Germany's Emissions Hit 70-Year Low As It Reduces Reliance on Coal - Slashdot
source link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/01/04/1722259/germanys-emissions-hit-70-year-low-as-it-reduces-reliance-on-coal
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Germany's Emissions Hit 70-Year Low As It Reduces Reliance on Coal
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Germany's Emissions Hit 70-Year Low As It Reduces Reliance on Coal (theguardian.com) 86
Posted by msmash
on Thursday January 04, 2024 @12:23PM from the encouraging-feedback dept.Electricity generation from renewable sources was more than 50% of the total in 2023 for the first time, while coal's share dropped to 26% from 34%, according to the federal network agency. Germany had resorted to coal following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Moscow cut off gas supplies. But since then Germany has significantly reduced its use of the fossil fuels.
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Came to post the link [ft.com]
Let me click through the first time with no paywall; hopefully it does for most.
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I thought I heard the other day that Germany just dropped all the incentives (rebate? Tax?) for EV purchases.
That's gonna hurt them for emissions this coming year too, no?
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I'm brought to understand the German economy is in free-fall, so I imagine all kinds of measures like this are considered apropos.
That said, it's kind of like reversing the culture war to increase military recruitment in the US. There's no turning on a dime.
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Actually, Germany is Doing well, certainly better than the Brits and the Russians you love so much. [msn.com]
Free-fall? They're still trying to figure out if last year was an UP or a DOWN.
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Vladimir, is that you?
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No. Repeating Russian troll posts is what makes you a Russian Troll.
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Agora Energiewende is a state sponsored entity with highly contested goals and views here in Germany. Don't take their bullshit seriously.
Statistics show that Germany has the highest CO2 emissions in Europe. Coal and gas power stations are needed to provide stable power because green energy is unreliable.
The joke is that conventional power stations have to be under power ALL DAY to provide emergency power when not enough wind and solar power is available. Even days with 100% clean energy mean CO2 is blown into the air!
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Some gas and coal power stations have always been left to idle hot to provide power when consumers (who, like renewables, are also intermittent) increase their demands. Not all power stations, and not all the time. While it does take significant amounts of energy to keep a gas turbine spinning and sync'd to the grid, it takes a lot less than when it is drawing power; and when it is not synced but it takes even less.
This role is steadily being taken over by batteries, because they are cheaper and have response time in milliseconds. This will increase over time.
Intermittent is not the same thing as unreliable; most renewables are very reliable.
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Yeah, but you know better than to tell Magat the truth.
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100% clean energy means NO CO2 is blown. WHy? The mains have no place for the wasted energy
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Well you have to spin it for a victory somehow. In related news we can see clusterfuck in Ukraine is starting to be spun as a victory too: https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
Ukraine, having been made the useful idiot and thrown into a proxy war to bleed Putin off of power, having lost a fifth of the territory... Countless lives lost to the war and a huge part of the populace as refugees... It's power grid in shambles and just no tomorrow anywhere in any way at all... Is now supposedly winning the greatest of
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Exactly this. I mean I do not expect to fly very high here saying that ignorance might just not be strength, but come on. Basic reading comprehension?
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You act like there is an alternative. Just letting little war criminal man have Ukraine is not an option. On the bright side, Ukraine is making the Soviet's time in Afghanistan look like a picnic. Killing Russian soldiers is always going to be a worthwhile goal.
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Emissions are down ~9.6% from 2022 to 2023.
Industrial production is down a net 3.2% over the same period. Also note how capacity varies month to month:
https://www.economy.com/german... [economy.com]
Further, if they "can't afford the electricity" then that would reflect in prices, not just output, and we don't see that.
This seems like a textbook case of "correlation is not causation."
=Smidge=-
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> Are you suggesting that 3.2% of Germany's industrial production isn't enough to create 9.6% of Germany's emissions? Well it is.
Well industry contributes ~22% of Germany's emissions, so if we charitably assume a 3.2% shrinkage in industrial production means a 3.2% in industry-related emissions, that's 0.22 * 0.032 = 0.007 or 0.7%.
In other words, no.. it's not. I'm not even suggesting it, it's plainly evident.
> Also it's not just industrial production
Diesel prices in 2023 were lower than in 2022 [globalpetrolprices.com] and t
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Have you actually looked at the price of electricity in Germany?
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/... [europa.eu]
Definitely at the high end for Europe (and 4x (!) what I pay here in Canada).
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It's down just over 3% year-on-year. France's is down 2% which sets some sort of benchmark. But the German figures were flat until May 2023, roughly, since the pandemic. So whatever has happened, it was pretty recent. Both France and Germany have remained a little down on pre-pandemic levels. Since, for Germany, it's a recent downturn compared to similar European nations, screaming de-industrialisation seems premature as there wasn't the same slow down a year ago compared to what is in general affecting the
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There were problems with pumps on Nordstream I, and because Siemens will only take payment in US Dollars and Russia had been locked out of the SWIFT exchange (and the $300 billion they had in it stolen) they couldn't get it fixed. Nordstream II hadn't opened yet. Both pipelines were not "empty", the terrorism resulted in the largest methane leak in history, something like $300 billion in gas was vented into the atmosphere. Dewatering the pipelines after they're repaired will probably take longer and cost
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They were removing Windfarms for coal mining. We need more than just reducing emissions, we need to develop technology for surviving in hot burning conditions that won't go away.
