Closing all the nuclear plants and replacing them with increased coal usage, mainly. Compared to France where nuclear makes up a huge proportion of generation capacity and the UK where gas is the main source (not low carbon, but much lower than coal).
While nuclear is low carbon, it is not cheap and does not like to load follow (whereas renewables can simply curtail and shut down when there is insufficient load or transmission for their generation). If there are consistent excess renewables on a grid, it seriously impairs the economics of nuclear. France’s nuclear reactors load follow but are hard on the mechanicals attempting to do so, and France has some serious issues with reactor maintenance and refurbishment.
Coal and nuclear are the first to be driven out of the generation mix due to their poor economics (or sometimes air pollution regulation as is the case with coal), and remaining coal and natural gas will be driven out over the next decade. Natural gas competes with renewables and batteries, both of which continually decline in cost. Peaking natural gas (vs more efficient combined cycle gas turbine) is already no longer competitive with batteries, and those generators are quickly being replaced.
Tangentially, Germany has twelve interconnectors with neighboring electrical grids. They need not stand up all of this low carbon generation themselves. They also have almost 10GW of hydro storage and almost 5GW of battery storage (so far).
New nuclear isn’t cheap. Existing nuclear is cheap enough. The fact remains that the answer to OP’s question is Germany shuttered its plants and began importing dirty power.
I believe the question should be, “what is the cost of the emissions delta of early turndown of these plants vs continuing to run them until retirement (whether due to economics or longevity),” in both fiat and emissions. It is not as simple as “we should’ve run them until the doors fall off.” That is a simple idea for a complex problem.
> It is not as simple as “we should’ve run them until the doors fall off.” That is a simple idea...
It is also a straw man. The Neckarwestheim reactor, which Germany shut down this year, began operating in 1989 [1]. The average age of America's reactors is almost a fifth longer, with decades life left [2].
Renewables on the other hand definitely do not like load following: they are slow to start up and are severely impacted by regular weather conditions like night and no wind
Citations below, it really comes down to it being uneconomical to load follow when capacity factor declines below a sustainable threshold, which will surely comes as renewables scale up. You can see this today on the daily graph for France when solar production ramps over the day, pushing down nuclear generation.
> You can see this today on the daily graph for France when solar production ramps over the day, pushing down nuclear generation.
That.... is exactly what nuclear plants are literally designed to do.
As for "economics". If we don't discuss the politics of disregard and underinvestment in nuclear power plants, we can't discuss the economics. The only reason your last link exists is precisely because French government sat on its ass and did nothing to the most important energy source in their country. What do you think will happen to your renewable energy after decades of similar disregard?
If we don't discuss where to get energy on a quiet night, we can't discuss "economics". The only reason "Germany has replaced nuclear with renewables" discource exists is because Germany burns insane amounts of coal and imports energy from France and Denmark every time there's a dip in renewables (aka at least every 12 hours or so).
> What do you think will happen to your renewable energy after decades of similar disregard?
I hope it's not the governments' mistake to make next time, given how much easier it is to scale renewables anywhere from multi-gigawatt down to however many milliwatts solar powered pocket calculators were.
> given how much easier it is to scale renewables anywhere from multi-gigawatt down to
Easy to scale nameplate capacity? Yes. Easy to scale generation? No.
Right now, as I write this, in Germany:
- Wind: 66.5 GW installed capacity. Generation: 1.82 GW, or 2.74% of that
- Solar: 69.1 GW of installed capacity. Generation: 0.38 GW, or 0.55% of that
- Hydro: 9.78 GW of installed capacity. Generation: 3.09 GW, or 31% of that
So Germany is busy burning gas (generation: 7.6 GW), coal (generation: 14.2 GW), and "bio fuels" (generation: 5 GW), and importing electricity from as far away as Norway
> As you wrote that, the sun is still low (in practice) on the horizon even here in Berlin.
Exactly
> If you want to argue storage capacity etc. is up to the government
Yes, the storage capacity is also an issue.
> but not where I was going.
I don't know where you were going, but when you say "it's easy to scale renewables" and then say "oh, but the sun is below horizon and inadequate storage capacity", it's clear that it's not that easy to scale renewables.
I don't know if it will be solved by large scale government-backed mega-projects — which can be anything from grid-scale batteries, cubic kilometres of cryo-hydrogen, hydroelectric dams, or (my personal favourite) a global TW-scale power grid — or if it will be spontaneous local interest like electric cars and slightly scaled up versions of the ~kWh battery packs I see in Obi and Kaufland as home power storage.
