Open Infra Map; shows major electrical lines, power plants, gas & oil lines, and telecom/data centers. Gets its data from Open Street Map: https://openinframap.org/
I wonder if this might be misleading. A lot of Los Angeles’ (LADWP) electricity has traditionally been generated generated by coal-fired plants in other states. I’d have to dig into more recent sources to see if that’s still the case, and whether that’s reflected in this dataset.
(Edit: read the sources list, and that should be reflected, but the map is not displaying heavy imports to SoCal. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d suspect LADWP obscuring sources in the published data).
That’s interesting yeah like a tonne of Quebec hydro gets sold to New England it might or might not get counted
But I also can’t tell where the data is coming from why are so many Canadian provinces gray? I’m sure the website had citations somewhere but it was pretty slow in mobile safari so I didn’t bother to check
The test I always use for this is Prince Edward Island -- 100% of their provincial electricity generation is wind, but it only makes up 3% of their usage, the rest being imported from New Brunswick.
From that perspective the map must be at least trying to reflect imports, as PEI isn't listed as 100% green energy.
I find it mildly amusing how for all green talk and net zero pledges, EU bureaucrats and wide public does not give much notice to the third-world-level dirty-as-hell coal-powered generation in Poland.
They do - Poland agreed to the same decarbonization targets and participation in the carbon market as the rest of the EU so it had to implement policies supporting them - chiefly in the form a solar power subsidy program.
The program was more successful than the government anticipated and capacity ballooned so much that the grid needs modernization if it's to support more renewables.
Also electricity usage per capita per year is like 25% lower than say in Germany or France, so emissions in absolute terms are lower than they might appear.
There's a long way to go, but the country is on track to meet the goals set - partly because it's actually cheaper that way.
The EU has a cap and trade system ("EU ETS") for large industrial installations. So as far as I understand, the Poland coal plants are not invisible to the EU. They pay a market price for each ton of CO2 emitted.
Poland does try to cancel out the price signal sent by the EU ETS with billions of subsidies. I guess that's part of the reason why they emit so much. But the emission cap still holds; if Poland pays for the right to emit a ton of CO2, then that ton cannot be emitted elsewhere in the EU.
Unlike most of Europe they have very poor starting point with minimal hydroelectric power resources etc which makes things look relatively worse. However their current progress if you look at the graphs is still fast paced.
“In September 2020, the government and mining unions agreed a plan to phase out coal by 2049 which coincides with 100th anniversary of Karol Wojtyła being assigned to st. Florian's parish in Kraków,[10][11] with coal used in power generation falling to negligible levels in 2032“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Poland
I read your sentences three times and I don't get what exactly you're trying to criticize here or what you're raving at?
"All the green talk" is precisely about getting rid of coal-powered generation in Poland (and other EU states), so what the heck is your complaint here?
This is super cool! For California, my understanding (from PG&E materials) was that highest demand and carbon intensity was around 3pm to 9pm. The graph here seems to show that even though demand/supply is smaller at night, we have very little non-solar renewables so that carbon intensity is pretty bad all night as well... If that's true, I'm curious why PG&E makes it sound like electricity use at night is not as bad. Do they anticipate bringing more wind online and are trying to get ahead with the messaging to the public?
One concern I have about this map, is that the allocation of natural gas applies a flat coefficient to all natural gas sources. As far as I can tell, it does not give any rebate/reduction for natural gas that has a dual purpose -- namely, to provide heating and cooling in addition to the electricity process.
In other words, there are additional processes being driven by the residual heat, often called combined heat and production or cogeneration. It seems that the CO2 g/kWh should be lowered to reflect that these plants only supply a portion of the CO2 for electricity production. [1]
That UK -- Norway link is (or was) the longest undersea electricity cable in the world[1] at 450 miles (720km).
How do the exports and imports balance; Finland is importing 800MW from Sweden then exporting 400MW to Estonia, is it possible some of that is the same power? Norway is importing 425MW from The Netherlands and exporting 1.2GW to the UK and 200MW to Denmark?
Why does the UK export 73MW to Northern Ireland but then import 286MW from the Republic of Ireland, i.e. why doesn't Northern Ireland import from Republic of Ireland and skip the overseas bit?
Hmm, maybe this is a "bug" or some intentional way this measurement is made, but when you view the carbon production over time, you can see that some low-carbon sources like wind & solar seem to vary in proportion to the energy being produced. So these aren't exactly zero-carbon because of production and maintenance and whatnot, but it's obviously very low. However, wouldn't this carbon production be annualised at a constant rate - solar power doesn't produce more carbon the brighter the sun shines (does it?)
