Guest essay by Alberto Z. Comendador
As the US weighs whether it should withdraw from the Paris agreement, a critical question is how effective have climate change policies been so far. A failure of the policies adopted until now doesn’t necessarily mean that future policies will likewise fail, but it will provide further evidence that decarbonizing is, well, difficult. And expensive.
One routinely hears comments that the US is the country most affected by climate contrarians / denialists, and that in other parts of the world (most notably Europe) this debate doesn’t exist, there is consensus about the need to act, etc. To quote a German citizen:
‘The 97% of climate scientists who agree on the basics include many conservative scientists. That there is a problem is not a partisan issue. How to solve it, that is politics. The Paris climate agreement was signed by nearly 200 countries and thus many conservative governments. They accept that climate change is a real problem. European conservative parties may be less active, but do not deny there is a problem.
In Europe only Trumpian racist parties deny there is a problem. That the climate “debate” is mostly an American problem shows that the problem is not conservative versus liberal, that it is not a lack of scientific evidence, it is not a problem of the communication of science. The problem is the corrupting influence of money in US politics and media.’
I take him at his word.
Germany is the country with the strongest consensus around the need to ‘do something’ about climate change. No other nation has started an ambitious a plan as Energiewende. The program started in 2000 and set an objective for 2050 – though bizarrely, as is common with these ‘plans’ and ‘roadmaps’, the objective is stated in absolute greenhouse gas emissions rather than the emission intensity of the economy. It’s easy to see the problem:
a) If emissions by 2050 are higher than the plan stated, advocates will claim that this happened because economic growth was stronger than expected. In other words: advocates could claim climate policies succeeded in making emissions lower than they would otherwise have been. Of course advocates of emission cuts never clarified how much economic growth they expected in the first place, so this claim is completely unfalsifiable.
b) If emissions by 2050 are the same or lower than the plan stated, advocates will claim success for the plan – even though the decline in emissions may in fact be due to economic crises and/or population decline.
Not to sound repetitive, but the only measure of progress that makes sense is the emissions intensity of GDP. In particular, how much this intensity declines per year. In this article I will show a positive number, i.e. how many more dollars of GDP per ton of CO2 emissions we get every year, as that seems more intuitive to me. I call it the decarbonization rate. I use CO2 emissions from combustion, as emissions of methane, ozone, N2O, and CO2 from land use are highly uncertain.
Anyway, let’s get back to Energiewende. We’re now 1/3 through the plan, so if it’s having any effect one should see:
a) That the decarbonization rate in Germany is higher than in the previous period
b) That this rate is higher than in other countries, which presumably don’t care so much about climate action. Compared with the US the difference should be massive.
Here we can see US decarbonization since 1966, as emissions data starts only in 1965. We can see the same for Germany since 1971, as that’s when the country’s GDP data starts – at least in the World Bank’s website.
Ooops: now only is Germany’s rate about the same as the US’s, it’s also lower than it was before!
In fact, to be more precise, the 2000-2015 average is 2.06% for Germany and 2.26% for the US. Over 1971-1999, Germany’s average is 3.13%. But this figure is inflated by the very high increases of 1989-1992, when the formerly communist economy of East Germany shut down most of the CO2-intensive industries (with little effect on GDP). Excluding those four years, Germany’s pre-Energiewende average is still 2.58%, or a bit higher than since 2000 – though one must mention the figures for the 70s are ‘helped’ by high oil prices.
I guess the best one could say is that Germany’s decarbonization rate is about the same as before.
Just to be clear: a higher rate of decarbonization is the minimum one could ask of a climate policy. It’s necessary, but not sufficient, because it’s still possible for that policy to cost so much as to make the reduction in emissions not worth it. One shouldn’t automatically consider a higher rate of decarbonization better than a lower one. In other words, one has to consider cost-effectiveness – as with every other thing we spend money on.
In Germany’s case there is no point debating the cost-effectiveness of climate policies, because their effectiveness is at best zero.
Advocates of emission cuts are entitled to their own opinions, not to their own facts. If someone wants to make the case that climate policies have in fact been successful, whether in Germany or worldwide, he has to find fault with the numbers supplied by the World Bank and BP. If the data on fossil fuel combustion were significantly wrong, that would be big news. If the data on German (or global) GDP growth were significantly wrong, that would be huge news.
