11 ms·

Coal replaces wind as most important energy source in Germany in H1

85 points by agent327 5y ago

agent327 5y ago
We regularly get excited stories about how wind is now the most important energy source in Germany, but it is important that people realize moments like that are exceptions to the rule. In general, most German energy comes from the worst polluting energy source we have: coal.
- consp 5y ago
  This includes massive amounts of lignite which is the worst of worst.
- Tepix 5y ago
  We would have been a lot further down the road to renewable energy if the current government had not stopped the wind industry in its tracks (due to corruption).
grlass 5y ago
You can see a great map of how terrible Germany's grid is compared to say France with this map [1]. Compared to France, which is so green due to high levels of nuclear, Germany has banned the building, and is compelling the decommissioning of all nuclear plants, with the last ones expected to be shut down in the next couple of years [2]. [1] https://www.electricitymap.org/?lang=en https://www.electricitymap.org/?lang=en [2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-germanys-nuclear-phase-out https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-ge...
- fredsted 5y ago
  It's really sad that Germany is shutting down and replacing nuclear with coal due to Fukushima.
  - bayesian_horse 5y ago
    It's sad that people want to risk giving up a good chunk of their country for a while due to a nuclear accident. Yes, the engineers and scientists all say those accidents can't ever happen. Then they do. And again. And again. Fukushima wasn't even "that bad" but terribly expensive and inconvenient.
    - nix23 5y ago
      It's sad that people want to risk a big chunk of their lungs due to daily coal smog.
      - bayesian_horse 5y ago
        As Germany is vilified so much in this discussion: I live in Germany and there is no deadly smog in Germany. I'm too lazy to look up if our air pollution is generally better or worse than in France, but in general, air pollution here is driven by traffic, not coal plants. Nuclear power, in its current form is not sustainable, both because of recurring accidents leading to political issues and because of the unsolved waste storage problem. The bottom line: We want to go to mostly renewable energy sources, and the shortest path leads, unfortunately, through more fossil fuels. We need to increase energy production. We would also need to replace our old nuclear power plants with something. If we replace those with new nuclear power, we will eventually have to decommission and replace those (and deal with all the waste). Coal plants are easier and faster to ramp up and ramp down. I don't like it. But there it is.
        pyrale 5y ago
        > As Germany is vilified so much in this discussion I wouldn't care about Germany's problem if German politicians weren't trying to export it to their neighbours, whether by lobbying for energy transition credits not to be usable for nuclear, or by fucking up the spot power exchange. > I'm too lazy to look up Too lazy to look up actual figures, but not lazy enough not to post about it :(
        5y ago
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  France is massively subsidizing nuclear power, and just like everybody else, has no real long term solution for the nuclear waste. Also, if there is a major accident, it is not the power companies or their investors that will pay the cost, it is the tax payers and the rest of society. Same with decommissioning the nuclear plants, for which the companies are supposed to hold back some funds, but they just undercalculate that, go bankrupt and the taxpayer pays up.
  - marsouin 5y ago
    If I may, the taxpayer always pays in France anyway, it's the very basis of our nation . Orano, the group in charge of nuclear waste management isn't bankrupt at all. Also, there is a special agency (ANDRA) in charge of it and french facilities reuse up to 96% of fossile materials, which is not so bad.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    >>Also, if there is a major accident, it is not the power companies or their investors that will pay the cost, it is the tax payers and the rest of society So you mean exactly how with coal the entire society bears the cost of just running the plants? Even if we set climate change aside for a second, there are huge health downsides to burning coal. I mention coal specifically because we're talking about the contrast with Germany here. >>Same with decommissioning the nuclear plants, for which the companies are supposed to hold back some funds, but they just undercalculate that, go bankrupt and the taxpayer pays up. The only issue I have with this is that nuclear power plants should have never been operated by private companies in the first place. They should have been national property and taxpayer funded from start to finish.
    - gitanovic 5y ago
      That might be a good solution, I also am against privatization of some strategic assets, and energy production is obviously one of them
    - ElKrist 5y ago
      It's the case for France. Electricité de France (EDF) operates the nuclear plants and is owned at 84.5% by the French State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Franc...
