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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> Germany's lobby to continue burning fossil fuels and spewing the resulting GHGs into atmosphere

Isn't Germany a world leader in implementing renewable energy?

More recently Germany has become a NIMBY country when it comes to building more wind power. From the outside it appears a lot of the easy wins have already taken place for wind in Germany, and once they began building closer to residential areas, people have gotten increasingly upset about it:

"Wind power is Germany's most important source of clean energy. But wind turbines have become contentious here, as more and more people protest against them being built near where they live."

https://www.dw.com/en/the-germans-fighting-wind-farms-close-...

"Germany has set some of the most ambitious goals of any nation for shifting from fossil fuels to greener energy. Now the centerpiece of that push—onshore wind power—is slumping, prompting the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and the bankruptcies of wind-power developers and turbine manufacturers. Wind power, often seen as a clean, abundant energy source, has faced growing bureaucratic hurdles and acrimony in communities out to block the erection of new turbines. "

https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-push-for-wind-power-en...

renewables are not big enough in a huge industrial and developed country like Germany

Hysterical shutdown of nuclear plants following Fukushima lead to the gap being covered by fossil fuels

also while US have very cheap gas from the domestic industry, Europe is constrained by a couple of pipelines and shipments and market fluctuations, so it didn't replace coal

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Your charts show lignite holding stable, hard coal declining, nuclear declining, natural gas increasing slightly, and renewables expanding tremendously.

Renewables provided 45% of Germany's power production in 2020, and 41% in 2021 H1.

I started writing the comment before looking at the chart

however

nuclear capacity fell by 8GW

natural gas grew by 4GW

and the charts only explain the capacity

unlikely the renewables can replace nuclear in that sense

of course, saying that the historical shutdown of nuclear was replaced by fossil fuels I mean in the same and following year.

If Germany keeps betting big on renewable after that and it's currently producing 41% it's a different story

No, but people love their misinformation (in both directions). Coal and gas are slowly going down in Germany. Germany built a new coal plant 6 years ago only to shut it down this year. The real problem is that renewables aren't being built fast enough.

They are compared to all the countries bigger than them. But compared to other Western European countries, not so much.

Merkel’s CDU has been popular because they offered stability, but there’s an understanding in Germany now that the country has fallen behind in critical areas like car electrification and grid storage technologies.

Not really, that was Denmark, or France's nuclear buildout.

Was, the conservative party dismantled that pretty quickly.

The same party has been in charge for (16?) years; the Greens are popular in Germany.

Edit: Maybe I'm misunderstanding something?

Germany had a bunch of nuclear plants, which have pretty low carbon emissions.

Then they decided to shut them all down; and that they urgently need a new gas pipeline - Nord Stream 2 - to import natural gas from Russia.

Doesn’t sound very carbon neutral to me.

And that'll make Europe dependent on Russia. Doesn't sound much of a problem to me but down here, Putin is seen as a somewhat bad person. So, Europe will have to bow to him to have not too expensive gas, I'll have a lot of fun hearing our politicians telling that, poor them, they have to negotiate with him :-)

On the other hand, making Europe economically dependent on Russia lowers the likelihood of war between them and fosters cooperation in other areas. Germany doesn't buy the US narrative that Russia should be treated with hostility at all costs.

> On the other hand, making Europe economically dependent on Russia lowers the likelihood of war between them

No, it doesn't.

Attempting to break economic dependence, or to preempt such attempts in the anticipated future, is at least as common a cause of war as geopolitical competition between powers that aren’t in a dependency relationship.

The CDU has a wing that still depends on old coal-burners for their jobs. Shutting down nuclear was their idea of keeping those folks “working” for longer while solar and (especially) wind were spooled up.

To that end, it’s looking better now that the Greens are in the ruling coalition.

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