So proving that climate policies have worked is simple: prove the numbers wrong.
You could win a Nobel Prize.
References:
Emissions data from BP can be found here. The 2016 version should be published in a month or so.
GDP growth data from the World Bank can be found here.
The calculations and plot used in the article can be seen here.
Further reading
Shameless plug here: this is the fourth article in a series (not sure if it will continue). The first showed that there is little difference in the rate of decarbonization in Europe compared to the US., and little improvement over time either side of the Atlantic (except during periods of oil crises) That article left out Germany, as I thought (mistakenly) that the data would be a mess due to the reunification.
The second illustrated that:
a) The rate of decarbonization, worldwide, has actually declined since the Kyoto agreement in 1997.
b) Even if climate policies managed to increase this rate by 1% (essentially doubling it, as the historical average is only 1.1%), the difference in century-end temperatures would be only 0.38ºC
The third article likewise assumed that climate policies increased the rate of decarbonization by 1%, but applied this to historical data since 1979. In other words: if we had implemented effective decarbonization policies back then, what would be the difference in current temperatures? The answer is between 0.05º and 0.1ºC, depending on how much of the reduction in emissions corresponds to a reduction in CO2 concentrations.
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I don’t really care what Germans decide to prioritize in their economy. As far as I’m aware there has been consensus support for Energiewende – at least among the main political parties. Every country should be free to follow its own political and economic path according to the wishes of the population. The problem arises when the principles underlying the German Energiewende get incorporated into formal EU-wide policy mandates. There is no way the Germans are going to go down the path they’ve chosen on their own because that would make it even more absurd and meaningless, and so a policy that currently has democratic legitimacy in Germany is going to have to be rolled out across the EU whether or not it enjoys the same legitimacy in the member states. The Germans are wealthy enough to fritter away some of their wealth in order to appear virtuous, and “good luck to them,” I say, but what about the Southern and Eastern EU member states who already have an excess of economic woes, and don’t need another dead weight on their shoulders?
If, at least, it was the free will of the population, which was not influenced by anyone. But the propaganda machines run even better than they have ever done in the USA. Germany also has a much longer “tradition” in agitation and brainwashing to put it mildly. We have and have had specialists in our history. In this way, the opinion of some journalists is expressed daily and not the meaning or ideas of the people. What remains is brainwashing as in a Chinese re-education camp at times of MAO.
Exactly, Hans-Georg. Just try not reading any newspaper and not watching news on TV for 1 or 2 years which I did from 2014 on. If you then watch TV news again you will immediately notice how low the information content really is and how big the agenda part of the story is. They don’t even recognize what they are doing and think everything else than their agenda is fake news. And they really believe in it.
The transparent lies that are contained in that quoted German citizen are one problem that Germans have, amongst others (toxic radical Muslims, high electric rates, shutting down nuclear plants that have operated safely for decades because a foolishly equipped Japanese reactor succumbed to a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions, one that could never occur in Germany). That bogus 97% claim sure gets around. At it’s most accurate, it merely states that 97% think CO2 emissions have SOME effect on global temperatures, not climate. Every single “denier”
pointed out by the global warming alarmists believe CO2 has SOME effect. Germans are stupid all over the place. No wonder Hitler had it so easy rising to power.
The German population is not stupid, it was sold for years only for stupid. And still is. This is also due to the victorious allies, who after 1945 put the control of our media in the hands of a few persons and families who were obviously free from Nazi influences. What the Allied had not considered, however, that each after the war had sufficient capital for the publication of a newspaper was not free from Nazi influence. On the contrary, in the time of Hitler, he swam only invisibly under the surface, but nevertheless busted the required capital out of this system.
Decarbonizing a nation is killing it’s economy and eventuelly it#s population.
As we know the entire Co2 alarmist mantra is total BS
Every money invested in this hoax is wasted.
Meanwhile the World looks to elsewhere… Giant HORNETS…are threatening to all Humankind…it is necessary that the human beings, instead of destroy among them, destroy to those dangerous insects of huge exponential growing…seriously beginning already, at present.
The issue is that there is a difference between German policy and what people claim is the policy.
