Germany transforms former coal mines into Europe's largest lake landscape
euronews.com161 points by ohjeez 6 hours ago
161 points by ohjeez 6 hours ago
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)
The "interesting" part is that the mine closing will significantly reduce the water supply to Berlin on its own, and filling the pit will probably raise the issue to possibly catastrophic levels: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/spr...
Czech republic has some really nice quarries and dams where you can swim for free or next to free. One thing I've noticed is that Czechs only seem to go to such places when it's really really warm. So they're often empty even when they're perfect for swimming. At least the ones near me in Plzeň. I grew up swimming in the Atlantic so my idea of swimming temperature may be different to average Czechs!
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
The Minnesota Iron Range is full of these and they're absolutely beautiful; terrifyingly deep, however.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAL_d-5FsGQ - Tioga Pit Mine (225' deep)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Mine_Pit_Lake (450' deep)
Stumbled across this one later in my recommended videos that I like even better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC267JdGN24
This report seems to be a bit one-sided. They say the lakes will be used as reservoirs for rivers like the spree. The issue is that the spree was feed for years with excess water from the old mines which had to pump the water out. Now they don’t pump water anymore to fill up these lakes and some parts of the spree run low on water during summer. The water table fell a lot over the last 10 to 20 years in Berlin. I’m not sure what exactly contributed to this situation overall. But they had plans to pump water from the Elbe into the Spree to help out with the situation. But cities downstream are not happy about the situation. For me this feels like a somewhat similar situation to the Colorado River situation with the upper and lower basins.
https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2026/07/wasser-mangel-...
> The water table fell a lot over the last 10 to 20 years in Berlin. I’m not sure what exactly contributed to this situation overal
Climate change, as your article says.
It also says that they want to use those new lakes as reservoirs to help out the situation.
Yes climate change is the biggest issue. But also the fact that the spree was artificially topped up for roughly 100 years and the cities and industries count on that water.
So it will be rough for the area. It’s man-made though. That’s why I compared it to the Colorado basin situation around lake Lake Mead. Here is another article: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/presse/pressemitteilungen/spr...
To provide a counterpoint that is missing in the article: Conservation organizations are somewhat skeptical that these projects might take much longer and be more expensive than planned, due to climate change.
Projects like Garzweiler and Hambach were expected to take 25 to 30 years to fill up, but with droughts like this summer it might take much longer and the water would have to be diverted from already stressed ecosystems like the Rhine.
This whole topic has become much more complicated in the last years...
Mining operations often are toxic environments for various reasons aren't they?
It's dependent on the minerals being prospected for and the mining techniques as well as general awareness and regulations that were in place during operation. Yellowknife has a huge ecological issue due to Arsenic being actively used in Giant Mine[1] but that was introduced to ease mining (mercury is also commonly used for gold extraction and purification, though occasionally offsite). So it really depends on the mine. Mines are never good for the environment but how toxic they are will vary.
Excavation pits can be clean and I'm pretty sure they would have considered what was left in the pit.
What you're thinking of is the processing aspect of mining, which is a whole different beast.
No, not exactly. Many kinds of rocks and soil will release Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) or otherwise release sulfates and heavy metals into the environment. Of course a lot of this will already be known from the treatments they had to do when keeping the water table low when mining.
When I was a kid I remember a number of very old stone quarries that had been allowed to fill, then years later they had to put up warnings for people to stay out because the high Ph water was dissolving metals into it.
This really depends on the composition of the minerals. Butte, MT is famous for its pit that is filled with highly toxic water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butte,_Montana#Berkeley_Pit (or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-Ej2EtE744 ).
This reminds of a retirement community that was developed in Rome, GA on the site of an old limestone quarry.
https://www.thw.com/projects/49-senior-living/323-berry-coll...
Turning old brownfield into usable and livable space is a win all around
Haunted Hydrology's video for October 8 is about divers in flooded mines:
These strip mine reclamations are just great.
In the 1990s, we lived on a lake in Indiana that was reclaimed from strip mines. Recommended.
There's a sandstone quarry I've swam in, the deep end is 60+ feet deep. I wouldn' want to be a lifeguard there. Although the added depth doesn't really mater past about 15 feet.
https://www.cityoftenino.us/parks-recreation/page/quarry-poo...
This quarry in chicago used as a storm water buffer is cool. It would be interesting to drive over it when it is full.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/environment/2026/07/11/chicago-...
