At this hour, German electricity comes in at 420 g CO2/kwh; France 101 g CO2/kwh overall and...
69 g CO/kwh for power generated in country.
6:10 PM (EST US) 01/17/22.
Eco2mix France
Electricity map
The wind is blowing again in Germany and the wind turbines in the country are producing 18.4 GW, 28.66% capacity utilization.
The wind however is not blowing so strongly as to stop coal from being the largest source of electricity being generated in Germany, with coal plants producing 26.1 GW of electricity. Natural gas is producing 7.8 GW of German electricity.
The good news for the Germans about the wind blowing is that the coal waste they are dumping into the planetary atmosphere is blowing in the wind toward Poland. That's good news for the French as well. Coal waste kills people whenever coal plants operate normally.
This winter, to speak in much loved "percent talk," I have yet to see the carbon impact of German electricity to be less than 200% that of France; I've seen it as high a 500% that of France.
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Last edited Wed Jan 19, 2022, 07:39 AM - Edit history (2)
...download CAISO data going for weeks on end and actually calculate the capacity utilization of all that shit that will be landfill in 25 years, the number of 5 minute periods that the single nuclear reactor at Diablo Canyon was producing on a 12 acre footprint more electricity than well over thousands of square miles of former wilderness converted into industrial parks for wind turbines.
For 19 years here I've heard people prattle about some tiny subset of a week long period, but for periods of weeks, I've built spreadsheets of the "renewable will save us" shithole California.
In expectation of this very, very, very, very, very selective attention, I took the liberty of downloading weeks of data as *.csv files, converting them to excel files for calculation purposes from the CAISO website which is found here: CAISO Supply Page
I do this to confront the appalling ignorance of people who want to pretend that a five minute period is representative.
I make especially sure to download data at both equinoxes and both solstices.
Here's the tailing data of a 24 hour period of five minute increments on the winter solstice a few weeks ago for all energy sources in California during that period:
The graphic of the so called "renewable energy output for the full 24 hour period:
At no point, zero times, did thousands of square miles of wilderness trashed to make industrial parks for wind turbines produce as much electricity as the Diablo Canyon plant produced on a 12 acre footprint.
Zero. None.
Now, of course our bourgeois brats with big batteries in their McMansions with Teslas in the garage and tens of thousands of subsidized solar cells on the roofs probably would be perfectly content to let service workers living with four or five people in a one room studio apartment in Cudahy California lay in the dark until the wind started blowing again, but for everyone who gives a shit about the future of humanity and, um, climate change this is an obvious obscenity.
I have many of these spreadsheets. For example, I have one covering the period between midnight on September 6, 2021 through September 13, 2021 covering 2304 five minute periods over 8 full days. The number of five minute periods that Diablo Canyon was producing on a 12 acre footprint more electricity than all of the wind garbage strewn all over thousands of square miles of trashed industrialized wilderness was, in that period, 1,555, or in "percent talk" that liars use to misrepresent the so called "renewable energy" victory, for 67.49% of the time, all the wind turbines in the entire State of California were unable to produce as much electricity as Diablo Canyon.
Here's the high, low, average, and standard deviation for that 8 day period, the units being MW:
Except for tiny in state coal capacity - with coal buried in "imports" - the most reliable form of energy in that State, as reflected by the standard deviation was the nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon.
And what is the plan of California? To restore the wilderness that will be littered with abandoned wind turbines in 25 years? No, it's to close Diablo Canyon and work for the further destruction of the planetary atmosphere.
And why are such ignorant things being done with the atmosphere racing toward more than 422 ppm concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere that will coming April or May?
Because people lie and misrepresent a failure as a success, the failure being so called "renewable energy," which doesn't produce much energy and isn't, in fact, close to being renewable or sustainable.
It appears that there are people here who think I'm stupid and uninformed and that I don't give a shit. One doesn't study the CAISO and Electricity map data if one is either.
Speaking of Electricity Map Data, that shithole coal dependent country Germany has a carbon intensity as of this writing 8:29 PM EST US 01/18/22 of 439 g CO2/kwh, compared to 113 g CO2/kwh for France.