The home battery packs are already at a level where they just about make sense financially over their working lifetime, but hardly anyone will want to spend €17k for 15+ years of grid independence, especially here where the grid is basically guaranteed to work.
It is the same issue, and pretending that it isn't is disingenous at best. What's the point of "quickly scaling renewables" if they can provide 0.55% of their nameplate capacity?
> I don't know if it will be solved by
Indeed, no one knows how this problem will be solved (and if it can be solved), but it doesn't stop you from statements like "how much easier it is to scale renewables anywhere from multi-gigawatt down to however many milliwatts". Germany has easily scaled renewables to gigawatts. And yet even now, during the day wind is at 2.38% capacity, solar is at 43% capacity, and 15 GW has to come from coal even though if you look at numbers only, there's 67 GW of wind installed.
> especially here where the grid is basically guaranteed to work.
Currently the only reason is working is that countries burn copious amounts of coal and gas to keep up with demand. Even Denmark which is covered in wind turbines currently only utilizes 9.6% of installed wind capacity, and has to import 34% of its electricity from Norway.
But sure do tell me how easy it is to scale renewables without accounting for the actual reality we can observe literally right now?
> What's the point of "quickly scaling renewables" if they can provide 0.55% of their nameplate capacity?
If you're doing that bad on average over the year, you put them in the wrong place.
Fortunately the actual number for PV is about 10%, and even given that capacity factor the world is currently on the path to that alone being sufficient by the early 2030s.
> no one knows how this problem will be solved (and if it can be solved)
It definitely can be solved.
Any of the things I listed, alone or in combination, are sufficient to solve it.
They're almost certainly not the only options, and I'd be surprised if lil' me can pick the best, but they all work.
> Currently the only reason is working is that countries burn copious amounts of coal and gas to keep up with demand.
"Currently".
That's like saying your car is "currently" only as fast as a bicycle while you're in a 20 zone and have yet to reach the autobahn, but then trying to use this fact to conclude cars are incapable of higher performance rather than just you've not done it yet.
And if everyone running the grid were to say "we're not having a grid any more", Kaufland and Obi both sell kWh-range battery packs at low enough prices that, given the way they wear over use, they'll already be cheaper over their lifetime. That lifetime is longer than most people care to invest for, hence why it's not common, but it is already there.
Thing is, industries don't operate on "average energy". Neither do services and people's homes. They don't care if you have 100% energy tomorrow if today you get 0%. Yes, on average you will get 50%. But in practice you'll have complete disruption.
When the sun is down, it's down not just for a singe country or a city. When the wind is not blowing, it's not just a local phenomena for a single country/city. Etc.
> the actual number for PV is about 10%, and even given that capacity factor the world is currently on the path to that alone being sufficient by the early 2030s.
So, riddle me this: if you want to account for days when wind and electricity produce only 1-3% of their installed capacity, how much capacity (and storage) needs to be installed to provide full energy needs?
> That's like saying your car is "currently" only as fast as a bicycle
False analogy
> And if everyone running the grid were to say "we're not having a grid any more", Kaufland and Obi both sell kWh-range battery packs at low enough prices that, given the way they wear over use, they'll already be cheaper over their lifetime.
How many of those battery packs you will need for "no grid"?
> hence why it's not common, but it is already there.
Of course it's nowhere near "there", wherever there may be.
Indeed, but we don't need it everywhere — between transmission lines and that most of the good sites in Germany are pretty close to the major industry and population centres (except Berlin and Brandenburg, which is basically marsh and nature reserves, leading back to the transmission lines).
> Indeed, but we don't need it everywhere — between transmission lines and that most of the good sites in Germany are pretty close to the major industry and population centres
1. Not everywhere, but you need quite a lot of them. You significantly underestimate how much power modern civilisation consumes
2. You can't build a hydroelectric plant/storage in the marshes. You can't build it willy-nilly in any river you want, either. You can't just build it on any lake or in any mountains you like.
> I might be overestimating power lines or people's willingness to have transmission lines near them.
The question isn't about power lines. The question you started with is "Hydroelectric is generally counted as a renewable, and it's also a storage system."
The problem is that yo uneed to build a lot of them, and you can't just build them abywhere you want.
> What's the ampacity of a typical high voltage line?
Zero. The storage capacity of a high voltage line is zero.
> The question isn't about power lines. The question you started with is "Hydroelectric is generally counted as a renewable, and it's also a storage system."
Needless pedantry as everyone uses transmission lines so that power creation and storage aren't in the same physical location as the end use.
If you've got a 5 GW line going from Berlin to, say, the Czech border (where there's currently already a 1 GW hydro plant, I make no claims about environmental capacity for more even though it seems plausible at first glance), then you've got hydro storage keeping the lights on in the city even though it's 215 km away because there's nowhere here to put any hydro storage.
