What a fucking joke. It’s amazing how all these countries set weak goals for themselves and then fail anyway.
We’re all going to die lol
The UK likes to go the other way by talking up a ridiculous goal and then immediately failing it, like "Our goal is to produce zero CO2 and become the global leader in renewables by 2025” and then immediately open a new coal mine.
That’s basically what Germany did. They recently shut down their nuclear plants and restarted their coal plants.
And yet coal power production is practically at the lowest level ever (except for corona months 03/20 and 04/20)
Germany still has a very long way to go to be carbon neutral.
Almost 79% of its primary energy consumption is fossil fuel. 17% is renewable.
For comparison in France 46% of the primary energy consumption is fossil fuel, 14% renewable and 40% nuclear.
Look at the industry’s growth in France though. Renewables has been growing at the expense of nuclear. This is happening in Germany as well.
That is just blatant misinformation. Name one single coal plant that has been restarted since nuclear power was phased out.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-reactivates-coal-fired-power-plant-to-save-gas/a-62893497
The Mehrum plant in Hohenhameln and the Heyden plant in Petershagen (whose operation has been extended).
Unless your nitpick is that these were started before the final nuclear shutdown, but I never said otherwise, only that both things happened recently.
Wow… Where have I read that lie before? Oh, yeah. 20 times in this thread already, because you all get your alternative reality sppon-fed by the same lobbyists.
Actual reality:
The “massive” amount of nuclear shut down
The actual problem was stopping to fund solar, smashing a hundred thousand jobs in renewables under the pretense of “saving workers”. ~20k jobs in coal heroically saved.
But they could easily do it (and get paid by fossil fuel lobbyists) because the discussion is completely twisted anyway. And most constructive discussion of the topic will be drowned in fairy tales about renewables not working, nuclear being our only savior and other bullshit.
Basically this whole thread is a perfect example. We discuss electricity production because that’s the direction the nuclear social media cult is pushing every discussion into…
The actual report linked in this thread is for a German report of construction and traffic sectors not meeting their emission reduction goals… and I’m pretty sure neither coal nor nuclear is used to power cars nowadays. And the electrification bottle neck for transport is the production pace of electric cars, their still too high prize, limits on loading infra-structure etc., not actually energy per se.
Thank you for debunking this nuclear fanboy bullshit that gets repeated all the time.
Yes, but the goals in germany are written into a law, and the highest council actually blaming the government for failed goals.
Still not gonna change a damn thing. The (federal) government(s) don’t care, they are busy framing harmless protesters as potential terrorists and jailing them accordingly. Or they simply change the law again so that they do not have to be held accountable for their missed goals (see the ministry for transport).
The government has more interest in pursuing the global power ambitions of the Standort Deutschland rather than accomplishing environmental goals, even in spite of one of the parties being named Die Grünen (which is basically just good PR for them and nothing of substance) - and the goals that are being pursued anyway are all to the slogan of Cem Özdemir “Zwischen Wirtschaft und Umwelt gehört kein oder”. Environmentalism as long as it remains profitable, even at costs of +2, +2,5, +3 or more °C
The next elections are sure to be won by Merz, with or without the AfD, and very likely to have the FDP in influential ministries, so nothing will change - or perhaps even for the worse.
That’s what happens when the main goal of production is not the goal of creating socially necessary goods, but to insert money into the labor process and end up with more than you had at the beginning.
Sure… the once-again-below-5%-party will get influential ministries. And the Greens totally did not manage to meet their climate goals in agricultur and industry, both huge causes for emmisions. Oh, wait. They by far surpassed them. Soemthing you cannot say about traffic (FDP) or construction (SPD).
But yeah, I know. Brain-damage doesn’t allow you to not parrot the popular fairy tales of the German right wing media, we get dwoned in on adaily basis for nearly two years now, just once.
Let me guess… you also totally believe the popular fantasy of the Greens losing voters in droves (actual ~0-0,1% since the election) because that’s the narratives spoon-fed to you with weeks of rediculous talk about the Green’s reaching a new low constantly… while their coalition partners actually lost 33-40% of their respective voters since the election.
The kind of law where people go to jail or the kind of law people have long televised meetings and write op eds?
German here.
