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Comment by shakow | Hacker News Reader

1. Because Germany is still producing 6× more energy with coal than Poland;

2. Because Germany deliberately shut down low-carbon footprint nuke powerplant to please their voters, then built coal-burning plants to compensate for the lack of production.

3. Because Germany is the first economy of Europe and arguably the top political power (which is not the case of Poland, far from it) and thus should be leading bby example.

> It's almost as if Germany proving the model that you can reduce CO2 while turning off nuclear plants that is the underlying problem.

Germany is not proving anything: today is a good day (https://app.electricitymap.org/map), and her electricity is still 4× carbon heavier than France, and closer to Balkan-level than Western Europe level.

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> Because Germany is still producing 6× more energy with coal than Poland

That's already not true.

> In 2020, Poland produced 152,208 GWH from primary energy sources, relying heavily on coal and fossil fuels. Hard coal, accounted for 47% of primary energy production in 2020, followed by lignite (24.9 %), natural gas (9.1 %), crude oil (1.6%) and renewables (10.75 %). More than 6% of Poland’s energy was produced by industrial power plants.

In Germany there were 560,000 GWH produced with 16.2% from lignite and 7.5% from hard coal.

According to my napkin calculations that means Germany produced approximately 1.4 times the amount of energy by coal.

> That's already not true.

I just read it from GP's figure, I indeed didn't check further.

>Because Germany is still producing 6× more energy with coal than Poland

Not 6x more. They're producing about 150 TWh from coal for 84 million people while Poland does about 120 TWh for just 37 million people.

Per capita, Germany uses far less coal and with current trends it'll use less actual coal for its 87 million people fairly soon.

>Because Germany deliberately shut down low-carbon footprint nuke powerplant to please their voters, then built coal-burning plants to compensate

That accounts for the slight blip on the graph I linked to above that lasted until 2014. This blip has received an overwhelming amount of attention given that it was relatively small, lasted a few years and coal usage started diving again in 2014.

It was symbolically important to the nuclear industry, but for all the wrong reasons.

>Because Germany is the first economy of Europe

This is the only reasonable answer.

>today is a good day (https://app.electricitymap.org/map), and her electricity is still 4× carbon heavier than France

Going back in time and building nuclear plants in the 1960-70s probably is the best way to have a relatively cheap, carbon free grid in 2020 but unfortunately it also means that there's an almighty gargantuan bill to pay when those same plants age out in 2030. France is sitting on either a financial ticking time bomb if they choose to rebuild or a potential nuclear disaster if they choose to extend their lifetimes well beyond viability.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-trouble-with-europes-ageing-...

https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energ...

Poland uses more coal but Germany uses more gas. CO2 is CO2.

> Per capita, Germany uses far less coal

It would be great if globabl warming were per capita, too.

> This blip has received an overwhelming amount of attention given that it was relatively small, lasted a few years and coal usage started diving again in 2014.

That's the whole problem, that it stayed a ‶blip″ instead of becoming the foot of a growing curve. No one said that Germany was 80% carbon-free then, only that they nipped in the bud any chance of decreasing their carbon production for the last decade.

> a potential nuclear disaster

Is that much worse than the actual half-a-century running disaster?

https://www.euractiv.com/section/air-pollution/news/german-c...

https://climateanalytics.org/briefings/about-80-of-eu-and-ge...

https://www.dw.com/en/coal-fired-plants-cause-huge-health-bi...

https://beyond-coal.eu/last-gasp/

I agree with your general claim (Germany isn't half as low in electricity CO2 as many others), but today is far from a good day. Solar is high, I give you that, but wind is almost exceptionally low.

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