As a Greens voter who hasn't really kept up with this specific topic: What's the argument for stopping Nordstream 2 exactly? I know the Greens are against the pipeline. I'm all for focusing on renewables and not giving more influence to Russia, but is the project even preventing that? It's not like Germany is suddenly going to import a ton more gas from there, but is instead cutting out the middlemen that are Ukraine and Poland where existing pipelines run through instead for purely cost reasons.
I imagine the concern might be Ukraine losing that leverage as a non-NATO member after what happened 2014 and Germany having less of a reason to help them out. But that's really the only angle I can think of.
Asking purely out of informational reasons.
In short: Because there is a chance that our dependency on gas will be higher in the future once we are out of coal, which will give Putin a lot more leverage over this country.
Why will we need more gas in the future? Because our energy needs will go up as we are phasing out things like the combustion engine and oil/coal home heating. And because Gas Power Plants are the perfect power gap fillers. They have the ability to go from off to on quickly and vice versa, while being more efficient than coal plants. For a stable power grid you always need to have supply and demand in harmony. No matter how much solar we build, it won't give us energy at night. Building wind farms in the north sea will give us more or less reliable numbers, but getting all that from the north to the south is bound to significant energy loss.
In a perfect world, we would be massively investing into battery and battery like systems to save energy during green overproduction, alongside building a green grid. But that's not something even the greens are talking about and even in that scenario we would need gas power plants as back up systems.
Instead our government is putting the duty of saving green overproduction on citizens and there is no plan to change that from either party!
Our solar grid is currently as decentralised as it gets. We are building 5GW solar per year and most of it (like 90%) is from people putting solar roofs on their own homes. The current government is hard limiting the energy selling price for those private investments. If you install a solar roof today, you will only get 0.07€/kWh that goes into the grid, while the average buy price is 0.30€/kWh. This gives energy providers massive profit margins while not having to invest any of their own money. But it also forces people to buy expensive home batteries to make the most out of their investment. The plan is even to give people zero money for "over" produced energy. And still people are investing into that tech like crazy. 16% of the "Einfamilienhäuser" in my city are already equipped with solar tech.
By the way, if you order a solar roof today, you have to wait for 8+ months. The infrastructure to build more than 5GW isn't even there...
California has the most reasonable energy concept. They are using nuclear energy to have a certain, low, base level of energy, they are massively investing into private, home solar panels and into huge, professional facilities. While building massive battery stations and new, even more efficient gas power plants.
That's a concept that I understand. What our parties are throwing at us are hashtags.
Long Story short: Because we have no clear, good green energy concept. We will probably need even more gas in the future. Because all we have is an insignificant amount of green energy, not enough capacity to save green overproduction and gas will be used to make up for that.
Beautiful