The German energy transition to date has not been about replacing carbon-intensive power with low-carbon power. In fact, it has been about replacing near-zero-carbon nuclear power with renewables.
So when people point at the greenhouse gas emissions and suggest that the energy transition has failed, they are mistaken about the real point of the transition to date.
There is a strong political interest that has prevented Germany transitioning from carbon-intensive power to renewables. The German government is doing everything it can to keep the coal power industry alive.
That happens when lowly engineers mess with lofty political ideals. We should let politicians run the grid, they know best.
Strong political interests,
Also known as citizens
A failure of the policies adopted until now doesn’t necessarily mean that future policies will likewise fail
=======
when talking about government it is a guarantee. learning from your mistakes only works if you see them as mistakes. in government it is forbidden to admit a mistake.
So in Europe, where media is more controlled by Governments, they are more on board with the Climate Change caused by Carbon Dioxide being detrimental to Earths environment and not a beneficial Fertilizer that has caused the exponentially increasing Bio-Mass of Flora and Fauna that are in reality Sinks. They therefore want a Reduction of Carbon Dioxide in the environment – that is like putting the Earth on a Diet – so that it cannot gain Bio-Mass weight. Therefore, by depriving Flora of Carbon Dioxide it will stunt their growth once they get rid of Carbon Dioxide from the environment and Flora will start to die. That Fauna eat Flora and rely upon Flora to provide Oxygen, they’re advocating the suicide of all life on Earth. Okay, I’m going to some real extremes with that. Since 99.95% of Carbon Dioxide is from the exchange between the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and the Oceanic waters, flora and fauna respiration, soil respiration and volcanic activities…and what we humans contribute is minute to that at 0.05%. The Earth is not only sustainable without what Humans contribute, it will naturally increase the Carbon Dioxide without our burning of Fossil Fuels, cement manufacturing, industry and deforestation activities. The whole ideologies of “Forcing” is to destroy Capitalism and send humanity back to the Stone Age. It has nothing to do with the Earth Warming or Climate Change. It’s more likely to bring on the next Glacial Period with the Solar Minimum starting. But they don’t seem to care about the facts that Global Warming is keeping that held at bay.
Putin suggests Germans replace nuclear with firewood
Quote:
01 December 2010
Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has told German businessmen that they may have to rely on Russian firewood for heating if they do not want to construct new nuclear power plants or bring in Russian gas supplies. At a business conference organized in Berlin by the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Putin recognised that “the German public does not like the nuclear power industry for some reason.” He continued: “But I cannot understand what fuel you will take for heating. You do not want gas, you do not develop the nuclear power industry, so you will heat with firewood?” Putin then noted, “You will have to go to Siberia to buy the firewood there,” as Europeans “do not even have firewood.”
Putin may be many things, but “fool” is not one of them.
Switching to a less efficient form of energy production could NEVER cause an increase in GDP. It’s like switching your GI tract with one that is 25% as efficient as your old one. You’ll be eating four times as much food just to get the energy that you had before. The extra resources spent on gathering the energy means less resources going to other activities. In other words, instead of buying that new television or going out to eat twice a week, families will be spending that money on electricity instead. Less efficiency means more waste, less GDP.
Wait for the next nuklear to burst. I hope its not in Germany. Wait for the renewables to work, it will be in Germany. And that’s because in Germany there are the smartest Ingenieurs worldwide. Its only a matter of time.
Marty, you forgot your “/sarc” tag.
If they’d skipped the solar and wind and concentrated on more nuclear plants, the Energiewende might’ve been headed on the road to success.
As many of the greens have stated, their goal is the de-industrialization of the west.
So they are already headed for success.
German greens are a bit different… well worth researching their approach to see how.
You will note Germany is still one of the world’s largest economies and industrial/engineering powers
If we skip wind and solar its no “Energiewende”. Btw. wind turbines are the most productive renewable in Germany. We are just expanding the power grid so that the electricity can be routed from the wind power stations in the North Sea to southern Germany where it is needed.
“wind turbines are the most productive renewable in Germany” And yet Germany has to buy electric from countries who produce electricity by burning coal and operating nuclear power plants. Got it. Renewables are a failure.
