest. And batteries or pump-storage hydro-electricity plants can't manage that. So Green Hydrogen has this important place. And there is also white Hydrogen, thats naturally occuring and can be harvested. The problem here is that we only discovered it in the 80s and the process to understand how this natural effect functions is still in motion. So we don't know yet how to find more white hydrogen and also can't estimate how big the world reserves of it could be. On the engineering level it seems to be a very good solution for everything thats big and has to go far, like Ships, submarines and Trucks but not a solution for small city cars and Scooters
Good comment. White hydrogen got some hype around the beginning of the year with some major discoveries... but no update since then. However, you forget about the less speculative blue hydrogen (converting a mix of fossil fuels and water to a mix of hydrogen and CO2 and subsequently storing the CO2 in suitable underground reservoirs). Blue hydrogen is cheaper today than green hydrogen* and while financial analysts predict the latter to become cheaper than the former in a decade or 2, I think basic thermodynamic considerations give the blue variant a structural edge over the green variant... To bridge the gap between what thermodynamics suggests and the real world you need scientists that build machines that approach the thermodynamic efficiency limits in a cost-effective way and this may be where Germany's belief in technology decides like the video wants to suggest.
*In fact, Biden's IRA seems to have the effect that blue (and opposed to green) hydrogen is about to boom this decade in the US, with the US becoming global hydrogen leader. This context could explain the big attention at COP28 for CCS. Blue hydrogen is usually associated with natural gas as the fossil fuel feedstock (CO2 can typically be stored in the same reservoir where the gas was extracted from), but the Germans are perhaps secretly betting on a variant with coal.
I´m sry but I don´t really like this video.
The title suggests a discussion and analysis on how the German Government handles Hydrogen and if it is a viable solution to a problem Germany faces. This isn´t really the case until the end of the video. It does not matter why Germany lost the second/first world war and the passage for this is way too long. It would´ve been better to categorize the video into chapters, so that one can skip the part that is not really important for a discussion on the future of Hydrogen in Germany. I mean TH-cam already has a feature to split a video into chapters, so that users may skip parts they don´t seem necessary to watch/important. Why not use it?
So yeah this is so far the only video of yours that I´ve disliked because it just drifts too much Off-topic and wastes viewers time in doing so. I did like the endpart however :)
Saying that nuclear power is the cheapest is just too easy.
Yes, how could you even calculate the cost if it is totaly unclear how to store the waste?!
@@kommtzeitkommtradt5969 there is nothing unclear about it. Use reactors that consume waste and build storage inside geological structures.
You see some rocks with layers and swirls? Rock flows, and some rock types trap and store materials geologically.
With careful choice and some digging, you can build a storage warehouse where in 1000 years, the earth will have crushed and sealed it - water tight. Not all rock works like this, but salt domes work well and most of them are already dug out.
These formations exist only in conditions of geological isolation on the scale of thousands of years as a requirement of their formation.
Every salt dome is the perfect storage site.
It's not really the cheapest if you consider the construction costs and the dismantelment afterwards. Both are payed by the taxpayer.
I would say that's not it's biggest selling point.
@@kommtzeitkommtradt5969 at least, you have waste you can store somewhat. thats a major upside against fossil energy, which is the current alternative. and do we really want to calculate the prices against fossil fuel induced global warming? nuclear energy becomes more attractive if you think about it this way. (yes, in the end, everything needs to be renewable anyways, i know, but we're not there yet. and between coal/oil/gas and nuclear, nuclear is a very clear winner imo)
The change in attitude towards nuclear energy was Russian FSB work in Germany. This made it dependent on Russian fossil fuels.
Absolutely 👍. It was Putin's master move. But also American NGOs and lobby are to be blamed.
Nah, we have plenty of idiots here - no need to invoke the Russians. If anything, they might have worked to strengthen or encourage already existing trends as they do in all rival countries.
Shooting ourselves in the foot has been a German tradition since 1914 - no sign of us stopping anytime soon.
Nice theory, but is there any proof?
