News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺
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(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
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Meanwhile in Germany:
You are aware that this is over 5 years old data (2017!) for the German electricity mix, right?
Please don't get me wrong, the scale up of renewable energy sources is certainly not going fast enough in Germany (thanks to our conservative government that ruled the country for 16 years until 2021!), but please argue this position using the real data for 2023 (57.7% renewables in the German electricity mix)!
You're right, I'm sorry. I chose the picture because it was the first okay one I found in English. I'll change it right away.
our conservative government that ruled the country for 16 years
and the next 16 years, if everything works well Ü
!please kill me!<
This is for sure fantastic, don't get me wrong, but Europe has also exported some of its most polluting industries abroad. And then we also wag our finger at places like China and India.
China and India are great with solar: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capacity
Schleswig-Holstein is at 100% wind since 2014. It's Southern Germany that lags behind. https://spd-geschichtswerkstatt.de/wiki/Energiewende
Lots of coal burning leads to a powerful coal lobby leads to lots of coal burning, it's the circle of life. All that's missing is coal entering the food chain, IMO we should bring back coal butter, so the country can depend on coal even more and the coal lobby can make even more profits.
Damn all these German tears in the comments could be used for enough hydro electricity to actually make the German grid cleaner.
That wouldn't be long lived, though, because when implemented in the current German fashion, they won't be using salt water resistant equipment for cost cutting reasons and neglect all maintenance to cut even more costs. The tear powered hydroelectric plants will be rusted through and seized up in no time.
No it wouldn't. It would never be built because the FDP would block it and Söder would refuse to have it built in Bavaria and Merz would say something about immigrants using up all our German salt on the tax payers dime all day long and Sahra Wagenknecht would mention that we wouldn't need it if we were all good friends with Putin and the SPD would do nothing anyway and the AfD would blame the green party for not reactivating 45 year old reactors instead of building it,...
Meanwhile here next door in the Netherlands, we have wind farms and solar all over, and we sell our energy to the UK...meanwhile we have some of the highest consumer energy costs in the EU.
Consumers get screwed over here a lot.
Kind of selfish form you, aren't you thinking about the shareholders?
Since it says "right now", I doubt this listing is qualified for discussing the general state of the energy transition in these countries.
Edit: I checked it. Spain's gas share (as a random example) was significantly higher than 17% all over 2023 when summed up monthwise with wind contributing up to 30%.
Edit2: correct data for Germany for the same time mark: 52% fossil free (38% wind)
The reason Czechs use „mld.“ instead of „Mrd.“ like Germans for billions (miliardy/Milliarden) is because mrd means “fuck” (noun) in Czech.
Those poor Czechs just cannot afford vowels.
We totally can! Look, my address is
Petr Zhltal
Strmý vrch 14 (čtrnáct)
Čtvrť zmrdů
Krnov 5 (pět) – Srch
ČR
It's very a good sign, but I do have doubts about those figures. It's all too easy to look at total demand and total renewable generation, while ignoring the fact that the country is a net exporter and thus produces more than 100% of its demand - with the remaining uncounted percentage not being green.
"Fossil free" isn't exactly a recognised term, either, in which case fossil free =/= net zero =/= completely green.
we may all say a big "THANK YOU!" to Philipp Rösler (FDP) and Peter Altmaier (CDU) for both destroying the German PV-industry, establishing the "Solar-Ausbaudeckel" and the CDU/CSU as a whole to block and hinder wind power for over a decade very effectively.
And their very hard work to make Germany overly dependent on fossil fuels, to keep it that way and therefore blow ALL climate goals appears to be a success model, as the CDU/CSU are currently winning the public opinion with that intend, whilst those trying to follow the steps of our european neighors are slammed into the ground (just as our PV industry).
In other words: Germans don't want clean air. They don't want a future.
I'm Portuguese and as much as I'd love to run on 96% green energy I can't believe it... Last time I checked (it was quite a while ago I'll give them that) we imported a lot of nuclear energy from France. So unless France is 100% green and still has a green energy surplus (which it isn't/doesn't) we're just transfering our carbon footprint...
We do have a lot of wind turbines so maybe we don't import as much anymore but still...
Nuclear is green though, so France is a good place to be importing from. It also has the lowest mortality rate per kWh of all power sources, Chernobyl included.
Meanwhile in my country, renewable energy sources are frowned upon and the government just announced plans to build 3 new coal powerplants.
Rational governments get that fossil fuels aren't going anywhere, coal and oil will stay just where they like they have for longer than humans have been a thing.
Capitalist societies tho... private companies own those fossil fuels rights and they want to sell as much as they can for as long as they can.
We should be planning centuries in advance, not a financial quarter at a time.
Ha! “Planning”