It makes sense that there's some lookup of X energy source being Y tons co2 per mwh, and this is probably correct when the vast majority of the co2 is coming from the fuel, and the construction + maintenance etc are a rounding error, but this wouldn't be the case for solar, wind, etc.
It’s live updating, so 0% of the electricity right now is being generated by coal (ie. The coal power plant is off). Note that Greece says “estimated” though so I presume they don’t have the actual live numbers.
You can view averages from the past 30 days, 12 months, and 6 years though and that shows the percentage of coal generation being about 800MW over the past 12 months.
Closing all the nuclear plants and replacing them with increased coal usage, mainly. Compared to France where nuclear makes up a huge proportion of generation capacity and the UK where gas is the main source (not low carbon, but much lower than coal).
This is what REALLY bugs me about Germany in general. There is a cultural belief that germans are data driven and unemotional in their decision making. That they are the wise leaders who run the EU. They do not have the populist issues like the UK with brexit or the chaos that france has. They are not like the consuming americans who vote for trump. And yet, the reality of the energy policy demonstrates that Germany is nọt immune to this kind of traps. They prefer to shut down nuclear power plants and yes install many renewables.
They didn’t actually do the math. The point is while renewables may generate 50% of energy, the other half comes from coal which must be turned on when there is no sun or wind, which is so polluting even in comparison to natural gas, that it destroys the overall mix. You can estimate coal as around 700g/kwh(just look at poland when the sun isn’t shining) which divided in half gets you pretty close to Germany’s average of 300g. Had Germany switched to natural gas, they would be much closer to the UK, which did not have an energy transition.
Germany had a much higher peak in emissions in the 1970s and 1980s, unlike the UK which phased out coal early, or France which went all in on nuclear.
German emissions have been rapidly declining since 1990 (even with nuclear reactors closing, because the investment was steered into renewables). They just need a few more years to catch up to their neighbours.
> Is it because the German industry and population is much bigger?
No, this is CO2 per kwh, so is proportional to population.
What you have just discovered is that Germany does a lot of greenwashing. They may have spent trillions on renewables but, well look at the graphs, they still burn insane amounts of coal.
They chose the politically popular choice of closing nuclear and in doing do sabotaged their climate agenda. Turns out building a grid of only variable renewables doesn't work yet.
Reading this is enormously frustrating. People have been shouting at the top of their lungs, that this will be the inevitable outcome of policy in Germany. Energy policy in Germany has no chance to accomplish its stated goals and is costing people a fortune.
> Germany is doing a lot to reduce CO_2 emissions. At least you have the impression when listening to politicians and reading newspapers. E.g. a few months ago it was announced that Germany is on track with the goals posed by the government (e.g. see https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschland-klimaziele-erfu...).
For one thing, it's not absolutely obvious that germany will reach its CO2 reduction goals, from they own saying [1], but they might not shoot too far: [2]. (It's not very far from them in many sectors, but energy got a bad 2022.) However, I don't know how "ambitious" those objectives are.
> Also in many statistics you can see that already around 50% of the electricity consumed in Germany is from renewable sources. How comes that on electricitymaps.com Germany is on the higher side of carbon intensity? Is it because the German industry and population is much bigger?
The problem is, basically, that the other 50% is _very_ CO2 heavy , and it only got worse in 2022-2023 because the last nuclear plants closed, and gas got more expensive so more coal got used. [3]
This explains the vast difference between Germany and France on the electricity map: France hardly gets 20% of its electricity from solar panels and wind farms, but the other 80% are from atoms and water drops instead of lignite, which just makes a huuuge difference.
Also, remember that electricity-maps only looks at, well, electricity - which only accounts for roughly 1/4th of the emissions [4]. Germany still has a large industry, and it's building... petroleum cars. (I was surprised to read that as far as "Industry" emissions are concerned, Germany and France are actually rather close, at ~25Mt/y. But I suppose the cars go in to the "Manufactoring" category, where Germany is clearly on top....)
All in all, the per-capita CO2 emission of France ends up being almost twice as low as Germany. Which is maybe why it's easier to reach reduction goal: "all" Germany has to do to get a massive reduction is to clean-up its grid. The country kinda-sovereignly decided to make it harder by ditching nuclear, but it's actually the "easy" part (in the sense that it's transparent for most people when they switch on their TV if the electricity is" clean" or not. The only consideration is whether it is "cheap" or not.)
