For anyone who is interested in a detailed view of these stats worldwide in real time and cross-border with carbon intensities and individual breakdowns by electricity source: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h
WTF is Australia doing? Aren’t they aware they have plenty of sunshine and an insanely long shoreline?
IIRC Australia mines a huge amount of coal
The sun doesn’t shine at night. Have a look when it is daytime there and you’ll see upwards of 60% of their electricity is solar.
Or use the EM site and check for past statistics.
The sun doesn’t shine at night.
Wind blows at night at the shoreline.
Have a look when it is daytime there and you’ll see upwards of 60% of their electricity is solar.
Well, over 12 months it’s not that rosy, except for Tasmania:
I thought you’d at least have a chuckle when you realised that it was night time when you made your dumb comment.
Over the last 12 months it is 25% solar and 13% wind. The population centres on the east coast are worse than WA, SA and TAS in that regard.
Yes, 45% of coal generated electricity is awful, but you were still incorrect in saying Australia is doing nothing.
A collosal solar farm and transmission cable to Singapore is under construction which is will be a great achievement when complete.
you were still incorrect in saying Australia is doing nothing.
Except I did not say that. I asked what’s going on and that things aren’t that rosy. You must me have confused with someone else.
Shame, innit? They could be the n1 Solar panel producers per capita and panel exporters…oh well. This is why the charge against fossil fuels has to be led by net consumers (in the name of defense against geopolitical risk) and the producers will reduce extraction…but local consumption of coal probably will never disappear completely unless locals complain about smog.
Australia is just an oil company, a coal company, and a mining company disguised as a trench coat. The Liberal party (essentially just American Republicans opposed to guns) spent 2 decades killing any green energy initiatives in favor of fracking the Outback
Really cool. Thanks for the share. Also quite depressing, most countries (even rich ones who have like triple responsibility) are barely even trying.
Wasn’t Germany that weird one where ‘gas’ was labeled as ‘renewable’? Or was that something diffrent?
No, worse, they labeled it as green. Naziland never fails to be on the wrong side of history
Wasn’t Germany that weird one where ‘gas’ was labeled as ‘renewable’?
Biogas from decomposition is renewable. That definition is accepted internationally.
Doesn’t mean it’s ecological. There’s a difference.
No, that was France labeling Nuclear as Renewable. Because, because it doesn’t emit CO2, I guess. Don’t know what „Re-New“ translates into French and I‘d be surprised if it is „Split Atoms“.
Fuck off, France did this in reaction to Germany trying to pass gas as green (not renewable!)
Electricity imports also rose to 24.9 TWh, driven by lower generation costs in neighboring countries during summer.
For the love of God, please just build nuclear instead of virtue signaling with solar panels while you import your energy needs.
There’s no sense in spending limited public funding on nuclear now - renewables and storage is winning on all fronts.
Shutting down what nuclear existed was a costly mistake, but going down that path again is an even worse one
They’re getting poorer and deindustrializing at a rapid pace.
The ironworks in Ruhrgebiet died a century ago, in case you didn’t notice.
Germany has the EU’s highest energy prices. Just saying.
Sure just saying, not trolling at all.
Solar drives energy prices down, not up. In the summer the energy price regularly goes negative because there is so much solar available.
And it isn’t even remotely true, other countries have higher energy prices than Germany within the EU. The Netherlands for example has crazy high energy prices. And that’s in absolute numbers, not even corrected for things like GDP.
Norway has one of the lowest. And they don’t have only 62.7%.
99% of their energy comes from renewables.And in the USA, some of the states with lowest prices have the highest % of renewables.
Norway regularly has very high energy prices… in fact, they’re so high they want to cut exports.
The reason they’re high is because of the grid in other countries being hit by low wind or grey sky days, pushing up the minimum pricing that they’re also subjected to by being part of the same grid.
Seems to be a recent thing, as I was looking at data from Feb 2023, and unrelated to Norway’s use of renewables.
Interesting article nonetheless.
They should definitely cone to a different pricing agreement with Norway as to not negatively affect them.
