| 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. |