Germany's Emissions Dive to a 70-Year Low Amid Decline in Coal Use
Germany's Emissions Dive to a 70-Year Low Amid Decline in Coal Use
Germany's emissions have hit a 70-year low at 673 million tonnes in 2023, largely due to a decrease in coal power generation and an increase in renewable energy sources.
For a country that people shat on a lot for closing their nuclear plants Germany is on the right track reducing their C02.
Thank you Germany, that's impressive
Now think about how much lower it could have been with nuclear power.
Not much, since it covered only about 4% of the demand to begin with. Plus billions in compensations for nuclear companies if the plans had been changed again. Plus Billions to transport the waste through the country again and again because there is no storage safe enough on the long term. All of that money is by far better invested in renewables.
They have been searching for more than 30 years to hide the last nuclear waste somewhere and still haven't found a suitable place. That's why they don't want nuclear power.
The simple answer is propably that it would not have been lower. Nuclear correlates very closely with German electricity exports and yes Germany has been a net electricity exporter for years. Especially with the gas crisis lignite was rather competitive, so it would most likely not have been lower.
The good news is that the current government has systems in place, which should bring something like 79% of emissions to zero by 2050. What is really lacking is agriculture and trucks. There are plans to increase taxes on trucks to include a carbon price of 200€/t, which should help. Some of the EU agricultural legislation would also help with agricultural emissions, but those will propably never go to zero anyway.
The bad part is most of it is way to slow.
I remembered vividly when some people predicting soaring high coal electricity generation would occur in Germany for 2023 back in April. Of course, those who had been studying the actual Energiewende for a while knew that would never be the case.
Interestingly, most of Germany import in 2023 was also from renewables. One could say that German coal has been beatened by growing renewables both at home and abroad.
Here's the graph over time.
Since this is capacity, intermittent sources like renewables will be overrepresented compared to actual usage, but the trends should still be accurate.
Edit: nvm, here's actual usage
Some good looking graphs there.
Really living in a notable period of history right now. People will be reading about this time 100 years from now.
It's the curse of "May you live in interesting times"
I think Germany should have kept open their nuclear power plants as long as they could. But I don't think opening new ones was the right idea.
Hopefully they keep making the gains they have.
No.
Schacht Konrad was a bad idea. Gorleben would've been a bad idea.
La Hague and Sellafield were bad ideas.
Nuclear risk aversion is democratically decided.
Nuclear energy discourages wind energy expansion, which is the better path for Germany IMO.
100% this, but idiots gonna complain because big oil pays propaganda to push nuclear wich needs years to build and is unreliable.
I don't know about that some of the new gen 4 reactors that are starting to come out effectively tackle a lot of the downsides like cost or the need to store waste.
I don't think a 100% nuclear solution is a good idea but it sounds like it'll have its place in a future national energy portfolio for a lot of countries.
It is expensive to run, has the same sort of issues with fuel procurement from potentially hostile countries as fossil fuels, has waste storage issues and takes ages to build. Cooling is also very vulnerable to droughts in the water sources used for it. There really aren't many arguments in its favour.
For real now? I thought they were going back to coal?
That's what the propaganda keeps saying. I wonder why...
Germany based.