Even back under Merkel, elected parties had a habit of defining good goals and then rendering them impossible to hit through policy. This meant that no one could fault them for trying, and no one could fault them for not being able to hit them.
Nowadays my countrymen aren’t as stupid anymore. That doesn’t mean we can do anything about it, but especially since Merkel we don’t believe any of these leaks anymore.
Good ol CDU turning almost everything they touched into steaming horseshit
The goal is complete decarbonization until 2045 and a lot of sectors in Germany are already on track with that goal, energy being one of them. That with a minister of finance, that does not want to spend money and a minister of transportation, that is more a puppet of the automobile industry and does not care about decarbonization. Imagine the US without the huge subsidies into clean energy. That’s what Germany is trying to do under their current minister of finance.
Energy or electricity? Those are two very different things.
Sorry, that was imprecise. The correct German term would be Energiewirtschaft, that can be translated to energy industry. That’s not only electricity, but also production of biogas, district heating, refining of fossil fuels and so on. The struggling departments from worst to slightly struggling are: -transportation: widespread use of fossil fuels -building: heating with fossil fuels and emissions from concrete -industry: high use of energy and no alternative to fossil fuels in some cases
Great that the plan is for the entire economy. Cheap and reliable clean electricity is possibly the most important and straightforward(ish) issue to solve with steel and concrete sitting at the opposite end of the spectrum.
I’m much more optimistic, though I do think it will get worse before it gets better. I think we’ll end up with a few mass killer enviromental events before humans start to save themselves properly. It’ll never be too late as Earth is always going to better than anywhere else for us.
Quick list of things hopeful in my feeds of the top of my head.
- Renewable energy is the cheapest energy.
- Agrivoltaics can increase yeilds while also providing power.
- Home Solar & battery pay back time is coming down all the time.
- Electric cars are the cheapest over their life time and the upfront costs are tumbling.
- Electrification of more and more transport types is happening to save costs.
- EVs are going V2H/V2G/V2X which means you get a large home (and office?) battery to take part in energy markets.
- Second life EV batteries will eventury be a source of larger, cheaper, home batteries.
- Just the other day another methane solution : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/22/bacteria-that-eats-methane-could-slow-global-heating-study-finds
- Fusion looks closer than 50 years out now.
- RightToRepair + OpenSource is slowly spreading and will reduce life time costs and reduce e-waste. Regulators are waking up too.
- Vertical farming is developing and will end up cheaper.
- Lab meat or precision fermentation is a path to animal free animal protein at lower costs.
- 5 minute cities as an idea is spreading.
- Covid has normalized WFH
- Green spaces in cities to cool them and improve mental health is increasingly being talked about and pushed in some forward thinking cities.
- Peak population is constantly revised down and sooner. Once population starts to fall, it’s not set to stop for a long time.
There is a lot of movement. It’s all about aligning economics with fighting climate change. Which is natural as using less to do the same thing is better for both.
One thing that is a very good sign is oil companies are scared. They are spending a lot of money pumping out FUD. Doom peddling to slow climate action, but economics is against them. Even without climate damage being costed in. Which governments will do when oil is less powerful.
Fight the doom!
Some of the things you listed are indeed good, but we’re not going to avert climate catastrophe unless we reject the idea that we can only do good things if they’re less expensive than the bad thing alternative.
There’s also a lot of propaganda paid by fossil fuel lobbyists (and some nuclear lobbyists still going for the perceived easy target of renewables, as rediculous as it is…) with the goal to disrupt the energy transition.
And the majority here actually believes they are anti-fossil fuels while they actually parrot their propaganda (for example the “Germany stopped nuclear power to burn more coal”-fairy tale you can read a hundred times by now here - only invented for the talking point of coal being needed, when Germany is actually at a historic low in use) and thus constantly running (objectively wrong) talking points against renewable power.
On one hand I love the obvious panic of fossil fuel lobbyists getting more desperate and rediculous in their massaging by the day. On the other hand, they already brain-washed a massive amount of people that I fear are really lost and will fight tooth and nails against a reasonable green transition to pursue their fantasies of “sane” nuclear build-up (that isn’t sane because nobody is actually building enough capoacities to make sense mathematically), without that “non-working” storage (that nuclear power actually needs to be economically viable) and “expensive” renewables (same, same…).
