In Germany, The Energy Transition Situation Only Gets Worse
September 07, 2024/ Francis Menton
Plenty of virtuous places (New York, California, UK, Australia) want to compete for the mantle of “climate leader.” But let’s face it, at least among places with significant population, nobody can top Germany. In Germany, they got started on a massive build-out of wind and solar electricity generation way back in the early 1990s. By year-end 2023, they had total wind and solar nameplate electricity generation capacity of 148 GW, which is about 2.5 times average demand (of about 60 GW) and about 1.5 times peak demand (of about 100 GW). So surely, the days of fossil fuels in Germany must be numbered.
Time for another update on Germany’s progress toward energy nirvana. The bottom line is that, like the Red Queen, Germany is running faster and faster to stay in place. In the meantime, it is destroying its economy.
My last update from Germany was on June 15, and covered the then-latest data for the full year 2023. The news was that Germany had finally surpassed the benchmark of getting more than 50% of its electricity from “renewables.” That news had been excitedly announced at multiple news outlets, including Reuters, which had the headline “Renewable energy's share on German power grids reaches 55% in 2023.” Did you get fooled by that headline into thinking that the 55% was from wind and solar? Actually, as I noted in the June 15 post, of the 55%, 8.4% came from “biomass” (i.e., wood chips imported mostly from the U.S.), and 3% from “hydro” and “other,” leaving only 43.6% from the wind and solar. The capacity of the biomass and hydro generation facilities, by the way, was only 12.9 GW, meaning that they produced about 25% as much electricity as the wind and solar facilities with less than 10% of the capacity. No surprise there.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-9-7-in-germany-the-energy-transition-situation-only-gets-worse