- mogadsheu 5y ago
  Having spent >15 years in and around energy, I prefer to setter clear of value judgments on energy sources. Nuclear power is green for the duration of our lifetimes, at the cost of a near eternity of fallout.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    >>Nuclear power is green for the duration of our lifetimes, at the cost of a near eternity of fallout. We have a permanent, forever solution to nuclear waste, it's just that no one wants to pay for it. It's easier to just keep kicking the ball down than solve the issue permanently. It's called deep borehole disposal - you drill a hole down to Earth's crust(~5km or deeper), fill the bottom 1-2km with nuclear waste, fill it back up. Literally solves the problem forever. It's not coming back up on anything shorter than a geological timescale, and the land above the borehole is perfectly safe to live on. The main reasons why it wasn't and isn't pursued is 1) cost - drilling itself is "solved" but inventing new storage casks that would fit the hole and re-processing the waste to fit is a new engineering challenge which would cost money 2) the idea that nuclear fuel, even spent, can be reused - either in breeder reactors, or for other purposes. If you bury it 5km deep it's almost impossible to retrieve it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal The above is why I'm kinda annoyed when people say that nuclear is bad because we just produce waste that will pollute for centuries. Like, yes, but we also know what to do with it, we're just unwilling to pay for it.
    - marsouin 5y ago
      Very true and it will become affordable at some point, also why we choose to store waste, for now. On a brighter side, fusion is making progress and produces no waste.
      - Tepix 5y ago
        I don't buy the argument. What if it does not become cheaper? When many of the nuclear reactors were built, there was no pervasive global terrorism that is a threat to nuclear waste storage (edit: an nuclear reactors). Things don't always improve.
- curiousgal 5y ago
  The issue is that Germany is actively sabotaging the adoption of nuclear power. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-four-others-oppose-classing-nuclear-green-eu-2021-07-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-four-others-...
ghego1 5y ago
Are falling back to 1921?
rmoriz 5y ago
This was driven by specific commercial interest, as a new big coal plant was turned into service last year and the rise of the Greens and public protests made them hurry to burn coal as fast as possible. A public court declared the plant (Datteln 4) as beeing built illegally so there are huge doubts that it will ever return the construction costs. Public opinion towards brown coal mining is at the lowest, hence everyone tries to mine and burn as much as possible until legislation will prohibit further exploitation.
- shoto_io 5y ago
  German here. In hindsight it was very stupid to go out of nuclear in a panic attack just to burn coal and buy nuclear from France instead. A big fail.
  - masta 5y ago
    Sorry to burst your bubble, but for years, Germany sold more power to france than it bought from there. https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2019&flow=scheduled_commercial_exchanges_de https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=... Also, during harsh winters and warm summers, france is happy to buy electrical energy from us, because of the unreliability in their system under those circumstances. (Also German here ....)
    - MagnumOpus 5y ago
      > for years, Germany sold more power to france than it bought from there. True, and from 2020 onwards (conveniently not in your data set but available from the Bundesnetzagentur), that is no longer true as German nuke plants get decommissioned ever faster and power production in Germany shrinks. > france is happy to buy electrical energy from us, because of the unreliability in their system under those circumstances France is happy to buy German power in the summer because it is cheap as chips - 0.02c per kWh wholesale because of solar panels that only produce well in the middle of summer when nobody needs much power.
      - 5y ago
G3rn0ti 5y ago
Have there been any technological advances regarding the wind and solar's capability of providing a base load? While Germany has been subsidizing wind and solar aggressively and even pushed back on the construction of coal plants in some areas, AFAIK nobody got a solution to tackle the inherent unreliability of green energy. The German government ought to have a plan for this, I hope?
- hannob 5y ago
  I mean there's a lot to say about failures of German energy politics, but this isn't necessarily one of them. One of the biggest developments in energy in the past years is that Germany started a hydrogen strategy. A major buildout of hydrogen electrolyseurs is planned in the upcoming decade (and given the support for this from basically all sides I expect this to be extended). In the end we'll likely have hydrogen gas plants that run in times where renewables are scarce. Also there are projects to adapt industry electricity demand to production. The aluminium company Trimet, which is one of the largest electricity users in Germany, is already doing this.
