German riot police clear protesters for coal mine expansion
cnn.com
cnn.com
In the last months of 2022, about a third of power production came from coal. In 2006, about a third instead came from nuclear plants.
Source (Swedish): https://www.tn.se/naringsliv/24056/efter-nedlaggningen-av-ka...
Officially coal is supposed to be phased out by 2030.
You are misrepresenting the data here, implying that coal production somehow has increased over that time period but in 2006 coal stood for about 60% of the power production. Coal usage is trending downwards, but during 2021 and 2022 it has gone up as a direct result of shutting down the nuclear plants and the reduced gas input.
I never made the claim you state either. The failure is the re-introduction now taking place.
First, because it is a result of their energy policy over the last decade(s).
Second, because the consequences of "the war" are driven by how they decided to react to it.
"The war" is being used as a convenient scapegoat. Everyone could see that the sh*t had to hit the fan one day because of the terrible energy policies in most of Europe... when that happens politicians are always very keen to find reasons "outside of their control"...
The US wasn’t the only one who warned the German government about the geopolitical risk they would be exposed to.
Angela Merkel shut down nuclear power in Germany and then tied our industry to Putin.
Let me frame it in the IT landscape. If your storage kicks the bucket but you had no real backup, no procedures to bring back anything, and no spares you couldn't blame it on a random act outside of your control. If it turned out you had repeated warnings but instead chose to phase out backups and to replace the enterprise storage with SD cards from a shady manufacturer then you really wouldn't be able to claim "random act of God". And if when all is said and done you end up on the board of the shady SD manufacturer that kind of seals the deal on whether you are to blame or not.
ApoCOALypse Now! [YouTube]:
The depiction has a breakdown of taxes also and the trend is what I remember. I must admit I’m not 1000% sure whether the page that links it is great though: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/13/german-household-elec...
That did the industry in Germany a real solid: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Schlaglichter-der-Wirtschaf...
Compared to 2015, it is down by 10% or so: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Schlaglichter-der-Wirtschaf...
Now, I certainly advise caution how to interpret these figures and how inflation is factored in, etc. are big factors. Having several family members across Germany working in industrial production, there is a common theme that “production is shifted abroad at scale” though… Also keep in mind: the industry didn’t pay these 35 cents/kWh prices, those were what consumers paid…
The past 17+ years of political failure did the German working class a real solid. When the head of a state advises people to “use a sponge and not shower so often to preserve hot water” it’s almost surreal that a government charging 45+% of tax of a countries GDP is unable to ensure people have hot water, heating or keep up the electrical supply for industry.
As an example: if (!!) the 10% decline was adjusted by the official inflation, would you believe that it was 2% from 2015-2020 or would you rather go for 5% that reflect also real-estate and other commodities relevant for industry (e.g., if steel increased 50%, so might industry output simply because of price changes). So, the “official figures” could be vastly inflated and the situation could be a lot worse even.
It is only common sense. Is it surreal that central planning does not work? We know that for a long time.
I am engineer, I was born in Spain. I have a company in Europe. For me it was completely nuts what the german Government did with the money, I worked on those projects because it was were the money was. Spending fortunes on solar panels(manufactured from coal in China) where there is no sun?
I was in favor of putting gas pipelines with Russia, but it was really nonsense not creating alternatives instead of a single provider. Letting a single bomb destroy your entire economy?
High taxes does not protect you against stupidity, on the contrary.
Germans are awakening to reality, and that is a great thing. It will take some time and pain though. But seems people only learn this way.
It is not as bad as in Ukraine. I was in Kiev one week before invasion, everybody was like: "Ohh, Russians will not attack, they never do". Those guys later had to improvise Molotov cocktails against tanks because they were ill prepared, never fired a gun.
You pay a high price for stupidity.
To be fair though the government of Ukraine had been preparing since the mini invasions of 2014. Probably a situation where you can never prepare enough.
