Yet another Hacker News

Germany turning abandoned coal mines into 23 lakes, becoming artificial wetland

61 points ohjeez 1 hour ago 20 comments

wg0 1 hour ago | parent

Now please bring back solar + nuclear energy and stop pretending that burning oil is cleaner.

BlackRabbit1 1 hour ago | parent

We are currently busy building new gas turbines. lol.

eigenspace 52 minutes ago | parent

Even if the number of gas turbines will increase (it's not increasing nearly as much as you'd think if you just look at the number being built, because old ones are also being decomissioned), the amount of gas being burnt on an annual level is going to be going down. These gas plants are for bridging gaps left open by wind and solar which cannot yet be covered by batteries.

If you believe in the transition to renewables, Germany fundamentally does still need gas turbines to make that happen, more than we currently have.

bryanlarsen 49 minutes ago | parent

That's not inconsistent. A robust grid will have enough capacity of any sort to cover peak demand during a dankelflaute but enough zero-emissions generation and storage to cover generation at all other times.

And that's exactly what Germany is doing. Their natural gas plants only run ~15% of the time. Usage is going down faster than capacity is going up.

KyleTheDev 44 minutes ago | parent

TIL Dankelflaute, a time when it is too dark with too little wind for either solar or wind energy generation. Thank you for this amazing word.

bryanlarsen 42 minutes ago | parent

It has to be scoped by area. A Dankelflaute that covers the European continent has never been observed. OTOH, a Dankelflaute that covers only Germany is a regular occurrence.

Tomte 37 minutes ago | parent

Because everyone copies it: the word is Dunkelflaute. U, not a.

rdudek 38 minutes ago | parent

I hear there is a shortage of blades for the turbines.

soco 55 minutes ago | parent

Added 17GW solar in the last 12 months, reached 129GW: https://solarzubau.de/deutschland/

eigenspace 50 minutes ago | parent

Why mention nuclear but not wind? Wind has nearly as low an LCOE as solar, and is still dropping too, and wind power is anti-correlated with solar power, meaning we get more wind at night and in the winter.

dgellow 34 minutes ago | parent

The north, where I live, has lots of windmills and more is being built

wg0 14 minutes ago | parent

Yeah wind too.

Zigurd 34 minutes ago | parent

One of these things is not like the other. You can have solar next week at a reliable price and you'll be able to buy insurance for your solar array on the private market. Nuclear isn't going to happen no matter how many data center projects get hyped. No nuclear project will be complete before we're all talking about data centers like we talk about the Metaverse.

axus 37 minutes ago | parent

Haunted Hydrology's video for October 8 is about divers in flooded mines:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/V-HW5HAL7Lk

m4rtink 23 minutes ago | parent

This is quite normal thing to do for many open pit mines or rather hard not to do if the pit goes below the water table.

There are some very nice natural swimming pools in the local area thanks to that, for example:

https://www.kudyznudy.cz/aktivity/koupaliste-u-libuse-v-lule... (stone quarry, IMHO one of the best summer swimming pools anywhere)

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zatopen%C3%BD_lom_v_Blansku (stone quarry)

https://www.jednoustopouceskem.cz/listing/lom-kaolinka-prime... (kaolin mine)

jmlim00 8 minutes ago | parent

I recently went swimming in one of these submerged mines/quarries in North America. This one flooded during a severe hurricane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Brownstone_Quarries

pretzellogician 18 minutes ago | parent

These strip mine reclamations are just great.

In the 1990s, we lived on a lake in Indiana that was reclaimed from strip mines. Recommended.

vitaflo 4 minutes ago | parent

There are lots of these in northern Minnesota and they used the tailings to turn the areas into some really great mountain biking trails, which really helps those old mining towns.

nurettin 16 minutes ago | parent

Germany is pretty famous for tagebaurekultivierung.

jttnr 16 minutes ago | parent

On the one hand, it's nice that they're doing it.

One might think that they've come to the conclusion that it's time to phase out coal and move towards renewables. But coal is still big in Germany, and with the current Minister for Economic Affairs, Katarina Reiche [1], the fossil fuel lobby has installed a puppet in that position, one who is going all in on fossils again and pushing legislation that makes it much harder to expand solar and wind capacity. Even though no one needs coal anymore, big companies like RWE still forcibly demolish villages to expand their mines and show off their power .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherina_Reiche [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine