It's not that impressive if you consider that the current government in Germany is driving a massive de-industrialization campaign. Destroying the own car industry fits well in the agenda.
If we manufactured diesel out of wood or algae, the same cars would suddenly become very green - in case of algae cultivation for fuel, you can reach carbon negativity (the process net-decreased carbon in atmosphere).
This is likely more green than building battery electric vehicles with large capacity. Batteries are great but cars don't need more than 100km of charge. Longer trips should be on bio-diesel or bio-gas.
Still I dont think its Carbon negativ because they rather make hydrocarbons out of it and the production uses energy plus. Only wanted to state the possibility of Carbon negativ as real.
Its about the transition phase between now and a full electric vehicle fleet.
Combustion engine will exist in the next 20-40 years.
I am not an expert or sth. If you have links or could expand a bit more on why fossil fuel would be preferable, that would be nice. Thanks
The "truth" is that the Energiewende was a wise decision from early 2000s for Germany making a case that it'd be possible to transform an industry nation to renewables and possibly export technology to other countries since we all frantically should figure out ways to reduce our carbon emissions.
Germany would be at ~80% electricity from renewables by now if the Merkel government in 2013 wouldn't have stopped it: Renewables were heavily subsidized by the German electricity customers and was so successful around 2012 that electricity prices skyrocketed; instead of finding other ways to further boost the building of more renewables while lowering electricity prices for the customers, they just stopped it. And when Merkel also irrationally decided quit nuclear energy after Fukushima even earlier (2022) and Russia quit delivering cheap gas, we're now in this pity situation in which we have to burn coal like its 1920.
So don't claim it "did not even work" because they didn't really try.
Peaks in renewable generation would go into electrolysis to produce hydrogen which can "save" the surplus energy the same way we're heaping up natural gas to be used in times when the sun is not shining and when in addition there's no wind. Plus there are industrial processes that cannot (yet) be based on electric energy and need to run based on hydrogen or derivatives.
In addition we can save surplus renewable energy locally, regionally and in neighbor countries (e.g. Norway with its pumped hydroelectric energy storage).
This has been backed by several studies but was critically dependent on scaling up renewables massively. With the latter we failed, for political reasons.
I'm not even blaming "foreign influence". We have good data that car manufacturers, energy and chemical companies didn't want to risk their profitable fossil-based business models and thus lobbied the according governments.
> It would have worked, if only. First of all, you do not know that.
Well, as I said, it worked that well that electricity prices skyrocketed and Germany set a world record in renewable electricity production in ~2012. We had >200k employees in a (IIRC) world leading solar industry. Nowadays you can only buy Chinese solar products while the German solar industry is dead.
> Secondly, it did in fact not work. Your solution did not take into account whatever factor made it fail, so it failed.
That kind of argument opens up a can of worms where everything is legit. Just because people don't "like" some project would legitimize harming the country they've sworn to protect. Why oh why is my first association the lies about Brexit.
It's an analogy. Foreign in this case means "foreign to your ideology", if you will.
> We have good data that car manufacturers, energy and chemical companies didn't want to risk their profitable fossil-based business models and thus lobbied the according governments.
Again, "foreign influence". We're talking about electricity. Car manufacturers and chemical companies don't care whether their electricity comes out of a coal plant or a windmill. They care about price. Production capacity of renewables may be impressive on paper and therefore cheap in theory, but it's not available on demand. That requires (hitherto non-existent) buffering solutions that completely change the economics. So, you did not provide a comprehensive solution that takes these factors into account, therefore you failed. Rather than learn from your mistake and tackle the harder parts of the problem, you blame others. This is how I know I'm dealing with an ideology.
> Nowadays you can only buy Chinese solar products while the German solar industry is dead.
I don't see how that's relevant. If you can't produce solar panels more efficiently than the Chinese, then you should just buy them from the Chinese if you need them.
They planned to be at about 80% of primary energy to be based on renewables which got boycotted by Merkel government AND they expected to bridge the residual needs with cheap Russian gas which got rendered impossible in the current situation. Now the only option is shitty coal.
BTW: Nuclear energy is damn expensive (for the tax payer), the nuclear waste problem is still not solved and in France (>70% nuclear) we just started to see the huge problems with fission when climate change results in a drought.