That's why it matters what the amp-acity of a HV line is.
UK is a varied mix so hard to say the main source. gas, coal and oil (almost entirely gas) together are about 40% of generation. The other 60% is imports, biomass, wind, solar, hydro etc.
This is what REALLY bugs me about Germany in general. There is a cultural belief that germans are data driven and unemotional in their decision making. That they are the wise leaders who run the EU. They do not have the populist issues like the UK with brexit or the chaos that france has. They are not like the consuming americans who vote for trump. And yet, the reality of the energy policy demonstrates that Germany is nọt immune to this kind of traps. They prefer to shut down nuclear power plants and yes install many renewables.
They didn’t actually do the math. The point is while renewables may generate 50% of energy, the other half comes from coal which must be turned on when there is no sun or wind, which is so polluting even in comparison to natural gas, that it destroys the overall mix. You can estimate coal as around 700g/kwh(just look at poland when the sun isn’t shining) which divided in half gets you pretty close to Germany’s average of 300g. Had Germany switched to natural gas, they would be much closer to the UK, which did not have an energy transition.
Germany had a much higher peak in emissions in the 1970s and 1980s, unlike the UK which phased out coal early, or France which went all in on nuclear.
German emissions have been rapidly declining since 1990 (even with nuclear reactors closing, because the investment was steered into renewables). They just need a few more years to catch up to their neighbours.
No, it's an impossible equation. Germany cannot win this game without nuclear, barring an unlikely huge breakthrough in battery storage real soon.
Because of renewables' intermittency, there's an upper limit on how much you can have of them in the mix. If the rest of your mix (even just 20%) is coal, your CO2/kWh average is destroyed because its emissions are so much worse than the rest.
There will always be a minimum need for a "base load" energy source in the mix, and only two of them are low carbon : hydro and nuclear. Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro, but they decided to ditch the other one... guess what happens next ?
This is actually not true (or was only very briefly true) [1] Germany has added a lot of renewables over the last couple years. And more than compensated their nuclear plants, which only played a minor role in Germany's electricity production at that point anyway. Of course Germany could have reduced the CO2 output even more if the nuclear plants hadn't been turned off. However, when the discussion heated up again last year it was basically already a moot point. Planning to decommission the plants was already too advanced. There was no personal, no company that wanted to operate the plants, no fuel, etc.
The moment they shut down their last nuclear plant they had several quiet nice in a row. The total output of renewables was about 4% of the installed capacity.
So Germany had to burn copious amount of coal, and gas, and buy energy from France
- Wind: 66.5 GW installed capacity. Generation: 1.82 GW, or 2.74% of that
- Solar: 69.1 GW of installed capacity. Generation: 0.38 GW, or 0.55% of that
- Hydro: 9.78 GW of installed capacity. Generation: 3.09 GW, or 31% of that
So Germany is busy burning gas (generation: 7.6 GW), coal (generation: 14.2 GW), and "bio fuels" (generation: 5 GW), and importing electricity from as far away as Norway
> Is it because the German industry and population is much bigger?
No, this is CO2 per kwh, so is proportional to population.
What you have just discovered is that Germany does a lot of greenwashing. They may have spent trillions on renewables but, well look at the graphs, they still burn insane amounts of coal.
They chose the politically popular choice of closing nuclear and in doing do sabotaged their climate agenda. Turns out building a grid of only variable renewables doesn't work yet.
Reading this is enormously frustrating. People have been shouting at the top of their lungs, that this will be the inevitable outcome of policy in Germany. Energy policy in Germany has no chance to accomplish its stated goals and is costing people a fortune.
> Germany is doing a lot to reduce CO_2 emissions. At least you have the impression when listening to politicians and reading newspapers. E.g. a few months ago it was announced that Germany is on track with the goals posed by the government (e.g. see https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/deutschland-klimaziele-erfu...).
For one thing, it's not absolutely obvious that germany will reach its CO2 reduction goals, from they own saying [1], but they might not shoot too far: [2]. (It's not very far from them in many sectors, but energy got a bad 2022.) However, I don't know how "ambitious" those objectives are.
> Also in many statistics you can see that already around 50% of the electricity consumed in Germany is from renewable sources. How comes that on electricitymaps.com Germany is on the higher side of carbon intensity? Is it because the German industry and population is much bigger?
The problem is, basically, that the other 50% is _very_ CO2 heavy , and it only got worse in 2022-2023 because the last nuclear plants closed, and gas got more expensive so more coal got used. [3]
This explains the vast difference between Germany and France on the electricity map: France hardly gets 20% of its electricity from solar panels and wind farms, but the other 80% are from atoms and water drops instead of lignite, which just makes a huuuge difference.
