> If you put old vegetable oil in them they would break instantly and expensively.
Haha, an acquaintance of a local Linux user group I used to visit drives an old BMW which he has modified to run on vegetable oil. To be precise, oil which has been used for preparing french fries. You can easily recognize the smell. He was a car mechanic, I guess he knows quite well what he does.
Yep. A basic diesel engine is a pretty amazing thing that, like a jet engine, can burn pretty much anything and is simple to maintain. Once you start adding all the modern gubbins in it to make it efficient and powerful, you lose that generality.
The main issue with using alternative fuels in modern diesels is the injectors: unit injectors and common rail systems are high pressure, precision components that are very sensitive to fuel quality. Used frying oil is not clean.
So your mate's BMW either had some modifications to let it use vegetable oil reliably, or it's really old!
> Now Germany spews out about same carbon as before giant investments in solar, electricity is four times the price as in US, plus they now have to buy from France cause they don't produce enough.
Well, they require a more complex motor which handles higher pressures and supercharging. The picture would be different if you would compare motors with the same price.
That's an inherent problem of non-fossil electricity production. Electrical energy is expensive to store (some hydro plants e.g. in Austria do that).
For both nuclear and renewable, the marginal costs for producing an extra MWh, once the plant is built, are close to zero. Because on a market of any commodity, the marginal costs determine the market price, this means that once there is more electricity produced than there is current demand, the price goes to zero. This is actually the realization of the old promise from the fifties that with nuclear energy, energy would be so 'cheap' that it would not be worth the effort to install an electrical meter.
The flip side of the coin is that energy production with this cost structure, marginal costs at zero, need some degree of subsidies to be economically interesting for the operators. Renewable energy in Germany is funded by a very visible green energy tax. Nuclear power in turn is expensive to build and was mostly funded by research funds and hidden subsidies. Such as that the final storage of spent nuclear fuel is paid by the state. Extremely expensive but it does not appear in the books of companies.
Coal plants in Germany have the same problem as elsewhere: They are becoming too expensive.
Renwable power in Germany is mostly a mix of solar and wind energy. In the summer, the curve of solar production fits nicely the daytime of the highest demand, while the higher production of wind energy is in cold stormy winter months. What needs to complement the mix are gas power plants which can be ramped up and down quickly. Coal plants are too slow for that.
That's not true. Diesel was a byproduct of gasoline production, which was cheaper because in less demand. This is changing slowly.
> Now Germany spews out about same carbon as before giant investments in solar, electricity is four times the price as in US, plus they now have to buy from France cause they don't produce enough.
That's disinformation. Germany has a high and growing percentage of renewable power, and it exports electricity - for example, frequently to France, especially in the summer, because scarceness of cold river water to cool the french nuclear plants.
Then, renewable energy in Germany is subsidized to some degree, a subsidy which is paid by a small percentage on the bill of private households. On the other hand, there are numerous companies which are except from this tax.
Also, every time there is an oversupply of wind or solar energy, the price at the energy spot market goes to zero. In the net result, companies are paying much less for energy.
And what you also are leaving out of the equation: Renewable energy is now cheaper than nuclear. There is only one nuclear power project in the EU, Hinkley Point in Britain, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the whole project is likely to make a net loss. I guess the only thing that keeps it alive are the nuclear weapons ambitions of the UK government.
Haha, an acquaintance of a local Linux user group I used to visit drives an old BMW which he has modified to run on vegetable oil. To be precise, oil which has been used for preparing french fries. You can easily recognize the smell. He was a car mechanic, I guess he knows quite well what he does.