Have a nice evening.
Last edited Sat Jan 22, 2022, 01:35 PM - Edit history (1)
carbon intensity for electricity is exactly 400% that of France, respectively 416 g CO2/kwh for Germany compared to 104 g g CO2/kwh for France.
(9:45 AM US (EST), 1/22/22)
For most of the week, when I checked in, the German carbon intensity was between 325% and 375% that of France, so I decided to cherry pick at time just like all of the anti-nuke "renewables will save" us do and have been doing here for 19 years.
I note with due disgust that Germany removed clean energy capacity that is reliable to replace it with very dangerous forms of energy that is also reliable but kills people, coal.
This fact will be obvious to anyone who opens the electricity map, at any time: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
They still report in the bar graphs on the left side for Germany what the nuclear energy capacity was before the Germans decided to shut it an replace it with coal: 62.6 GW. Around the world the capacity utilization of nuclear energy is the highest of any form of energy, generally exceeding 90%, but in France right now, where four reactors are shut for inspection, the capacity utilization of nuclear energy is 80.36%. (In the three remaining German nuclear reactors in operation it must be close to 100%.)
My mouse failed while I was writing this post, and in the time it took to replace it with a spare, German carbon intensity rose to 429 g CO2/kwh compared to France's fell to 102 g CO2/kwh, making German carbon intensity in "percent talk" 482% higher than that of France. As of this writing the capacity utilization of all the wind turbine is 16.44% (10.5 GW/61.8GW) and solar is running at 5.08% (2.97GW/58.4GW) capacity utilization.
Let's go with the French nuclear capacity utilization, 80%, for argument to show how many people in Europe Germany is killing with its decision to displace nuclear energy with coal. At 80% capacity utilization the 62.6 GW of now largely shut nuclear plants would be producing if the Germans hadn't decided to kill people by shutting them down would be 62.6 GW * 0.8 = 50 GW rounded to the nearest integer.
There are probably thousands of references in the scientific literature to the estimation of mortality per TWh of electricity. I'm not going to waste precious time to confront another issue of bad thinking of the type that routinely presents itself by listing a ton of them, but am going to go with a publication in the Lancet family of journals, since these deal with public health and medicine and because this one has a nice breakdown of the mortality connected with reliable energy.
It's here: Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.
Here's table 2: 
Now let's be clear, the Germans embraced the policy that was advanced here and elsewhere early in my tenure in blogging, specifically that the purpose of trashing wilderness and mining the shit out of the planet for so called "renewable energy" was to displace nuclear energy. Few advocates, if any, ever talked about replacing dangerous fossil fuels. I note that immediately on leaving office, German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder who first put this ignorant policy in place immediately took a job in Gasprom.
That Angela Merkel, a scientist, continued with this policy certainly reduces both her scientific credibility or honesty in my opinion.
How many people, referring to Table 2 did German policy kill per day?
Let's estimate:
As of this writing Germany is producing 20.7 GW of coal power, an amount of energy that German nuclear plants could have easily produced were it not for fear and ignorance on the part of anti-nukes. If this were the continuous average amount of coal energy that Germany produced over a 24 hour period, it would amount to 0.497 TWh. If we're inappropriately generous to the Germans and pretend that they aren't burning lignite but are burning only anthracite, this works out to 0.497TWh * 24.5 deaths/TWh = 12.2 deaths per day, a rate that would produce approximately 4,460 deaths per year and roughly 40,000 serious illnesses.
The corresponding numbers for replacing the same coal power level, 20.7 GW with nuclear would be close to zero (0.094 deaths/day) working out to 3 deaths/year.
Were these figures to hold in the German wind energy nirvana that all our anti-nukes, including "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes, want to applaud, German energy policy is killing about 4500 people per year, if and only if they actually burn enough coal on average to address the unreliability of their wind junk and their trivial solar junk. Note, that the Lancet figures refer most likely to continuously operated coal plants. It is very likely that the "zeroth" law of thermodynamics, the one involving the fact that all thermal systems move toward continuous temperatures when in contact, means that the Germans have to burn coal to get up steam without producing any electricity, another way unreliability kills people.
