German energy giant RWE has begun dismantling a wind farm to make way for a further expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in the western region of North Rhine Westphalia.

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

  • gomp
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    1 year ago

    your pro-consumer laws

    Don’t those actually come from the EU?

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      They’re implemented on the EU level but Germany isn’t exactly unknown for pushing for them. The EP also likes to do it, the commission has more an eye on competition, sometimes those things overlap e.g. pushing train operators to finally implement a unified ticket shop (buying a trip from a single provider, even if the trains are run by different ones, has the consumer benefit that if a train is delayed and you miss a connection you can then take pretty much whatever train to reach your goal. And from the commission’s perspective they want train operators to compete, but not by building walled gardens)

      • JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        As far as Germany specifically, I think one I heard about ISPs being required to discount customers who fall victim to low bandwidth. In other words, they can’t sell you a 50mb/s contract and then say “sorry, bandwidth is bad here so you will only get 20mb/s.”

        • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, little online test about it, too, but in the end even that took years and there isn’t really any feasible way to get what you want other than suing the company