France is at the stage where it has to reduce the other not-low-hanging-at-all fruit: transport emissions. (Because the current technology forces people to trade relatively cheap, comfortable and versatile gas-powered cars for EVs that are none of those three things - at the moment - and they'll understandably kick and scream to avoid that.)
In a different world, Germany would have invested in R&D to build small and affordable electric cars, while France would have invested in R&D to build smaller and safer nuclear reactors.
Instead, Germany paid software engineers to make car cheat tests [6], and France paid consultants to make the electricity market undecipharable while 1970's nuclear plants where rotting in place [7] ... and then 2022 happened !
Not only Germany uses lots of coal, it also uses a lot of the worst kind of coal, lignite. Lignite is low grade coal, Germany has a lot of it, and burning it in local power plants is pretty much the only thing you can do with it, so that's what Germany did.
It also lacks nuclear (because of political decisions), and hydro (presumably because a lack of suitable sites), two of the big low carbon sources.
So Germany may have 50% renewables, but the next one is the worst in terms of emissions (lignite/coal), then there is gas, which is not as bad as coal, but still bad, and that's about it.
And most of the renewables in Germany is solar, which is, according to the website, one of the highest of the low carbon sources. Hydro, wind and nuclear are all lower. Not a big effect though, almost negligible compared to coal.
Unfortunately that is a wrong impression. Electricitymaps is correct regarding Germany's CO2 emissions.
It has nothing to do with the country's population and industry size, because these figures are the CO2 emitted per kWh of electricity.
The problem is simple : Germany chose to shut down nuclear power and to invest massively in renewables (€500B in wind and solar)
Wind and solar are of course intermittent and, because you can't store electricity at scale, you cannot run a country's electricity grid on these alone, especially a country with heavy 24/7 industry. That is the central lie of the German Energiewende.
In reality you always need some more stable energy sources to handle the "base load", they can be :
- Hydroelectricity (if you have the right geography)
- Coal
- Gas
- Nuclear
Of these four, only hydro and nuclear are low CO2.
You can see on Electricitymaps that some countries like Norway are doing great because they have Hydro for their base load. Germany doesn't have the geography for that, unfortunately.
The only low CO2 choice remaining for German base load is nuclear, but we know what happened to that...
There was a focus on (mainly Russian) gas, which is slightly better than coal, but Putin is using this as a geopolitical weapon now.
So that leaves you with coal, and there are two big problems with that :
1. Coal emits SO much more CO2 per kWh than renewables or nuclear that it completely destroys Germany's average CO2 emissions score. With coal in the mix, you would need not 50% but maybe 90% of renewable electricity to compensate for the insane emissions of the small % of coal. Unfortunately as I mentioned, 90% of renewable electricity isn't possible because of intermittence. Which means Germany won't ever solve this problem unless A. a breakthrough in energy storage is discovered (good luck) or B. it restarts its nuclear power plants and builds new ones.
That is the embarrassing reason why many German politicians would rather talk about the % of renewables in the mix (which is completely meaningless for climate), rather than the CO2/kWh figure (the only thing that counts for climate) where Germany is doing so badly (on average 6-7 times worse than France)
2. Air pollution from coal power plants causes over 10.000 premature deaths in Europe every year
Most of the coal plants in the European top 10 are located in Germany.
Imagine the reaction if a neighbouring country operated another source of energy (say, nuclear) that caused 10.000 deaths / year in the region ? Fukushima was one (1) direct death by radiation, btw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...)
It's great news that apparently, 60% of Germans are now in favour of nuclear power. I hope that the generation of 1970s Die Grüne activists that caused these disastrous energy policies in Germany are voted out of power asap.
The addition of China data would make the legend useless, but it still goes to show out sized some things are, while the UK continues to chase Net Zero at the expense of its citizen's wealth, other countries (India, China, the US) prioritise their economy.
Heading towards a clean energy future is great, but it's costing our poorer citizens unequally more than our wealthier ones. See: ULEZ.
I'm always at a loss with this argument. How does chasing cheaper sources of energy that also happen to be renewable hurt the poor? Gas generators cost the most per kWh to run. Our electricity prices rocketted because of natural gas prices rocketing.
If we'd managed to get off gas sooner we'd have clean cheap power, and energy independence.