The reactors only recently went online again.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...
So a coalition government where greener parties represent 50% of the governing coalition would likely be greener than one where they only have 25%, but to do everything according to their own party programme they would need to have a majority vote to be able to govern without forming a coalition.
Sometimes participating in a coalition government means the government takes actions the individual party may not find desirable, but they accept these because they do get to have their say on other topics. And sometimes local branches of a party have a differing opinion on some topics.
This is overall a good system though. It means you can vote for a party closest to your ideals, and even have a chance that they can govern (e.g., as part of a coalition), or at least have them represented in parliament.
Wind and solar don’t work in Central Europe.
Whats left, now that the wolf is at the door, if you want the lights on and heat for the family?
Dirty coal.
It's so much easier to profit and seize control during periods of volatility.
Yes they bring an instant and infinite stream of EU and government funds.
This simply isn't backed by real life experience. A not too small factor about Germany producing more power is that France for years now always has problems producing enough energy, because they have to put down their nuclear plants for various reasons. In these situations nuclear power plants typically still require energy.
France put all its eggs into nuclear, like pretty much no other country, and doesn't produce enough energy to even cover its own energy demands. And not just now, but the topic goes through the media at least once a year. Nobody denies that, it's just a fact.
Reality just isn't that simple.
France is one of the biggest exporters of electricity in the World and that's where most of the non-nuclear and non-renewable production goes.
Here a graph that shows "total energy used in the country minus its production of energy", which shows that France that mostly produces nuclear energy consistently requires more energy than it produces.
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/france/Energy_imports/
Even though that wasn't really what I am talking about. The reality is that France frequently has to shut down many of their reactors, which causes them to for longer periods of time require energy from Germany.
The reason for that is that for example in July 2022, 29 of their 56 nuclear plants were offline due to outages. Given that as you the majority of what France produces is nuclear energy, this is a big problems. These offline plants still require energy for cooling. So if other countries didn't provide energy France would have had a blackout. A lot of that is evidently cold by climate change and heat (these problems mostly happen in summer), but at the same time France for example at the end of 2021 had issues and needed to import energy for heating.
This is not to be pro-gas or coal at all. I think they should be abandoned as quickly as possible for many reasons, CO2, pollution both at energy production as well as fuel production, limits on availability, etc. This is to say that just everyone switching to to nuclear energy isn't a magical fix.
There is a strong need for mixes, both in how energy is produced and saved. And when I say saving, I don't mean batteries, but storage plants, some for long time storage like pumped storage hydroelectricity, and various types with typically lower storage, but quicker response times for spikes to prevent outages. Cause then one can actually make use of less consistent energy sources. Short-term and long-term storage work. And the more of those you have to more stable your energy grid will be, regardless of whether you use nuclear power or other power. And you won't have to shut down plants so quickly, because you overproduce at certain times of the day, be it for solar energy or less demand at night, for nuclear energy.
In 2021, France exported a total of some 87 terawatt hours of electricity. Meanwhile, electricity imports to France amounted to 44 terawatt-hours that year
Ukraine war turned France into a net importer (not by much) but their situation is far from as bad as in other countries, for example my country, Italy.
energy production by source in France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:F...
energy consumption by source (the mix is much more diversified than the production)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:E...
It's true that they had to shutdown multiple reactors, but on average their energy production creates a surplus respect to their demand.
Statistics are presented about the benefits of renewables, which seemingly never include the environmental destruction of the gas peaking plants propping them up.
If you counter with 'what about batteries', the lie by omission shifts from environmental destruction to child slavery. Battery supply chains cannot escape the contaminant that is child slavery.
Of course, this is while the West agreed to give China and India free reign to build unlimited coal plants until 2030.
Why can't renewables shake these fundamental deceptions? You're either hiding emissions (gas) or hiding child slavery (batteries).