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.
Interesting machine that mines the coal and makes the lakes possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8772vEfUu8
This is a great idea. I think there are issues with possible contaminants but if that can be sorted...
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
They came to the conclusion in 2018. There is a law in place to phase it out completely by 2038.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausstieg_aus_der_Kohleverstrom... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
Wind and solar power do not provide dispatchable power and they therefore do not replace conventional power plants.
Germany isn't keeping their coal-fired power plants and they're not building new gas-fired power plants despite the energy transition but because of it.
You're spreading conspiracy theories when you claim Katherina Reiche is a fossil fuel puppet. She is doing what has always been the plan for the energy transition: Building gas-fired power plants.
That plan is even in the DENA study for the energy transition:
https://www.dena.de/fileadmin/dena/Dokumente/Pdf/9262_dena-L... (p. 29)
And before you claim DENA is some sort of fossil fuel lobby organization, they're not. DENA belongs to the German state and was founded in 2000 by SPD and Greens:
I remember reading somewhere that they are planning on using excessive wind/solar energy to generate Hydrogen gas and use that for energy instead of Hydrocarbon gases.
"Wind and solar power do not provide dispatchable power and they therefore do not replace conventional power plants. Germany isn't keeping their coal-fired power plants and they're not building new gas-fired power plants despite the energy transition but because of it."
4 hour storage battery operated renewables are now cost competitive with gas plants.
Exactly, but it is not a binary thing. The most capable solution is a combination of both. The batteries can kick in within seconds to bridge a couple of hours, while the gas turbines have enough time to fire up slowly as the batteries get close to empty and there is still no wind or sun.
Sorry, but in Germany there isn't even much of a debate anymore about whether she is a puppet of the gas industry. She even asked EnBW for arguments in favor of gas-fired power plants in order to avoid holding a technology-neutral tender process as required by the EU: https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/katherina-reiches-minister...
Yes, the so called base load isn’t the strength of intermittent renewables and yet Germany turned off clean, nuclear power in favor of gas and coal plants.
I wonder how that happened…
Base load is an obsolete concept. A renewables-heavy grid simply doesn't work that way.
Renewables like solar have a per-MWh generation cost of zero. You literally have to make the electricity price negative before it makes sense for the operator to shut it down. Their profitability depends only on the average electricity price: the high market price during the winter makes up for the near-zero market price during the summer.
In a free electricity market there is absolutely zero demand for a power plant which generates a constant amount of power and acts as the "base supply". With dirt-cheap renewables its capacity simply isn't needed during the summer and its nonzero running costs makes it unable to compete. What is needed instead is a peaker plant which can supplement renewables, and which is profitable when it operates only during low-sun low-wind "dunkelflaute" winter weeks.
Nuclear is fundamentally incompatible with this. It is the most expensive form of electricity generation and its costs are dominated by the need to pay back a massive construction loan. In a free market a nuclear power plant would only be able to operate for a few weeks per year, which instantly kills its business case.
Want nuclear? Then you'll have to accept that it will require huge government subsidies, and that during high-supply moments you'll be turning off free renewables to make space for expensive nuclear.
If anything, one could say that renewables will be the new base load supply. The real question is: who will be doing the peaking?
Fear. I grew up when the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl reached us. I didn’t grow up eating mushrooms. We still measure radioactivity here, ask any hunter. When Fukushima happened, it tore open an old wound. Is it rational? I’m not sure, but I remember my parents taking in 2 Ukrainians for a month to detox in Germany.
I think this is spot on. It is not rational, but it's deeply rooted. I vividly remember the children's TV explaining nuclear chain reactions, what happened in Chernobyl, and why kids couldn't play in sandboxes on the playground anymore for a while. Die Sendung mit der Maus had a whole segment with ping pong balls on mousetraps, setting one off, and that cascading into hundreds of mousetraps shooting the balls everywhere. Much like middle-aged American adults in 20 years are going to remember Sesame Street having very special episodes about Katrina or 9/11, middle-aged Germans remember a very fearful time around a nuclear disaster that happened close enough to home that it impacted them - fortunately not in a truly disastrous way. And that has an impact on public opinion, emotionally.
We measure radioactivity in Germany because boar and deer are still contaminated. Especially in southern Bavaria. Samples exceeded the EU limit value for consumption by up to 25 times.
