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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

> the U.S. would not take

Other countries have not done anything either (lip service doesn't count).

This is a "lack of good alternatives" problem, not a US problem.

No, this is a lack of political will problem, worldwide. Renewables can supply all the power we need. We just need to build a lot of them and switch heating and transportation over to electricity.

What's Germany been up to?

They've been shutting down nuclear power and keeping coal.

Take a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...

Nuclear went down, to be replaced by wind/solar. i.e. they did nothing useful.

Actually it's worse than it looks - they've outsourced their CO2 emissions to China to build all those solar cells, etc.

Germany is an example of a failure, not a success: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910540

This narrative is very funny because it plays into boomer tendency of hating renweables. Germany showed that it's possible as long as you don't give up along the way. Countries like China or the US never started doing anything in the first place so criticism coming from those countries is just plain hypocritical. "I don't want it and now I don't have to because haha look at Germany, what a loser, haha"

Thank you for pointing this out, as a German it's kinda grating to keep on reading this kind of stuff, which also regularly frames the German nuclear exit as some kind of knee-jerk reaction to Fukushima.

When in reality the exit was already decided as far back as 2000, with the Bundestag ratifying it in 2002 [0]. A decision which was backed up by the EGG [1], a regulatory framework to facilitate and subsidize the large scale expansion of renewable energy sources that has been happening in Germany for over a decade now.

As such, I'd like to think we've been a bit ahead of the curve in terms of recognizing the problem and actually doing something against it. In that context, the still on-going use of coal ain't exactly great, but the reasons for that are way more political (miner jobs) than anything else.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomgesetz_(Deutschland)#Novel...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...

I find it incredible to hear the stuff people spout about Germany.

Germany's decision to pay higher prices for electricity is what really kick started the downward spiral in solar prices. Germany proved solar wasn't just possible, but feasible. And every country has benefited from Germanys decision.

Germany itself has likely benefited, even if they had stops and starts along the way, and some minor setbacks.

I'm not sure what to make of your linked graph considering there were no nuclear reactors shut down between 2005 and 2011 [0].

8 of them were shut-down in 2011 as they reached the end of their life expectancy, after having been operational for 40+ years.

Would you rather have us keep running old reactors while insisting how absolutely safe and secure they are?

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernreaktoren_in_Deu...

Germany has been reducing CO2 emissions at a lower rate than the US recently. The US has benefited from cheap natural gas displacing coal, while Germany has gutted its solar program and (more recently) stopped building new wind turbines. Meanwhile Germany still burns lignite to supply about 25% of its electricity (a rate that has been fairly stable for as long as I can find numbers, at least thirty years).

In 2002 Germany had an energy mix of 22% hard coal, 27.8% lignite and 30% nuclear. Nowadays it has 9.7% hard coal, 19.9% lignite, 13.2% nuclear and 47.2% renewable energy. It's merely a matter of time and political will.

Would you mind sharing the source and year for these numbers? The only stats I found were not from 2019 and coal was higher than 9.7%.

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