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Yet this "myth" is what has lead to countries with heavy amounts of green baseloads being able to decarbonize and those without are still struggling.

The failure of the Germany energiewende is a great example, Californias struggle is another.




What failure are you talking about? The German Energiewende despite significant opposition from lobbying groups has lead to >20% of electricity generated from renewables. It also kicked off a large boom in renewable energy research and industries, Germany was world leader in solar and wind industries (the following governments policies toward fossil and back to nuclear ran into the ground)


Target of Energiewende was clean, cheap and reliable energy. It is not cheap and thanks to intermittency and lack of grid build up (Suedlink problems) will soon also be unreliable.


It is clean (compared to what it was before) and reliable. Cheap was never a target. In fact, household prices are artificially and intentionally (as by design) kept high to promote conservation. Average day-ahead market prices at EPEX SPOT in 2021 were lower than prices for France.


This was the promise of Energiewende:

>The promise was sweet: Germany's transition towards a low-carbon society would cost the average household no more than €1 ($1.1) per month, "the price of a scoop of ice cream," as Jürgen Trittin, then minister for the environment, put it in 2004.

So please don't try to rewrite the history. It was supposed to be cheap.


> The failure of the Germany energiewende is a great example

Except it's not as big of a failure as many try to claim. It's meeting huge challenges, for sure. But part of the problem has little to do with inherent flaws of renewables.. like the politics around building more grid transmission lines from north to south (if you hold this against renewables you have to hold political resistance against nuclear too).


Germany's energy transition to green is arguably not a failure. Renewable energies manage to replace most of nuclear production in 15y while still reducing coal usage: https://energytransition.org/2018/01/german-energy-consumpti...


https://www.montelnews.com/news/1323149/germany-may-allow-re...

24 May 2022 16:36

> (Montel) The German government plans to allow a market return 10.4 GW of hard coal, lignite and oil-fired reserve capacity if a gas supply crunch threatens power supply security, Montel learned on Tuesday.

> The new rules are designed to use as little gas as possible in an emergency situation by replacing the generation from gas-fired power plants, a government document seen by Montel showed.


That article says that they want to replace gas with coal if russia cuts of the gas supply, what else would you expect?

They also plan to change some laws to speed up transition to renewable energies: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/Energie/0406_uebe...

You can argue that renewable are not deployed fast enough in germany, and there are good arguments for that, but the article isn't about that.


Nobody claims that Germany is currently independent of fossil fuels. I don't see how your quote is relevant.


You were talking about reducing coal usage no ?

But maybe there's a catch about re-commissioning coal massively and still planing to reduce it on the long term.


I think we were talking about trends spanning several years and not emergency measures that try to increase economic pressures during a war.


Germany isn't a failure (yet?), they reduce emissions at a good pace and the objective is set to year 2050.

California has AFAIK a major grid-related problem: bad maintenance, not enogh interconnections with neighboring states... In which way renewable energy creates a problem there?




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