After Germany last year committed to closing its nuclear reactors, it’s relying more on coal and importing power from neighbors that use nuclear energy.
When the German government shut down half the country’s nuclear reactors after the Fukushima disaster in Japan, followed two months later by a pledge to abandon nuclear power within a decade, environmentalists cheered.
A year later, however, criticism of the nuclear shutdown is emerging from a surprising source: some of the very activists who pushed for the phaseout.
They say poor planning of the shutdown and political opportunism by the government have actually worsened the toll on the environment in Germany, and Europe, at least in the short term.
To make up for the lost nuclear power, which supplied 22% of Germany’s electricity before the phaseout began, the country has increased its reliance on brown coal, a particularly high emitter of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and a major contributor to global warming. Brown coal now supplies 25% of Germany’s electricity, up from 23% a year ago.
Previously a net exporter of electricity, Germany now imports as much electricity as it sells abroad. Removing so much German electricity from the market has benefited power companies in neighboring countries that rely heavily on coal and nuclear power, thereby undermining Germany’s environmental goals and its nuclear safety concerns.
I must have missed the win in the action of the German government. They shut down zero greenhouse gas generation of electricity on their own soil and import electricity at a higher cost from folks who generate electricity with coal. That logic is so tortured that even Orwell would have trouble with it.
Gotta watch for those tsunamis in Germany.
The only tsunami to hit will be the reaction of Germans to unnecessarily higher electricity bills when they drop on the mat. The only thing that hasn’t dropped in that country is the penny.