This simply isn't true. Coal use for electricity has been declining consistently in Germany and especially since the first shutdowns of nuclear plants (cca 2011). And the replacement was not natural gas as in e.g. the US.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?time...
Looks like coal usage for electricity production indeed only went up for ~3 years around 2011, probably we can consider that a mere blip within the downward trend.
Wind and solar indeed seem to pick up what nuclear used to bring to the energy mix. Gas usage is only slightly up over 30 years, which doesn’t look like it’s directly substituting nuclear — but surely it could have gone down had nuclear be kept around?
(Personally, I wish politics would have pushed harder against coal and simply ignored nuclear for a couple more decades. But political feasibility is important ofc, and I don’t know how hard of a sell that would have been in 2010.)
In general what I think is people make a pariah out of Germany and its energy choices, but this is mostly based on false data, which tells me enough. The debate is riddled with false data which lead to even worse conclusions. In the end the numbers are positive and that's all what's important for me. There are better candidates for criticism when looked at individually or even globally, what the individual strategies accomplish on a global scale. So when looked at globally, the German energy transition has accomplished a ton. E.g. the 600TW of solar this year never would've happened without it, which more than offsets the 10-15GW of nuclear they switched off, most of which was past its retirement age.
A point you certainly can argue about, is that coal should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear, but that discussion is over now.
For gas use electricity production is just a minor use. Most gas is consumed by industry and for heating purposes. Not enough happened in Germany in the last years electrifying them.
Right. Coal stayed online where it would have otherwise gone away. That was true for close to a decade.
> gas use electricity production is just a minor
And growing. Look at your own chart. The change in natural gas electrical generation is about as large as solar’s entire controbution.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...
As a result, Germany’s industrial production is falling. Which will be great for the environment if countries who previously imported goods produced by Germany’s clean nuclear power don’t just switch to goods produced by China and South East Asia’s far dirtier electricity.
Of course, China is steadily increasing its own nuclear energy production, so it’ll end up being clean eventually, and likely sooner than us given how efficient they are.
But it’s not like we’re reducing dependency on nuclear power. It’s more like we’re trading the risk of nuclear accident in our own backyards for something else. I tend to think that the something else is the risk that the eastern world’s factories stop accepting the western world’s increasingly worthless paper money, which they’ll be in a much stronger position to do once we’re no longer able to manufacture what we need due to environmental concerns.
The causality here seems debatable.
Cheap Chinese goods which take market share from German goods aren't just cheap because of cheap energy.
In Spain, where we didn's shut down nuclear energy nor have oil or coal, energy intensive industry is also threatening or shutting down (https://www.miningweekly.com/article/alcoa-threatens-to-shut...). The threats are barely hidden "subsidize our costs or else...".
(this was later un-done in 2009 and then redone in 2011 which is the cause of confusion).
IE. Germany got INCREDIBLY lucky that China went hard into renewables and dropped the price of them dramatically. Because they did basically replace or plan to replace all the nuclear plants with coal plants.
Lets have a look at how the German electricity production has shifted over the years:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
- Fossil gas: 2011 -> 2023 = stable.
- Coal: 2011 -> 2023 = large reduction
At the height of the energy crisis when half the French nuclear fleet was off line due to corrosion issues.
Germany temporarily reopened a few mothballed coal power plants to keep the lights on in France.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
You should probably have started with a correct statement, not a falsehood that you had to rephrase into a correct statement.
As we've concluded it evidently was not. Both coal and nuclear power has been replaced with renewables.
I would suggest you stop spreading falsehoods.
Those require a large amount of baseload energy.
Now. For years they switched to coal. Even today, Germany falls to the siren songs of the gas lobby, who promise a €1.5tn investment into gas infrastructure will be happily written off for the sake of the planet.