German energy policy moves from expensive stuff that doesn't work well to stuff that doesn't exist.
Um, OK...
Germany’s Merz: Nuclear fusion to make wind power obsolete
The participants in this week’s North Sea Summit in Hamburg committed to building 15 GW of offshore wind per year over 2031-2040. Country leaders including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirmed the goal of 300 GW on the so-called North Seas by 2050. At the same time, he apparently believes that wind turbines will begin to be dismantled much sooner!
Wind power is a “transitional technology” and it will be around for “ten, twenty, maybe thirty years,” Merz claimed, as quoted by Bild. He expressed confidence that Germany would put the world’s first fusion reactor online and estimated it would make electricity so cheap that no other generation methods would be needed.
Merz said repeatedly that the nuclear exit was a mistake
The country abandoned investments in nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster and prompted early closure of all reactors. Causing much controversy, especially during the recent energy crisis, the phaseout was completed in 2023.
In the campaign before last year’s elections, Merz called wind turbines ugly, adding that he’d like if they could eventually be taken down. He recently said the nuclear exit was a “huge strategic mistake” that caused “the most expensive energy transition in the entire world...”
Nuclear fission works, is cleaner and safer than coal, on which Germany now depends, and far more reliable and sustainable than so called "renewable energy." There is no evidence that fusion ever will drive a power plant.
= new reply since forum marked as read
As the German assholes have shown, definitively, a commitment to so called "renewable energy" is a commitment to fossil fuels, excessive mining, the destruction of wilderness, and, clearly, an effort to rob the poor to enrich the rich.
Germany is a coal dependent nation; coal plants kill people whenever they operate normally.
The aesthetics involved in calling industrial parks for wind turbines "sculptures" is right out of Ayn Randian contempt for the environment; I am personally appalled and offended by the marketing that shows vast stretches of once virgin wilderness with microplastic spewing unsustainable short lived industrial junk that will become landfill within 20 years.
The single nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon in California produces, far more reliably, more electricity, on a twelve acre footprint more energy than thousands of square miles of wind turbine industrial plants spread across thousands of square miles of once pristine desert ecosystems.
Electricity generation in California, by Source.
Anyone, and I do mean anyone who applauds this outcome in that coal dependent hellhole Germany, to my mind is not an environmentalist, but is merely an easily manipulated rote thinker.
I would add that anyone who is betting the future of one's country, and in fact, the future of the world on nuclear fusion - and to be clear I support plasma physics research - is demonstrating contempt for the future of humanity, and is clearly unfamiliar with even the basic tenets of industrial and academic science.
The result of this "renewable energy will save us" pro-mining, pro-development attitude is written in the planetary atmosphere, which is collapsing leaving the planet in flames.
In the 23 years I've been writing at DU listening to mindless antinukes pratting on about tearing the shit out of the planet for so called "renewable energy" the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide (not to mention the other heavy metal and carcinogenic particulates associated with fossil fuels) has risen, since the week beginning November 17, 2002, by 55.71 ppm as of this writing, from 369.74 ppm to (as of the week beginning January 25, 2026) to 428.39 ppm.
This has come at a cost of vast subsidy to the rich paid by the poor on a scale of trillions of dollars, this on a burning planet where around 1 billion people lack access to improved sanitation.
The myopic airheads in the fossil fuel coddling antinuke industry who praise so called "renewable energy" have such obscene indifference to reality as to actually complain about nuclear subsidies. They are obviously incapable of understanding economics, just as the can't compare the vast ongoing death toll associated with fossil fuels, about which they have never given a rat's ass.
IEA overview, Energy Investments.
The graphic is interactive at the link; one can calculate overall expenditures on what the IEA dubiously calls "clean energy."
The bourgeois poorly educated antinukes applauding this outcome, to my mind, lack even a trace of decency or even a trace of moral awareness.
The last best hope of humanity, capable of doing less and less while bourgeois brats pick lint out of their navels complaining about things they are incapable of understanding, chanting silly slogans, is nuclear fission energy. It's here; it works; and it saves human lives and in fact, vast stretches of increasingly disappearing wilderness, and slows the rate of the degradation of the planetary atmosphere.
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
The German nuclear phase out was not only an economic crime; it was a crime against humanity and, in fact, against the planet's ecosystems.
Clearly, it disgusts me.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
This is obviously not because I agree with any of the nonsense in it, but rather because it reinforces my definition of what a cult is.
My definition of a cult is an organization comprised of people whose beliefs cannot be changed by any amount of information.
I track the information released as pure numerical data at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory, each spring reporting here on the setting of new records, which, of course, have been occurring every spring of every year in this century, and, indeed before it.
I generally, since the records appear regularly in spring, to save time, repeat some of the language, adding updates as necessary.
