[pydry]

Just 6.5% of German electricity was generated through coal last year.

By contrast Poland was ~90% for years and only just slipped below 50%.

If I had to guess why Poland never got any criticism for that while Germany was routinely pilloried by certain flavors of propaganda I would hypothesize that it was because Poland weren't humiliating the nuclear industry by swapping them with solar panels and wind turbines at 1/5th the price.

[slaw]

You forgot 14.8% electricity was made by brown coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite

[Saline9515]

Solar panels and wind turbines are useful, but don't provide the base power a network needs to be stable, and on-demand capacity to give some flexibility. Ironically, fossil fuel electricity plants have to be built as part of renewables projects to make them viable.

This is why after having spent a trillion of euros in renewables, Germany still has the highest cost of electricity and still relies on French nuclear to stabilize their network. Same goes with Spain, that had a major blackout caused by a renewable shortfall.

[pydry]

Neither does nuclear power. This is why when half of the French nuclear power plants were down for unscheduled maintenance in 2022 they had to import German solar and wind energy and burn a ton of gas.

Gas, batteries, grid interconnects and pumped storage are the only things which can stabilise the grid to properly match supply with demand. There is far more money available for all of them if you don't have to spend 5x as much per kWh on nuclear power.

While the global warming denialist brigade did try to pin Spain's blackouts on too many solar panels it was actually caused by voltage control on the grid.

[leonidasrup]

Its an irony that in 2022 the most problematic were the newest N4 reactors, not the oldest one.

Another irony was that already in in 2015, the French National Assembly voted that by 2025 only 50% of France's energy will be produced by nuclear plants. So in a way the nuclear reactors themself helped to fullfill the 2015 promise.

To be serious. After event in 2011 Fukushima, French nuclear energy didn't get much support from French politicians and was seen only as a necessary evil, which will be sooner or later replaced with German style energie transition. Only after the 2022 Russian invasion and stopping of Russian gas started the French politicians to understand the value of electricity source not dependent on foreign gas imports.

Germany imports all of its gas and batteries, has no significant potential for pumped storage (in relation to the size of its electricity grid).

Solar panels were not the cause of Spain's blackout, insufficient voltage control in solar invertors was a contributing factor. Like with many serious accidents, there was not a single cause of Spain's blackout, but many factors.

[Saline9515]

France had to reduce nuclear maintenance for a long time to pay for the EU rules that forces it to give discounted nuclear electricity to private producers, which led to the situation you mentioned. Besides, french nuclear is important in stabilizing the german grid by adding/removing up to 20% power with a short delay. This leads however to increased wear on the reactors and maintenance needs.

And interestingly, you mentioned gas: in 2022 the EU went through a major energy crisis as Germany was counting on Russian gas to produce electricity. Pumped storage is finite and already maximized in Europe, same as hydro. Batteries are still unproven economically at scale.

One can accept climate change but be sceptic about the solutions pushed by the various lobbies, which led to the downfall of German's industry.

[nkmnz]

That number is clearly wrong. The german term "Kohle" includes the english "coal" (Steinkohle) and "lignite" (Braunkohle). The real number is >20%.

German: https://strom-report.com/strommix/

English: https://strom-report.com/electricity-mix-germany/