Coal and fossil fuel use in Germany at a record low for electricity in 2023 | Hacker News Reader

Coal and fossil fuel use in Germany at a record low for electricity in 2023

energy-charts.info

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Seems like a misleading headline. Total energy used is at a record low:

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

Much of the decline came from gas, presumably because they stopped buying so much from Russia.

It's striking vs the France chart, though I wonder how this reflects electricity import / exports https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

And because of the mild weather in the winter season 2022-2023. Also, private households are saving on energy as much as they can because of high prices.

Please explain how the winter temps affect electricity use. Heating only accounts for 4% of household heating sources in Germany [1].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1189752/household-heatin...

My parent's comment was about total energy usage.

That doesn't make sense, though, as the charts refer to electricity generation, not primary energy.

Oh, I'm sorry. I took "total energy consumed" too literally. You've been right and my comment doesn't make that much sense for electricity.

it's not only winter but many industrial processes moved out of Germany because of high energy price. Large chemical plants are just running at minimum capacity: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/german-chemicals...

Could still be better. Having the same level of CO2e per GWh over the last 12 months as the USA is kind of embarrassing for an EU member state.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US

(You need to set the time period to last 12 months, not sure if you can encode that into the URL)

They phased on nuclear too early - other than that they're RAPIDLY moving in the right direction, as is the US.

The fact that they phased out nuclear at all is astonishing and definitely not a move in the right direction. Politics and radiophobia won.

It isn't a fair comparison as Germany has terrible geography in comparison to the US for energy generation, and certain energy sources like hydropower are very efficient, but not possible to replicate given the environmental impact.

Hell, even solar generation in Germany isn't anywhere as good as the US, where it can build solar parks in the south, meanwhile most of Germany has what, 6 hours of daylight during winter?

To me, it's absurd that the US has literally the best geography of any country in the world and yet isn't coal-free.

It has even a river that divides the country. It's almost as if it was hand-drawn by god. With mountainy regions, hot and cold areas, deserts and tropical areas, America you have no excuse and can do better.

The US also has got enormous and inexhaustible (all together) coal mines, and oil fields of course. The price of natural gas is negative in some parts of Texas.

Natural gas isn't so terrible for the environment, despite not being renewable.

But coal? Yikes. As you've said it, as gas is so cheap, perhaps use lots of gas and invest in renewables. But go coal-free.

Texas has 100GW of solar and 50GW of batteries in ERCOT’s interconnect queue. Eleven times smaller than Australia, far more rapid and ambitious decarbonization based on the economics alone. I would not expect the remaining coal (14GW) and gas (66GW) in Texas to be around long.

(we deployed about 1GW/day of solar on average globally in 2023, and this is expected to rise to ~2.7GW in 2024, reaching 1TW deployed annually; the US is also now one of the largest LNG exporters in the world)

> CO2e per GWh over the last 12 months as the USA

Well, Germany uses half the electricity per capita.

Germany is killing it.

Since I've moved here I've been following renewable energy numbers and also what the government commits to, and it's incredible how they've managed to meet consistently the solar and wind generation goals.

Unfortunately, they haven't been able to meet other goals such as amount of housing built etc.

But coming from a third-world country where I wouldn't trust any kind of plans coming from the government, it's really surprising to me.

To achieve this, in a bureaucratic country like Germany, they need to align many stars like building permits, subsidies, companies that can navigate the system, capital. Yet, they still manage to do it.

And that's in a current political situation with three parties in the government that disagree all the time. Imagine what could be done in more stable times!

The huge issue I see is that they fail to implement enough social balancing, which leads to more and more people voting for the extreme right wing party AfD, which will cause a lot of trouble after the next elections.

Politics in a democratic regime end up reflecting the desire of the people, if somebody is to blame for this mess are the voters themselves.

This situation makes AFD temporarily strong, but also gives space to other parties to perhaps say yes again to atomic energy and other non-conventional ideas.

Also brings more power to CDU and other parties that resembles more stability. Politics is a self-balancing system, it's not so useful to care about it.

I'd agree if only we had more time to solve the upcoming challenges. But currently it looks like no one's going to be strong enough to do the right things. Four years are a lot of (wasted) time in the short period we have left.

German here. German middle class considers the current political situation (across all federal layers) the least trustworthy in at least 30-50 years. The majority of the people is frustrated AF because of government paralysis for no real reasons but political gambling.