Who makes the decision to put posts from this “publication” on the RealClearPolitics Energy page? What’s the purpose of posting junk articles like this, especially from esteemed researchers such as A. Z.Comendador – I’m real sure that’s his real name.
So let me clue you in. The age of fossil fuels is over. Coal is dead and there’s nothing President Racist-Bigot is going to do about. Oil is next – the price crash continued today with no end in site.
The age of renewable energy is here. The solar and wind juggernaut will not be stopped. I have a 4.14kW solar array – trust me, I know how it works, I know the truth. Your lies about what’s happening in Germany and around the world are worthless, and won’t help the fossil-fuel cronies who fund this garbage.
So get on board, get out of the way, or get run over.
So that’s What’s Up with That!!!!
So, you run your whole house with that 4.14kW panel? What do you do at night? How many batteries do you use and what is their life expectancy?
Coal is not only dead, it’s coming back.
Oil won’t be dead for hundreds of years.
Price crash? Do you always project 3 month trends out forever?
What solar and wind juggernaut, remove the subsidies and it dies instantly.
PS: I love the way you just declare facts you don’t like to be lies. Let me guess, you’re in the 3rd grade.
MarkW displays his ignorance of PV solar. One does not need batteries if they use a grid tie inverter.
And where does that grid tie power come from????
Get off the grid, then come back. (assuming you have enough power run your computer.) [I ran my 14kW propane generator for 4 hours yesterday while the grid was down. How many solar panels did Joseph have? Oh yeah – probably less than a quarter of what I need – and only necessary parts of my farm are powered.]
The power for the grid tie comes from the panels. Joe had 4.14kW of panels, (read his post.) You can get more if you need more.
So, he got his electric from the “grid”, not from one panel. Okey dokey, then.
“I have a 4.14kW solar array – trust me, I know how it works, I know the truth. Your lies …”
So Hall, do you want to tell us how well it works? That’s how you tell the truth.
As others have noted, it is a mugs game trying to decipher any of this honestly, other than to say it ain’t so honest and has had minimal impact on reducing emissions or increasing GDP as a result of striving to transform to a low carbon economy. Many obvious mistakes were made, including implementing roof top solar in a low solar radiant geography, which runs at some of the lowest efficiencies of installed name plate vs. actual Kw/hr production. With huge costs to replicate back up spinning demand for solar/wind inefficient density.
If the Germans had kept their nuclear energy assets operational for their intended lifespan, then they probably would have led the world in this premature misguided effort that will have little impact on lowering temperatures by 2050. And we don’t even really know that cooler temperatures are actually beneficial for the environment or the economy. Especially the agricultural economy that relies on warmer is better than cooler.
The off loading of many CO2 processed items that the Germans import don’t accrue to their carbon balance sheet either, so it doesn’t count. This is the first fraud in the accounting. And one that all other low carbon nations fail to account for as well. So the whole point is already lost when the exercise itself is fraudulent. In fact, this is a total fraud for all other nations importing product that was produced in China. Sort of like Canada wanting to claim the moral high ground on lowering emissions at home while exporting their coal by the boat load to China. And then importing all that junk back into the country while not accounting for any CO2 consumed in the manufacturing and shipping of such. Talk about fiction.
The only upside to this current failed experiment is that we will have some experience and knowledge with non fossil fuel power generation in about 33 years (2050) from now when oil and gas technology will be very expensive due to higher costs extracting from more inaccessible locations and costlier non traditional oil supplies. Maybe I am wrong about this, because if the whole world gets fracked, then maybe there is whole lot more fossil fuels that don’t peak until well after 2050. But we do run short on carbon based fuels in our grand children’s lifetimes, so planning to transition to something else is not completely in vain.
I don’t have a Twitter account, but I do read the site. It seems Paul Krugman has gone on a series of really profound tweets: https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/859455397274550273
‘Climate change is the rain; climate policy the umbrella. What do we know?
1. Climate change could be really, truly, civilization-ending bad
2. Mitigation policy is NOT hugely costly. We have lots of evidence and experience: pollution control done well not at odds with growth
And the usual record is that market-based stuff — cap&trade or taxes — ends up much cheaper than expected. Check history of acid rain
Oh, and renewable technology has made action even cheaper than optimists imagined. So uncertainty is NOT a reason to do nothing’
There you have it: scrubbers in power plant smokestacks were relatively cheap to deploy, therefore switching off fossil fuels will also be cheap. Genius.
