Reduction has been minimal, and now that we no longer have the Russian gas that we used to substitute coal, we are turning coal plants back on. While at the same time shutting down clean nuclear.
The mind boggles.
Go to https://www.electricitymaps.com On almost every day, Germany is the 2nd least green country in Europe, only after Poland.
In 2014, Germany was the largest producer of CO2 emissions in Europe, by a wide margin.
Coal are the bottom two things on the chart (brown and gray). Drastically down. Gas use percentage wise is pretty much the same as 10 years ago. Obviously you're making things up.
Germany is also not turning coal plants back on: there were about a dozen coal plants put on stand by this year as an emergency, but they mostly stayed off. The funny part is that the emergency was mostly related to the collapse of nuclear in France where most of the surrounding countries suddenly needed to support it. But in the end renewables made up most of the difference. Here's a Twitter thread with the data https://mobile.twitter.com/CoalFreeDave/status/1620360558255...
Europe needs to get off fossil fuels and it's about to do that really fast. Unnecessary hurdles were removed to make renewable deployment easier. As a consequence there's been a huge uptick in nuclear lobbying and astroturfing - this industry is scared it's about to be made officially irrelevant. All sort of plans are being made but there will be so much new renewable generation by the time this plans are finalized, let alone the decades it will take to get anything done with nuclear, that it will not matter at all.
"Ab Oktober werden insgesamt zwölf Kohlekraftwerke mit einer Leistung bis zu knapp sieben Gigawatt zusätzlich Strom für das deutsche Netz zur Verfügung stellen."
From October, a total of twelve coal-fired power plants with an output of up to almost seven gigawatts will provide additional electricity for the German grid.
> Gas use percentage wise is pretty much the same as 10 years ago.
The very chart you cite has gas use almost tripling from 1990 to 2020, from 36 to 91.
> the collapse of nuclear in France
There was no "collapse" of Nuclear in France. This counter-factual talking point has been corrected so many times it isn't funny any more. What happened was that France scheduled maintenance work that had been deferred during the pandemic. This was planned, because with nuclear power, you can plan things.
The reason that it was planned for summer is that that is when both energy demand is at its lowest and otherwise not-so-stellar renewable production is at its highest.
Unlike renewables, which are mostly unpredictable, and the little that is predictable is bad: that they produce far less energy when it's needed most.
And even the Twitter thread you cite (which also incorrectly speaks of French "outages"), admits that a whopping 1/3rd of the reduction in nuclear production was due to Germany turning off plants.
Also, you might want to take a closer look at the chart you cited. The still very modest drop in coal you spotted mostly coincides with a drop in total energy consumption, making the relative reduction even more modest than it already is. So we just used less energy overall. Whoop-dee-doo. And coal use rose again even in 2021 in absolute terms, so before the war.
Read the Twitter link I posted: only a 1/6 of the deficit caused mostly by the nuclear failure in France was replaced by coal. Those plants were put on stand by because wishful thinking is not a good policy, but they were mostly idle.
A quarter of France plants were out unplanned, another quarter were in planned maintenance. This was all documented extensively, we should not debate facts. On top of that the EDF kept blowing its own deadlines all year. Summary from the NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
"A record 26 of its 56 reactors are off-line for maintenance or repairs after the worrisome discovery of cracks and corrosion in some pipes used to cool reactor cores."
Shutting down a quarter of your fleet because of worrisome discovery of cracks, causing panic on the energy markets across the continent does not sound like predictable to me. Renewables on the other hand are extremely predictable and pretty much always deliver on the prediction because they are so distributed.
The chart says Germany produced 165TWh from coal in 2021 and roughly 250TWh in 2010. I believe you should check the dictionary for the words "modest" and "predictable".
> only a 1/6 of the deficit caused mostly by the nuclear failure in France was replaced by coal
1. Once again: it was not a "failure". It was scheduled maintenance/inspection.
2. Yes. The French were able to schedule this maintenance/inspection in the summer, when energy demand is at its lowest and renewable production at its highest. It is so helpful to be able to schedule these things. Unlike renewables, which you you can't schedule at all, and the only thing you really know is that they will produce the least energy when you need it most.
3. Once again: this was scheduled maintenance/inspection. And during the scheduled inspection they found some cracks. This is something that happens when you inspect things. That is why you do the inspections: so you find stuff that you then fix.