  - avion23 5y ago
    The H2 strategy is a scam to give the oil and gas industry subsidies. Hydrogen will never be feasible as a storage medium. There are countless arguments for that. In the end, it's simply a question of efficiency. Germany has absolutely no strategy for lowpassing supply and demand. Instead the big energy providers bring the net to a "dangerous" situation and "save" the net by providing emergency power. Of course at horrendous prices. Which is payed by the tax payer (EEG law). The energy prices are some of the highest in the world while not making any progress towards less polution
  - G3rn0ti 5y ago
    So does the hydrogen strategy have implications for hydrogen cars about which everybody keeps saying they were a waste of time?
    - hannob 5y ago
hannob 5y ago
Just some context so people understand this better: This is not an indication of some "back to coal" trend. Wind has overtaken coal for the first time last year. Now for a few months the situation is back to coal as the most important source. These things obviously fluctuate and thus it's not a linear trend, but the overall trend is still that renewables are growing and coal is in decline. (And to be sure I'm not misunderstood: That doesn't change the fact that the high coal use in Germany is a big problem and the wind buildout is far too slow.)
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  There is also the problem that regulation for building wind turbines got much stricter. In a lot of places where wind turbines were previously built, it is no longer permitted to do so. Those turbines usually get replaced after 20 years when subsidies run out and it's no longer economical to operate them. The new regulations will lead to a net negative in wind installations in the upcoming years.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - phicoh 5y ago
    I'm confused. I thought wind turbines are relatively cheap to operate. You have an initial investment to build them and then some amount of maintainance, but certainly on land that's not very expensive. With subsidies, it can make sense to replace wind turbines early and collect new subsidies for a new one. However, I don't understand why you would take existing ones down is the subsidie stops? That suggests that they operating at a loss even when the wind turbines is already written off.
    - corty 5y ago
      Transmission or no transmission is a huge difference in maintenance cost. And land locations south of Hannover are poor conditions for wind turbines generally, with few exceptions. In those cases, earnings can be scarce and things can get uneconomical.
kabanossen 5y ago
So what was H1 for 2019? Pretty obvious that the numbers for 2020 would be lower because of Corona. More interesting to compare 2021 with 2019.
- imtringued 5y ago
  https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&share=wind_share https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?... The comparison is slightly unfair though because 2019 has ended but 2021 hasn't.
imtringued 5y ago
Germany gives priority to renewables and 2020 needed less electricity which meant coal wasn't needed. Strangely enough people will still interpret their pet theories like Germany building more coal or the wind being less reliable it something as basic as the covid lockdown slowing down economic activity.
- ElKrist 5y ago
  The article also mentions a decline in energy production from wind, in absolute terms: "In contrast, renewables generated 114 billion kWh of the total, which represents an 11.7% drop on an annual basis and this was largely due to the decline in wind power." This part is completely unrelated to covid
Audiophilip 5y ago
Here's an animation visualizing the reach of the air pollution caused by coal plants across Europe: https://twitter.com/EurBeyondCoal/status/1064771743783497729 https://twitter.com/EurBeyondCoal/status/1064771743783497729
dougmwne 5y ago
Given how much I've heard about Germany's solar investments and seen the panels on roofs around the country, it's a bit of a reality check that solar only accounts for only about 9% of their energy mix. It makes me wonder if it's measured properly since some would get used at the point of generation and not go into the grid. It also makes me wonder if the tech has been generally oversold in the press vs. its potential.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  From what I’ve been reading on German communities, the vast majority of private solar panels seem to be used directly and not sent to the grid. No idea if there are official stats about this. edit: Wrote this slightly wrong. So what I’m usually reading is that they are mostly used privately, and only the leftover energy gets sent to the grid.
rbrbr 5y ago
I am reading so much bullocks in this topic. Are there representatives of nuclear power active here trying to defend their industry? I thought we where beyond the fact that nuclear power is ridiculously expensive if you add all the hidden costs including the decommission. Yet I keep reading comments from people as if they just woke up from a thirty year long cryo sleep.
amai 5y ago
This wouldn‘t happen if Germany had a CO2 tax.