It's that bad that >90% of my friends and acquaintances chose to not read the news anymore and go with ignorance and escapism. Germany seems to be going through some kind of identity crisis right now (we lack most competencies for 21st century and used to cover all problems with money and arrogance) and chances are not that low we'll end up with far right leadership.

(The only good thing is that the German army is that much underfunded and bureaucratic that a military coup is impossible. /s)

Fellow German here. I share your sentiment 100%. I quit consuming standard news early last year and replaced it with reading primary sources if the topic was substantial. Further, there are capable experts on Youtube. However, cutting through the noise and hyperbole takes time, and sometimes experts do not realize having left their field of expertise.

By now, I fully agree with Neil Postman's verdict that news primarily exists to entertain. Many discussions could be decided by looking at a chart if the discussion's participants had the will and competency to do so, which, I am afraid, is regularly not the case.

Regarding the production and consumption of electrical power, I find www.smard.de/home/marktdaten a great tool. Before using it, I had no idea of basics such as the order of magnitude of power production and consumption or the meaning of units like Watt hour. In effect, quitting news helped me to expand my horizons far more than I expected.

Wait, what? Whatever happened to all the coal fired power plants Germany is going to spin up to keep us all warm and toasty?

Yeah I have the same question.

My understanding is they had to bring more coal online to offset shutting down nuclear. What gives?

well.. its actually a bit more complex than that. The TLDR is that the slack of nuclear was picked up by renewables (mostly wind). the slightly more complicated reason is that wind often was kept off in favor of non-throttle-able base-loads like coal and nuclear. Now with the latter out of the picture the slack has to be taken up my either expensive NGAS or wind. NGAS can be throttled somewhat quickly so if there is wind its now used.

This suddenly reveals the true capacities that were there all along.

Not sure I get your point in 2019 Germany was producing 123.6TWh of wind energy in 2023 it's 139.8 TWh. Yes it's increasing but it doesn't even start to compensate the total that went from 522TWh to 436TWh. And the wind production capacity increased at the same time from 62GW to 69GW during the same time interval.

A huge problem with the German coal phase-out by 2038 ("ideally by 2030") is that the law doesn't prohibit exporting coal. So with every coal plant that's shut down, coal becomes cheaper and will be burned by someone else.

We're doomed.

> China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years, according to a new report released this week. It's the equivalent of about two new coal power plants per week. The report by energy data organizations Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.

> That's despite the fact that much of the world is getting off coal, says Flora Champenois, coal research analyst at Global Energy Monitor and one of the co-authors of the report.

> "Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas," she says. "We saw that China has six times as much plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined."

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...

China is also building enough renewable power than their grid expansion rate leading to a structural decline in CO2 emissions. At the same time the utilization factors of the coal plants reduce each year.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...

They are not accounted for when they are not supplying electricity thus the headline. But they are still running in idle mode, consuming coal.

And by "record low", we mean "nearly six times that of neighboring France."

Compare: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&...

Unsurprising, given the countries' opposing views on nuclear power.

However, in 2023, Germany has for the first time produced most of its electrical power (52%) from renewable energy sources [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germanys-2023-renewa...

Currently at 80GW of solar and 66GW of wind with a goal of 215GW cumulative solar capacity by 2030. Roughly speaking, they’ll have over 300GW of wind and solar by the end of the decade assuming at least another 20GW of wind gets built. For comparison, this is five times more than all existing French nuclear generation capacity (61GW), and does not include hydro, pumped hydro, batteries, and interconnectors.

So the whole nuclear argument is frankly silly. This will be done before even a few GWs of nuclear were to come online.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/11/22/germanys-january-octo...

Capacity is not generation.

Generation capacity * capacity factor = reasonable estimate of generation over a window of time.

Maybe it's better to use numbers based on generation estimate then? Comparing capacity of baseload and intermittent energy sources is very misleading.

The need for baseload generation is a myth.

https://www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/uploads/pub...

https://energypost.eu/dispelling-nuclear-baseload-myth-nothi...

https://theconversation.com/baseload-power-is-a-myth-even-in...

Sure, renewables+gas can be considered a baseload source of electricity. Though it's not very cheap nor carbon neutral.