For example, from this sample from the series, from April 20th of last year: New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 430.19 ppm
The relevant excerpt:
This is the first reading to exceed 430 ppm in the history of the Observatory. The first reading to exceed 400 ppm took place not so long ago, the week beginning May 26, 2013, week 22 of that year, when the reading was 400.03 ppm.
We're doing swell, aren't we?
Four of these readings exceed increases of 5.00 ppm, three of which were in 2024. Of the top 50 week to week/year to year comparators 24 have taken place in the last 5 years of which 13 occurred in 2024, 3 in 2025, 40 in the last 10 years, and 45 in this century.
Of the five readings from the 20th century, four occurred in 1998, when huge stretches of the Malaysian and Indonesian rainforests caught fire when slash and burn fires went out of control. These fires were set deliberately, designed to add palm oil plantations to satisfy the demand for "renewable" biodiesel for German cars and trucks as part of their "renewable energy portfolio." The only other reading from the 20th century to appear in the top 50 occurred in the week beginning August 21, 1988, which was 3.91 ppm higher than the same week of the previous year. For about ten years, until July of 1998, it was the highest reading ever recorded. It is now the 44th highest...
The obvious conclusion is that in the 21st century things with respect to the accumulation of the dangerous fossil fuel waste are getting worse faster.
In this thread I posted information on how much money has been spent in this century on so called "renewable energy in this century."
Often when appealing to these figures, I point out that the trillions squandered on this pixilated scheme is greater than the gross national product of India, a nation with more than 1 billion human beings living in it.
As a person who cares about human poverty, I think this a disgrace.
It is obvious that "investment" in so called "renewable energy" has only made things worse, not better. It shouldn't take too many brains to conclude that so called "renewable energy" has nothing to do with addressing the use of fossil fuels nor their effect on the climate. So what is the real purpose of this cult thinking?
I've been here for more than 23 years. In those 23 years, there are very few posters in this forum, in which I've participated on and off, who come in handing out nonsensical dogma, easily dismissed with real numbers, that so called "renewable energy" has something to do with the collapse of the world climate, who don't start out bad mouthing nuclear energy. In fact, they almost never give up this line of toxic and deadly shit. They have certain slogans they chant, for example "nuclear energy is too expensive" as if the collapse of the planetary climate isn't "too expensive;" "nuclear energy is too dangerous" despite its extraordinary low death toll compared to deaths from fossil fuels on which so called "renewable energy" depends, prattling on about so called "nuclear waste," which is what they insipidly call valuable used nuclear fuel, which has a spectacular record of not killing anyone while fossil fuel waste, air pollution and climate collapse kill millions of people each year. Another real whopper is that nuclear energy is dependent of subsidies, an incredible bit of hypocrisy given that as of 2025, subsidies for the useless "renewable energy" industry are an order of magnitude higher than those paid for nuclear energy,
I often post here the numbers in units of energy, the Exajoule, as opposed to units of power, Watts, misleadingly applied to support the useless "renewable energy" industry, since peak Watts are meaningless if reliability is random and capacity utilization is well below 35%, with solar and wind rarely if ever, obtaining extended periods of matching that figure, the data from the IEA, generally from the World Energy Outlook, an annual publication it releases every November, which I have been tracking and downloading since the late 20th century.
Here, from the most recent edition, is the figures, in Exajoules, for the primary energy produced from each energy source in the most recent edition World Energy Outlook 2025:
Page 420.
For convenience, I've also put together a spreadsheet covering data from selected years:
(Some of the earlier editions used the unit MTOE - million tons oil equivalent - but have been converted to the SI unit EJ in the table.)
A spreadsheet of reflecting a decade of the IEA's World Energy Outlook data for consumption and sources of energy.
A tell from the members of the antinuke "renewable energy will save us" cults, is reference to the WEO with an illiterate interpretation of what it says and means. Often this takes the form of declaring soothsaying more valuable than data. I have no use for soothsaying although as a scientist I am trained to respect data. There is a difference, and poor thinkers in my experience are more fond of soothsaying than data.
Now we here that "investment" is the same as "success" and "rewards."
Lot's of people "invested" in Bernie Madoff's investment firm. They lost almost everything.
There are wise investments and there are stupid investments.
As a planet, we have, to be sure, "invested" in so called "renewable energy," again on a trillion dollar scale, and robbed the future generations of wilderness, mined the shit out of the planet's best ores, leaving little for the future other than piles of tailings and other waste, and, oh yeah, a destroyed planetary atmosphere. This was not a wise investment, since the result was a huge loss, a loss humanity cannot even begin to afford, the destruction of the planetary atmosphere.
Let me say that again:
We lost the planet's atmosphere.
One would need to be in a cult to not understand that.
Have a nice work week. Again, I'm pleased to award you a DU Star for giving a chance to display how cult thinking works.