A study found that most of the contamination these days doesn't come from Chernobyl anymore but from nuclear weapon tests.
https://www.infranken.de/bayern/warum-wildschweine-in-bayern...
PS: hunters with contaminated boars have to pay for the disposal themselves but can get the money back from the state. So, like with everything around nuclear: in the end it's the taxpayer who has to pay for it.
https://www.bayern.landtag.de/www/ElanTextAblage_WP17/Drucks...
> and yet Germany turned off clean, nuclear power
Oh ffs. Nuclear power is not clean. Look what the GDR left us with the Wismut "heritage" - mining for uranium is incredibly toxic, and safely disposing of the spent fuel and all the other irradiated remains is incredibly expensive.
We just don't see it in our Western nations because we get our uranium from Russia, other -'stan countries and remote regions in Australia and Canada where barely anyone lives to care about the destruction.
As for the disposal, over half of the already measly budget for the Ministry of Environment goes to take care of the nuclear waste - 1.4 billion euros A YEAR [1]. In contrast, only 400 million euros are spent on environmental production. Nuclear power wasn't just never clean, it also was never cheap because the true costs were never accounted for.
On the other hand: it is significantly cleaner than power generated by burning fossil fuels, and we don't exactly account for the environmental impact of renewables either. Like it or not, people care only about the direct impact it has on them, and it has been long enough since Chernobyl that nuclear isn't scary anymore. An anti-nuclear argument based on waste might not be wrong, but it isn't going to convince many people either.
Want to convince people that nuclear is a bad idea? Forget about the waste, the dangers, and the overseas environmental impact, and instead focus purely on the cost. The business case for nuclear in a renewable-heavy grid is extremely poor, and very few people like nuclear enough that they would willingly pay massive subsidies to choose it instead of any of the alternatives. For most people nuclear is a necessary evil and a magic-solve-everything solution to the climate crisis: they don't like it enough to stick to it when more attractive options exist.
> conspiracy theories when you claim Katherina Reiche is a fossil fuel puppet
lol, wtf?!
Before becoming a minister she was employed by E.ON (for non-Germans: one of the big four energy companies in Germany) to lobby for their interests.
She is _the_ prototype of a fossil fuel puppet.
> and they're not building new gas-fired power plants
Uh... Whut? They're not just building them, but actively subsidizing them: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-government-appro...
Because of pinky-promises about 'hydrogen' some time in future.
Cool, but how is this bigger than, e.g. East Finland's lake landscape?
The title is incorrect. The articles’s text adds “artificial”:
“Part of Lusatian Lakeland – now Europe's largest artificial water landscape”
Even that’s debatable, I think, given, for example:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alqueva_Dam: a 250 km² artificial lake
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd_Reservoir: over 3,000km²
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJsselmeer: 1,100km²
=> it depends on such things as whether you call a reservoir a lake, how you define “water landscape”, etc.
I wish someone would try to convert them in geothermal plant.
I think you need to go much, much, much deeper for that.
I was thinking about hybrid approach. Drilling to 5km and get water that has 200 C and use natural gas to provide additional heat to produce steam at 374°C.
Alternatively, flood the mineshafts and set up heat exchangers. Wait for Co2 turbines to become viable and get rid of gas.
Germany is pretty famous for tagebaurekultivierung.
The Tagebaurekultivierungsaktivitäten have been going on for a long time. I remember visiting some former open pit in the 90s, as they started filling it, noting how it would take like 10 years or so. Pretty strange land.
10 years? That's nothing. Flooding Hambach will take approximately 40 years. And that includes water from the Rhine carried there by pipeline, which in the current state of the Rhine is... optimistic.
Is it safe to recreate in water that has been exposed to all of that mining slough?
We changed the URL above from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/germany-is-... to an article that has more information.
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Now please bring back solar + nuclear energy and stop pretending that burning oil is cleaner.
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.
> Wind has nearly as low an LCOE as solar
Because production costs aren't what's setting the prices, supply and demand is.
Cheap solar and wind power doesn't help when it's not available.
How much less of a problem is this as batteries improve? Honest question, I never saw this quantified.
It's in german but quite interesting article regarding this : https://www.solarserver.de/2025/12/19/analyse-dunkelflauten-...
What is the insight there about solar and wind depending on sun and wind and how batteries change that? It would be interesting to quantify that. Is there a relevant number in that page?
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.
