Meanwhile in Germany:
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You are aware that this is over 5 years old data (2017!) for the German electricity mix, right?
Please don’t get me wrong, the scale up of renewable energy sources is certainly not going fast enough in Germany (thanks to our conservative government that ruled the country for 16 years until 2021!), but please argue this position using the real data for 2023 (57.7% renewables in the German electricity mix)!
You’re right, I’m sorry. I chose the picture because it was the first okay one I found in English. I’ll change it right away.
our conservative government that ruled the country for 16 years
and the next 16 years, if everything works well Ü
!please kill me!<
The past 16 years have been conservative. The next 16 are for the far-right populists. There’s a difference.
Hence the formulation “if everything works well”
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I love how we literally can’t do shit for ourselves here in Italy
You keep repeating this point but renewable energy HAS to be exported when production is over the grid absorption rate. And coal plants have to be on continuously to guarantee baseload due to you moronic energy policies. You can’t bring up a (cherripicked for a single extraordinary year) graph you don’t understand and think it’s a gotcha. Not even mentioning the fact that France exports its energy too.
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This year is an anomaly because nuclear production was low because some power plants had to shut down for maintenance. Germany typically imports power from France.
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I have found this nice article (in French) :
https://fr.linkedin.com/pulse/exportations-délectricité-françaises-en-allemagne-finir-steven-lorantIt’s … more complex than one picture.
The average idea is that :
- if you consider physical exchange directly between France and Germany, on the average, France massively exports to Germany.
- but most of the electricity shared between Germany and France goes through Swiss. Swiss has dams to store energy. Germany has many surplus of production with renewables. Swiss is used for transit. As a result, Germany is a net exportator of electricity to France.
Why do you use this tone?
Good for providing up to date data.
But damn, Germany could have been 65% fossil free if they hadn’t closed the nuclear plants prematurely.
Such a waste of carbon budget.
Anyway, you’re probably going to have a conservative government again after this one. Hope you don’t become the big laggards.
If the approval process continues as it currently does and solar installations do not slow down massivly, by the end of the term the approved renewbales projects should bring Gemany above 80% renewables. Practically speaking that would be the coal exit done. Maybe not fully, but they would not matter much.
As for the rest, the current plan for hydrogen power plants is currently being negotiated with the EU. The good news it looks like a deal has been reached and if the plans shown by the current government are implemented, that would basicly mean a full coal exit and the starategic storage question being answered.
Basicly the current German government has passed laws for an estimated 64% redcution of emissions by 2030 compared to 1990. The current target is 65%. So with a bit of luck it will work out.
Yes, I see the advantage of CO2 neutrality, but:
The amount of active Nuclear repository sites for spent nuclear fuel and high level waste is… underwhelming.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
60 years time to find a suitable hole to drop the waste into and very limited success so far. Nobody wants it in the own backyard (even if it would be suited.).
The other end of the chain (mining and enrichment) doesn’t look like an environmental success story either, or does it? Poisoned groundwater looks like an issue to me… also if it happens in Canada or Kazakhstan.
The dots in between… One meltdown around every 20 years (worldwide) ? - the area here is just too densely populated to risk one here. They started to dismantle the first plant in Germany in 89 - still not done.
Edit: in my eyes the cons (I just named a few of them) outweigh the advantages. I mean the co2- neutrality is a big plus, but is it enough to justify the risks and damages? Aren’t there better alternatives? Am I wrong? Please bring facts.
Edit again: thinking further, for me the question to answer is not, either add more CO2 to the atmosphere or have (more) nuclear fission plants. It is the question, how to remove fossils from the energy mix without having to use nuclear fission. With the one extreme to only use what you have and its many backdraws.
Not true. One big problem in Germany is that the grid can’t handle all the electricity generated by renewables so they often shut them down. Something you can’t do with nuclear l. Since nuclear got of the grid it got more capacity for renewables hence the share jumped this year.
You can shut down or scale back energy/electricity produced from nuclear power plants as well by controlling the reaction rate. What would have been ideal was if nuclear had remained and the renewables took the production capacity share from fossil fuels
The German nuclear plants needed maintenance and refurbishment. Makes sense to invest an other billion to run it for 2 more years.
