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This is a meaningless headline, which follows a regrettably common way of producing misleading statements. If you look at the article, you'll find that solar g
by radford-neal 7y ago
This is a meaningless headline, which follows a regrettably common way of producing misleading statements.
If you look at the article, you'll find that solar generation accounted for only 19% of the total. It's the "biggest source" only as a result of their choice of how to group the other sources. If they had decided to have a "fossil fuel" category, that would have been the biggest. But they decided to split fossil fuels into brown coal, hard coal, oil, and gas, so it doesn't win. Similarly, if they'd split solar into subcategories according to exactly which technology was used, none of them would have been "biggest".
You should similarly ignore misleading statements about "disease X is the biggest killer of Y", and so forth. They're all meaningless when the division into categories is arbitrary.
- aurelwu 7y ago"Fossil fuel/non-renewables" would not have been the biggest, as you can see in the chart, "renewables" is bigger. Also they didn't split it into those subcategories so that solar wins, this technology split is a absolute standard way to differentiate between technologies which is always used, and it makes no sense (on that level of detail) to not differentiate between lignite, hard coal, gas and oil which all need different power plants, have different costs, different emission factors etc.
- rayiner 7y agoSplitting brown coal and hard coal is not standard and would change the result.
- aurelwu 7y agoIt absolutely is standard in germany: German Environment Agency does it this way [0] Fraunhofer Society does it this way [1] German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy does it this way[2] Agora Energywende (important think tank) does it this way [3] AG Energiebilanzen does it this way [4] [0] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/strommix-in-deutschland https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/strommix-in-deutschland [1] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/daten-zu-erneuerbaren-energien/ISE_Stromerzeugung_2018_Halbjahr.pdf#page=9 https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... [2] https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/Energiedaten/energiedaten-gesamt-pdf-grafiken.pdf__blob=publicationFile&v=38 https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/Energiedaten/ener... [3] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/service/agorameter/chart/power_generation/11.07.2019/14.07.2019/ https://www.agora-energiewende.de/service/agorameter/chart/p... [4] https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/ https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/
- radford-neal 7y agoEveryone using the same split doesn't make the split non-arbitrary. Aren't small-scale hydro and large-scale hydro rather different things? Is large-scale hydro really "renewable", given that reservoirs fill with sediment, and their creation leads to lots of CO2 being released? Why is nuclear power "non-renewable"? It's renewable on any reasonable time scale, and doesn't produce CO2 during operation. Surely photovoltaic and thermal solar power are rather different technologies?
- imtringued 7y agoI have never seen a chart that doesn't split them.
- merb 7y agomost countries do not run brown coal. at least not as much as they used to.
- roenxi 7y agoA safe starting point - I generally assume Reneweconomy.com.au is wrong about everything substantive until it has been reported by someone else. And in this case their insight into the details German energy grid is going to be extremely limited. That being said, brown coal is a completely different beast from black coal. Gas also has a lot of fundamental differences. If it makes sense to split wind and solar, it makes sense to split brown and black coal. A key detail; brown coal is not going to appear as an export. If you shut down a brown coal power plant, less coal will be mined. If you shut down a black coal power plant, maybe the coal is still mined and then exported.