I think this headline is misleading.

A better headline might read: “Coal found beneath wind farm. Turbines dismantled to make room for mining operation.”

Delete this InfoWars-level bs misinformation meant to smear clean energy.

One small privately owned wind farm is being disassembled, this is not a general new policy or anything signalling a shift away from clean energy.

Ban straws! (even though disabled people need them and they create negligible pollution)

Replace your car with an electric one! (even though it still works fine and will end up in landfill, never mind the environmental cost of producing the new one, or the source of the electricity it uses)

Reduce your carbon footprint! (even though its a term we invented ourselves to shift responsibility to you, while we fly our private jets around creating more pollution than you ever could in 10 lifetimes)

Recycle! (even though 90% of it ends up in landfill anyway because we don't want to pay to actually recycle it)

All equates to

Look the other way while we continue to rape the planet and blame it on you!!!

Never forget - capitalists (and the governments they're co-dependent on) only want more money, they don't car about you or me or the planet, only about themsleves and the numbers in their accounts, and they will never willingly stop doing whatever it takes to make more.

I live next to this coal mine and the wind farm is on my monthly Autobahn trip right next to me. Maybe to shed some light on the "why":

The coal mine was scheduled to be mined until 2038. The plan was to extend the mine to the west, the wind farm is to the east of the coal mine. RWE of course has big investments into mining this lignite until the very last possible day. There are problems with extending to the west though: old towns still exist there and the residents would of course love to stay in their homes the family had for generations. To the east, where the wind farm is, there is nothing but fields and some wind turbines. There are about 150 turbines in the wind farm and ~15 of them are standing where the mine is extending to now. Those 15 also were the first to be built for the wind farm and they are nearly at the end of their lifespan, some of them are even deemed structurally unsafe.

Of course it would be better to stop mining the lignite but decades ago the contracts with RWE were made and just forcing a company out of a contract that is worth billions of Euros is extremely bad precedent and would hinder future investions. Buying out the contract to cease mining faster also was not possible, because RWE was unwilling to settle for a reasonable sum of money.

That's an old wind farm that would be due being taken down. Wind turbines have a finite life span, they oscillate slightly and this loosens the ground around the base, so after around 30 years they're taken down. Typically they end up being sold to poorer countries where they're installed on a new base.

It's about density. Renewables Are great, but not on terms of value add per square foot. The coal under the wind mill is worth orders of magnitude more than the windmill.

And, it's not as bad as it sounds. In general, the number of windmills keeps increasing.

Germany is basically what happens when an entire country embraces greenwashing as its ideology.

I thought renewables were cheaper than coal. How is this possible?

Renewables are cheaper than coal.

What you've misunderstood about capitalism is it's not the thing that is cheapest that gets investment. The investment goes to the thing that gives you the highest ROI, return on investment.

If it produces a better ROI per square meter, it gets the investment.

The problem is capitalism.

Germany's green energy push was secretly propped up by outsourcing fossil fuel needs to Russian natural gas. The war in Ukraine and America subsequently blowing up the Nordstream 2 pipeline means Germany will need to find new alternatives to feeding their energy needs. One could hope this results in a speed up of green tech development as it becomes more of a pressing necessity than just, you know, the right thing to do. And hey speaking of knowing the right thing to do and then not doing it because of the perverse economic incentives for ignoring it, it's funny to note that the global leader in green tech is China but due to this new cold war the US is brewing and due to Germany's newly-humbled-into role as Jr Junior partner to the US there's no way there will be the necessary cooperation there between national tech sectors

Just shows how green capitalism is just a waste of time. You'd think a country as geographically small and vulnerable as Germany would take this into account but guess not.

The tile is dangerously misleading. OP, please...

Maybe they should support more nazis, sanctions against other fuel resources and further terrorist attacks against peaceful infrastructure by their so called "allies".

I thought renewables were cheaper than coal. How is this possible?

