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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Bowing to public pressure on climate change, Germany on Thursday promised to speed up its exit from coal power generation and to pay operators compensation in a strategy instantly rejected by environmental campaigners. With the announcement that coals could be history by 2035, instead of 2038 as previously planned, "the exit from coal begins now, and it's binding," Environment Minister Svenja Schulze told reporters in Berlin.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and premiers from the states of Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg agreed overnight a "shutdown plan" for the country's power plants using the highly polluting fossil fuel. The scheme will be written into a draft law set to be presented later this month and ratified by mid-2019. Meanwhile the government will compensate coal plant operators to the tune of 4.35 billion euros ($4.9 billion) for plants set to fall off the grid in the 2020s alone, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said.
The payouts "will be spread out over the 15 years following the shutdown" and represent an "affordable and in my view good result," Scholz added.
Giant RWE, with its power stations in North Rhine-Westphalia, will take the lion's share at 2.6 billion euros. But the group complained that was "well below" the 3.5 billion of losses it expects.
Some 3,000 jobs are set to go at the energy firm "in the short term" and 6,000 by 2030, mostly via early retirement, RWE added. That represents around 60 percent of RWE workers in the especially dirty brown-coal sector and one-quarter of the company's total workforce.
[...] A plan agreed in December under pressure from demonstrators calls for Germany to reduce output of greenhouse gases by 55 percent compared with 1990's levels.
The country has already admitted it will miss an intermediate target for 2020.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday January 20 2020, @12:45AM (2 children)
Problem is that renewable is either solar, in a country that gets next to no sun between about November and March (either because of limited daylight hours or because the sky is end-to-end dull leaden grey), and wind, which is mostly on or near the north sea and in the Bundestag. It'll be interesting so see how they dig themselves out of this one.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 20 2020, @01:08AM (1 child)
I hear the North Sea sports some yuuge waves [energyvoice.com] most of the year 'round.
Maybe by negotiating with their union co-member, Portugal? I hear those have quite a good experience [wikipedia.org] with renewables. Likely sie Germans will need to give something in return to the Portuguese, but it doesn't seem to me as a preposterous and impossible idea.
Hint: as weird as it may sound (to americans?), humanity have more means to evolve than only competition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 20 2020, @03:46PM
Should you ever run across these means, please tell us. In the meantime, we have several large countries with different competing methods of power generation and such. I think it'll be more educational than everyone stumbling along the same track.