Overproduction of renewables, transmission, and battery/pumped hydro storage negates the need for fossil gas for that last bit of power. Certainly, today, fossil gas is used to fill the gaps, but as the world begins deploying in excess of 1TW/year of renewables this year, that fossil gas will be rapidly pushed out of the mix. And it is arguably better to let those generation facilities become stranded and require decommissioning vs more nuclear (which is orders of magnitude more expensive to decomm due to the nature of nuclear fuel, spent, unspent, and anything it has exposed).

Once the world is awash in clean, renewable energy, we can then scale up direct air carbon capture, paying back the carbon debt we incurred through industrialization burning fossil fuels. No nuclear required.

It sounds great until you start doing the math. We can't decarbonise without nuclear, just look at Germany. It's a poster child for renewables yet it's barely doing better than Poland (where I live). Meanwhile France is (as of now) emitting 1/10th of Germany's CO2 per unit of energy generated.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/21/us-can-get-to-100percent-cle...

https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/11/01/most-scenarios-tod...

There are lots of grids without any nuclear power already. Poland only has ~34GW of total fossil generation, very easy to replace without nuclear.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PL?wind=false&solar=fal...

You're focusing on electricity and omitting heating, transport, industry and farming.

By which metric is Germany barely doing better than Poland? In 2023, Poland produced 26% of its electricity from renewable sources [1], while Germany produced 52%. And that is with more than twice the amount of people living (and using energy) in Germany as compared to Poland.

[1] https://notesfrompoland.com/2024/01/03/poland-produced-recor...

Renewable energy is not the target, carbon neutrality is. German CO2 emissions per capita were only marginally better than Poland's in 2022 (8.0t vs 8.1t).

Well, I would say that if your population is twice as big as that of another country, any per capita goal is naturally much harder to achieve.

That's not how per capita works.

It absolutely is.

Yeah because France uses Nuclear, Germany does not and energy is expensive AF there.

Germany renewable generation capacity is relatively new, France will have to pay the bill to replace their legacy nuclear fleet as it approaches end of life. France is coasting on old capital investments that will eventually come due. Cost of renewables and batteries continues to decline, the cost of nuclear does not.

Pencil out what it would cost to replace all current French nuclear generation at today’s nuclear build costs. It’s astronomical.

Germany will have to replace all of it's solar and wind capacity long before most French reactors become EOL.

Which is factored in the cost. Sometimes companies upgrade early because the newer versions are more efficient.

The French are looking to have their entire nuclear fleet become EOL the next 20 years and for replacement they have 1 reactor being constructed. That is an awful spot to be in.

What is not factored in, however, is that nuclear reactors can work for much longer than 40 years (which is a time span used by LCOE). Not to mention storage and grid extension. French reactors will have their lifetime extended beyond 60 years which gives France plenty of time to restart it's nuclear industry.

It's often tossed around that reactors can work for 80 years, but not a single one has managed that yet. The longest running nuclear plant is Beznau in Switzerland, now running for 54 years. But it needed extensive and expensive repairs around 10 years ago costing billions [1]. Swiss media reported that the reactor contains thousands of holes. [2]

So the reality is less simple and rosy than people like to pretend.

[1] https://www.axpo.com/ch/en/about-us/energy-knowledge.detail.... [2] https://www.thelocal.ch/20151008/worlds-oldest-nuclear-react...

Yes, nuclear reactors need maintenance, but extensions to 80 years are being approved, so 80+ years doesn't seem unrealistic for existing reactors.

It's neither realistic nor unrealistic, we don't really know because it hasn't been done. What we do know is that it won't be cheap. France for instance plans to invest 20-25 billion per year to keep its fleet running. But they are all in on nuclear and basically have no way out. Decommissioning of their 56 reactors would bankrupt their electricity sector so they're kicking the can down the road. The rest of the world will have cheaper options.

This sounds more like anti-nuclear propaganda. Decommissioning a functioning nuclear reactor doesn't need to be more expensive than running it. You just unplug it, let it naturally cool down, and later you can figure out how to recycle the unspent fuel (or bury it deep enough, if people really demand it) at your leisure.

And if renewables really live up to the hype (I kinda hope it does, because otherwise it will get rather awkward for the climate), France can decide to install those fancy always-available renewables at that time, without going thru the pesky "We're being praised for our renewables while burning so much coal and gas!" stage Germany is famous for.

Yes and everyone has a pot with endless gold.

The document says "generation". I though Germany imported a lot of their electricity. I can't tell if these numbers include the source of the imported power.