Poorer people in the ULEZ area don’t own cars, they live in flats overlooking car ridden streets. Besides ULEZ is not about stopping Co2 emissions or net zero, it’s about removing dirty smoke from the roads poor people (the ones you see on the bus) live on.
This thing again, with Sweden being all green while one of its biggest companies is busy with cutting down trees left, right and center, and then there's of course Norway, which have made their money on oil and gas, with the latter being extremely lucrative especially now, after the war in Ukraine started.
Of course, I know this is "only" about the way they're generating electricity, yadayadayada, because I'm sure the only thing stopping the African countries from going all "green" when generating electricity is the lack of will, not the lack of money (which, again, countries like Norway and Sweden acquired on the back of very non-green actions).
And then there's a question about how "green" hydro is in the first place, as even Khrushchev himself received a lot of critics from inside the Party for the environment devastation brought by building lots of hydro projects on the Volga [1]
[+] [-] jodrellblank|2 years ago|reply
Is there a collection like an "awesome maps" list anywhere?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37187760
[+] [-] thenewarrakis|2 years ago|reply
Open Infra Map; shows major electrical lines, power plants, gas & oil lines, and telecom/data centers. Gets its data from Open Street Map: https://openinframap.org/
Open Railway Map; shows railroad lines. Also gets its data from OSM: https://www.openrailwaymap.org/
Also Sentinel Hub has satellite imagery that although it has less resolution than ie Google Maps, it is updated daily: https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/
[+] [-] anonporridge|2 years ago|reply
Light Pollution - https://www.lightpollutionmap.info
Fire and Smoke - https://fire.airnow.gov/ (US) https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/ (Canada)
Earthquakes - https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/
Ship traffic - https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/
[+] [-] nighthawk454|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angst_ridden|2 years ago|reply
(Edit: read the sources list, and that should be reflected, but the map is not displaying heavy imports to SoCal. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d suspect LADWP obscuring sources in the published data).
[+] [-] api|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acc_297|2 years ago|reply
But I also can’t tell where the data is coming from why are so many Canadian provinces gray? I’m sure the website had citations somewhere but it was pretty slow in mobile safari so I didn’t bother to check
[+] [-] wlonkly|2 years ago|reply
From that perspective the map must be at least trying to reflect imports, as PEI isn't listed as 100% green energy.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fuoqi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tade0|2 years ago|reply
The program was more successful than the government anticipated and capacity ballooned so much that the grid needs modernization if it's to support more renewables.
Also electricity usage per capita per year is like 25% lower than say in Germany or France, so emissions in absolute terms are lower than they might appear.
There's a long way to go, but the country is on track to meet the goals set - partly because it's actually cheaper that way.
[+] [-] wcoenen|2 years ago|reply
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...
Poland does try to cancel out the price signal sent by the EU ETS with billions of subsidies. I guess that's part of the reason why they emit so much. But the emission cap still holds; if Poland pays for the right to emit a ton of CO2, then that ton cannot be emitted elsewhere in the EU.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_22_...
[+] [-] Retric|2 years ago|reply
“In September 2020, the government and mining unions agreed a plan to phase out coal by 2049 which coincides with 100th anniversary of Karol Wojtyła being assigned to st. Florian's parish in Kraków,[10][11] with coal used in power generation falling to negligible levels in 2032“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Poland
[+] [-] izacus|2 years ago|reply
"All the green talk" is precisely about getting rid of coal-powered generation in Poland (and other EU states), so what the heck is your complaint here?
[+] [-] amadeuspagel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotsliketea|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] powerbroker|2 years ago|reply
In other words, there are additional processes being driven by the residual heat, often called combined heat and production or cogeneration. It seems that the CO2 g/kWh should be lowered to reflect that these plants only supply a portion of the CO2 for electricity production. [1]
1 - https://www.jenbacher.us/en/our-solutions/industries/industr...
[+] [-] politelemon|2 years ago|reply
I also liked the cross border exports and our dependency on each other.
[+] [-] jodrellblank|2 years ago|reply
How do the exports and imports balance; Finland is importing 800MW from Sweden then exporting 400MW to Estonia, is it possible some of that is the same power? Norway is importing 425MW from The Netherlands and exporting 1.2GW to the UK and 200MW to Denmark?
Why does the UK export 73MW to Northern Ireland but then import 286MW from the Republic of Ireland, i.e. why doesn't Northern Ireland import from Republic of Ireland and skip the overseas bit?