You get it. But at the end of the day, the fossil fuel companies will lose because of economics. Renewable energy and electrification is cheaper and better and planet saving. There will be economic feedback loops kicking in as less fuel is used, taking up the price.
But “in the end” isn’t fast enough for my taste… or for the taste of people losing their homes or base of life to floods, draughts, forest fires and so on.
And it won’t even get better but just worse even if we stopped co2 emission completely today. We would have need that feedback loop a decade ago. Instead the same lobbyists now sabotaging it got a lot of renewables killed the moment they were too cheap to compete.
If you draw a curve of deployed solar and wind power, the last decade is a hole that basically threw us back more than the missed time even.
And even if renewables take over for economicla reasons now, they will just change tactic and instead sabotage storage and infrastructure to keep fossil fuels relevant.
Germany had a very coal heavy power prodcution originally and massively build up renewables… and the lobbyists were already ahead… they blocked grid extensions to create pockets depending on coal no matter how much cheap green electricity is available. They blocked grid extensions to make diversification less effective. They -also for that reason- pushed antiwind sentiments in one part of the country and anti-solar in another. They made storage commercially unviable by massive double taxation (once as an end consumer while loading, then as a producer while unloading).
And they did all that basically without anyone taking much notice because they also -and much more visible- blocked wind and solar power in general (ffs… they killed a 100k people industry and sold it off to China just because solar was getting too cheap).
Yes, renewables are extremely cheap. So cheap in fact that people fight for their chance to build solar and wind in designated areas instead of wanting subsidies like for other power production. But if we don’t take a very close and constant look, we will be surprised in a decade how all those renewables did not actually help reduce co2 much as the 10-year-infrastructure plans for storage and grid are suddenly about lagging 9 years behind. Just look at such basic projects like the north-south grid connection in Germany. The 10-year plan to build SüdLink is scheduled to be done in ~6 years now… after 12 years. 100% sponsored by conservative local politicians and conservative nimbys cosplaying as environmentalists.
Never give up hope. That’s what fossil fuels companies want.
In 2005 me and my now wife watched “Who Killed the electric car” and it felt hopeless. Now we both drive EVs and you see more and more of them on the road. Home solar used to be a pipe dream, but now I know more people with it and hope to set it up myself. My electricity provider claims 100% renewables. We plan to remove gas use from the house.
Germany will hurt itself by not looking forwards, and as that becomes more and apparent, it will be harder to maintain. Fossil fuel money will start to reduce and with that, it’s corruption of politics and information. At some point, I hope some jail time is handed out to those who knowing slowly climate against for money. Now, climate action and money are more and more lined up. Always have been long term, but now short term too. Aligned on energy and thus everything down stream of energy. Which a lot of stuff!
Australia’s Teals movement shows common sense can win out.
It’s amazing how all these countries set weak goal
It’s can kicking. Make a promise for something 25 years in the future. Who cares if the country can’t meet it? You’ll likely be out of office or retired by that point. That’s the next person’s problem.
That’s the next person’s problem.
it is until people start getting organized and seeking justice on those responsible
We’ll be fine. We’re gonna throw some reflective particulate into the atmosphere or some shit.
We’ll drop a giant ice cube into the ocean, solving the problem once and for all!
You kid, but we’re not gonna get greenhouse gases under control. We’re gonna find a way to stabilize temps and kick the can down the road to the next issue co2 causes.
Didn’t you hear him? ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!
Por que no los dos?
because of this
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That’s fallacious reasoning.
Just because climate engineering is the only way to stabilize temperatures doesn’t actually mean it can be done. That’s all hypothetical tech, just like carbon capture and other fairy tales we tell ourselves to cope with the reality of the end of the fucking world.
I’ll tell you what will happen. We won’t do anything to stop or slow climate change and we’ll reach a tipping point, after which society will rapidly collapse into warring factions and any hope of stabilizing the climate will be gone until we have a nuclear winter reset.
We’re all going to die lol
I agree … but that attitude also encourages people, especially leaders … and especially the billionaires that control this world … to believe that destruction is the ultimate end and to just play along, pick up as much wealth as possible while you can and do whatever you please because the end is near.