Interesting context I would like to know

Germany had been a net electricity exporter for the last 2 decades.

I'm assuming that's still the case for last year or it would be bigger news. I did see one article fretting that they might turn into a net importer later in the decade.

No, Germany has been a net importer in 2023. Whereas in 2022, 27.5 TWh were exported, in 2023, 8.6 TWh had to be imported. The summer was particularly disastrous, with 5.5 TWh imported in August alone. Germany consumed 483 TWh in 2022 and 457 TWh in 2023.

Image of net export (2023) by month: https://ibb.co/jDkg9sF.

You can query and visualize these data on the official site of the Bundesnetzagentur (Federal Network Agency): https://www.smard.de/home/marktdaten. It's a capable tool, you should check it out. Once using it I realized that news reports cannot replace looking at the time series data.

Germany has around 80GW of capacity in fossil fuel plants so it can generate pretty much all of its electricity from that alone. The reasons it doesn't are:

1) it's cheaper to use excess wind and solar from neighbouring countries which is the vast majority of its imports. Prices in Germany have gone down dramatically since the nuclear shutdown

2) it's better for the environment

So it's basically a win win and far away from disastrous. What is disastrous is when a quarter of your nuclear fleet goes offline unexpectedly and you need to import electricity in the middle of the biggest energy crisis of the last 50 years. And you need to nationalize the electricity company because it made a hole of 20 billion in a single year.

You can see "Import balance" on the chart.

Technically true, but still misleading, as the total production has gone down significantly:

2022: 491,8 TWh 2023: 436,8 TWh

So Germany is not replacing fossil fuels with renewables, it just produces less electricity overall. Which might be caused by the fact that electricity is so expensive nowadays, that especially energy-intensive industries are getting less and less economical, so they lower their production or even shut down completely and move elsewhere.

How much of the production in 2023 were to prop up France's ailing nuclear plants?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...

In 2023 nothing because the plants are back online, but last year a lot. Although Germany does traditionally export electricity to France in the winter because France doesn't have enough to cover electrical heating. Not sure what happened this winter.

French wind production is covering the needs currently. During end of December French production was mostly wind + nuclear.

That's great to hear. Energy-charts has data to 2014, and until last winter Germany exported more to France in every winter month except one, I think February 2022 or something.

Total production went down 12% and fossil fuel production went down 22%. So even in that sense fossil fuels are replaced with renewables.

The energy intensive industries that are affected mostly use natural gas. Energy prices for both gas and electricity have reduced significantly this year.

What is the difference between "waste renewable" and "waste non-renewable"?

I think it's differentiating waste that is burned in two categories: food and plant-based waste, which is renewable, and everything else that comes from non-renewable sources. But that's only a guess because those are typically the categories for waste separation in Germany.

...and that's all because they take electricity from Czech Republic and France, leading to increased prices there. It's like with being green by dumping trash to Poland which regularly lets it burn in the open. "Solutions"

Sources please. The trade was pretty even between Germany and France as well as between the Czech Republic and Germany [1]

The significant imports came from Denmark.

[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=...

Thanks. The irony of that comment is that prices in Europe last year skyrocketed because of the failure of French nuclear. All of the neighboring countries were stuck with the bill of that failure.

Oh really? it had nothing to do with the price of the LNG that went through the roof because of the war in Ukraine and the fact that electricity price are governed by the price of the last capacity called (LNG plants)?

It was one part of it. The second part of it is the supply was heavily constrained. Countries around France (e.g. Italy and in some parts of the year Switzerland etc.) depended on that electricity too. So when it was gone it really screwed everything up. You are correct that gas is the highest priced and sets the price of all electricity, but it simply wouldn't have been used as much if french nuclear hadn't failed. That's how merit order works.

Unlikely given that Germany has been the biggest exporter of electricity in the world for 13 of the last 15 years.

https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/electricity

Yes, and Germany is in steep industrial decline...

This is really misleading. They already have one of the largest "green" investments in the world and are still only getting pennies on the dollar back for it (Germany is not particularly sunny nor windy).

They still use massive amounts of coal compared to neighbors and the coal they use is lignite (aka Brown Coal aka the worst kind).

The only real change has been reducing overall electrical generation because of the shutting off of natural gas. A situation Germany is only in because of their steadfast refusal to adopt nuclear energy like their neighbors.

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