The value is simply more densely packed in the coal under the wind farm than in the surface area of the wind farm.

I thought renewables were cheaper than coal. How is this possible?

This is one of those in general vs in particular things.

In general, yes coal is way more expensive versus renewable energy. In this particular instance, they’re just expanding the site, all of the really expensive stuff like logistics and transportation are already paid.

This is the same reason just keeping old nuclear plants running is cheaper than building a new one. Each industry has expensive parts and cheap parts. If you’re doing something that only expands the cheap parts then you’ll be able to beat out competitors.

Naturally, they will inevitably pin the blame on China so :germany-cool: can build more coal guilt-free

The linked article is two sentences long and offers no context or understanding of the situation. It might as well be a headline. The only useful part of it is the photo of the wind farm being dismantled, which also shows a completely different wind farm in the background, on the other side of the expanding mine, that is not being dismantled:

But you wouldn't realize that just from reading the article.

My understanding based on this much better article from Recharge News is that the following information is critical to understanding this decision:

First, the wind farm being dismantled is the Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm, which consists of 8 turbines built over 20 years ago in 2001, totaling just over 10 MW of capacity (1.3 MW each). Recently constructed wind turbine power outputs are estimated at a 42% capacity factor, which is to say they generate about 42% of the peak power they're rated for because wind isn't always blowing; this would likely be lower for the older wind farm, but we'll use the current amount. The 10 MW wind farm would have made 3 GWh per month, which based on an average of 893 kWh per month per household is enough to power... 3386 homes [edit: corrected my horrible math]. Not nothing, but not a lot by modern standards considering the Chinese just built a single wind turbine that outdoes the entire Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm by half and then some.

Furthermore, as the turbines were built 20 years ago, they were always going to be decommissioned around this time, and that's documented in the agreements back then under which the turbines were built. RWE continues to construct many turbines elsewhere, claiming 7.2 GW of turbines are currently under construction, 720 times the rated output of the Keyenberg-Holzweiler wind farm. They've also built 200 MW of wind capacity in that locality, likely what we see in the background of that image.

If RWE were to replace the turbines that are being decommissioned, the coal underneath them will be worthless by the time the new turbines are decommissioned, and it's supposedly the last of the coal they will be allowed to dig up. They've clearly made huge investments in building out wind power, so this represents the last vestiges of cleaning up their act.

I could not advocate more strongly that coal should be left in the ground, but this all comes down to corporate investors who care more about money than the environment, and agreements made 20 years ago, as well as the fact Germany and much of the EU is still desperate for any source of energy to maintain their current level of industry right now while they're still building out carbon-free generation to fully replace coal/oil/gas. Reality is complex, and to me this isn't as big of an insult to clean energy advocacy as the microscopic EUObserver "article" could lead one to think it is.

Coal is still dying in the West, so let's not go thinking this one last gasp means that trend has changed. If we're lucky, and demand for coal falls quickly enough, they might even scrap this mine before they've gotten everything out of it. Keep pushing!

12ft paywall removed link

The demolitions are part of a deal brokered last year between Robert Habeck, the Green party's minister for economy and climate action and Mona Neubaur, who is the economy minister for North Rhine Westphalia, to allow the expansion of the mine.

In return, RWE had to agree to phase out coal in 2030, eight years before the previous deadline. "It's a good day for climate protection," Habeck said at the time.

What’s the timeline for getting this expansion built? And what’s the lifecycle of the plant? I understand there are energy scarcity concerns, but how is this the most economical option when it’s ~7 years until they’re supposed to phase out coal?

Didn't the green party in Germany have power in government right now? And weren't they the same guys who dismantled their nuclear plants?

I'm not very informed on German politics but if the answer to both was yes they should really rename their green party to the oil party.

One on those wind turbines can provide about 16.000 households with energy. This coal thing is RWE pushing for rights to tap more fossil resources in Germany. Way to go boomers