As if billionaires needed more reasons to pick up as much wealth as possible while they can lol
Not german but I’m in the same continent and in a country that nobody really cares about and we are nearing the threshold where renewables produce more than we require to run the country.
Funny thing is, private citizens are doing more for that effort alone than government in real terms because saving money is high on the priorities list here and free, renewable energy is a good thing, even more if you can produce it yourself.
Meanwhile, we’ve been fighting the government to cancel the authorization to log nearly 2000 old growth cork oaks for installing a solar panel farm when we have a lot of room to plant off shore wind farms.
Nobody really understands what is going on.
Which country?
Portugal
Oh nice. Yeah, Portugal runs under the radar here. I found rhis https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/portugal
Seems like you got rid of coal already. Oil/gas seem to hover however. Do you have plans about getting rid of fuel cars? And what do you use gas for? In Germany it’s mostly heating, I would have guessed you don’t need so much heating in Portugal and can use the AC in winter.
And good look with these oaks, I hate forest being cut down.
There a few incentives towards the purchase of eletric cars but its something still way out of reach for the majority of people. But the number of eletric cars is rising.
Gas is mostly used to run a few eletric generation plants. AC is a doubled edge sword here as houses are poorly insulated and the minimal recommmended power for having an equipment is 10.35Kva, which is a power requirement where all VAT is applied at 23%. The equipments are also very expensive and the installation even more.
And thank. Lets hope we can make enough noise to have to trees left alone
cork oaks
Portugal! What a wonderful country full of wonderful people. We do care about you and your delicious but slightly greasy food.
You’ve been eating at the wrong places… that’s a spanish thing: too much olive oil on every dish and too much fat on every cured meat
I just remember a sandwich covered in melted cheese with an egg on top and some kind of sauce. And a lot of delicious fried food. Both usually with fries as a side dish. Never any salad unless I specifically ordered it. I’m sure I could have gone to lots of restaurants where they would have had lighter meals, but I was on holiday so greasy was perfect.
Francesinha.
You can get those swimming in a pool of fat and you can get it very lean and clean.
You’ve been to Porto, right?
The make or break for that dish is the sauce. Some people can make it very heavy and some are capable of making it very light. Just know the amount of booze it goes in it could fuel a small plane.
Then comes the cheese and some places just overdo it. Four or five thin slices are enough but I do know some places throw half a block over every sandwhich.
I apologise for the fries. That’s fast food influence. And the egg was unexpected; that’s an addition from the croque madame.
Hope you had fun here.
I mean, they have only really started since the corrupt right-wing shitheads are not in office anymore. Now we only have to deal with a minister of transport who just refuses to work and claims policies the greens pushed for are his achievement lol
Wow what a surprise, guess brown coal isn’t good for the climate. Bunch of idiots those German politicians. They even tried to weaken that EU bill that bans the sale of new fossil fuel cars.
Voted in by German citizens.
Who have been subjected to targeted information warfare/propaganda for years.
And also, people straight up lie and deceive.
It’s a very, veeery good thing the fucking CDU was voted out. No matter how much you hate the current government for one reason or another, at least they do something besides shoveling money into their pockets and maintaining status quo.
We’ll see whether their ideas work out, but at least they have some.
I had high hopes for the current government, but I never imagined the FDP would be able to do so much damage with so few votes. The way it is now, I’m pretty disappointed. A lot of great ideas that were just shut down in their infancy.
It’s not just the FDP though, Scholz is at least complicit with their bullshit. It is beyond me, how the SPD supports whatever Wissing does in the transportation department.
The fact that Scholz didn’t even come to my mind when I thought about the German government says it all. I had no expectations and I was still disappointed.
Awww, poor German people. Never learned to think for themselves. Just learned how to follow orders.
You don’t realize how incredible funny it (or sad… depned on perpective) it is to see people like you parrot the same lie spoon-fed to you by lobbyists again and again while talking about other being too stupid to think.
This incredible post-factula world where popular narrative trumps reality is truely lost…
Lol, what an egoistic view of the world. “Everybody else is to blame but me”. It’s all those lobbyists, immigrants, bankers, politicians, nazis, antifa, that boogeyman over there! But me? Nah, I’m perfect and all my friends and family never do anything wrong. In fact, anybody who I can identify with is globally right.
Now that’s sad.