The renewable energy share skyrocketed since the nuclear shutdown
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Nuclear is the highest priority of energy generation because it’s ultra cheap to produce and completely stable
Not how the laws work in Germany: Renewables always have priority, they get to sell their production first, everyone else has to make do with the rest of the demand.
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Except that if you calculate the complete cost including building the plants it’s stupendously expensive compared to renewables even including energy storage.
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I do like nuclear, but of course the costs matter regardless of profit seeking. If you have two options that are same benefit but one costs more, to go with that one is just wasteful.
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Why is that irrelevant? These plants don’t run forever and are very expensive. You wouldn’t buy a car either that costs 15 million Euro, but in return just uses 1liter of diesel per 100km.
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Nuclear costs double per kilowatt than solar tho??
And Nuclear Plants are always built by for profit companies?Removed by mod
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This is for sure fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but Europe has also exported some of its most polluting industries abroad. And then we also wag our finger at places like China and India.
China and India are great with solar: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capacity
Current government in India is heavily pushing for solar energy.
Incredibly based
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Guess where all that Italian import comes from. Really, it’s clear you have very superficial understanding and very strong opinions. Typical for germans tbh
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We have a deep-seated problem with corruption. Most politicians are just cockpuppets of the economy, and fossil fuel corporations have plenty of politicians stuck on their cocks. We were the forerunners of green energy, now we’re just cum-soaked whores.
Wtf is going on in Italy?
We’re lazy fucks.
France usually exports electricity, this year is an abnormality.
And last year was an anomaly as well? Next year, the French nuclear plants will be repaired and their rivers will carry sufficient amounts of water again?
Yes, exactly. It’s in the management PowerPoint for next year, so don’t worry about it
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Exporting? Electricity doesn’t know about economics, it has its own laws.
if it didn’t have to export electricity to “97% fossel-free” France.
I mean, it doesn’t HAVE to, does it? Presumably it’s a voluntary trade?
Edit: Lol. Just like Reddit, get downvoted for asking a neutral question.
The united EU energy market means that essentially, yes they have to.
Maybe voluntary is the wrong word, but do they not get paid for the exports?
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Sssshhhh, don’t interrupt the nuclear circlejerk.
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Its interesting they use “most recent generation of turbines” but don’t do that on nuclear. Also WISE is not a credible source. It’s an anti-nuclear organisation with guys like Mycle Schneider on board.
Which source says 117g/kWh for nuclear? IPCC 2014 says 12g, UNECE 2020 about 5.1g (for EU28 nuclear).
Its interesting they use “most recent generation of turbines” but don’t do that on nuclear.
Feel free to tell us how much cheaper current nuclear power plants are than the ones that were built in the 70s and 80s.
I’m sure there’s some great data from Flamanville, Olkiluoto or Hinkley Point, showing us all how cheap and affordable nuclear has become.
If you thought just a little bit about what I wrote, you would know I was discussing the second graph.
Answer my points, not reinterpret them to fit your agenda.
They shutdown half of their reactors temporarily for maintenance in 2022. It was a one time thing. Your statement makes it seem like they do it every year.
Electricity don’t know about capitalism, it has its own laws.
My electricity provider shuts off my power if I don’t pay, obviously physical laws of electricity allow at least that much.
Gritinks from Poland!
Italy isn’t any less
There’s no "unknown ", so that’s good at least.
Maybe in the Vatican.
Vatican is powered by holy spirit
Consumption by source
Weird way to put it… also wtf is hydro storage generating?
Electricity? Like, you use excess power to lift water and generate power from letting it descend when you need power. The latter is generated. Or am I not getting something?
I know. It never generates more than it consumes so it has negative production overall. Or is this a real-time chart despite saying “past 12 months”?
“consumption takes imports and exports into account, production ignores them”
I think the idea is that it only uses excess energy that would otherwise be wasted to fill it, so it kind of generates energy as it’s essentially filled for free.
Yes, I know. Still, misleading: they show up negative in these power generation charts most of the time and this is supposed to be a cumulative one.
Rain fills them without consuming energy
Yes, they are part of the water cycle, sometimes collecting water from a significant area, but usually not. This is the upper reservoir of our largest hydro storage plant:
Rain is only collected over the area of the reservoir, and it would only fill up a few centimeters on a rainy day. In fact, the water evaporates quicker than that so a lake would never naturally form in this location.Are all hydro storage like that though? It doesn’t seem too outlandish to think of a hydro storage plant that is also fed by a river
I said most
Maybe it’s getting the power out of the storage.