85 points by agent327 5y ago

We regularly get excited stories about how wind is now the most important energy source in Germany, but it is important that people realize moments like that are exceptions to the rule. In general, most German energy comes from the worst polluting energy source we have: coal.

consp 5y ago
This includes massive amounts of lignite which is the worst of worst.
Tepix 5y ago
We would have been a lot further down the road to renewable energy if the current government had not stopped the wind industry in its tracks (due to corruption).

grlass 5y ago

You can see a great map of how terrible Germany's grid is compared to say France with this map [1]. Compared to France, which is so green due to high levels of nuclear, Germany has banned the building, and is compelling the decommissioning of all nuclear plants, with the last ones expected to be shut down in the next couple of years [2]. [1] https://www.electricitymap.org/?lang=en https://www.electricitymap.org/?lang=en [2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-germanys-nuclear-phase-out https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-ge...

fredsted 5y ago
It's really sad that Germany is shutting down and replacing nuclear with coal due to Fukushima.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  It's sad that people want to risk giving up a good chunk of their country for a while due to a nuclear accident. Yes, the engineers and scientists all say those accidents can't ever happen. Then they do. And again. And again. Fukushima wasn't even "that bad" but terribly expensive and inconvenient.
  - nix23 5y ago
    It's sad that people want to risk a big chunk of their lungs due to daily coal smog.
    - bayesian_horse 5y ago
      As Germany is vilified so much in this discussion: I live in Germany and there is no deadly smog in Germany. I'm too lazy to look up if our air pollution is generally better or worse than in France, but in general, air pollution here is driven by traffic, not coal plants. Nuclear power, in its current form is not sustainable, both because of recurring accidents leading to political issues and because of the unsolved waste storage problem. The bottom line: We want to go to mostly renewable energy sources, and the shortest path leads, unfortunately, through more fossil fuels. We need to increase energy production. We would also need to replace our old nuclear power plants with something. If we replace those with new nuclear power, we will eventually have to decommission and replace those (and deal with all the waste). Coal plants are easier and faster to ramp up and ramp down. I don't like it. But there it is.
      - pyrale 5y ago
        > As Germany is vilified so much in this discussion I wouldn't care about Germany's problem if German politicians weren't trying to export it to their neighbours, whether by lobbying for energy transition credits not to be usable for nuclear, or by fucking up the spot power exchange. > I'm too lazy to look up Too lazy to look up actual figures, but not lazy enough not to post about it :(
      - 5y ago
bayesian_horse 5y ago
France is massively subsidizing nuclear power, and just like everybody else, has no real long term solution for the nuclear waste. Also, if there is a major accident, it is not the power companies or their investors that will pay the cost, it is the tax payers and the rest of society. Same with decommissioning the nuclear plants, for which the companies are supposed to hold back some funds, but they just undercalculate that, go bankrupt and the taxpayer pays up.
- marsouin 5y ago
  If I may, the taxpayer always pays in France anyway, it's the very basis of our nation . Orano, the group in charge of nuclear waste management isn't bankrupt at all. Also, there is a special agency (ANDRA) in charge of it and french facilities reuse up to 96% of fossile materials, which is not so bad.
- gambiting 5y ago
  >>Also, if there is a major accident, it is not the power companies or their investors that will pay the cost, it is the tax payers and the rest of society So you mean exactly how with coal the entire society bears the cost of just running the plants? Even if we set climate change aside for a second, there are huge health downsides to burning coal. I mention coal specifically because we're talking about the contrast with Germany here. >>Same with decommissioning the nuclear plants, for which the companies are supposed to hold back some funds, but they just undercalculate that, go bankrupt and the taxpayer pays up. The only issue I have with this is that nuclear power plants should have never been operated by private companies in the first place. They should have been national property and taxpayer funded from start to finish.
  - gitanovic 5y ago
    That might be a good solution, I also am against privatization of some strategic assets, and energy production is obviously one of them
  - ElKrist 5y ago
    It's the case for France. Electricité de France (EDF) operates the nuclear plants and is owned at 84.5% by the French State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Franc...
mogadsheu 5y ago
Having spent >15 years in and around energy, I prefer to setter clear of value judgments on energy sources. Nuclear power is green for the duration of our lifetimes, at the cost of a near eternity of fallout.
- gambiting 5y ago
  >>Nuclear power is green for the duration of our lifetimes, at the cost of a near eternity of fallout. We have a permanent, forever solution to nuclear waste, it's just that no one wants to pay for it. It's easier to just keep kicking the ball down than solve the issue permanently. It's called deep borehole disposal - you drill a hole down to Earth's crust(~5km or deeper), fill the bottom 1-2km with nuclear waste, fill it back up. Literally solves the problem forever. It's not coming back up on anything shorter than a geological timescale, and the land above the borehole is perfectly safe to live on. The main reasons why it wasn't and isn't pursued is 1) cost - drilling itself is "solved" but inventing new storage casks that would fit the hole and re-processing the waste to fit is a new engineering challenge which would cost money 2) the idea that nuclear fuel, even spent, can be reused - either in breeder reactors, or for other purposes. If you bury it 5km deep it's almost impossible to retrieve it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_borehole_disposal The above is why I'm kinda annoyed when people say that nuclear is bad because we just produce waste that will pollute for centuries. Like, yes, but we also know what to do with it, we're just unwilling to pay for it.
  - marsouin 5y ago
    Very true and it will become affordable at some point, also why we choose to store waste, for now. On a brighter side, fusion is making progress and produces no waste.
    - Tepix 5y ago
      I don't buy the argument. What if it does not become cheaper? When many of the nuclear reactors were built, there was no pervasive global terrorism that is a threat to nuclear waste storage (edit: an nuclear reactors). Things don't always improve.
curiousgal 5y ago
The issue is that Germany is actively sabotaging the adoption of nuclear power. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-four-others-oppose-classing-nuclear-green-eu-2021-07-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-four-others-...