Peaker plants are not baseload power. Baseload power means constant output, peaker plants are by definition variable output. You should also take into account that renewables+peaker plants replace coal plants in Germany, the emissions are reduced compared to before.
>Peaker plants are not baseload power
Not according to reality. [1] Gas has been producing consistently on a daily basis for over a year in Germany. Natural gas is used to prop up baseload generation in Germany and practically every region it's used.
[1] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electric...
What are you trying to say here? That reducing emissions is not good? That only 100% reduction is good and anything less is bad? That's quite a strange point of view to have.
Wind and solar are marketed and sold as emission-free. Meanwhile, while countries pat themselves on the back, they're building brand new gas plants.
'Renewables + gas' is not even close to emissions-free, especially not when Germany has gas plants firing literally 24 hours a day for the last year or more.
We're also quite keenly aware of the downsides of other energy sources. You could equally argue that there are many lies of omission related to fossil fuels or nuclear.
It's not everywhere a problem, a really old solution is:
https://www.iflscience.com/giant-water-battery-in-the-swiss-...
And if you don't have much water that could be a solution:
There are quite some ways of providing backup for wind and solar: ordinary hydro power and geothermal energy for base load, pumped storage hydro power, hydrogen conversion and tidal power for peaks. And even gas plants aren't that problematic either - assuming you only need them for peaks instead of, like now, replacing broken-down French NPPs, you can fire them with bio-gas gathered from farm animal dung or bio-waste.
> If you counter with 'what about batteries', the lie by omission shifts from environmental destruction to child slavery. Battery supply chains cannot escape the contaminant that is child slavery.
Of course they can, it is only a matter of money and oversight over governments.
Take the case of Tasmania, Australia. Tasmania is generally an energy exporter, and receives 100% of their power via hydro. In 2016, unexpectedly low rainfall led to serious supply issues in the hydro plant powering the island. The solution? The government organized air deliveries of diesel generators to meet the shortfall. Diesel generators are worse than coal.
In mere months, Tasmania's 'green energy revolution' was desecrated by diesel. Decades of progress erased. Green image gone.
As for pumped hydro storage, same issue. If one of your variables is 'we get more than X rainfall', it cannot possibly be described as reliable enough for baseload power.
This is the problem. Green solutions get decimated by reality, and they're dutifully covered up by greenwashing propagandists. Don't look too closely at our diesel generators or gas peaking plants. Don't look at our battery supply chains.
Even nuclear is not a solution, just look at France and Switzerland who had to take down a lot of their nuclear capacity beyond the broken-down NPPs because they lacked cooling water.
A decent renewable power grid has to have a lot of different energy generation paths: hydro, solar, wind, bio-gas, tidal (where possible), geothermal, enough interconnection paths to other regions, storage (battery, pumped hydro, flywheel) and regularly tested backups. The backups may even be fossil, no one has a major issue with that, the key thing is that the backup capacity must never be assumed as a regular operational capacity. And obviously, the generation capacity has to be scaled in a way that assumes a decent set of overproduction as no kind of power generation has an availabilty/capacity factor of 1... if your total consumption is, say, 100 GW, you have to have at least 200-300 GW in generation capacity.
Germany is facing the danger of de-industrialization and losing their economy, they need to react fast to get energy prices back to a realistic level, Its not the time for rosy climate goals and climate extremists(Die letzte Generation), the entire country is at risk.
Despite other comments saying Germany is wasting its taxes, the way Germany handled the gas crisis is certainly better than the UK, which ironically should've been less affected.
high taxes allowed Germany to strike new deals with Qatar, and to buy gas from alternative, certainty more expensive suppliers.
UK just looks like a crazy show from outside. Weirdly enough it was put up for a vote and people went for it with the Brexit.
With the leftist government for another 3+ years in Germany, the chances for Germany to get back on track are nil. And if Germany sh*t its pants it’s not rosy for the EU either. UK gone, France not exactly outpacing everyone and the South on the brink of financial collapse.