Comment by cyberax
16 hours ago
Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground.
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
The data does not back up this narrative: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
The share of electricity production that coal lost is primarily take up by wind and solar, not gas.
electricity is only one power source - you not gonna use it for e.g. heating because its expensive. When you look at graph with energy consumption by source german situation is bad and solar provides less than 6% and wind less than 11% [1]. Now go compare with france where nuclear provides 37% of energy.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
The devil is in the details. The easy part is now done, and further significant increases in solar/wind in Germany are not going to happen.
Renewables now dominate generation during the optimal periods, but there's nothing on the horizon for other times.
Your graph also ignores energy used for heating and for industrial processes. Their electrification is now stalled by high energy prices.
> not going to happen … nothing on the horizon for other times
Batteries and storage.
> heating and for industrial
That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
3 replies →
Coal phaseout is already 3+ years ahead of schedule in Germany without any government intervention because coal plants simply can't compete against renewables anymore.
Yeah. It's so great that Germany has to directly pay for gas power plants.
Yeah, but we're Germans. We don't stop when it's reasonable, not when we want to follow an idea.