Yes, it looks egoistic if you are this deluded as you are.
But we have real problems to solve and can’t save every propaganda victim that refuses to accept reality because you run on the usual hateful narrative about Germany. Hey, I don’t even blame you. Telling a lie about Germany any time you need to divert from some own issue is a well honored tradition in Europe (and thus wide-spread in media) and so I understand that you were trained to follow that pattern. It’s sad (or funny… I still haven’t decided…) none-the-less.
So you can cry about those imaginary egoistic Germans of yours all you want. The actual ones are massively building up renewables, are -contrary to your beloved lies- on a historic low in coal use. And this report is actually about the transport and construction sectors not matching their emission reduction goals (while sectors liker energy or industry -the actual sources of coal use- are easily fullfilling theirs… but that’s not mentioned because -as I said before- energy and industry are not even remotely the topic of this report.)
What makes you think that person only thinks poorly of German low-information voters? Low-information voters are a plague around the world.
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Luckily we will get rid of coal soon.
I hope so…
Well duh? Are they nationalizing all carbon emitting industries to begin a managed decline of the industry or are they hoping economic magic and wishful thinking will work?
they’re turning their coal power plants back on after shutting down their nuclear power plants. oh, and planning on converting existing natural gas pipelines to carry hydrogen instead… likely generated by natural gas.
Natural gas is a byproduct of gasoline refining, so I’d rather see it converted to hydrogen than have it get burned, whether for use or disposal.
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Sure… they turn up coal power to result in the lowest coal use ever.
Just like they shut down reactors that produced laughable 2,6% of all electricity that year, yet those reactors (ones that were replaced by renewables even) could have single-handedly reduced their emissions by massive amounts.
Just like they never actually used more than a few percent of gas in electricity production (because they only use gas as short-time peak burners to compensate supply/demand spikes and that’s really expensive even when gas was cheap) but somehow were so completely dependent on gas to not sit in the dark that they started to burn even more coal… again while actually massively reducing coal.
I don’t know if it’s magic or advanced quantum mechanics allowing them to do the polar opposite of the popular narratives every single time…
…or you are just brain-washed to believe every lie about Germany again and again. Hmm… No, that sounds unrealistic. It’s probalby the magic thing.
Well not a bad idea tbh, as most state owned and controlled companies tend to go belly up.
“Recommendations” are useless when line must always go up.
No matter the platform worldnews comments contain mainly ignorant, overconfident bullshit. Glad to know that there are some things in life one can depend upon.
China still is the ONLY country in the world to have met the super meager Paris Climate Accord goals.
China has absolutely not met the Paris accord goals. Check climate action tracker for a good breakdown of countries policies and actions and the projection it puts them on. No country is anyway close.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/08/climate/cop27-emissions-country-compare.html
New York times reported China is ahead of pledges
… did you link the correct article? It seems quite critical of China’s emissions?
None of the world’s biggest emitters – China, the United States, the European Union and India – have reduced their emissions enough to meet the Paris Agreement goals.
Over the past two decades, China’s emissions have surged as the country has developed economically at a breakneck pace. Mainly because of its reliance on coal, one of the highest-emitting fuels, China now accounts for almost a third of all human-caused greenhouse gases — more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined.
Granted, the article says that China’s emissions are projected to peak in 2025, but that still means emissions are estimated to increase every year for another 3 years. They have not (yet) actually reduced their annual emissions, let alone achieved anything close to net-zero.
According to projections from Climate Action Tracker and other monitoring organizations, China’s emissions are nearing their peak, years ahead of when China’s government had pledged to reach that goal. Analyses show China’s rate of emissions neither growing nor declining from now until 2025, before gradually dropping off. China’s peak will occur at a far lower per capita emissions level than countries like the United States.
The goal that China has beaten, it would seem, is their own internal peak date goal. It’s good that they set and kept a goal, but keeping an internal goal is not the same thing as keeping the Paris Accord goals. The Paris Accord represents the bare minimum for avoiding a climate catastrophe and should continue to be the primary bar which we measure countries against.
They literally have a graph showing their paris accord goal as of now, where they as of now, and a 1.5c goal. They and India are ahead.
Also
China’s emissions are nearing their peak, years ahead of when China’s government had pledged to reach that goal.