And it will be even less of a problem once those countries properly ramp up their installation of more renewables and storage.Upgrading the grid infrastucture is a massive undertaking in some countries.
The UK grid is built around coal generation. With the shift to offshore wind away from population centres, new tranmission cables are required. Sadly there is excessive wind generation and suppliers are paid to shutdown. It is laughable.
But yes, with more renewables it will improve.
To be fair, Norway and those states rely heavily on hydro, which is great if you have the geography for it, but it’s not a route that can work for every region.
Excluding hydro renewable sources tend to cost more if you include storage currently, though that premium has been and is coming down.
Iowa and South Dakota rely mostly on wind and are amongst the states that have the cheapest electricity in the USA - https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/Others/24-08-Letter-Vance.pdf
List of countries and states and their % of renewables: https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/Countries100Pct.pdf
It’s certainly true it’s easier when you have hydro though.
Exactly. I grew up in WA, USA, and power was always quite cheap due to how much comes from hydro. Now I’m in Utah, and it’s only cheap because we use coal and natural gas (and produce a ton of the latter), though we’re replacing a lot of that w/ solar (turns out deserts get lots of sun) and prices are remaining pretty low.
Renewable energy will certainly look different in each region. I don’t know what would work best for Germany since I don’t know the geography very well, but comparing Norway to Germany isn’t going to be a productive conversation.
It’s the coal they’re burning.
“This single thing is more expensive in this country” is a stupid way to compare prices from countries.
Remember Berlin has a latitude of 52.5°. That puts it far north of the 49th parallel border.
My friend is dumb and doesn’t know the significance of the 49th parallel. Can you explain it to them?
Sure, but Munich is south of the 49th parallel. I’m not sure how amenable it is to solar down there, but surely there are some areas that would work, no?
If baveria wasn’t one of the worst NIMBY hell holes in the (known by me) world.
True, but climate in Central Europe is different to the US-Canada border.
I’m thinking solar is hard.
Yeah, you get even more clouds.
They used to have nuclear too
Yeah, what’s up with that? Nuclear works well for France, so why did it fall out of favor in Germany?
It’s not perfect, but it does a fantastic job at providing a base load alternative to batteries, which could significantly reduce rollout costs if they had existing plants. It’s probably not worth switching now, unless they have some dormant plants that could be fired up quickly (like we’re doing in the US).
There has always been quite a noticeable anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany, especially in the 70s/80s and after Fukushima political pressure rose to get rid of nuclear power. Some also say that the SPD was very friendly with Putin and that’s why they were happy to increasingly rely on Russian gas imports. Not sure if that’s true though
Yeah, what’s up with that? Nuclear works well for France, so why did it fall out of favor in Germany?
Lobbying (corruption).
Biomass may well be renewable, but I still don’t think it counts as green.
Why not? Doesn’t creating the biomass require sequestering carbon?
Coal is sequestered carbon.
UK for comparison (Average over year)
GW % Coal 0.18 0.6 Gas 8.31 27.7 Solar 1.52 5.1 Wind 9.36 31.1 Hydroelectric 0.41 1.4 Nuclear 4.36 14.5 Biomass 2.15 7.1 That’s an incredible amount of wind power.
One of the nicer upshots of cutting the cord with Russia is the sky high price of electricity incentivizing big investments in renewable energy.
Nice graph with no freaking labels.
Original chart source: https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/Stromerzeugung_2024.pdf
Slide 17
Original chart source: https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/Stromerzeugung_2024.pdf
Slide 17
I wish people would stop conflating energy with electricity.
So Germany had ⅔ of it’s electricity from renewables, but still has gas for warming homes, petrol for cars, diesel for trucks, and so on.
You’re right, but if you read beyond the title it’s clearly stated that it’s about electricity generation.
That’s fair, but it’s still a very relevant metric. It shows the automatic transition made in electrification when people switch over to heat pumps, electric stoves or EVs.