I’ve been to a hydro storage plant and I know how it works. It stores power by pumping water into an upper reservoir when there is excess power and then letting it through turbines at peak demand. Overall, it achieves about 80% efficient energy storage whose capacity scales very cheaply as opposed to battery storage, and can respond to demand in a minute.
However, it never generates power in the usual sense so it should show up negative on an overall chart. Is this a real time one? I don’t think so because it says “past 12 months”.
Could a dam lake be counted as hydro storage? That wouldn’t require energy spending to pump water up, but it can work as a “cache”?
Nope, that’s just regular hydroelectric. All hydro power plants have valves to control the flow and they do adjust them on demand, for turbine/filter maintenance, and/or hydrological event control.
Also, dam lake is a misnomer because lakes are naturally occurring. The correct term is reservoir. However, a reservoir can be natural and not dammed, like the oldest Czech pumped storage power plant at Černé jezero, which I visited. (The reservoir is a beautiful mountain lake and unfortunately, nature preservationists capped the water level changes to 4 cm, limiting capacity.)
Yeah I didn’t know the correct term for it in English, in Finnish it’s called “fakelake” or maybe more accurately “artificial lake”, but fakelake sounds better
Then there are ponds and pools, which can be either natural or artificial.
I understand that it’s a net loss but maybe they’re only counting the power generated while unloading (which is still stupid but hey)
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Schleswig-Holstein is at 100% wind since 2014. It’s Southern Germany that lags behind. https://spd-geschichtswerkstatt.de/wiki/Energiewende
Alter, es ist immer mein reudiges Bayern, oder?
Vergiss nicht BW
Oida, i bin’s ned
Mein niederbayrisches Dach hat gestern Solarzellen bekommen. Sind zwar noch nicht angeschlossen, aber immerhin…
So macht ma des, Maggus!
Wir versorgen uns seit einem Jahr auch mit ca. 90% eigenen Solarstrom. Fühlt sich echt gut an.
I couldn’t be less surprised
Like most of the time, the answer is complex: Yes, there is less wind in the south, but also yes, the south could approve more wind turbines. Yes, the south slows down the construction of high voltage power lines from the wind-rich north to the energy-hungry south, but the states that have to be crossed also do “their part”.
In the end a couple different electricity-pricing regions would help in balancing all of this.
That number is slightly misleading because practically we should subtract Hamburg’s consumption from our overproduction. Someone does have to power the peppersacks and it of course should be us, to keep them dependent.
Lots of coal burning leads to a powerful coal lobby leads to lots of coal burning, it’s the circle of life. All that’s missing is coal entering the food chain, IMO we should bring back coal butter, so the country can depend on coal even more and the coal lobby can make even more profits.
That was a horrible thing to read but a wonderful thing to know.
“Coal butter! Power yourself with the power of coal! Available in lignite and anthracite! And for those extremely demanding consumer: new charcoal butter! 100% natural sourced!”
(I’ll excuse myself now.)
The utter beauty of the whole thing is that with the overall efficiency of the process of making coal butter, we could justify lots and lots of more lignite strip mining to both make the actual coal butter and to power the butter making process. Coal lobbyists will love it!
The wiki entry literally states that it was discontinued due to its manufacturing inefficiencies.
That’s my point, it’s so inefficient that it’s the perfect excuse for strip mining vast areas in order to get the coal needed to produce it.
Thanks for the TIL about coal butter!
Damn all these German tears in the comments could be used for enough hydro electricity to actually make the German grid cleaner.
That wouldn’t be long lived, though, because when implemented in the current German fashion, they won’t be using salt water resistant equipment for cost cutting reasons and neglect all maintenance to cut even more costs. The tear powered hydroelectric plants will be rusted through and seized up in no time.