Every country has different pledge responsibilities it would be drastically unfair to ask more of developing countries to reduce at the same rate as non, especially taking into account the looting the west has done and the offshored emissions on their behalf.
I’m not anti-China. I’m just pro-clarity.
When someone says “China has absolutely not met the Paris accord goals” and you respond “New York times reported China is ahead of pledges”, it creates the impression that you are correcting the former statement with a contradictory source. The source is not actually contradictory, however, because it explicitly affirms the original point.
They literally have a graph showing their paris accord goal as of now, where they as of now, and a 1.5c goal. They and India are ahead.
That is excellent. I’m very pleased to hear this. Perhaps you could share that graph next time instead?
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It’s in the article.
spoiler
How is your reading comprehension so poor?
This graph, correct?
It doesn’t seem much closer to the blue Paris Accord goal compared with any of the other graphs in the same article, as far as I can tell.
As for India, I don’t see how beating a goal of **+**25% emissions with +20% is any cause for celebration. I actually agree with you and the article when you say that they don’t need to be held to the same standard as fully developed economies, but in that case we probably shouldn’t be talking about them at all when it comes to meeting emissions reduction goals.
Fair enough if we’re going just on pledges on total emissions change by 2030 than China and many other countries like India, Sweden, Denmark and Morocco are in line for the pledges taken. This is just a component of the Paris Accords the main pledge was to take action to limit warming well under 2 degrees. No countries action or policies are in line to meet that pledge. That can be seen in the article you linked showing how far off all four emitters are to 1.5.
Climate action tracker and the CCPI they put out are the best sources for accurately tracking countries actions. China and pretty much all other countries fall down on their net zero targets rooted in fiction and missing NDC targets.
You’d think the shock of the gas shortage from Russia would of been a wake up call and they’d be ahead of a timeline like this…
This is the best summary I could come up with:
BERLIN, Aug 22 (Reuters) - German goals to cut greenhouse emissions by 65% by 2030 are likely to be missed, meaning a longer-term net zero by a 2045 target is also in doubt, reports by government climate advisers and the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) show.
“According to the current status, Germany would still emit 229 million tonnes of climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions in the target year 2045,” the UBA report found.
Under pressure from the pro-business FDP party, the ruling coalition in June agreed to dilute a bill to phase out oil and gas heating systems from 2024.
Building minister Klara Geywitz said the sector was making progress but needs improvements in some areas to close the emissions gap, adding that climate protection measures should be practical and doable to avoid overtaxing people.
The council said assumptions made by the transport ministry on the effectiveness of the planned and already implemented measures, such as a discounted national rail ticket, a CO2 surcharge on truck tolls and increased working from home, were also optimistic.
And that is ultimately a gap in the transport programme," Brigitte Knopf, deputy chairwoman of the council, told a news conference presenting the report findings on Tuesday.
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The UBA is truly one of the funnier institutions. It’s a federal agency tasked with suggesting and studying how to cut emissions, so they propose goals for legislation, none of which ever have been listened to even slightly. It’s basically a welfare program and I don’t even mean that derogatory.
getting rid of nuclear power for russian gas was always a bad idea and this is why
Except that never happened. Gas is mostly used for heating in Germany, not for electricity like nuclear power. I don’t know where this rumour started (probably somewhere on reddit) but it’s just not true.
Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not saying that relying so much on Russian gas was a good move or that we couldn’t (and shouldn’t) have done a lot more to move away from coal. But that particular argument is misinformation.
Electricity could be used for heating (via heat pumps) if Germany had an abundance of clean electricity in the winter.
We are trying to get more heat pumps installed, but people are still proud of getting a new gas furnace installed in 2023, thus avoiding a potential ban and betting on guaranteed dirt-cheap natural gas for another 20 years.
But either way, nuclear power is history in Germany and it makes absolutely no sense to bring it back. We never had a lot of nuclear power to begin with and the few power plants that could maybe be reactivated with a ton of money and labor are just a drop in the bucket. Building new reactors takes decades from initial planning to going live and nuclear construction projects are notorious for immense cost overruns. Plus, there are only a few construction companies in the world that have the capabilities to build a nuclear reactor and they’re already tied up in other projects. We would need dozens of new reactors built simultaneously and they would still be finished too late to contribute anything meaningful to a carbon-free electrical grid.