It skews the metrics though. By the title you’d think Germany is already more than halfway through to become carbon neutral, when it is obviously still extremely far away from that goal. People read this and think we’re actually doing okay.
carbon neutral
That’s a propaganda term by people who promote bullshit like e-fuels because “the only CO2 emissions are what was already out of the air, so bottom line it’s neutral”.
Please stop spewing climate denial propaganda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net-zero_emissions https://unfccc.int/news/a-beginner-s-guide-to-climate-neutrality https://sustainability.yale.edu/explainers/yale-experts-explain-carbon-neutrality https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20190926STO62270/what-is-carbon-neutrality-and-how-can-it-be-achieved-by-2050
Please stop spewing climate denial propaganda.
The only one spewing propaganda is you. The world needs “net negative” to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere that was already blasted into it since the industrial revolution, not “net zero”/“carbon neutral”.
Get a clue.
Those are stepping stones on the same path you dingus. Calling literal climate scientists & institutions propaganda just proves my point about your climate change denial.
proves my point about your climate change denial.
Your brain is broken.
The world needs “net negative”
Of course.
And carbon neutral is a major step in that direction. Carbon neutral not the end goal, and most people don’t claim that it is.
The hell is “doing okay”?
I am so frustrated by the discourse around renewables and climate change. Everybody online seems to be treating it like a puzzle or a board game, where you “win” at climate change when you find the “right” solution.
That’s not how it works. I don’t care about the “carbon neutrality” of Germany any more than I care about the “carbon neutrality” of a patch of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a global process that is never going to end. We’re always going to need energy, it’s always going to come from a mix of sources and we need to eventually find a global equilibrium we can strive to maintain.
Data is data, but taking issue with news, and particularly positive news, as if they were propaganda in a campaign where eventually people will have to elect the one source of energy they consume is kind of absurd. Yes, renewables are gaining ground, solar is moving faster than expected and no, that doesn’t make the issue go away and we still need to accelerate the process and remove additional blockers to that acceleration. There are no silver bullets and there never will be.
positive news
The point is that it’s not positive, not more than an article telling you that tomorrow it will be sunny.
It’s at best mild.
Now who is confusing weather with climate?
It’s an article telling you that inflation wasn’t as high as intitially expected. Doesn’t mean prices went down, but it’s still good news against the alternative.
We’ve looped back around to arguing about the meaning of “positive”, which mostly tells me this is entirely a discussion about vibes, and maybe that’s the best takeaway anybody can get from it.
Not doing nearly enough isn’t “positive news”. But thanks for proving my point. This is literally not going to do anything for us as a species with the current trajectory we’re on, because, again, it’s not enough, not even close to it.
Okay, so beyond nihilism, what’s your point?
I mean, obviously this is at least an intermediate state towards whatever survivable endgame we want to reach. We need to be at this stage at some point to get to where we want to go.
Should this stage have happened sooner? Probably. Was it possible? Maybe.
But we’re here now, so… what’s your take? Because you seem concerned about good news discouraging people from something, but you also seem to be claiming there is no valid path forward, which seems way less productive to me.
Nihilism isn’t the same as realism. We need to make great leaps, not babysteps. We were on our way to a catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius globally already, and that was before the result of the US election. Do you seriously believe the rest of the world, who already failed to do their own part, is going to now also compensate for the addition of the US emissions under Trump? That’s not happening, especially not if we continue to delude us with misleading headlines like this. Toxic positivity is absolutely not helpful when the world needs a serious reality check.
No toxic positivity here.
I will note, though, you haven’t met the brief. The closest thing to a target I see there is “great leaps, not baby steps”. I’m gonna need something slightly more specific than that.
Exactly. Both numbers are interesting, because electricity will likely be scaled up in the same proportions. If we’re comparing countries, we should use total energy, but if we’re just looking at progress within a country, looking at electricity generation is totally valid.
Well, from where I stand it’s a useful number to understand the value of electrification. You hear a lot of misinformation along the lines of “why move to EV/heat pumps/whatever if the electricity they use is made by burning gas”.
Which is a big “if”, and knowing what the energy mix is in your country/area is an important rebuttal and answer to that particular question.