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Coal use in Germany for power has trended down since 1990. The rate was highest 1990-6 but has continued. The hyped increase 2021-present is a pretty small blip in the trend and has now ended, it seems as emissions fell along with coal use falling again. Germany still burns far too much coal for power, though.
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This story keeps on getting repeated. In Germany, they dismantled three wind turbines because they were sitting on land that got used for an open cast coal mine. It was about half of a small wind farm, so the use of plural is wrong.
In the mean time, Germany is expanding it's wind power generation elsewhere.
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This is propaganda attempting to dismiss German failures. Germany averaged 431 g CO2 per kWh for the last 12 months. Compare that to France which averaged 53 g CO2 per kWh. Germany is 8x dirtier than France. Germany uses gas for heating while France uses clean electricity. Also Germany industry has a proven record of falsifying emissions.
Face reality. Germany picked coal over nuclear, and the climate is paying the price.
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France is mostly nuclear which is always panned as infeasible on slashdot.
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The French nuke plants were built long ago with massive state subsidies, and even now they are basically owned by the state. There is nothing preventing nuke plants from being constructed in the US other than the fact that they are routinely over budget, many years late, and the electricity isn't competitive.
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To a great extent this is because of the US's absurd number of lawyers who all want to be millionaires and the overweening greed of the insurance cartels. It doesn't help that most of the large construction companies here who have the capabilities to build something like a nuke plant are accustomed to the graft and waste of Pentagon projects. Pretty much a "worst of all possible worlds" situation.
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First, the Germans use France's nuclear electricity. Second, "state subsidies" - as opposed to who? We have private electricity and no companies are spending on new generators. We have to pay power bills, for new generators and pay for home solar. Companies are allowed to make 40 cents difference "buying" our solar for 6 cents and selling for 46 cents. Total free market failure. If solar really was an answer normal people would not be allowed to do it. Multinationals would of swept in with massive solar fa
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There's an anonymous coward that likes to post "nobody wants nukes" on Slashdot, usually with cherry picked examples of nuclear power plant projects failing to meet goals on budget and schedule. There's over 400 civil nuclear power reactors operating in the world today, picking out a handful of examples showing some kind of failure doesn't make nuclear power infeasible. We don't declare all passenger jetliners as unsafe because of a couple crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX, neither should we declare nuclear p
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Chine has built 50 of them in the last 15 years, more than the rest of the world combined. They can do that because they are competent, and people like you are not.
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It can be done, it's just expensive. It might also not be viable long term without different fuel cycles if everyone does it.
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It's pretty obvious when you can't reuse your fuel and have to store spent fuel rods (with nowhere to go) you will have cost inefficiency. Jimmy Carter pretty much killed nuclear power in the US when he put a moratorium on breeder reactors in the 70s.
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I know, such anti-technology fact-denying views at the very least should get your Nerd Membership card revoked. But we had to lower admission standards to let in all the cryptobros, so there is that...
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I've even seen Helen Caldicott referenced here as though she weren't known to lie about anything to do with any sort of radiation (including cell towers and power lines).
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by ZipNada ( 10152669 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @01:40PM (#64131851)
Germany 'picked' wind and solar, which have been producing an ever larger percentage of grid electricity. The coal plants are being phased out, why did you lie?
Meanwhile, "Despite predictions of shortages and blackouts, Germany produces more energy than it needs, exporting energy to France over the summer, note Green Party leaders pointedly, where nuclear power stations could not operate because of extreme weather."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]-
If Germany picked wind and solar why are the averaging 431 g CO2 per kWh? And that is after spending 500 billion euros on wind and solar.
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This is good! Diversity of clean energy sources is exactly what we need!
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A drop is a drop. Could Germany do better? Yes.
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They shutdown all 17 of their nuclear power plants in favor of coal.
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Germany is such a failure for being significantly further north than France. Why didn't they think about this when maps of Europe were being first drawn! Why didn't they pick a spot where they weren't sitting on an abundance of coal at a time when it wasn't known that coal dependency was bad for anyone. How could they. Do they not have a magical time machine?
Yes Germany picked coal over nuclear. Doing anything differently would have been abjectly stupid. But not quite as stupid as calling someone a failure
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They shut down all nuclear power plants. The only way emissions are lower now if they are not producing their own energy (e.g., buying from France).
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Or they got it from gas from Qatar, displacing coal, more from wind, kept nuclear open a bit longer and imported some power from France. You can look this stuff up quite easily and don't have to speculate. Which is what I did.
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Looking it up is what I did, I mean.
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They article says how.