May someone send him a link to this article?
PS: not to beat a dead horse, but has anyone noticed that proponents of CO2 emission cuts never talk about the costs/results of the actual CO2 emission policies? It’s always CFCs, scrubbers or some other totally unrelated stuff. Have they been under a rock the last 20 years?
We were able to put scrubbers on power plants, therefore we can also get the CO2 out as well.
Krugman is and has always been a shill for who ever is paying him the most.
A good article but I would add an important fact. The emissions per GDP are averages and should be takes as such. However I note that Germany, the world’s leader is decarbonization has seen it’s cost of electricity skyrocket and it is not completed its climb. The price of electricity has either tripled or quadrupled (I have read both). Thus it is a certainty that poor homes have experienced their power being cut off for lack of ability to pay. How many are dark and cold? And maybe without water if they have a well?
These are also the cost of environmentalism.
The price of electricity has either tripled or quadrupled
It’s a bit more complex than that although you’re not entirely wrong. My understanding is that that in order to keep their industry competitive, Germany (and Denmark) have kept electric rates to manufacturers down and made up the difference by raising rates for residential users. Add in the bribes to Wind and Solar generators and you end up with rates even higher than Hawaii where fossil fuels for power generation have to be imported from the mainland 4000km distant.
Maybe one of the German readers can clarify or provide further details.
That’s substantially the case – largest industrial concerns are exempt from the renewable element of electricity cost.
but note that Germans use far less electricity than US households and are much more likely to have solar panels and/or a share in a renewable energy production scheme – the largest part of German renewables is owned by individuals and communities.
“scheme” Yep, that says it all.
Ah… WUWT misses the mark once again. The initial goal of the energiewende was to close all nuclear plants without increasing CO2 emissions. As this article shows that has been a resounding success. Another beautiful example of the lies WUWT peddles.
Tripling energy prices is a “resounding success” ??…I’m sure the poor would not agree…
This is the big difference between USA and Germany. Even the poor have enough for life, housing, energy and heating. Everyone has the right to social assistance. You may call it socialism I call it human.
Yup, increase the costs so that the poor can no longer afford electricity is a good way to keep your emissions down.
Too bad for those who are dying in the dark.
1) neither this article nor my comments mentioned energy prices. Deflecting is super childish.
2) electricity prices in Germany are 30% or so higher than in my country (the Netherlands) which has hardly any renewables. ‘Triple’ is just another fake news statistic you just throw in there in lieu of actual analysis.
Your country, the Netherlands, imports nuclear-generated electricity from France. It used to import that electricity from coal-fired\nuclear-powered Germany.
how in the world is that relevant
Reg, France now imports more from Germany than it exports to it – and that’s as much renewable as coal power
And yet another fantasy from griffie.
benben, Germany has only closed 8 of its 17 reactors. They are burning brown lignite coal to replace the phase out of the nuclear, and while building out renewables, they still need base load power as well as spinning reserve to come online instantly if the wind quits blowing, or sun is shaded.
“Following the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Germany has permanently shut down eight of its 17 reactors and pledged to close the rest by the end of 2022.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out
They’ve closed another since 2011 Ron and the rest go in phases by the end of 2022. This year for various reasons 4 of the 8 remaining have been offline at same time, with no impact…
also, they always did burn lignite… now they are burning it in the new plant they built since 2008 (they won’t build any more coal plant now). It is renewables that made up the slack from the nuclear plant.
Increasingly they have grid scale batteries to replace spinning reserve and are grouping hydro/wind/solar/fuel cells etc into virtual power stations, so there’s always something producing power.
For example, Vermont closed its nuclear plant and now they have to pay for an “extension cord” to Quebec to obtain hydro electric power.
yes… so Ron Williams, what you’re saying is that Germany closed a number of it’s nuclear plants while keeping its CO2 emissions neutral (as per the data in this article). Which was the exact aim of the energiewende. I’ll guess I’ll have to take that as a ‘Ben, you are right, but for some reason I can’t just outright say that, so I’ll do it in some circumspect way’. Thanks Ron, I appreciate it anyway 😉
@Barbara, how is that relevant to Germany? Other side of the ocean?
