A very interesting article in The Conversation, “Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal — and why it won’t go back”, explains the country’s energiewende (energy transition or energy revolution), and why the 2022 decision has turned out to be the right one.
Ill-informed sceptics claim Germany burns more coal because it has closed its nuclear power plants, the data show that this is not only wrong, but has driven huge growth in the development of renewables: a month before the closure of its nuclear power plants the distribution of power generation in Germany was 53% renewable, 25% coal, 17% gas and 5% nuclear; it now stands at 60% renewable, 24% coal, and 16% gas. None of the doomsayers’ predictions have come true: the country now uses more energy from renewables and has decreased dependence on coal and gas.
In addition, eliminating nuclear energy has ended distortions in the energy market: nuclear power is extremely rigid, and cannot be switched off. The system is now more flexible, driving investment in renewables, which have gone from representing only 6.3% of energy consumption in 2000 to a total of 51.8% in 2023 as a whole.
At the same time, coal use will continue to fall, while gas remains a last flexible way to cover possible momentary gaps in supply and demand, a role that is progressively being covered by the growth of storage options or by imports from Scandinavia that, in addition to being a reliable and stable partner, has an increasing surplus of renewable energies.
In addition, a large part of Germany’s renewable energy generation is in the hands private citizens: in 2019, they owned 40.4% of the total installed renewable energy generation capacity in Germany, through community wind energy cooperatives, biogas installations on farms or solar power generation panels on the rooftops of homes. In the early 2010s, that percentage was more than 50%.
We are not talking about hypotheses, but data: the German energy transition is working well, it is achieving effective emission reductions, and it is doing so by increasingly promoting investment in renewables both at an individual and corporate level. If, instead, it had extended the life of its nuclear plants, that investment would have been severely curtailed by the distortion nuclear plants suppose in the energy mix, and it would have taken much longer to reach the target.
All of this is far from intuitive: up to 51.6% of German citizens still think that the closure of nuclear power plants was premature, but they are wrong. On many occasions, when we talk about complex systems such as energy generation, subject to issues such as the level of flexibility and auction systems, what intuition tells us is not necessarily the right thing to do, and what we need to do is listen to the experts. And in the case of Germany, no matter what the doomsayers said, the data indicates that the country is on the right path.
(En español, aquí)
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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