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Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, but people see Germany as being fundamentally unserious about climate change when they retire nuclear and keep burning insane amounts of destructive brown coal. I don’t think the electricity mix is even significantly cleaner than the US’s

EDIT: confirmed, the US had 365grams of CO2 per kWh (805lbs per MWh) but Germany had 385g per kWh in 2022.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247991/annual-power-sec...

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German electricity mix is ~50% renewable (https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...).

US renewables + nuclear ist at ~40% (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/us-electricity-energy...).

Also note the growth rate: German renewable electricity fraction went from 26% to 50% while the US went from 12% to 23% (since 2012). So they appear significantly more serious about climate change than the US.

Total CO2/capita/year is also significantly higher for the US (15 tons vs 9 tons, approx.)

Yeah, but total CO2/capita/year is like <4 for France.... That's where nuclear power really shines. Of course these calculations do not really capture all CO2 required for nuclear power.

Electricity mix is a fairly useless number on it's own. Especially for an industrial powerhouse like Germany. Renewable's share of total energy consumption in Germany is about 15%, and has been decreasing.

The number is the US is similar, and has been rising.

Good question, I just checked. The numbers I can find for 2022:

Renewables: US: 21.5% Germany: 44%

Nuclear: US: 18.2% Germany: 6%

Fossil: US: 60.2% Germany: 45.9%, 20.1% from lignite (brown coal)

So pretty clear win on the renewables for Germany. Adding Nuclear for "clean energy" it's still pretty ahead. However, Fossil in the US is mainly gas, which is cleaner than lignite. Hard to quantify.

Sources: US: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

It’s not actually that hard to quantify. Per kWh, the US got 365g of CO2 per kWh (804lb/MWh) in 2022 compared to 385g/kWh for Germany.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247991/annual-power-sec...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity...

That's just electricity generation, which is only a portion of total energy usage. Both countries use about 15% renewables overall. The exact number is hard to measure, complicated by importation and exportation of energy and other factors.

You need to be careful with these statistics because Germany is a (large) net importer of electricity. How are imports counted is not always obvious (nor should it be, Netherlands exports electricity to Germany, sometimes it's mostly solar powered, sometimes purely gas)

That certainly complicates the situation, as Germany imports and exports energy. But Germany is a net exporter, not importer, at least in 2022, but I believe it's so for most years.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-...

People see Germany as a foolish naive nation which is currently hurting itself economically and making a clown of itself. It is having the opposite of the desired effect. Other countries will be more hesitant to transition to green technologies when they see Germany suffering.

Really? Which countries would those be? All the European countries that have far higher renewable use than Germany?

No one considers Germany a leader in renewables. It's just a straw man for the nuclear fanboys.

Germany sees itself as a leader in the green transition even if this is not factually correct.

Oh, well you don't have to worry about other countries being put off by Germany's decisions, because no one else does. Good news, eh!

It's not like Nord Stream 2s destruction was the single largest act of industrial sabotage in human history, alongside the single largest carbon emission in human history. Being complicit in one pipeline being bombed could undermine decades of progress in a single moment.

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