The same thing has happened in the U.S. Close a nuclear power plant and and obtain “green” power else where.
Presidential Permits | Department Of Energy
Re: Vermont electricity tie to Quebec.
Details here:
https://energy.gov/oe/services/electricity-policy-coordination-and-implementation/international-electricity-regulatio-3
PP-400 TDI-New England 12/05/16
Click on: PP-400 TDI-New England > PP-400 TDI-New England.pdf.
There is internet information that emissions have increased in Vermont since the 2014 closure of their nuclear power plant.
More people burning wood to heat homes and businesses, coal too. Also free standing electric generators using various types of fuel. Simply put, people are not going to live without electricity. Unless government uses armed force to compel us.
Barbara, I wouldn’t doubt your ‘internet information’. But as this WUWT article clearly shows, the germans managed to close a lot of their nuclear plants without increasing their CO2 emissions. Which is exactly what I said, which is exactly what happened. *sigh*
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_opinion_by_country 59% of Germans believe climate change is human caused. 10% more than US. Not an overwhelming majority
http://www.dw.com/en/renewable-energy-use-surges-in-germany-over-weekend/a-38670834
Germany got most of its electricity from renewables last weekend, it seems – with its coal plants and half its nuclear offline
So, you are now claiming the nuclear plants in France are renewables? Okey dokey, griffie.
And what about 24-7-365 renewables supplying Germany?
You mean the nuclear plants in France? You are jumping on the griffie bandwagon of fantasy, too? Again, okey dokey.
Decarbonization is not the objective–it’s the excuse.
Griff writes, “but note that Germans use far less electricity than US households and are much more likely to have solar panels and/or a share in a renewable energy production scheme – the largest part of German renewables is owned by individuals and communities.”
So why is that a good thing? Stupid people say such stupid things. You hear the same thing from idiots in California.
First off, the US is a very diverse country climate wise. Second, Americans tend to enjoy more living space in out homes, even the poor. Increased power usage is an indication of a higher standard of living.
The environmental impact of the US power system is insignificant these days. That means renewables can not have a beneficial impact on the environment. PV owned by individuals in northern climates is all environmental impact from the manufacturing phase and no benefit.
Not one nuclear plant has been built to reduce ghg. Nukes were built to make electricity, just as hydro and fossil plants were. Subsequently, evaluations were done to determine the environmental impact of existing plants and proposed new plants including ghg.
On a per kwh basis, nuclear outperforms everything including wind and solar. That is what the life cycle analysis determined.
During the end of the Clinton/Gore energy disaster, I worked for Duke Energy. Clinton/Gore having failed to get ghg legislation, established a voluntary ghg reduction reporting system. The huge reduction came from the likes of Duke and TVA. Improvements and nuke and coal plants were not made to reduce ghg but as a result of economic decisions.
Clinton/Gore were anti nukes and pushed for the phase out of nuclear. Since the US was an early leader in building nukes, it was the early leader in extending the life of nuke plants. At the time, US utilities did not have a choice to build new nukes.
At $5/MMBTU for natural gas every US nuke plant is economical.
So is closing old nukes phasing out nuclear power or an economic choice?
Lost of money has to be invested to extend the life of any power plant. France made the choice to build new nukes. Subsequently, the French brought up as much US nuclear technology as they could. The French learned how to extend the life of their fleet.
No reduction in CO2 per KWh as a result of energiewende, per German government figures. Wholly predictable on the science fact. The result of irrational anti-nuclear beliefs in technically pre-failed renewables. THis is hardcore energy science denial on the established physics. Because the woefully inadeqaute energy intensity and uncontrollable intermittency and variability of renewable enrgy sources compared to fossil or nuclear fuel cannot deliver the enrgy the grid requires, when required. These are basic laws of physics and facts that subsidy law and delusional faith can never fix.
?dl=0
Of course this has also happened through a greater science denial, in the most intense, most decarbonising, least physical(concrete/steel, fuel) and land resource using, least environementally damaging, cheapest, all you need when you need it, safest and wholly sustainable replacement for fossil energy. They are turning that off. By law.
