This isn't very ambitious. Ontario, which was pretty dependent on coal, managed to end it in less than a decade.
2. It was Schröder who made the decision to take Germany off nuclear power and also to make the country energy-dependent on Russia:
As Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder was a strong advocate of the Nord Stream pipeline project, which aims to supply Russian gas directly to Germany, thereby bypassing transit countries. The agreement to build the pipeline was signed two weeks before the German parliamentary election. On 24 October 2005, just a few weeks before Schröder stepped down as Chancellor, the German government guaranteed to cover 1 billion euros of the Nord Stream project cost, should Gazprom default on a loan…Soon after stepping down as chancellor, Schröder accepted Gazprom’s nomination for the post of the head of the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream AG, raising questions about a potential conflict of interest.
Russia now provides 35% of Germany’s oil imports and 39% of the natural gas imports.
That said, the percentage that nuclear energy contributed to Germany's electricity production has been completely replaced by renewable energies. Gas plays a negligible role there, although it's usage has been growing slightly over the past 20 years.
Lastly, people who claim that Germany relies too much on Russian oil and gas imports like to ignore just how much the Russian economy relies on oil and gas exports.
Electricity production share of those in Germany: 35%. Consumption share: 38%.
https://www.bayerische-staatszeitung.de/staatszeitung/wirtsc...
In certain areas during peak generation times, sure. But overall, renewables like wind and solar are simply not viable as a complete replacement to fossil fuels (in Germany at least) until storage of excess capacity has been solved. Until then, Germans will be burning coal or Russian gas all winter long.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601514/germany-runs-up-ag...
These numbers are the average share for the whole year 2018 for all of Germany.
> But overall these technologies are simply not viable as a complete replacement to fossil fuels
That's not a goal. A communicated goal is to increase the share of renewable electricity to around 85% by 2050.
But the source of energy consumed doesn't matter if greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. This chart tells the whole story [0]. German renewables really started kicking off around 2009, and yet emissions haven't budged since then. They actually ticked up for a few years in the mid 2010s. It's pretty clear that simply installing excess capacity is not the way forward when that infrastructure sits wasted 95% of the time.
[0] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
Note that your chart shows greenhouse gas emissions not only for electricity production - which was the topic we are discussing here.
They are not rising, which can easily be seen from the chart you have linked. The problem is that they were not falling as planned.
For 2018 it is projected to be 854. 6% less than 2017.
https://www.klimareporter.de/deutschland/co2-emissionen-fall...
> They actually ticked up for a few years in the mid 2010s.
That was when industry production recovered after the economic crisis. You can see that in the chart: manufacturing/construction in 2009 was at 109, in 2010 it was at 125.
The longer trend is year over year changed by the amount of economic activity, climate in that year, amount of new renewable put online, etc etc.
Furthermore, Ontario's economy has been effectively stagnant over that period, and the cost of energy clearly played some role in that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288 (though German-extracted coal is largely too expensive to bother with now)
It seems like the opposite is true: Every year you wait, the upfront and recurring costs drop.
Unless you have a serious near-term problem arising from the status quo (e.g. stagnant air filled with coal exhaust), and that problem can be solved altogether at a tolerable cost, there is no advantage to moving first or early.
Happened over the last years often in cooperation with cities, which now have the problem of being stuck with polluting coal power stations that are not even profitable anymore. Contracts are often laid out in a manner that the cities have to shoulder the load. My sympathy is limited, they could have listened to the advocates of green energy who predicted that.
Anyway, deconstructing those new coal power stations and trying to help the affected cities and regions would raise the price of moving to green energy later. I'm not sure that would be completely offset by the lower prices and technological improvements one can expect to see each year.
The strategy agreed upon today was a revision of an earlier plan that would have cost a "mere" 5bn euro. This deal was however opposed by the individual federal states of Germany, which demanded 60bn – just to put the final 40bn in perspective.
40bn is still a huge sum of money (about 1/3 Jeff Bezos, for scale), but as a German voter and tax payer I have to say that I am entirely fine with this. Germany is a very prosperous country, and we have to get away from coal, the sooner the better. True, it probably could have been done with less money, but to me 40bn is still a favorable deal over no deal at all.