[The regularly scheduled car inspection found some problems with the engine that were duly fixed. Germans: OMG!!! WE MUST IMMEDIATELY BAN ALL CARS!!!! ]
5. "Modest". Yep, that's fairly modest, particularly when compared to considering a tripling of gas use as "unchanged". And that reduction went hand-in-hand with an overall reduction in demand in the last years. Also, you need to look at the lignite coal numbers, because lignite is the worst polluting kind: hardly changed at all. We did reduce the hard-coal a bit more due to shutting down the mines (by removing subsidies).
No. The EDF did not schedule maintenance of half of its fleet. A quarter yes, a quarter went out unplanned. This caused a huge energy crunch across most of western Europe. When it became clear the EDF doesn't have the situation under control the futures prices exploded everywhere but especially in France. At one point the futures prices there reached almost 2000$ per MWh. I've posted one link that documented the problem from a reputable source, and posted a quote directly here. That you choose to ignore reality and live in a constructed world is a testament to the wishful thinking mentality of the pro nuclear crowd.
But like I posted elsewhere it doesn't really matter -- Europe needs to remove fossil fuels and this will happen a lot quicker than most people assume. The ink on the plans for new nuclear plants won't even dry.
> No. The EDF did not schedule maintenance of half of its fleet
Yes it did.
> A quarter yes, a quarter went out unplanned.
Great to hear that you are backing off from your "collapse" narrative. But still not quite correct. These were planned shutdowns for planned maintenance/inspections. Some of these inspections found problems, as inspections sometimes do and therefore the plants were offline longer than just the original inspection period and some additional checks were performed and problems were found that had to be remedied.
And once again: these checks were scheduled for the summer (extended to fall), and even with some of the extended maintenance required most plants were operational again in winter.
> Renewables on the other hand are extremely predictable and pretty much always deliver on the prediction
LOL. I would really like to be able to schedule our "Dunkelflauten" for the summer ...
The only thing that is predictable about renewables is when they definitely won't be available. Which is when we need energy the most. Yay!
> This caused a huge energy crunch across most of western Europe.
LOL. Attributing the spike in energy prices mono-causally to the scheduled maintenance (taking slightly longer than planned) of a part of France's nuclear fleet that you yourself write didn't take that much to replace is ... cute. Do you think there may have been other events in that time that could have had some impact on energy prices? Like maybe the largest disruption of Europe's energy supply in the last half century? Nah, that can't be it.
And it is also important to remember that these are water pipes running under high pressure. Cracks are an expected feature of this system, ask any plumber. Of course they need to be fixed in time, which is why there are regular inspections, but it's not as if there's some catastrophic flaw that was revealed the way it is presented in the press (particularly the German press, though the NY Times article is also pretty bad).
And of course you can expect more leakage/cracks as these plants reach the end of their service life, and especially if you defer the needed inspections/maintenance as was done during COVID.
It should also be noted that the extraordinary success of the French nuclear program has led to complacency and underinvestment, as that success was increasingly taken for granted. Fortunately that is starting to change, the French are taking their nuclear industry seriously again, and not killing it off in favour of renewable dreams that don't (and didn't) pan out.
There was a collapse of nuclear output in France because half of its plants were at one point offline. Of those, about half were unplanned and unscheduled because of "mysterious stress corrosion". Normally a net exporter, France became a net importer of electricity. The surrounding countries kept it on life support all year. The EDF kept postponing deadlines throughout the year because they could not solve the problem. The prices were skyrocketing across western Europe, but at one point (I think late summer, but not sure) they blew up in France only, after yet another delay, reaching almost $2000 per MWh on the futures market. My guess because it became clear that the EDF doesn't have a grip on the issue, and the neighboring countries maybe can't provide enough support in the winter. The government was preparing for blackouts, and pleaded to conserve energy. The situation overall with EDF got so severe that it had to be nationalized.
All of this is easily verifiable, and well documented, but only for people that are willing to read and look at facts. For some, you included, this is mostly a religion so I realize it's difficult to get far. It's like telling a person of faith that we have no proof a god exists -- this will not work. So take care.
Reduction has been minimal, and now that we no longer have the Russian gas that we used to substitute coal, we are turning coal plants back on. While at the same time shutting down clean nuclear.
The mind boggles.
Go to https://www.electricitymaps.com On almost every day, Germany is the 2nd least green country in Europe, only after Poland.
In 2014, Germany was the largest producer of CO2 emissions in Europe, by a wide margin.
https://gefira.org/en/2015/12/15/germany-the-largest-co2-emi...