this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Solarpunk Travel
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It's crazy to me that Germany still has such a dirty grid. I had a German economics professor like 20 years ago that was telling us all the aggressive actions Germany was taking to reach carbon neutrality. What happened?
Nuclear exit, Germany has a lot of lignite, which is much dirties then hard coal, then a lot of electricity exports and now Putin shut down gas, so coal is used instead. The good part is that nuclear is shut down at this point and renewable built up has picked up a lot of speed, so it is propably much cleaner now. Also important to say, that the US west coast has a pretty clean grid, which improves the entire country.
This misses the point that during the 16 years of conservative government under Chancellor Merkel the previous advances in renewable energy at best stagnated and local production capacity of wind and solar systems was massively reduced. Nuclear energy was really only ever a small part of the picture.
Nuclear energy is baseload, just as lignite is. What you see today is 12GW of lignite baseload, which would have been easy to replace with 12GW nuclear, which was available when she came into power. However she did everything she could to help out coal. In 2011 solar was growing very quickly, so she accelerated the nuclear exit massivly and put strict end dates to the use of the npps. This means using nuclear as dispatchable generation was not attractive any longer, as would have been the case earlier with a fixed amount of electricity allowing for more variable operation. Then a year later in 2012 she destroyed solar as well, by cutting subsidies. That worked pretty well, until 2017, when wind was built so quickly that it threatend coal again, so the paperwork was increased to slow wind down.
That is really it, if nuclear exit would have been executed a bit smarte, solar subsidies not cut and wind paperwork not increased it would have worked. But one thing is really important: Merkel came to power in 2005. Back then renewables were more or less a joke in the German grid.
The good part is solar built up is really fast these days and hurting lignite by regularily producing as much electricity as consumed. Combined with more wind, especially the fast construction of more offshore, this should kill coal in the next five years.
Thanks for the clarification.
Merkel happend.
😭