At the same time, wind energy is a dirt cheap, proven technology that is much more easily deployed, scales really well, is decentralized and reliable. Yes, it can be intermittent but it’s predictable (weather forecasts exist). And if we had invested a fraction of the R&D budget for nuclear fission and fusion into energy storage technology, it would be a complete non-issue. We have some work to do in that regard, but sodium ion batteries are pretty far in development and should be much cheaper. Iron redox flow and liquid metal batteries also have potential, maybe hydrogen. Demand response will also be a big factor. With flexible pricing during the day, both households and businesses can save a lot of money by using more energy whenever there’s a lot of it and less when it’s scarce.
Your second paragraph could be summed up as: we chose the destination years ago, so there’s no point changing course.
Will wind and solar will be sufficient to replace all the gas with heat pumps, and keep them running every day in the winter? I would also be hesitant to give up gas heat, without understanding where the replacement electricity will be coming from. “Demand response” means that the rich stay warm, while industry migrates to countries with better price stability… or continued CO₂ emission to avoid those outcomes.
Perhaps in the end it doesn’t really matter, since the transmission infrastructure for EU-wide renewables will also be useful for buying nuclear from the countries that are investing now.
Your second paragraph could be summed up as: we chose the destination years ago, so there’s no point changing course.
Which makes perfect sense when you consider that there’s a deadline, we’ve gone a very long way in one direction and going all the way back to take another route would guarantee missing that deadline.
It’s like you’re taking your ship from China to Rotterdam, you’re past the Suez canal, in the Mediterranean and now you decide to turn around and go around Africa after all. It really would be idiotic.
It’s like you’re taking your ship from China to Rotterdam, you’re past the Suez canal, in the Mediterranean and now you decide to turn around and go around Africa after all. It really would be idiotic.
That decision wouldn’t be idiotic if I actually wanted to go to Africa. It takes even longer to turn around from Rotterdam.
In my example, ‘Rotterdam’ is supposed to be the ultimate destination, so it would be equivalent to ‘carbon neutrality’. Changing the destination to ‘Africa’ would be the equivalent to just building nuclear power plants for the sake of it, regardless of whether they help us reach carbon neutrality.
Yes, it could and increasingly is. But that still doesn’t make it true that the nuclear power was replaced by gas.
You have to look back a few decades to see the whole picture. If we’d kept investing in nuclear technology since the 1980s, with a focus on passive safety and cost reduction, we’d never have needed all that gas in the first place.
By “we”, I mean the entire western world, not Germany specifically. The fossil fuel companies allegedly encouraged anti-nuclear sentiment during that era, and nobody had the organization and foresight to fight back, so we’re all paying the price today.
I don’t really know why you are trying to start a discussion with me because I never argued against any of that. You are right, we could be a lot farther if we had done a lot of things earlier. And it sucks that we aren’t. All of that doesn’t change that the comment I replied to was factually wrong. We could have replaced gas (or coal*) with electricity by using electricity based heating. We did not replace nuclear power with gas.
Edit: * I wrote coal, I meant oil.
That doesn’t make any sense. That’s like, going to a mechanic and giving them a few million to start an auto business vs going to some random guy, and giving them billions to start an auto business. Sure, eventually it would work out, just by sheer volume of investment, but it’s just not feasible. Otherwise governments and private industry would’ve just done it. That’s like saying we should’ve had the foresight to invest in hydrogen powered cars. Why prioritise that when batteries are easier and cheaper?
If your goal is reliable carbon-free power, it’s not obvious that renewables will work out. We basically have to build these enormous continent-spanning machines in order to maintain uptime regardless of weather conditions.
It might be possible in the US and Europe, large regions that will hopefully remain politically stable, but it’s never been done before. By comparison, we have built reliable nuclear power plants. Is it really so obvious who is the mechanic and who is the random guy?
It is, I’ve not seen a single academic study show otherwise. Not the west, nor China, have shown scepticism towards renewables. But there’s plenty of that when it comes to the nuclear question. Just look at HPC and SWC in the UK. Companies won’t touch it unless the UK government guarantees they make a profit. Not a long term profit. A profit before the project is completed. They want an advance. Then there’s the US, over-budget and delayed. Finland, over-budget and delayed. France, over-budger and delayed. EDF prefer their renewables investments than their nuclear ones, mainly because half their nuclear plants are unreliable, and nobody wants to waste more money on them.
