Germany greenwashing stupidity is more irksome than other countries just dragging their feet. It's like being stabbed in the front vs the back.
Germany's behavior also makes it harder for other countries to do what they do. Since it's a unified grid, Germany gets to virtue signal without getting serious about the centralized storage needed to make all renewables possible. Other countries hit the storage needs way sooner because the grid as a whole is already trying to buffer Germany's intermittent power.
We had a government that was actively dragging its feet and, in many ways, hindering progress. You can call that greenwashing, I would describe it as paying lip service to transformation while doing little to get ahead and also hindering progress in certain places when things got difficult.
It never felt very virtue-signaly to me, though.
I‘m all in favor of (critically) giving this new government at least a couple of years until we measure to what extent they were able to clean up that mess.
This, for example, is a necessary step because many of the states have been actively hindering wind power expansion with overly broad regulation. That‘s why wind power expansion fell off a cliff during the last couple of years.
Whether this measure can change that I do not know, but that’s the relevant background and with that context it makes sense why this is happening now.
They've taken the low cost, fast approach to cutting CO2 emissions rather than the high cost, incredibly-so-very-slow approach of commission a bunch of nuclear plants and then burn a LOT of coal and send a lot of money to Russia until they're finally done, over-budget and over-time circa 2040.
Storage is kind of a moot point when half of your grid energy is provided by burning gas. A megawatt provided by wind in 3 years time is 100 euros not sent to Putin - no matter how intermittently it is produced.
The graph above refutes any idea of this being virtue signalling. % renewables is only going up, fast.
> They've taken the low cost, fast approach to cutting CO2 emissions rather than the high cost, incredibly-so-very-slow approach of commission a bunch of nuclear plants and then burn a LOT of coal and send a lot of money to Russia until they're finally done, over-budget and over-time circa 2040.
Stop being a stupid marginalist. The cost of renewables is only cheap when one doesn't both to do the grid storage and other serious steps that make it actually scale to a 100% solution. Then it balloons right back up again.
Any country that cannot build a nuclear power plant on time will also hit delays trying to do other major infrastructure projects like grid-scale storage.
Germany's behavior also makes it harder for other countries to do what they do. Since it's a unified grid, Germany gets to virtue signal without getting serious about the centralized storage needed to make all renewables possible. Other countries hit the storage needs way sooner because the grid as a whole is already trying to buffer Germany's intermittent power.