Germany wants to be climate neutral by 2045. But a panel of government climate advisers says it's already in danger of missing a key target to cut planet-heating emissions by the end of the decade.
Germany wants to be climate neutral by 2045. But a panel of government climate advisers says it's already in danger of missing a key target to cut planet-heating emissions by the end of the decade.
Germany's climate advisory body has called for new policy measures to slash greenhouse gas emissions, warning that the country looks set to miss its 2030 climate change targets.
In a report published on Monday, the Council of Experts on Climate Change said Germany was unlikely to reach its goal of cutting 65% of emissions by the end of the decade compared to 1990 levels.
The panel, which is appointed by the government and has independent authority to assess the country's climate performance, said sectors such as transport and construction in particular were struggling to decarbonize.
Our Minister of transportation has been a disaster for our most climate minded government yet.
He continuously refuses to present any plans on how to reduce emissions in his sector. His emission reduction targets for the past few years were missed, but instead our climate bill was changed so it doesn't have immediate consequences as long as other sectors meet their targets. Investments in communal and private rail were cut by 20 million €, while 150 Million were given to Volocopter, a start up for personal-use passenger drones. "State-owned" rail did see minor increases in investments, but most of that money is locked for now until the government and "Die Bahn" company agree on financing it.
The only good new thing in transportation right now is the 49€ a month ticket for all public transport in Germany, and even that fails to make commuters switch to public transport as public transport remains unreliable and inconvenient outside of cities.
Deactivating a clean energy source means that you have to get energy from somewhere else. If they hadn't taken the nuclear plants offline, they could have taken coal plants offline instead. So the fact that there are still coal plants operating means that they did, in fact replace nuclear with coal, even if they don't add more capacity to do it.
Looking at the second image. That's factually wrong. Natural gas generators increased in capacity while nuclear is being killed. The whole process of killing nuclear has been over time period considerably greater than apologists like you tend to look at.
But you do you. If nuclear was allowed to stay active they could have killed off ALL hard coal and some natural gas at this point.
What was the gap left by nuclear power filled with?
Nuclear power had a total output of just under 30 terawatt hours (TWh) in the year before the last three plants went offline and output dropped to zero. On the other hand, the output of renewables was 237 TWh in the period between April 2022 and the final phase-out step. In the year after 15 April 2023, renewables had surpassed the previous year’s output, reaching nearly 270 TWh by early April, according to Fraunhofer ISE researcher Burger. With a net increase of more than 30 TWh, the additional output of renewables alone thus more than compensated for the loss of nuclear capacity in net public electricity generation.
Fossil power sources contributed 210 TWh to electricity production in the final year of nuclear power use, when Germany had deployed additional coal power capacity as a safety measure in the energy crisis. However, the fossil fuel-fired power plants’ output dropped markedly in the following year and stood at about 160 TWh by 15 April 2024. In fact, the use of coal power dropped to its lowest level in more than half a century in the same year Germany went nuclear-free, meaning fossil fuel did not see a revival to fill the gap. According to an analysis by the anti-nuclear NGO Greenpeace, energy sector emissions in Germany dropped by 24 percent.
So they turned off 30TWh of nuclear... Where they already spent all the carbon that it's going to spend. And instead kept oil/coal running.
Can you tell me where I have it wrong? How would it not have been infinitely better to keep the nuclear going and cutting an additional 30TWh of coal/oil? Maybe they would have been on track to beat their emissions goals.
ofc in the last year that the nuclear plants were operating they would've generated way less than when nuclear was a main source lol, this says that nuclear in 2010 produced 5x that of 2023 (150twh in reference to your source)
Building nuclear takes on average something like 15 years, so I don't see how this is going to help. Germany's coal will be shut off by 2035 anyways.
Besides, Germany already has a huge problem because no one can figure out where to put the nuclear waste they already have (one of the supposed "secure storages" is now leaking water and will likely poison the groundwater in a huge area, and will need to be reopened and cleared, costing untold billions).
At this point, even the major energy companies say it's not realistic nor beneficial to change course to reenter nuclear.
Only to be replaced by gas, which is still far from being carbon free.
Besides, Germany already has a huge problem because no one can figure out where to put the nuclear waste they already have
No one can agree on where to put nuclear waste. This is not some unsolvable problem, it's just anti-nuclear that opposes every solution given by scientists.
As a German, I am pissed about the way we try to get carbon neutral. Shutting off the nuclear plants before the coal plants was just plain stupid and primarily motivated by unjustified fear and that sweet sweet coal lobby money. And now our energy is still expensive af and still dirty and will be for a while.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that there’s more and more focus on renewables and that they make up a sizeable and growing percentage of our energy supply but it’s pretty clear that that’s not enough or at least not fast enough.
My country tries to go carbon neutral in a way that's physically possible to do so, but sadly our efforts here are way meaningless if a much bigger and more contaminating country like Germany goes and opens up coal plants.
We're a tiny country, we hardly have an impact, Germany is not.