No it wouldn’t. It would never be built because the FDP would block it and Söder would refuse to have it built in Bavaria and Merz would say something about immigrants using up all our German salt on the tax payers dime all day long and Sahra Wagenknecht would mention that we wouldn’t need it if we were all good friends with Putin and the SPD would do nothing anyway and the AfD would blame the green party for not reactivating 45 year old reactors instead of building it,…
…different organisational levels of the Greens would endorse an oppose it at the same time, because it’s climate friendly but its building requires trimming a hedge of brambles on the neighbouring plot. A local citizens’ initiative against it would form due to widespread concerns about the plant’s working fluid containing the dangerous chemicals Dihydrogen Monoxide and Sodium Chloride, this initiative would run for the next council elections and win in a landslide. Then everyone would sue each other, and after about 5 to 10 years of legal battle, construction would be approved under strict additional conditions. By then, the cost would have doubled and the plant as planned and approved would be technologically obsolete and important components out of production, so there would be no other choice than repeating the entire planning and approval process all over.
Bitte, aufhören 😭
I’ve never seen this man in my entire life
- Germans
Meanwhile here next door in the Netherlands, we have wind farms and solar all over, and we sell our energy to the UK…meanwhile we have some of the highest consumer energy costs in the EU.
Consumers get screwed over here a lot.
Kind of selfish form you, aren’t you thinking about the shareholders?
I’m baaaad that way.
If only you swamp-Germans knew our mobile numbers! You could send us ll a Tkkie for the electric! 😝
What? On your “handy”? 😜
The crazy thing is that renewable energy (particularly land-based) is much, much cheaper than conventional generation. This makes sense, as while construction and maintenance costs might be higher over the life of the plant, there is no fuel cost. And yet, consumers end up paying more for this cheap energy.
Detaching the generation market from the consumption market was down right evil.
We really don’t, or at least, don’t have to pay more for clean energy. When the wind blows or the sun shines my electricity prices goes down. Way down! Through the floor down. It all depends on your tariff.
It’s gas generators that pin the price high in the UK.
We’re very pro-business here. We talk a lot about it.
We’re also not so consumer friendly - that, you hear decidedly less about.
Since it says “right now”, I doubt this listing is qualified for discussing the general state of the energy transition in these countries.
Edit: I checked it. Spain’s gas share (as a random example) was significantly higher than 17% all over 2023 when summed up monthwise with wind contributing up to 30%.
Edit2: correct data for Germany for the same time mark: 52% fossil free (38% wind)
The reason Czechs use „mld.“ instead of „Mrd.“ like Germans for billions (miliardy/Milliarden) is because mrd means “fuck” (noun) in Czech.
Those poor Czechs just cannot afford vowels.
We totally can! Look, my address is
Petr Zhltal
Strmý vrch 14 (čtrnáct)
Čtvrť zmrdů
Krnov 5 (pět) – Srch
ČR
It’s very a good sign, but I do have doubts about those figures. It’s all too easy to look at total demand and total renewable generation, while ignoring the fact that the country is a net exporter and thus produces more than 100% of its demand - with the remaining uncounted percentage not being green.
“Fossil free” isn’t exactly a recognised term, either, in which case fossil free =/= net zero =/= completely green.
This data is plain wrong, at least for some countries.
96% for Portugal would be amazing, but that seemed excessive so I looked it up, renewables accounted for 73% only.
I mean, it not bad, but we could be 99% there by now if the governments weren’t pandering to utilities and fossil companies so much.
Edit: sorry forgot to link the source for power data
Yeah I agree. Scotland has a tiny population and isn’t actually a country. It’s a part of the larger UK that definitely has more fossil fuels.
Here is the UK grid: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Scotland is a country, but so is the UK, and the UK governs over Scotland.
It’s a similar mess with the transmission network. You have NGET owning the transmission lines in England and Wales, but SPT and SHET for Scotland, however all of these are overseen by NGESO, the system operator, who balance the generation and load. Just to make it even more confusing, the Wales and South West distributor WPD has been brought back into British ownership as part of the National Grid group, so you have NGED providing some distribution as well.
IIRC, France exports its excess nuclear power in the summer (little need for AC until recently), but imports during the winter (electric heat for the most part). Mostly to and from Germany, which uses some terribly dirty sources. Don’t know if that’s changed in the last few years, though.
They did import a lot that one year in summer when all their nuclear plants broke due to low river levels and some sort of maintenance issue.
The mix will fluctuate on a day-by-day basis. You could be 100% renewable on one day, wind solar, and hydroelectric (although that’s problematic in and of itself) with the inevitable nuclear for base load.
