Germany to miss 2030 climate goal: experts – DW – 06/03/2024
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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.

The findings contradict statements from German Climate Protection Minister and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, who said in March that projections from the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) showed emissions were falling and Germany would meet its goal.

  • @[email protected]English
    16•6 months ago

    No, not really.

    1. 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.

    Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/qa-germanys-nuclear-exit-one-year-after#three

    • Saik0English
      16•6 months ago

      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.

      • @tmjaeaEnglish
        12•6 months ago

        Phasing out nuclear was a decade long process, no last minute decision that could have been reverted, at least not in an (price-) efficient manner

        • @[email protected]English
          5•6 months ago

          The fact that they had 10+ years to revert the decision and didn’t is that much more damning.

          I would know, my country (Belgium) did the same. I will forever hold a grudge against those reality-denying environmentalists who recklessly misrepresented the drawbacks of nuclear to the public and killed any dream of energy independence well before I was old enough to vote.

          You were the chosen ones, Greens. You were supposed to fight the oil lobby, not join them.

          • @baruEnglish
            1•6 months ago

            I would know, my country (Belgium) did the same

            Didn’t various of your nuclear reactors need huge maintenance? As nuclear reactors get older the maintenance cost get crazy high. I remember seeing reports that said electrical grid problems could likely happen due to the age.

            Though it seems you mean more nuclear had to be built a few decades ago? That likely would be good at that time.

            But in this age, nuclear is costly if built now. Resulting in high electricity prices. That’ll make a country uncompetitive.

            • @[email protected]English
              2•6 months ago
              • Greenfield (new) nuclear’s LCOE is higher than renewables. This does not account for the additional GHG emissions from the fossil fuels that supplement renewables’ intermittency issues, and if we put a carbon tax on those then the maths would surely change (whether it justifies greenfield nuclear over things like energy storage or just paying the carbon tax I do not know, I haven’t seen a study on that).
              • Existing nuclear is cost-competitive with renewables. Yes, as with any 50 year-old infrastructure it will require maintenance. Refurbishing is still cheaper than shutting everything down and replacing that capacity with gas+renewables. The decision to shut down existing NPPs was political; so political in fact that the government had to put the nuclear shutdown into law (otherwise the energy operator would have done the economically sensible thing and refurbished the NPPs for an additional 10-30 years.
                Since the energy crisis we are planning to refurbish the NPPs that were shut down anyways. Of course the cost analysis is much murkier now that we have years of delayed maintenance to catch up on since the operator expected a complete phaseout in 2022.

              The debate over new nuclear is one thing. It’s not happening in Belgium anyways as literally no political party supports that. But shutting down existing nuclear is a moronic strategy that was only undertaken due to intense lobbying from anti-nuclear (and therefore pro-oil, whether they realize it or not) activists that cannot even remotely pretend that in the early '00s they correctly predicted that existing-nuclear-vs-new-renewables would reach a rough economic equilibrium twenty years later. They were killing the planet and they knew it, and didn’t care because it meant less nuclear (whatever relative intrinsic benefits that supposedly entails from an environmental perspective).

        • KalciferEnglish
          3•6 months ago

          Ahh, the good ol’ sunk cost fallacy.

      • @[email protected]English
        -1•6 months ago

        turned on coal/oil

        Like others already said and you can read in my response or the link provided, they turned off coal.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•6 months ago

      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)