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Germany Is Burning Too Much Coal (bloomberg.com)
Several readers share a report: Germany is widely seen as a world leader in the fight against climate change. Thanks to its investments in renewable power, wind and solar energy provide a third of its electricity, more than double the U.S. share. Germany's goal to lower carbon-dioxide emissions 40 percent by 2020 is significantly more ambitious than that of Europe as a whole or the U.S. After the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, Chancellor Angela Merkel vowed even greater determination. "We can't wait for the last man on Earth to be convinced by the scientific evidence for climate change," she explained. But there's another, troubling side to the German story: The country still gets 40 percent of its energy from coal, a bigger share than most other European countries. And much of it is lignite, the dirtiest kind of coal. As a result, Germany is set to fall well short of its 2020 goal. This dependence on coal is partly a side effect of Germany's abandonment of emissions-free nuclear power and partly foot-dragging on the part of a government wary of alienating voters in German coal country. During the summer election campaign, Merkel largely avoided the subject.
The emergency move away from nuclear has been incredibly short sighted. I understand not wanting to build new reactors, but shutting down running reactors, with all the capital investment involved, just doesn't make any sense. Especially when there is little risk of natural disasters in Germany.
If people are serious about maintaining the same quality of lifestyle that we have today without burning as much coal, the current solution is Nuclear Energy. Yes it does pose many risks but so does burning coal, and the latter seems to be destroying our environment.
That 40% sounds like a required need for base load. I doubt they will be able to eliminate it without much wailing and gnashing of teeth from their utility engineers.
They could have accomplished their goals by keeping those nuclear plants going. Shame they let feelings get in the way of good energy policy.
But but but.. they SAID all the right things and virtue signaled in the prescribed manner!
It's great they completely dumped nuclear power though, because OMG RADEYAYSHUNS!!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
The only country not part of the Paris accord is set to meet their goal. Odd.
Germany has spent 100s of billions on renewables without much to show for it. Their electricity rates are among the highest in Europe, yet they still pollute 10x as much as France" If they spent that money on next generation nuclear their emissions would have dropped. As it currently stands nuclear power is the only viable option to mitigate climate change.
Correction to your headline: They're not burning too much coal, which makes it sound like they're wasting coal by burning too much. In fact, this is just the opposite. The amount of coal they're burning is the amount necessary to provide 40% of the electricity to their country. A more accurate headline would be "Despite their reputation as a leader in renewable energy, Germany is actually burning more coal than most other European countries".
Germany is running out of reliable sources of power generation: If not coal or nuclear, then natural gas would be a good choice. But do they have the political capital to switch from one fossil fuel to another?
Leadership requires honesty. The brutal sort that doesn't give you the warm-and-fuzzies when it tells you that no, we won't be driving electric cars on the moon by decade's end but will in fact be drilling oil and mining coal and driving gas-guzzlers for decades to come because whatever man-made global warming there might actually be is the price of having the lights go on when you flip the switch and being able to exercise your right to freedom of movement.
No amount of feel-good nonsense, no amount of promises from Silicon Valley snakeoil salesmen and Wall Street middlemen looking to make a quick buck off your guilt, and no amount of knowitall career academics and government bureaucrats who can afford to drive Teslas and install hundred-thousand-dollar solar farms on top of their million-dollar houses will change the fact that people not only have a right to movement and shelter and prosperity through economic freedom, but are generally smart enough to notice when you shut off their lights and their heat at jack up their fuel prices in the middle of a brutal winter because "global warming."
Honest leadership recognizes these facts, which are grounded both in hard, immutable, physics and hard, immutable, western morality, and doesn't try to lie around them. Obama did not have that honesty, Hillary did not have it, and the entire Paris crowd and its cheerleaders, Frau Merkel chief among them, were all a party to the big lie. Trump does have that honesty and called bullshit on the bullshit. How about that for a shocker. The serial liar and the most naked of emperors we've put in the White House in a long time is the more honest one.
"According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total.
Yow-- that little??? Nuclear power plants provide about 11 percent of the world's electricity production now, so multiply that 230 years by 0.11, and it says we have a twenty-five year supply of uranium fuel if all of the world's electricity were nuclear.
I retract whatever I may have said earlier-- according to this, nuclear (at least, uranium-based fission nuclear reactors) is not a viable long-term solution.