This has made quite the headlines on environmental blogs and newspapers. As TreeHugger puts it : ” Germany now produces 20.8% of its electricity from renewable sources. That’s an increase of 15 percentage points since 2000 “
Now, let’s congratulate the main European economic powerhouse for that. The Germans truly deserve it and we got to give credit where credit is due. But, to me their decision to ditch nuclear – and doing it so fast – is a bad decision.
This is the case for two reasons : 1. the country will have to build new coal and gas fired plants ; 2. Its electricity is already much dirtier than the European average.
All this occurs as the IEA points to the fact that ” Chances to limit rising temps “bleaker ”. As I noted previously in front of the massive climate and energy scarcity problems, it is not about nuclear OR renewables as we need both of them.
I noted this week that natural gas isn’t a solution to curb our emissions…
Oddly enough, even if Germany has shut some of its reactors, it keeps on relying nuclear as it is importing some from neighboring countries like the Czech Republic or France. See this interesting article on Der Spiegel for more.
Where the United Kingdom embraced pragmatism and uses all possibilities – efficiency, renewables and nuclear – to stop climate change and slash its emissions, Germany has remained dogmatic because of the Greens and thus ditched nuclear. Schade !