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-58772572
[+] [-] sdflhasjd|2 years ago|reply
It makes sense that there's some lookup of X energy source being Y tons co2 per mwh, and this is probably correct when the vast majority of the co2 is coming from the fuel, and the construction + maintenance etc are a rounding error, but this wouldn't be the case for solar, wind, etc.
[+] [-] midasuni|2 years ago|reply
I suspect the sources would typically underestimate legacy sources (meausiring the co2 from burning gas but not the co2 from maintaining the oil rig)
[+] [-] stop50|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] botanical|2 years ago|reply
https://www.eskom.co.za/dataportal/supply-side/station-build...
[+] [-] stavros|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oakesm9|2 years ago|reply
You can view averages from the past 30 days, 12 months, and 6 years though and that shows the percentage of coal generation being about 800MW over the past 12 months.
[+] [-] ddon|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Gree...
[+] [-] oaiey|2 years ago|reply
I guess depends a lot on public sources.
[+] [-] unethical_ban|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pard68|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben_w|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tulip4attoo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sturmbraut|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] oakesm9|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MoreSEMI|2 years ago|reply
They didn’t actually do the math. The point is while renewables may generate 50% of energy, the other half comes from coal which must be turned on when there is no sun or wind, which is so polluting even in comparison to natural gas, that it destroys the overall mix. You can estimate coal as around 700g/kwh(just look at poland when the sun isn’t shining) which divided in half gets you pretty close to Germany’s average of 300g. Had Germany switched to natural gas, they would be much closer to the UK, which did not have an energy transition.
[+] [-] akamaka|2 years ago|reply
German emissions have been rapidly declining since 1990 (even with nuclear reactors closing, because the investment was steered into renewables). They just need a few more years to catch up to their neighbours.
[+] [-] pelorat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcjiggerlog|2 years ago|reply
No, this is CO2 per kwh, so is proportional to population.
What you have just discovered is that Germany does a lot of greenwashing. They may have spent trillions on renewables but, well look at the graphs, they still burn insane amounts of coal.
They chose the politically popular choice of closing nuclear and in doing do sabotaged their climate agenda. Turns out building a grid of only variable renewables doesn't work yet.
[+] [-] mbar84|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ntekFBE4o
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] phtrivier|2 years ago|reply
For one thing, it's not absolutely obvious that germany will reach its CO2 reduction goals, from they own saying [1], but they might not shoot too far: [2]. (It's not very far from them in many sectors, but energy got a bad 2022.) However, I don't know how "ambitious" those objectives are.
> Also in many statistics you can see that already around 50% of the electricity consumed in Germany is from renewable sources. How comes that on electricitymaps.com Germany is on the higher side of carbon intensity? Is it because the German industry and population is much bigger?
The problem is, basically, that the other 50% is _very_ CO2 heavy , and it only got worse in 2022-2023 because the last nuclear plants closed, and gas got more expensive so more coal got used. [3]
This explains the vast difference between Germany and France on the electricity map: France hardly gets 20% of its electricity from solar panels and wind farms, but the other 80% are from atoms and water drops instead of lignite, which just makes a huuuge difference.
Also, remember that electricity-maps only looks at, well, electricity - which only accounts for roughly 1/4th of the emissions [4]. Germany still has a large industry, and it's building... petroleum cars. (I was surprised to read that as far as "Industry" emissions are concerned, Germany and France are actually rather close, at ~25Mt/y. But I suppose the cars go in to the "Manufactoring" category, where Germany is clearly on top....)
All in all, the per-capita CO2 emission of France ends up being almost twice as low as Germany. Which is maybe why it's easier to reach reduction goal: "all" Germany has to do to get a massive reduction is to clean-up its grid. The country kinda-sovereignly decided to make it harder by ditching nuclear, but it's actually the "easy" part (in the sense that it's transparent for most people when they switch on their TV if the electricity is" clean" or not. The only consideration is whether it is "cheap" or not.)
France is at the stage where it has to reduce the other not-low-hanging-at-all fruit: transport emissions. (Because the current technology forces people to trade relatively cheap, comfortable and versatile gas-powered cars for EVs that are none of those three things - at the moment - and they'll understandably kick and scream to avoid that.)
In a different world, Germany would have invested in R&D to build small and affordable electric cars, while France would have invested in R&D to build smaller and safer nuclear reactors.
Instead, Germany paid software engineers to make car cheat tests [6], and France paid consultants to make the electricity market undecipharable while 1970's nuclear plants where rotting in place [7] ... and then 2022 happened !