Also, remember that electricity-maps only looks at, well, electricity - which only accounts for roughly 1/4th of the emissions [4]. Germany still has a large industry, and it's building... petroleum cars. (I was surprised to read that as far as "Industry" emissions are concerned, Germany and France are actually rather close, at ~25Mt/y. But I suppose the cars go in to the "Manufactoring" category, where Germany is clearly on top....)
All in all, the per-capita CO2 emission of France ends up being almost twice as low as Germany. Which is maybe why it's easier to reach reduction goal: "all" Germany has to do to get a massive reduction is to clean-up its grid. The country kinda-sovereignly decided to make it harder by ditching nuclear, but it's actually the "easy" part (in the sense that it's transparent for most people when they switch on their TV if the electricity is" clean" or not. The only consideration is whether it is "cheap" or not.)
France is at the stage where it has to reduce the other not-low-hanging-at-all fruit: transport emissions. (Because the current technology forces people to trade relatively cheap, comfortable and versatile gas-powered cars for EVs that are none of those three things - at the moment - and they'll understandably kick and scream to avoid that.)
In a different world, Germany would have invested in R&D to build small and affordable electric cars, while France would have invested in R&D to build smaller and safer nuclear reactors.
Instead, Germany paid software engineers to make car cheat tests [6], and France paid consultants to make the electricity market undecipharable while 1970's nuclear plants where rotting in place [7] ... and then 2022 happened !
Not only Germany uses lots of coal, it also uses a lot of the worst kind of coal, lignite. Lignite is low grade coal, Germany has a lot of it, and burning it in local power plants is pretty much the only thing you can do with it, so that's what Germany did.
It also lacks nuclear (because of political decisions), and hydro (presumably because a lack of suitable sites), two of the big low carbon sources.
So Germany may have 50% renewables, but the next one is the worst in terms of emissions (lignite/coal), then there is gas, which is not as bad as coal, but still bad, and that's about it.
And most of the renewables in Germany is solar, which is, according to the website, one of the highest of the low carbon sources. Hydro, wind and nuclear are all lower. Not a big effect though, almost negligible compared to coal.
Unfortunately that is a wrong impression. Electricitymaps is correct regarding Germany's CO2 emissions.
It has nothing to do with the country's population and industry size, because these figures are the CO2 emitted per kWh of electricity.
The problem is simple : Germany chose to shut down nuclear power and to invest massively in renewables (€500B in wind and solar)
Wind and solar are of course intermittent and, because you can't store electricity at scale, you cannot run a country's electricity grid on these alone, especially a country with heavy 24/7 industry. That is the central lie of the German Energiewende.
In reality you always need some more stable energy sources to handle the "base load", they can be :
- Hydroelectricity (if you have the right geography)
- Coal
- Gas
- Nuclear
Of these four, only hydro and nuclear are low CO2.
You can see on Electricitymaps that some countries like Norway are doing great because they have Hydro for their base load. Germany doesn't have the geography for that, unfortunately.
The only low CO2 choice remaining for German base load is nuclear, but we know what happened to that...
There was a focus on (mainly Russian) gas, which is slightly better than coal, but Putin is using this as a geopolitical weapon now.
So that leaves you with coal, and there are two big problems with that :
1. Coal emits SO much more CO2 per kWh than renewables or nuclear that it completely destroys Germany's average CO2 emissions score. With coal in the mix, you would need not 50% but maybe 90% of renewable electricity to compensate for the insane emissions of the small % of coal. Unfortunately as I mentioned, 90% of renewable electricity isn't possible because of intermittence. Which means Germany won't ever solve this problem unless A. a breakthrough in energy storage is discovered (good luck) or B. it restarts its nuclear power plants and builds new ones.
That is the embarrassing reason why many German politicians would rather talk about the % of renewables in the mix (which is completely meaningless for climate), rather than the CO2/kWh figure (the only thing that counts for climate) where Germany is doing so badly (on average 6-7 times worse than France)
2. Air pollution from coal power plants causes over 10.000 premature deaths in Europe every year
Most of the coal plants in the European top 10 are located in Germany.
Imagine the reaction if a neighbouring country operated another source of energy (say, nuclear) that caused 10.000 deaths / year in the region ? Fukushima was one (1) direct death by radiation, btw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...)
It's great news that apparently, 60% of Germans are now in favour of nuclear power. I hope that the generation of 1970s Die Grüne activists that caused these disastrous energy policies in Germany are voted out of power asap.
