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PEVEI t1_j4xemt6 wrote

Reply to comment by Fa1n in Germany says it is no longer reliant on Russian energy by scot816

Saying “just” doesn’t make it easy.

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Prinzmegaherz t1_j4ywoxd wrote

It seems that we can build lot‘s of LNG terminals in a short amount of times, but not renewables. They seem to take a looooong time here.

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YeaISeddit t1_j4z59ge wrote

Each of these terminals can bring in between 50-100 TWh of energy while Germany is adding around 20-30 TWh of renewable energy per year. The obvious reason for the difference is upfront cost. The cost for each of these 50 TWh terminals is around 1 billion euro, while the cost to build 50 TWh of yearly solar capacity currently costs 150 billion euros. So the upfront costs are 150x higher for solar.

Obviously there are differences in costs of operation of the facilities since gas costs money and the sun is free. But upfront costs are the big hinderance for now.

To replace the 800 TWh of energy capacity from Russian gas, Germany would have to spend around 2.5 Trillion Euro, equivalent to 6 years of the German government's entire budget, whereas with LNG terminals it can be done for 16 billion or 4% of the government's yearly budget. Given the extremely tight time window to accomplish the transition, LNG is the obvious choice.

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directstranger t1_j503nrg wrote

You also need gas to go hand in hand with renewables, each TW of renewables needs 1TW insalled in gas, for backup.

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LefthandedCrusader t1_j4zqcos wrote

Last year Germany installed 9GW solar and more than 3GW wind capacity. Not bad.

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kraenk12 t1_j51xf39 wrote

Renewable energy has been growing fast and is the highest among comparable Western European countries.

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