---
[1] https://phys.org/news/2023-06-germany-climate-narrow-fully-c...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greenhouse-gas-emissions-progr...
[3] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
[4] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany
[5] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/france
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...
[+] [-] GuB-42|2 years ago|reply
Not only Germany uses lots of coal, it also uses a lot of the worst kind of coal, lignite. Lignite is low grade coal, Germany has a lot of it, and burning it in local power plants is pretty much the only thing you can do with it, so that's what Germany did.
It also lacks nuclear (because of political decisions), and hydro (presumably because a lack of suitable sites), two of the big low carbon sources.
So Germany may have 50% renewables, but the next one is the worst in terms of emissions (lignite/coal), then there is gas, which is not as bad as coal, but still bad, and that's about it.
And most of the renewables in Germany is solar, which is, according to the website, one of the highest of the low carbon sources. Hydro, wind and nuclear are all lower. Not a big effect though, almost negligible compared to coal.
[+] [-] renaudg|2 years ago|reply
It has nothing to do with the country's population and industry size, because these figures are the CO2 emitted per kWh of electricity.
The problem is simple : Germany chose to shut down nuclear power and to invest massively in renewables (€500B in wind and solar) Wind and solar are of course intermittent and, because you can't store electricity at scale, you cannot run a country's electricity grid on these alone, especially a country with heavy 24/7 industry. That is the central lie of the German Energiewende.
In reality you always need some more stable energy sources to handle the "base load", they can be : - Hydroelectricity (if you have the right geography) - Coal - Gas - Nuclear
Of these four, only hydro and nuclear are low CO2. You can see on Electricitymaps that some countries like Norway are doing great because they have Hydro for their base load. Germany doesn't have the geography for that, unfortunately.
The only low CO2 choice remaining for German base load is nuclear, but we know what happened to that...
There was a focus on (mainly Russian) gas, which is slightly better than coal, but Putin is using this as a geopolitical weapon now.
So that leaves you with coal, and there are two big problems with that :
1. Coal emits SO much more CO2 per kWh than renewables or nuclear that it completely destroys Germany's average CO2 emissions score. With coal in the mix, you would need not 50% but maybe 90% of renewable electricity to compensate for the insane emissions of the small % of coal. Unfortunately as I mentioned, 90% of renewable electricity isn't possible because of intermittence. Which means Germany won't ever solve this problem unless A. a breakthrough in energy storage is discovered (good luck) or B. it restarts its nuclear power plants and builds new ones. That is the embarrassing reason why many German politicians would rather talk about the % of renewables in the mix (which is completely meaningless for climate), rather than the CO2/kWh figure (the only thing that counts for climate) where Germany is doing so badly (on average 6-7 times worse than France)
2. Air pollution from coal power plants causes over 10.000 premature deaths in Europe every year Most of the coal plants in the European top 10 are located in Germany. Imagine the reaction if a neighbouring country operated another source of energy (say, nuclear) that caused 10.000 deaths / year in the region ? Fukushima was one (1) direct death by radiation, btw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...)
It's great news that apparently, 60% of Germans are now in favour of nuclear power. I hope that the generation of 1970s Die Grüne activists that caused these disastrous energy policies in Germany are voted out of power asap.
[+] [-] user6723|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cypher|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] laputan_machine|2 years ago|reply
Heading towards a clean energy future is great, but it's costing our poorer citizens unequally more than our wealthier ones. See: ULEZ.
[+] [-] weebull|2 years ago|reply
If we'd managed to get off gas sooner we'd have clean cheap power, and energy independence.
[+] [-] midasuni|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|2 years ago|reply
This thing again, with Sweden being all green while one of its biggest companies is busy with cutting down trees left, right and center, and then there's of course Norway, which have made their money on oil and gas, with the latter being extremely lucrative especially now, after the war in Ukraine started.
Of course, I know this is "only" about the way they're generating electricity, yadayadayada, because I'm sure the only thing stopping the African countries from going all "green" when generating electricity is the lack of will, not the lack of money (which, again, countries like Norway and Sweden acquired on the back of very non-green actions).
And then there's a question about how "green" hydro is in the first place, as even Khrushchev himself received a lot of critics from inside the Party for the environment devastation brought by building lots of hydro projects on the Volga [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Hydroelectric_Station
[+] [-] paddim8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiscariot|2 years ago|reply