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.
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