Good luck with solar in Germany when you will be paying a fee for feeding in energy to the grid during solar peek time from 2027 onwards.
Why would that be unreasonable? Generating some power somewhere, sometime isn't hard. Generating the right amount at the right time in the right location is. (In other words logistics.)
So yeah the cost is in moving and storing the electricity by maintaining and expanding the infrastructure.
Do you have a source? Can you "waste" that energy instead of feeding it in?
It's solar so you can literally just unplug it. Although at the scale of an individual house you can just unplug (or otherwise deactivate) pretty much anything. It's the industrial scale stuff that can't be adjusted on a dime.
I could probably make a small PCB with a light sensor, that disconnects the solar panels (through a relay) once sunlight hits the sensor. So you aren't paying any fees for supplying the grid with energy.
Why not store it in small and large battery systems and use it later?
Much better yes. I am just thinking that worse case one could burn it to not have to pay, so in reality having to pay would not be a problem.
Added 17GW solar in the last 12 months, reached 129GW: https://solarzubau.de/deutschland/
Cool, these are currently supplying 0.06% of their installed capacity:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/fifteen_minutes
Very useful.
Yes, because we failed to invest in storage systems for the last... 25 years or so...
If we would have, it would look much different now.
We are currently busy building new gas turbines. lol.
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.
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.
https://unpopular-truth.com/2024/07/05/natures-influence-on-...
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.
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.
So, you're telling me there is daylight in Spain when we have night in Germany?
Also, have you ever done some research on how winds work? They're usually blowing (or not blowing) across the whole continent.
So, yeah, Dunkelflauten usually cover the whole continent.
I'm saying there is always wind blowing somewhere on the continent. For the time period where we have had widespread measurement of wind speeds continent wide, there has never been an hour without enough wind to turn a generator in some location.
https://communities.springernature.com/posts/quantifying-the...
I'm sceptical that more gas turbines doesn't create a more vulnerable grid. The possibility of gas shortages this winter is on the horizon and if the UK were to cease exports for whatever reason it would be a disaster for the rest of Europe.
Ed Conway released a video on the UK's gas network and disaster planning[0].
As shown in their documentary, a shutdown of exports to Europe would only require 2 or 3 failure events (low production from wind/solar, high-usage of gas for power/heating, disruption or cessation of imports via gas-tankers, well-placed damage to the gas network, extreme weather in the north sea). To maintain pressure in the gas network, they would begin shedding the largest loads first, exports to mainland Europe is #1 on that list.
Let's also not forget Nordstream and the disaster that caused when it mysteriously blew up. Before those pipelines exploded, there were protests in Germany because people were struggling to heat their homes.
Nuclear isn't vulnerable to any of these issues, we're very lucky that construction and investment has continued these past decades. /s
Capacity isn't the problem, usage is. If Europe reduced its usage to about 10% of current usage, full tanks would last a full year.
Nuclear is unsuited for this problem. Europe needs something that will supply approximately all of its power needs for only a few days a year. Europe already has enough natural gas storage to do this. If you built enough nuclear to cover all its power needs for a few days a year you'd have enough nuclear to supply all its power needs 365 days a year. That would work great, but it would cost tens of trillions.
We have to build new gas turbines since wind and solar do not provide dispatchable power.
I hear there is a shortage of blades for the turbines.
Where did you hear that?
I could only find news on the opposite: https://www.oedigital.com/amp/news/540213-siemens-gamesa-ceo...
I feel bad for the post-apocalypse folks who won't be able to find any dry, solid fuel to burn.
I dunno:
1. There should be plenty broken up press board after the apocalypse. It is apparently quite flammable but sometimes gives off bad emissions. Perhaps you should set up a website where people can print a guide to press board emissions, so we all will know which to cook foods with and which to only heat with.
2. And there should be plenty of auto tires. Here's a fella who needs only a few tires each day to heat a 12' x 16' corrugated metal siding workshop:
https://www.farmshow.com/view_articles.php?a_id=1072
Another article with photos:
https://www.farmshow.com/a_download_page.php?aid=MzI4Nw==
3. Finally we see:
"Study Shows Dangerous Plastics Are Being Used As Fuel To Heat Homes":
https://www.slashgear.com/2075676/plastic-fuel-burning-heat-...
So I don't see a problem finding dry combustible fuel, In fact gathering fuel will be somewhat like gathering manna in the desert!8-))