ghego1 5y ago

Are falling back to 1921?

rmoriz 5y ago

This was driven by specific commercial interest, as a new big coal plant was turned into service last year and the rise of the Greens and public protests made them hurry to burn coal as fast as possible. A public court declared the plant (Datteln 4) as beeing built illegally so there are huge doubts that it will ever return the construction costs. Public opinion towards brown coal mining is at the lowest, hence everyone tries to mine and burn as much as possible until legislation will prohibit further exploitation.

shoto_io 5y ago
German here. In hindsight it was very stupid to go out of nuclear in a panic attack just to burn coal and buy nuclear from France instead. A big fail.
- masta 5y ago
  Sorry to burst your bubble, but for years, Germany sold more power to france than it bought from there. https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2019&flow=scheduled_commercial_exchanges_de https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=... Also, during harsh winters and warm summers, france is happy to buy electrical energy from us, because of the unreliability in their system under those circumstances. (Also German here ....)
  - MagnumOpus 5y ago
    > for years, Germany sold more power to france than it bought from there. True, and from 2020 onwards (conveniently not in your data set but available from the Bundesnetzagentur), that is no longer true as German nuke plants get decommissioned ever faster and power production in Germany shrinks. > france is happy to buy electrical energy from us, because of the unreliability in their system under those circumstances France is happy to buy German power in the summer because it is cheap as chips - 0.02c per kWh wholesale because of solar panels that only produce well in the middle of summer when nobody needs much power.
    - 5y ago

G3rn0ti 5y ago

Have there been any technological advances regarding the wind and solar's capability of providing a base load? While Germany has been subsidizing wind and solar aggressively and even pushed back on the construction of coal plants in some areas, AFAIK nobody got a solution to tackle the inherent unreliability of green energy. The German government ought to have a plan for this, I hope?

