Germany wants to be climate neutral by 2045. But a panel of government climate advisers says it’s already in danger of missing a key target to cut planet-heating emissions by the end of the decade.
Germany’s climate advisory body has called for new policy measures to slash greenhouse gas emissions, warning that the country looks set to miss its 2030 climate change targets.
In a report published on Monday, the Council of Experts on Climate Change said Germany was unlikely to reach its goal of cutting 65% of emissions by the end of the decade compared to 1990 levels.
The panel, which is appointed by the government and has independent authority to assess the country’s climate performance, said sectors such as transport and construction in particular were struggling to decarbonize.
The findings contradict statements from German Climate Protection Minister and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who said in March that projections from the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) showed emissions were falling and Germany would meet its goal.
Well yeah… ya’ll dumb dumbs turned off nuclear and turned on coal/oil…
Despite the internet’s insistence to the contrary, Germany has not increased its power production from fossil fuels.
It is in fact at the lowest level of the past 30 years
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
Deactivating a clean energy source means that you have to get energy from somewhere else. If they hadn’t taken the nuclear plants offline, they could have taken coal plants offline instead. So the fact that there are still coal plants operating means that they did, in fact replace nuclear with coal, even if they don’t add more capacity to do it.
Yes, one can argue that more fossil energy could have been shut down if the nuclear plants had continued operating.
That said, Nuclear was replaced by renewables. Coal was also replaced by renewables.
Maybe more coal could have been replaced but claiming that nuclear was replaced with coal is a rhetoric trick but it is literally not true.
Also these assumptions about replacing coal always seem to come from people who have no idea about the power of the German coal lobby.
Coal is just about the only natural resource Germany has and is a massive industry.
The coal exit movement is decades old as well. But as the graphs show it is also glacially slow due to massive lobbying.
Looking at the second image. That’s factually wrong. Natural gas generators increased in capacity while nuclear is being killed. The whole process of killing nuclear has been over time period considerably greater than apologists like you tend to look at.
But you do you. If nuclear was allowed to stay active they could have killed off ALL hard coal and some natural gas at this point.
You mean “Installed net power generation capacity”?
Because that measures how much could theoretically be produced, not how much is actually produced.
For actual production, you might want to look at the two graphs below.
Particularly the 4th one shows that gas peaked in 2000 and has not gone up during the nuclear phase-out.
So capacity went up… But somehow that’s not building more? So almost like my original statement isn’t incorrect by any means then. Why so much nonsense arguments against me? Regardless of your argument. Nuclear should have been the LAST source turned off.
Those are peaker plants. They run seldomly but when they’re needed they need to be able to produce a lot.
Nuclear power btw is not suitable as peakers, they react too slowly.
You original comment was that someone “turned on coal/oil…”
That statement is factually and demonstrably incorrect.
Gas was not even part of that original claim but whatever.
Building capacity as a reserve for peak times is not the same as the plants actually running and producing emissions.
As the graphs show, the actual production and therefore emissions from fossil sources have gone down. This is what matters in he climate change debate.
The mere existence of buildings has little to do with the topic at hand.
No, not really.
Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/qa-germanys-nuclear-exit-one-year-after#three
So they turned off 30TWh of nuclear… Where they already spent all the carbon that it’s going to spend. And instead kept oil/coal running.
Can you tell me where I have it wrong? How would it not have been infinitely better to keep the nuclear going and cutting an additional 30TWh of coal/oil? Maybe they would have been on track to beat their emissions goals.
Phasing out nuclear was a decade long process, no last minute decision that could have been reverted, at least not in an (price-) efficient manner
The fact that they had 10+ years to revert the decision and didn’t is that much more damning.
I would know, my country (Belgium) did the same. I will forever hold a grudge against those reality-denying environmentalists who recklessly misrepresented the drawbacks of nuclear to the public and killed any dream of energy independence well before I was old enough to vote.
You were the chosen ones, Greens. You were supposed to fight the oil lobby, not join them.
Didn’t various of your nuclear reactors need huge maintenance? As nuclear reactors get older the maintenance cost get crazy high. I remember seeing reports that said electrical grid problems could likely happen due to the age.
Though it seems you mean more nuclear had to be built a few decades ago? That likely would be good at that time.
But in this age, nuclear is costly if built now. Resulting in high electricity prices. That’ll make a country uncompetitive.
Since the energy crisis we are planning to refurbish the NPPs that were shut down anyways. Of course the cost analysis is much murkier now that we have years of delayed maintenance to catch up on since the operator expected a complete phaseout in 2022.
The debate over new nuclear is one thing. It’s not happening in Belgium anyways as literally no political party supports that. But shutting down existing nuclear is a moronic strategy that was only undertaken due to intense lobbying from anti-nuclear (and therefore pro-oil, whether they realize it or not) activists that cannot even remotely pretend that in the early '00s they correctly predicted that existing-nuclear-vs-new-renewables would reach a rough economic equilibrium twenty years later. They were killing the planet and they knew it, and didn’t care because it meant less nuclear (whatever relative intrinsic benefits that supposedly entails from an environmental perspective).
Ahh, the good ol’ sunk cost fallacy.
in 2010 they produced ~150twh with nuclear btw
Like others already said and you can read in my response or the link provided, they turned off coal.
ofc in the last year that the nuclear plants were operating they would’ve generated way less than when nuclear was a main source lol, this says that nuclear in 2010 produced 5x that of 2023 (150twh in reference to your source)
And then compare it to the output gains of renewables here:
https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/10700856
who cares? 150twh of free production is free production
It’s not free. Those plants were old and had to undergo massive maintenance measures. And to build new ones costs absurd amounts of time and money. Renewables are cheaper and faster.
Coal usage is going down constantly. Coal is being phased out completely until 2035.
And? I said Coal/Oil. Notice that Natural gas is gasp Increasing!
Electricity production from coal and oil combined shrank from 55.6 GW in 2010 (before the phasing out of nuclear power plants began) to 42.2 GW in 2023. No one “turned on coal/oil” to compensate nuclear energy.
Ya’ll have issues with logic it seems.
You know what you could have done? Shrank coal and oil combined EVEN MORE! And by your own sources production capabilities were increasing. Why would they be doing that if the goal is to get rid of it all together? There is a cost to building that production capability you know. But at this point I’m talking to brick walls. None of you can actually string together a valid reason why nuclear was killed in FAVOR of the shit polluting the air.
I don’t know who you’re talking to. I didn’t make any of these politics.