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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

You’re messing with these stats a lot (I assume this is not malicious). The 50% renewables are not the cause of the extra 350g of CO2 in Germany.

The way you word this it sounds like renewables == bad, when in reality Germany is burning a boat load of coal which is causing the extra emissions, while France’s emissions are offset because they have lots of Nuclear power.

Nuclear power takes 20-50 years to come online- it’s too late to rely on it and burn fossil fuels in the mean time. That ship sailed long ago.

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> That ship sailed long ago.

That ship was sunk.

Germany had a lot of nuclear power, and decided shut it down. That is why Germany is producing so much CO₂.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...

It agree that we should have shut down coal power instead of nuclear power but fact is that this never happened. Deal with it.

Edit: „Deal with it“ might have been a snarky way to say it but on a serious note - nothing good comes from regretting missed opportunities forever. Get over them and make the best of the situation.

"Germany had a lot of nuclear power"

No, they really didn't. At its height it accounted for barely 20%. It was dwarfed by coal, lignite and natural gas. It was never anything like France that went all in with nuclear.

Since then, German consumption has exploded, yet the non-renewables have stayed about static while virtually all new demand is met with renewables.

> Nuclear power takes 20-50 years to come online- it’s too late to rely on it and burn fossil fuels in the mean time. That ship sailed long ago.

South Korea builds nuclear plants in less than 5 years on average.

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...

"The way you word this it sounds like renewables == bad"

The point is that unfortunately renewables == good is not often true either despite the common perception. It all depends on how they integrate with the rest of the grid which is something rarely considered when I hear speeches about having more and more renewables in the future

Once you decided to stop nuclear and go wind/solar, what do you do when it's 8pm in winter and there is no wind? => You fire up your coal/gas plants

The answer could be "storage" but right now, as you can see from the stats, this option is not favored and I believe there are good reasons. As you can imagine, if storage was an easy solution today, Germany's emissions would be much smaller.

Hopefully it becomes a more viable solution in the near future but at the moment we're still far from it

The OP misrepresents every time there is a positive solar energy story, using the same Germany story as an example.

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