hannob 5y ago
I mean there's a lot to say about failures of German energy politics, but this isn't necessarily one of them. One of the biggest developments in energy in the past years is that Germany started a hydrogen strategy. A major buildout of hydrogen electrolyseurs is planned in the upcoming decade (and given the support for this from basically all sides I expect this to be extended). In the end we'll likely have hydrogen gas plants that run in times where renewables are scarce. Also there are projects to adapt industry electricity demand to production. The aluminium company Trimet, which is one of the largest electricity users in Germany, is already doing this.
- avion23 5y ago
  The H2 strategy is a scam to give the oil and gas industry subsidies. Hydrogen will never be feasible as a storage medium. There are countless arguments for that. In the end, it's simply a question of efficiency. Germany has absolutely no strategy for lowpassing supply and demand. Instead the big energy providers bring the net to a "dangerous" situation and "save" the net by providing emergency power. Of course at horrendous prices. Which is payed by the tax payer (EEG law). The energy prices are some of the highest in the world while not making any progress towards less polution
- G3rn0ti 5y ago
  So does the hydrogen strategy have implications for hydrogen cars about which everybody keeps saying they were a waste of time?
  - hannob 5y ago

hannob 5y ago

Just some context so people understand this better: This is not an indication of some "back to coal" trend. Wind has overtaken coal for the first time last year. Now for a few months the situation is back to coal as the most important source. These things obviously fluctuate and thus it's not a linear trend, but the overall trend is still that renewables are growing and coal is in decline. (And to be sure I'm not misunderstood: That doesn't change the fact that the high coal use in Germany is a big problem and the wind buildout is far too slow.)

pantalaimon 5y ago
There is also the problem that regulation for building wind turbines got much stricter. In a lot of places where wind turbines were previously built, it is no longer permitted to do so. Those turbines usually get replaced after 20 years when subsidies run out and it's no longer economical to operate them. The new regulations will lead to a net negative in wind installations in the upcoming years.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- phicoh 5y ago
  I'm confused. I thought wind turbines are relatively cheap to operate. You have an initial investment to build them and then some amount of maintainance, but certainly on land that's not very expensive. With subsidies, it can make sense to replace wind turbines early and collect new subsidies for a new one. However, I don't understand why you would take existing ones down is the subsidie stops? That suggests that they operating at a loss even when the wind turbines is already written off.
  - corty 5y ago
    Transmission or no transmission is a huge difference in maintenance cost. And land locations south of Hannover are poor conditions for wind turbines generally, with few exceptions. In those cases, earnings can be scarce and things can get uneconomical.

kabanossen 5y ago

So what was H1 for 2019? Pretty obvious that the numbers for 2020 would be lower because of Corona. More interesting to compare 2021 with 2019.

imtringued 5y ago
https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&share=wind_share https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?... The comparison is slightly unfair though because 2019 has ended but 2021 hasn't.

imtringued 5y ago

Germany gives priority to renewables and 2020 needed less electricity which meant coal wasn't needed. Strangely enough people will still interpret their pet theories like Germany building more coal or the wind being less reliable it something as basic as the covid lockdown slowing down economic activity.

ElKrist 5y ago
The article also mentions a decline in energy production from wind, in absolute terms: "In contrast, renewables generated 114 billion kWh of the total, which represents an 11.7% drop on an annual basis and this was largely due to the decline in wind power." This part is completely unrelated to covid

Audiophilip 5y ago

Here's an animation visualizing the reach of the air pollution caused by coal plants across Europe: https://twitter.com/EurBeyondCoal/status/1064771743783497729 https://twitter.com/EurBeyondCoal/status/1064771743783497729

dougmwne 5y ago

Given how much I've heard about Germany's solar investments and seen the panels on roofs around the country, it's a bit of a reality check that solar only accounts for only about 9% of their energy mix. It makes me wonder if it's measured properly since some would get used at the point of generation and not go into the grid. It also makes me wonder if the tech has been generally oversold in the press vs. its potential.

Semaphor 5y ago
From what I’ve been reading on German communities, the vast majority of private solar panels seem to be used directly and not sent to the grid. No idea if there are official stats about this. edit: Wrote this slightly wrong. So what I’m usually reading is that they are mostly used privately, and only the leftover energy gets sent to the grid.

rbrbr 5y ago

I am reading so much bullocks in this topic. Are there representatives of nuclear power active here trying to defend their industry? I thought we where beyond the fact that nuclear power is ridiculously expensive if you add all the hidden costs including the decommission. Yet I keep reading comments from people as if they just woke up from a thirty year long cryo sleep.

amai 5y ago

This wouldn‘t happen if Germany had a CO2 tax.