Re:Germany to close all of its coal-fired power plants over ...
by ThePhysicist on Friday August 16, 2019 @03:30AM
(#20712912)
The coal industry just employs 20.000 people in Germany according to their own statistics (https://www.braunkohle.de/4-0-Zahlen-und-Fakten.html), of which two third will retire soon anyway, so it's hardly a critical industry I'd say. Politicians had no problem shutting down the black coal production either and it seems that didn't affect much the "identity of the labor class" in the affected regions (at least not mine as I'm from such a region with both of my grandfathers working in coal mines).
What we should have done is to really push renewable energy much sooner and in a more systematic way, then we could mostly be off nuclear and coal energy sources by now. The "Energiewende" politics of the Green party / SPD e.g. involving - among other things - large-scale subsidies on private photovoltaics plants wasn't really a viable strategy (IMHO) and more a way to hand good investment opportunities to upper middle-class / upper-class households (in the early days of solar subsidies people could earn more than 10 % interest rate, guaranteed over 10 years or longer).
Coal power has been slow to phase out not because the power is needed, but because the coal industry is important, especially in some regions already suffering from the shifting economic fortune of heavy manufacturing. It being the initial core of german industrialisation, it also has an outsized social relevancy as a marker of identity among the labor class.
But for these reasons, Germany would have replaced all coal with renewable energy, French nuclear power, or natural gas generation one or two decades ago. That's still an emission source, but far less so than coal.