I don't want you to feel gaslighted, but you are objectively very lazy and have an opinion without checking any data. This Reuters article doesn't deal with it, but with a short term situation in the summer. You probably didn't even read past the headline. If you had, you probably would've noticed this quote: "Since Destatis started compiling statistics in 1990, 2022 will likely be the first that Germany will be a net exporter of electricity to France, not the other way round, it said.". Thus it's easy to figure out the uptick in coal in the summer of last year in Germany has very much to do with the fact that half of France's nuclear plants were offline at that point, half of those because of unplanned maintenance. The dirty coal uptick was used to keep the lights on in France. Oops.
Nuclear shutdowns started in Germany in 2011. It should be easy to see that coal went down significantly since then and is at a historic low. Which brings me back to my original point:
Renewables have been pushed for 20 years and have started to accelerate only 10 years ago, yet they are already displacing fossil fuels in many countries.
And then we will look into Germany's CO2 per kWh and it is one of the dirtiest in Europe. That's probably because they have so much renewables. Or so little.
Using this news source to claim that coal consumption is going up reminds me of climate deniers who point to one climate graph from one region in Canada and show the temperature was actually cooling down, while not mentioning that the slice they showed was from March 1997 to October 2005, while the whole graph (including parts they hid) was from 1960 to 2020 and showed massive heating.
From your news source:
> "Only in Germany, with 10 gigawatts (GW), is the reversal at a significant scale. This has increased coal power generation in the European Union, which is expected to remain at these higher levels for some time," the IEA's annual coal market report said.
So your news source only mentions Germany, and only during an energy crisis caused be a war. If you only look at this one country, and only from February 2022 to April 2023 you may find coal consumption going up, but if you look over any other period, or include any other European country, you will see the opposite effect.
