Burying the problem?

As I continue last weeks’ path of Germany’ s nuclear phase out, I today will deal with another difficulty the country is now facing.

German Chancellor Merkel admitted the shift from nuclear to renewable energy can only be achieved by making use of fossil fuels for the time in between.

“If we want to exit nuclear energy and enter renewable energy, for the transition time we need fossil power plants, at least 10, more likely 20 gigawatts [of fossil capacity] need to be built in the coming 10 years“, Merkel said in a parliamentary declaration.

This will of course cause short- to mid- term increases in CO2 emissions, but since another governmental goal is also the reduction of CO2 emissions, politicians are facing a major task.

The solution to this problem might be a technology called “Carbon Capture and storage”. To see how this might help, check out the following video:

New Dawn for Solar Energy

In this week`s post, I will continue illuminating the German nuclear phaseout as I did in my last two posts. This topic also gained in relevance as the Italians decided not to build nuclear power plants in their own country 2 days ago.

I n my last post, I dealt with on- and offshore wind energy and to continue the path of the renewables, I  chose solar energy as this week’s theme.

Currently, according to statista.com, only 1.1 % of the total electricity generation comes from photovoltaics, due mostly to its high price. However, as you can see in the statistics below, the solar energy is the one whose share is to increase the most compared to the other kinds of renewable energies. 

A Breath of Fresh Air for German Energy

Last week, I presented Germany’s planned nuclear phaseout. As the German government intends to replace nuclear energy by energy from renewable sources, I decided to illuminate how this ambitious goal can be achieved. This week, I focused on, according to renewable energy expert Patrick Kenji Takahashi, who I will refer to in more detail later on,  “the most cost effective of all the renewables”: the wind energy.

According to an article from the Environment News Service, Germany does not only plan to abolish the usage of nuclear energy, it furthermore gave out the objective to reduce its CO2 emission by 40% and double its use of renewable energies by 2022. The same article also states that currently, 370.000 people work in the field of renewable energies. And the experts are agreed what is the strongest force in this strikingly important economic sector: guess what, it is the wind energy again.

Want new shoes? – I print you some.

We can almost call it Bergfest as we are working on our 5^th post of the current semester. Accordingly, I can resume that my field of interest has taken on an interesting form: Having been convinced about sticking to anything that is green (this might have been an act of coloring any possible, negative effect of information technologies), I suddenly found myself in the middle of a new discussion: Viral marketing. Let me tell you, this truly meant a lot considering marketing not really being of any interest to me. Even better, I actually had fun writing this blog post.

So there I was, stuck between the nostalgic and the experimental student which meant staying green or moving on. For this, I thank the news for the headline Trade Fair: LASER World of Photonics 2011 and the so- called 3D printer for having caught my attention. Let’s step into something innovative and futuristic!

“greenwashing” – A fairy tale of the green giant!

Once upon a time, there was a huge giant covered in a cloak of trees, playing with the clouds, roaming the woods and valleys, and listening to the harmonies of willows blowing softly in the wind; he surely beamed with joy and sereneness. He was kind, the green giant: He cropped little wind generators, played the strings of overhead power lines and arranged tidal power plants in the infinite vastness of the ocean.

It can be so easy to make big things happen. When you’re a giant!

 

New advertising campaign “RWE – the energy to lead”

This slogan belongs to the imagefilm production of the advertising agency Jung von Matt as part of RWE’s big budget advertising campaign in Europe. Indeed, I was more than astonished to hear about the big news: The energy giant intends to conquer the eco- friendly market, truly in the spirit of “RWE – the energy to lead”.