Anti-nuclear is anti environmentalism and the failure to act sooner is on the shoulders of the people who continue to expand fossil fuels and refuse to invest in alternatives
Germany doesn’t get all of its electrical power by renewable meness by a long shot. Nuclear plants were prematurely shut down before their end of life while at the same time germanies reliance on fossil fuels went up. This is what everyone is talking about.
I just called out this particular piece of misinformation. Being of the opinion that Germany shut down nuclear power plant prematurely doesn’t make it okay to spread misinformation, does it?
You haven’t shown a single piece of evidence to show that I’m wrong. I can just throw back to you that what your saying is pure missingormation.
That is just misinformation. First of all, nuclear power never contributed that much anyway. If all nuclear power plants ever built in Germany were running at full load 24/7 for 365 days of the year, they would produce 231 TWh, which is less than 10% of our total energy demand. So there was never that big of a hole to fill in the first place. Especially in the last ten years, when only a handful of power plants were still in service.
In reality, renewables have managed to replace both nuclear power and a large chunk of fossil fuels (source). Last year we had to export enormous amounts of energy to France, because their nuclear plants had proven so unreliable (source). This has admittedly led to an increased use of fossil fuels, which we could have avoided by building more renewables here (or in France).
And if you tell that lie annother million times it will become true.
Really! you just need to nelieve real hard in ti and then reality will adapt and the propaganda hammered into your head will finally become true.
It’s more interesting to ask where the fuel could come from, given a few years of planning. The energy density is so much higher than gas, that geographical locality doesn’t really matter.
Hey, Schroeder got paid so it also wasn’t totally bad idea.
Anyone know how they planned to do this? I understand the beginning:
- Shutdown the nuclear plants
- Burn more lignite (brown coal)
- …?
I am geniunely curious if anyone knows what the plan was/is. Please chime in if you’re german or know about german energy policy.
If all the subsidiaries that went into nuclear power the last few decades went to renewables instead Germany would have no issues at all, but hey… giving tax payer money to some very few giant energy companies is more important than creating a Europe leading renewables energy sector that does not rely on russian fossils or nuclear material.
You should know that nuclear power is very expensive while renewables are absurd crazy cheap. I’ve been to a German Endlager and it takes years and BILLIONS of Euros just to seal this thing off. Guess who is paying? Mostly tax payers.
There’s be no company in Germany which would be willing to run a nuclear power plant if they were responsible for the permanent disposal of their waste on their own instead of letting the tax payer pay (most of) for it.
That’s all well and good in the energy sector. What about transportation? If I understand correctly, transportation makes up the majority of the emissions Germany aims to cut
Sadly, we have a long history of incompetent transport ministers. That didn’t change with the last elections.
Funny, because the energy sector was the only on track to fulfill the targets. Last year it even overshot its targets and is expected to again save more CO2 as planned in 2023.
Maybe, just maybe, its more relevant that other sectors are managed by the FDP (market liberals) and SPD (social democrats), while energy is managed by die Grünen (greens).
Do you know about the transportation sector? It is where 2/3 of Germanys planned reduction is.
If only there was some means of replacing all that coal with a non-carbon intensive source of energy that isn’t dependant on the weather…
Has anyone heard of such a technology?
Sarcasm aside, that Germany shut down their last two nuclear reactors so recently and carried through is astounding. The excuses are mind-boggling. They’re old? Refurbishing is cheaper and faster than new built. They need re-certification? Then do it.
It’s more efficient to use the money required for
- The inspection
- The renovations
- Acquiring new fuel
And spend it on renewables than to do the above.
Also a big factor noone seems to care about: staff. The people who worked there have other jobs now. You can’t just plop a reactor plant somewhere and expect it to make electricity you need highly specialised staff for that. We also did not invest into training new staff because why would we, with the stop for nuclear power being decided 10 years ago.
Highly Specialized staff
I watched this animated documentary from the states called The Simpsons that seems to state otherwise.
Nein!
Doch!
Ohh…