The majority of improvement in this year was from decreased industrial output, which is certainly a glass half full.
However most of the rest of the improvement was from the transition to wind and solar, which is going like gangbusters. It says they are on track to get 80% of their electricity from wind and solar by 2030.
Solar production is really ramping up:
https://www.cleanenergywire.or... [cleanenergywire.org]-
This is extremely unlikely, as these do not provide baseload and there is not enough worldwide battery production capacity to provide enough storage to get anywhere close to that number.
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Germany could have hit this target years ago, if it had not shutdown working midlife nuclear planets. Selfishly it even continuing to do so once the energy price crisis had started, driving up the price of energy across the EU, whilst still importing nuclear generated energy from France.
At one point the Green government even started knocking down wind farms, to get at the lignite beneath them. Lignite or brown coal, is the dirtiest form of energy on the planet, yet the Greens prefer it to zero carbon clear
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I'm seeing no cite for any of your claims, so I am ignoring them.
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Why would they knock down wind farms to get something which is being used less? Can you provide evidence?
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They moved three windmills because they were close enough to an open pit mine that they could have been destablized by further mining. Big whoop.
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It only shut down a tiny handful of working midlife nuclear plants. What they actually did was shut down mostly end of life nuclear plants, some of which had already had multiple operating extension past end of life.
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by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @01:24PM (#64131783)
From the fine article:
Emissions from industry fell significantly, largely due to a decline in production by energy-intensive companies.
By driving up energy costs with their anti-nuclear policy they've driven out much of their industrial capacity. If they keep going down this path then they will only make their economy worse. This is hardly a "win" for them. It is common to see complaints that nations like the USA lowered CO2 by driving industry to China. Well, what do people think happened here? Maybe Germany didn't drive industry to China but they did drive it out of the country. In some cases we saw German factories get packed up and moved to North America where natural gas is cheap by comparison.
The mention of industry seeking cheap natural gas gets to the lie that shutting down nuclear power plants has nothing to do with Germany's natural gas consumption. The claim is that natural gas provides heating and nuclear fission provides electricity so by shutting down nuclear power they aren't burning any more natural gas. Well, what was the plan on heating German homes when or if they replaced fossil fuels with renewable energy sources? That's right, electric heating.
If Germany is planning to replace natural gas heating with electricity then they need large reliable sources of electricity to provide that electricity. If they are planning to lower CO2 emissions in the process then they need to use a reliable energy source that is also low in CO2 emissions. Given the scarcity of good places for hydroelectric dams in Germany they need nuclear fission for reliable low CO2 electricity. No nuclear fission means they will only get to their CO2 emissions goals by removing most every industry. I guess they can lower CO2 emissions by lowering population but most metrics on success for lowered CO2 is per capita so a lower population is hardly a means towards success.
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Can you point to where the industrial base of Germany has been driven out? The real terms value-added output has increased over the period you mention, at least until the pandemic. It rose quite strongly in revenue terms 2000-2005, less strongly 2005-2020 and took a hit after 2020, much as it did in nuclear France. So the effect you claim doesn't seem to be actually evident in the figures. https://www.macrotrends.net/co... [macrotrends.net]. It's pretty easy to fact check these days.
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It's in the fine article.
According to the study from Agora Energiewende, the study being discussed in the fine article, the reduction in German CO2 emissions was likely from moving the CO2 emissions to someplace else on the planet. If true then this is hardly a "win" for total CO2 emission reductions. I'm not going to play the game of "my source is better than yours" with you, I'm just going by what the fine article stated.
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Industrial output in Germany is up (long term, the current dip is since May in terms of variance from the overall EU trend line, and most places were hit by COVID). There seems to be a narrative that it has gone down, which I thought is what you were suggesting, apologies if you were not. Some heavy industries may have relocated but you find that in France too. Thus, it's not a trend that you can obviously ascribe to a change in energy mix, though. I would like to see per capita figures for all countries b
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Oh that's right, I forgot. We need to destroy the planet in the name of keeping everything cheap. I take it you played with a lot of toys that had cheap lead paint from China as a kid right?
No they haven't. They have 1/4 of the entire industrial production of the entire EU and they have had this quite consistently for the past 2 decades.
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https://www.agora-energiewende... [agora-energiewende.de]
They were only able to do this by consuming the full output of a couple of French nuclear plants. Spain is joining Germany in phasing out nuclear power, so I guess the French will have to build even more nuclear power plants.-
I understand the point you are trying to make, but I'm not sure I see a problem with this. If the French are willing to build nuclear plants, run them, and sell the electricity at a profit to Germany and Spain - so what?
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Stop making it sound like it works.
KwH prices are fluctuating wildly from hour to hour thanks to you. You don't have a proper grid between north and south to make good use of renewables. sigh. -
"Emissions from industry fell significantly, largely due to a decline in production by energy-intensive companies." That's Green-speak for industries failing or leaving Germany because of unreliable renewables unable to sustain a modern industrial economy...
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