The next day you could be still and overcast and you’ve already used all of your water from the dam so you have to run more natural gas in the mix.
To pick any random day and to say that that date is representative of the year as a whole is silly, you need averages over the course of a year.
we may all say a big “THANK YOU!” to Philipp Rösler (FDP) and Peter Altmaier (CDU) for both destroying the German PV-industry, establishing the “Solar-Ausbaudeckel” and the CDU/CSU as a whole to block and hinder wind power for over a decade very effectively.
And their very hard work to make Germany overly dependent on fossil fuels, to keep it that way and therefore blow ALL climate goals appears to be a success model, as the CDU/CSU are currently winning the public opinion with that intend, whilst those trying to follow the steps of our european neighors are slammed into the ground (just as our PV industry).
In other words: Germans don’t want clean air. They don’t want a future.
Hey, coal and gas were cheap in those days… - why thinking about the future?
And new Putin’s yachts were new and shiny
Meanwhile in Germany: +13 GW new renewables so far this year…
Thanks to Russia
ehhh Germany is buying less gas from Russia since they invaded Ukraine, which means that gas is more expensive and renewable energy is likely a more viable option. In no way would I thank Russia for that.
I’m Portuguese and as much as I’d love to run on 96% green energy I can’t believe it… Last time I checked (it was quite a while ago I’ll give them that) we imported a lot of nuclear energy from France. So unless France is 100% green and still has a green energy surplus (which it isn’t/doesn’t) we’re just transfering our carbon footprint…
We do have a lot of wind turbines so maybe we don’t import as much anymore but still…
Nuclear is green though, so France is a good place to be importing from. It also has the lowest mortality rate per kWh of all power sources, Chernobyl included.
Not saying nuclear isn’t green btw.
I, personally, am all for nuclear. However given the choice I’d rather my country invests in wind geothermal, solar and others. Nuclear can be a liability as we’ve seen in Ukraine.
When it comes to saving the environment, and considering you’re in the EU, the liability of nuclear as seen in Ukraine is minimal
Novaya Kahovka power plant is very not nuclear tho
Spoiler alert
It is hydro power plant.
Well that was just an example anyways. I thought it was nuclear but I might be wrong, never really looked too much into it.
Any nuclear power plant can become a liability during war times though. Hopefully it never comes to that, but you never know…
I think there’s a nuclear power plant in Ukraine a lot of people know about in Chernobyl or something maybe? I’m guessing that’s what they’re hinting at.
I don’t know about the others but I don’t think I can really consider solar green, it needs a lot of silicon not only to make enough panels to have an impact but also needs the extraction of stuff for batteries too, still better than coal ig.
Oh no. It needs lots of sand.
What’s the problem with silicon?
I still think in the long run it’s worth it. Maybe not as good as wind I guess, but 100% better than gas/oil/coal etc…
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There’s definitely some figure manipulation going on here. Portugal might claim it’s importing green energy from France, meanwhile France might stack up its renewable generation against its overall demand to make its claims, meaning both are ignoring much of the fossil fuel generation from France.
It’s still good progress, but the devil really is in the details. There’s a reason this post doesn’t call it “net-zero” or any other industry recognised term.
The biggest chunk of our yearly consumption is still gas. And France’s carbon intensity is much lower than ours still (one of the lowest in Europe), so any energy we’re importing from them is actually lowering our CO2 average.
Meanwhile in my country, renewable energy sources are frowned upon and the government just announced plans to build 3 new coal powerplants.
That’s because Europe is buying up all the cheaper natural gas.
We’re just pushing the pollution down the chain.
The cheapest gas right now is Russian gas, and Europe is buying very little of that.
Not exactly. For Sechin to make up for those profits he would have stolen if those profits existed he hiked up gas price domestically. New yacht won’t buy itself.
Also fucking lukoil that still is not sanctioned keeps selling oil, petrol and gas in Europe.
RIP air quality
Are you in Europe? Wtf Isn’t it a EU wide goal to phase coal out by 2030 or something?
Is it? Coal is rampant in Eastern Europe.
I think Romania is the only outlier, and that’s only because their former dictator forced them to build hydro and nuclear (ironically).
In Portugal the last coal plant closed maybe a year or so ago. Apparently some countries will take longer but, here’s a link https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/
But yeah, Poland, turkey and some balkans don’t have much planned…
