For the first time in 5 days, German electricity carbon intensity has fallen below 400 g CO2/kwh.
Accessed 12:33A 01/13/22. https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
I've been monitoring German electricity during the recent 5 days of dunkelflaute. For most of this period, the much vaunted "more than 60 GW" of wind power capacity when I checked in was at around 10% or lower, with the carbon intensity of Germany often rising above 500 g CO2/kwh owing to the reliance on coal. There were multiple occasions when all the wind turbines in Germany were producing less or merely equivalent, more or less, electricity than Germany's three remaining nuclear reactors.
For the first time in 5 days, German carbon intensity for electricity is below 400 g CO2/kwh, 381 g CO2/kwh to be exact. Neighboring France was high (for France) for about two days, between 90 - 100 g CO2/kwh apparently because France sipped the wind energy Koolaid, and thus found it necessary to burn some gas because the wind wasn't blowing there either. However the more than 50 nuclear plants operating in France kept its carbon dioxide dumping to 1/4th to 1/5th of Germany's. As of this writing France is producing 99 g CO2/kwh. (Generally France's carbon intensity for electricity is on the order of 40-70 g CO2/kwh)
When the wind wasn't blowing, the Germans burned coal. Lots of it. There is no industrial process for removal of the coal waste generated by this event from the atmosphere into which it was dumped. This waste is the problem of every generation that comes after us.
As of this writing, the wind seems to be blowing again in Germany, and the capacity utilization of the "more than 60 GW" of wind capacity has risen to 32.84% as of this writing. Germany is still producing more electricity from coal (22.9 GW) than it is from wind (21.0 GW) and solar combined, since solar is producing zero energy in the dark.
The waste from the decision to close 14 of Germany's 17 nuclear plants, and thus rely on coal, is totally uncontained, and this coal waste will remain with humanity, free and uncontained, more or less for eternity.
Recent scientific literature has correlated death rates from Covid to intensity of air pollution in Germany, but even without Covid, German air pollution kills people, regularly and continuously.
(For example, among others : Aloys L. Prinz, David J. Richter, Long-term exposure to fine particulate matter air pollution: An ecological study of its effect on COVID-19 cases and fatality in Germany, Environmental Research, Volume 204, Part A, 2022,
Congrats to the anti-nuke so called "renewable energy" champions here and elsewhere, especially in Germany, where nuclear energy is "too dangerous" but murder by coal is not. Heckuvjob.
History will not forgive us; nor should it.
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