@@markotrieste Well documented that anti nuclear movement got support from Russia in the 80s. Look around. Afterwards the Russian did it more discreetely
@@michaelrenper796 I know about that. But that interference was Soviet, from the cold war era, and was aimed at nuclear weapons, not power plants, and had nothing to do with energy independence but rather with war preparedness. I thought you had information about recent anti-nuclear-plants propaganda under Putin supervision for energy dependency purposes.
Hydrogen feasibility is quite a challenge for German engineers. Hope some luck goes their way
Sabina Hossenfelder a German physicist with a great science channel explains issues with hydrogen. Both Germany and Japan are going the hydrogen route, with the two of them teaming up what could go wrong? Honestly, I hope they succeed they are two of my favorite countries.
If they're using for plane i can get behind it because battery add alot of weight and unlike gas thye don't get lighter but everything else go electric for vehicles and any machine or nuclear and renewable for power hydrogen dont make sense to me
Remember Zeppelin?
It makes no sense to convert green electricity into hydrogen. That process alone is only 85% efficient. And then combusting the hydrogen for transportation is at best 60% efficient with today's technology. That's a 55% loss compared to just using the electricity.
@@ChrisTaylor-NEP For sure. Hydrogen is only useful as a last resort. If it can be easily electrified, that's the first choice. It's simply more efficient.
Well it is oversimplyfied to speak about hydrogen only in terms of powering cars.
There are plenty of uses where hydrogen is the only viable alternative to fossil carbohydrates:
- Steel. Chemical reduction of iron ores via hydogen is the only viable alternative to using coke (coal).
- High temperature processes. Glass, ceramics, cement, metallurgy etc. etc. is made at temperatures above 1000°C that cannot be electrified economically due to Ohm's LAw (higher temperature = higher resistance). You need a flame and the only viable alternative to natural gas is hydrogen.
- Organic chemistry. Everything from plastics, sythetic fibres, medicine etc. etc. is made of organic compoungs e.g. hydrocarbons. Those chemicals are made of carbon and hydrogen. The only alternative to using fossil carbohydrates as base chemicals is to produce hydrocarbon from biomatter. But there's a limit to sustainable production without interfereing in food production and converting more land for agriculture. Everything beyond that would need to be produced via direct synthesis of simple hydrocarbons like methane, methanole, formic acid or formaldehyde via CO2 and hydrogen and build everything else with these basic blocks.
- Ammonia production. Ammonia is also an important base chemical without which we wouldn't have fertilizer, explosives and dyes would cost a fortune. It needs hydrogen to produce.
- Global energy trade. Not every place with an excess supply of renewable energy can be physically linked via cable to a place with a demand for energy. In this case a major alternative to trading fossil fuels would be to ship hydrogen or synthetic fuels produced with hydrogen.
- Ships, planes and large machines. Imagine a plane taking five stops to recharge or a construction side being paused three times a day to recharge machines. Insane. You need synthetic fuels produced with hydrogen to keep the economy going.
Conclusion: Hydrogen will be an essential component of a fossil free economy. There is simply no working solution that can cover all the listed aspects in one system.
Germany examplfies great foresight in this field. I hope they will be succesful, they deserve it.
PS:
Steam engines are 10% efficient.
That's the difference between a pre-modern agrarian and an industrialized society.
Diesel engines are 30% efficient.
That's the difference between the 19th century and today.
60% efficiency is absolutely fantastic. It means a golden future for humanity if we avoid climate catastrophy.
NOT transforming the energy economy is the riskiest thing we can do.
Too much irrelevant waffle.
3 cents of electricity from nuclear power is a huge BS! This not includes the demolition of the power plant and the cost of storing the waste forever!
3 cents are fake costs. These were calculated by assuming a superficial best case scenario with 100% workload 24/7/365 over the whole lifespan (30 to 40 years).
30 to 40 years for a nuclear installation? Try 60 to 80. You’re a bloody liar or a bloody fool.
It is true, in Sweden we do it right now att that cost. Including demolition. The problem is that you need to keep the power plants for a verry long time
I like a lot both channels, in English and in Polish. I'd like to have a subtitled version for the polish channel (could be automatic Closed Captions even), it would help me to improve my polish significantly.
I liked this video very much