The continuous utilization of misleading "percent" talk, and the repeated nonsense statements that so called "renewable energy" is better than nothing, is pure intellectual garbage. Renewable energy, as demonstrated in the above crude calculations is worse than something that "something" the Germans had in their portfolio but closed in a fit of lying, nuclear energy.
As for stupid remarks about how long it takes to build a nuclear plant, I note with contempt that the Germans shut existing nuclear plants, killing people in the process. The Chinese have no problem turning out nuclear plants, and in another time, before the rise of ignorance on the part of people who may be metaphorically compared to arsonists complaining about forest fires, the United States built more than 100 nuclear reactors in a period of about 25 years while providing the lowest cost electricity in the world.
It's clear that the ignorance of anti-nukes, including "I'm not an anti-nuke anti-nukes" depends wholly on selective attention. I've personally lived through decades of "100% renewable energy" statements by year such and such. They were all garbage thinking then, and the remain so today.
Ignorance kills.
Have a nice weekend.
They're only 178% worse than France in "percent talk."
Great. They're still burning coal and dumping the waste in the planetary atmosphere because they shut perfectly operable nuclear plants.
It's time, I'd guess, for all the "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes to start cheering about how wind energy will save the world by assuming that every day in Germany will be like today.
The Germans are producing "only" 7.1 GW of power from coal, probably lignite because that's the fuel for which Germans tear the shit out of their country to get.
It's time to call up the Lancet figures for deaths caused by various forms of reliable energy.
Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.
Here's table 2:
At 32.6 deaths per GWh for lignite, the German nuclear phase out would "only" be killing 5.6 people per day if the wind kept blowing like today, which annualizes out to "only" around 2000 deaths per year; for hard coal, at 24.5 deaths per GWh, "only" around 1500 deaths per year annualized. Of course, as noted elsewhere during the recent weeks of Dunkelflaute, the death rate was much higher, but let's all think happy thoughts and happily dream of happy slaves digging cobalt for batteries to make all those Germans "green."
To produce 7.1 GW of "too dangerous" nuclear power, the death rate according to the Lancet figures, our German friends would have led to the deaths on average of 0.089 Europeans per day, annualized out to an average of 3.2 deaths per year.
But, you know those happy Germans, they've declared with a certainty worthy of a Donald Trump that nuclear energy, as opposed to lignite, is "too dangerous."
Climate change isn't "too dangerous" in Germany it appears.
For the last twenty years here I've been hearing how wonderful so called "renewable energy" is, especially from people who want to tell me all about Three Mile Island and insurance policies, Three Mile Island being the reactor that then President Jimmy Carter visited during the accident there 42 years ago, 25 years after he went directly into a melted core at the NRX reactor in Ontario. (It will kill him someday, I'm sure.) People love to talk about Three Mile Island. And Chernobyl. And Fukushima. They don't give a fuck about how many people die every damned day from air pollution not limited to climate change while we all wait in Godotian expectation for the grand "renewable energy" nirvana that didn't come, isn't here, and won't come.
So called "renewable energy" was never about climate change though, was it? We spent over 3.2 trillion dollars on this temporary future electronic waste between 2004 and 2019 to obtain the following result for carbon dioxide concentrations in the planetary atmosphere:
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 416.89 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 393.28 ppm
Last updated: February 7, 2022
Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory Weekly Data (Accessed 2/7/22)
That 10 year increase, 25.91 ppm higher than ten years ago is the third highest recorded out of 1,147 data points going back 21 years. The 52 week running average of these figures for 10 year increases has now reached 24.65 ppm/10 years, 2.46 ppm/year. For the week beginning January 1, 2000, the same figure was 15.26 ppm/10 years, 1.53 ppm/year.
You got to love that "not too dangerous" so called "renewable energy," in the days of the celebration of the lie.
Thanks for checking in to let me know the spectacular results of Germany reducing the number of people it kills each day by burning coal to "only" 40% (in percent talk) of the number of people it was killing each day of Dunkelflaute over the last two weeks.
I'm sure everyone is very impressed. I know I am. How I'm impressed is for other people to guess. I know how I take it.
Congratulations all around.
