From the LA times, a bold move, but unlikely they can pull it off.
Germany to close all 84 of its coal-fired power plants, will rely primarily on renewable energy
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The decision to quit coal follows an earlier bold energy policy move by the German government, which decided to shut down all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011.
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The initial targets are considerable, calling for a quarter of the country’s coal-burning plants with a capacity of 12.5 gigawatts to be shut down by 2022. That means about 24 plants will be shut within the first three years. By 2030, Germany should have about eight coal-burning plants remaining, producing 17 gigawatts of electricity, the commission said.
Statements implying that wind and solar can provide 50% of the power to the grid are not difficult to find on the internet. For example, Andrew Cuomo announced that
“The Clean Energy Standard will require 50 percent of New York’s electricity to come from renewable energy sources like wind and solar by 2030…”
Considering that the wind is erratic, and the solar cells only put out full power 6 hours per day, it seems a remarkable statement. Can intermittent energy actually supply that much power?
For some answers, we turn to Germany, which has some of the highest electric bills in the world as well as a high proportion of its electric power produced by wind and solar (19%). Let’s take a look at German consumption and generation.
More people are finally beginning to realize that supplying the world with sufficient, stable energy solely from sun and wind power will be impossible.
Germany took on that challenge, to show the world how to build a society based entirely on “green, renewable” energy. It has now hit a brick wall. Despite huge investments in wind, solar and biofuel energy production capacity, Germany has not reduced CO2 emissions over the last ten years. However, during the same period, its electricity prices have risen dramatically, significantly impacting factories, employment and poor families.
Germany has installed solar and wind power to such an extent that it should theoretically be able to satisfy the power requirement on any day that provides sufficient sunshine and wind. However, since sun and wind are often lacking – in Germany even more so than in other countries like Italy or Greece – the country only manages to produce around 27% of its annual electric power needs from these sources.
Germany’s task force on planning the definite phase-out of coal-fired power production has scrapped plans to present a decision before the end of this year.
Several days after three eastern German federal states had demanded better and more detailed plans to support coal mining regions, the so-called coal commission has decided to “conclude its work on 1 February 2019”.
The task force set up a working group from its ranks to draw up further concrete proposals for coal regions and to hold talks on these with both the federal and state governments, the commission said in a press release.
“Germany’s Federal Audit Office has accused the federal government of having largely failed to manage the transformation of Germany’s energy systems.”
“A little more than a year before Germany’s climate-policy “milestone 2020”, the auditing body has concluded a catastrophic assessment of the government’s energy policy. Germany would miss its targets for both reducing greenhouse gas emissions and primary energy consumption as well as for increasing energy productivity and the share of renewable energy in transport. At the same time, policy makers had burdened the nation with enormous costs.”
The audit further concluded that the program is a monumental bureaucratic nightmare where “The Federal Government, incidentally, does not have an overall grasp of the costs or any transparency in this respect.”
Merkel says EU should meet existing emissions aims, not set new ones
A proliferation of extreme weather events around the world provides ample evidence that climate change is a reality, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday, but she rejected calls for more ambitious climate protection goals.
But Merkel said such calls, most recently from the European Commission’s climate chief Miguel Arias Canete, for swifter cuts to harmful carbon dioxide emissions would be counterproductive, adding that setting new goals made little sense when European countries were already struggling to meet their cuts targets.
by A. Bojanowski, August 4, 2018 in NoTricksZone/Der Spiegel
Geology major, science journalist Axel Bojanowski just penned a commentary at Spiegel Online on the recent hot weather hype we witnessed in the wake of Europe’s warm and unusually dry summer.
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The title of his commentary: “Overheated – Forest Fires, Drought, Heat – Has The Climate Catastrophe Already Arrived? Time For A Cool Examination.”
Hundreds of billions of euros have been squandered on subsidies to wind and solar, all in an effort to reduce carbon dioxide gas emissions. However, that objective has failed too: CO2 emissions continue to rise.
Germany’s once highly praised solar equipment production industry has disintegrated, and now politicians are poised to make the same happen to its automobile industry.
A new German paper assesses wind energy in Europe . The results are devastating. It concludes that wind energy requires almost 100% backup and that the more capacity that gets installed, the greater the volatility.
The paper appearing at the VGB, authored by Thomas Linnemann and Guido Vallana, finds that “the total wind fleet output of 18 European countries extending over several thousand kilometers in north-south and east-west direction is highly volatile and exhibits a strong intermittent character.”
In other words the power supply across the European grid fluctuates wildly and thus cannot work well. The paper’s abstract continues: …
Germany’s task force for phasing out coal was meant to launch this week, but yesterday the government quietly announced it is delaying the kick-off. It is the third time the coal exit commission’s launch has been delayed.
The task force has become so controversial – even before it comes into existence – that the government can’t get it started. Since the idea was proposed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel last year, it has been plagued by fighting over who will lead it, what it will do, and how much power it will have.
by Michael Kruger, April 21, 2018 in P Gosselin NoTricksZone
Michael Kruger at German skeptic site Science Skeptical here writes about how solar energy indutry in Germany has disintegrated spectacularly.
What follows are 4 charts that show us some shocking trends, and how in reality the German solar industry has seen a bloodbath that can be rated as one of the worst in a long time. The reality is that Germany’s green revolution is far from being a model for the world.
German CO2 equivalent emissions refuse to budge 10 straight years running, despite hundreds of BILLIONS invested in green energies.
As we have been hearing recently, global CO2 emissions continue their steady climb, despite the trillions of dollars committed to green energy sources worldwide and efforts to curb CO2 emissions.
Yet Germany’s image as selfless defender of the climate, which was once largely deserved, is now a transparent fiction. Germany has fallen badly behind on its pledges to sink its own greenhouse gas pollutants. In fact, Germany’s carbon emissions haven’t declined for nearly a decade and the German Environment Agency calculated that Germany emitted 906 million tons of CO2 in 2016 — the highest in Europe — compared to 902 million in 2015. And 2017’s interim numbers suggest emissions are going to tick up again this year.
Germany’s utopian dream of transforming itself into the world’s green powerhouse is collapsing as its political and media establishment is mugged by reality. The country’s climate obsession has turned into one of the country’s biggest political and economic handicaps, making Germany almost ungovernable.
Germany’s utopian dream of transforming itself into the world’s green powerhouse is collapsing as its political and media establishment is mugged by reality. The country’s climate obsession has turned into one of the country’s biggest political and economic handicaps, making Germany almost ungovernable.
Sometimes you have to wonder which are the biggest fraud: Germany’s claim that its cars are clean, or its claim of being a leader in climate protection. Both, it turns out, are very fake and even downright frauds.
While German Chancellor Angela Merkel and German activists like going around and scolding Donald Trump for his “irresponsible” stance on “greenhouse” gas emissions, it is coming to light that Germany’s climate posturing is indeed a total swindle.
When it comes to climate change, there are worlds apart between Germany’s aspiring Jamaica Coalition partners. It is all about coal and it is not certain the divide can be bridged.
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
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