Post "nuclear phase out": New coal plants planned in Germany now number 26.

[NNadir]

I thought Germany was going to become a renewable paradise with solar and wind?

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2007/gb20070321_923592.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

Despite the Chancellor's push for climate protection, energy companies' plans for 26 new coal-fired power plants are likely to win approval.

Everyone in Germany is talking about climate protection -- everyone, that is, except for energy companies. They're planning to build dozens of new coal-fired power plants -- with the support of the governing coalition in Berlin.

The environment certainly seems to be in safe hands at the German chancellery in central Berlin, located next to the leafy Tiergarten park. Global warming and climate change is German Chancellor Angela Merkel's current favorite topic.

"The situation is threatening. There are fewer and fewer glaciers in the mountains. Storms are getting stronger," she lectures one audience. "We have to change course now," is another typical statement.

But it's a different story just a few kilometers away in a decrepit industrial park in the eastern Berlin neighborhood of Lichtenberg. There, energy provider Vattenfall is planning a project that hardly seems compatible with Merkel's grand plans for saving the climate.

The company wants to build a new coal-fired power plant there by 2012. The plan is for the new plant to burn up two million tons of Polish coal a year and provide a solid 800 megawatt electricity output, in addition to 600 megawatts of heat.

That's nice for Vattenfall, but less so for the climate...

[Dead_Parrot]

1. It WILL be a renewable paradise...

...in ten million years, when homo "sapiens" has died out and the biosphere has recovered.

You've got to take the long-term view, y'know.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. "likely to win approval"?!? Aber WARUM, bitte ??

Is this gov't totally powerless to prevent commissioning of new CO2 plants (aka coal-burning power plants)? Is five years' warning just not enough? Or is this just a flaw in the parliamentary approach to gov't?

[NNadir]

3. The Germans are incapable of producing greenhouse free energy without

nuclear.

The only nations that can produce greenhouse free energy without nuclear have huge hydroelectric or geothermal resources. This is because these are the only forms of renewable energy that are available continuously and on demand.

I am not allowed to state here the relationship between the anti-nuclear position and support for fossil fuels, but in any case this data point makes it obvious.

My opinion is that nobody was happier than the German coal industry when the idiotic nuclear phase-out was announced. Coal cannot be banned without nuclear.