Germans seem to prefer belief in undeliverable extremist propaganda to the rational facts and realities they “don’t like”. Now facing the most expensive electricity in Europe for no actual gain, along with the Danes, while Poland and Czechoslovakia install technology on their grid borders to stop Germany dumping unwanted peak renewable energy on their grids, while supplying Germany the electricity it needs from coal and nuclear when the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow. Bonkers! What happens when politicians interfere with the laws of physics and fail to do the maths. FACT: When fossil is gone Germany has one energy source that can keep it developed. Subsidy farming renewables cannot, the laws of physics will always win. Better get over themselves by then. Energiewende isn’t wending, and never could. Green science denial doesn’t deliver the joules.
The nuclear excuse is very weak for two reasons:
a) It was part of the Energiewende plan from the beginning
b) It’s not clear at all that large amounts of wind and solar can coexist with large amounts of nuclear. The former is intermittent while the latter cannot adjust output quickly (unlike coal and, especially, gas plants).
None of the countries with 30% or more of their electricity coming from a nuclear get a significant share from renewables. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country
But there’s an even more basic reason the nuclear excuse doesn’t make sense: the emission numbers themselves.
Electricity accounts for about 40% of Germany’s emissions of CO2 from combustion. Nuclear power in the last year analyzed, 2015, accounted for 17% of electricity generation; this is down from about 32% in 1999. In other words, even if nuclear output had been kept at 32% percent of electricity amid the renewables ramp-up, Germany would only have avoided emissions worth 15% of 40% – which is to say 6% of total emissions. (Both total emissions and electricity generation were very similar in 1999 and in 2015, so you can use either year as the basis for calculations).
Had Germany achieved a 6% reduction in emissions over 15 years, this would be equivalent to an improvement of 0.4% a year. In other words: instead of 2% a year, the country’s decarbonization rate would have been 2.4% a year.
Both Sweden and Switzerland are above 30% of nuclear, and have a very percentage of renewable. Maybe you reject hydraulic from the renewable definition, so you should say new renewable, only wind and solar. But then only a few countries have a significant percentage of those. Nuclear can be made to follow load, and it’s done quite a lot in France, it’s generally easier than for coal where the thermal stress of a quick change in temperature can have really bad consequences. German’s coal plant are now quite able to follow load, but they all had to be upgraded and modified for that. Even combined cycle gas has some constraints on how quickly it can change production, and the lowest level it can maintain, so is not necessarily better than nuclear in this regard.
6% less emissions wouldn’t change the world, but it’d mean they would near their 2020 target, that they are sure to miss now.
Of course, if they had invested even a portion of what they have spent into renewable in nuclear, they could have divided their CO2 emissions from electricity generation by 10 like France has, with enough money left to invest in the strongest security for those plants (the Fukushima accident is fully explained by the effort of Tepco to save money on everything and not properly train the team for an accident, as well as have no plan ready to bring spare cooling equipment by helicopter. Still the accident itself resulted in many time less casualties than just one year of pollution from the German coal plants).
I know several countries combine nuclear with hydro just fine. My point is that no country so far has been able to combine nuclear with intermittent renewables, i.e. wind and solar. Since most of the good hydro sites are already taken, that has some big implications.
Ok, now I see my wording was unhelpful. Where I said ‘None of the countries with 30% or more of their electricity coming from a nuclear get a significant share from renewables’ – as you noticed, I should have said wind and solar, not renewables.
JM, how much training do you get in your work place for 1000 yr natural disasters?
There was no need for a helicopter, spare cooling equipment was already on site. However, as result of the damage, working conditions were very dangerous. The three casualties at Fukushima occurred as a result of the natural disaster before any core damage.
When the plant manager got word that the nearby communities had been evacuated, he pulled his workers back. As in the US, we are trained not risk lives to protect equipment.
There is no reason rational to think core damage on a LWR will result anyone being hurt. No was hurt by radiation. There is a boat load of irrational reasons, especially in Germany.
@Alberto
“My point is that no country so far has been able to combine nuclear with intermittent renewables, i.e. wind and solar.”
So why build wind and solar?
Alberto has it backwards. Nuke plants were built to make electricity long before CAGW.
If you need electricity and are worried about ghg, nukes are the proven answer.
I do not think you will ever need to worry about too much wind and solar. It breaks faster than you can build it at some point.