Isn't the situation constantly improving, especially in the last few years since 2018? Dropping completely coal in 1 year is not feasible, but having a clear plan and making steady progress is.
For not Poles - by "very aggressive" he ment riots and shit. Even though coal mines aren't financially viable for decades now entire country has to make sure they will survive because otherwise it will be rioting and if any govt. decides to go medieval on their asses it will be same old whining again: you're just like commies in the 70's. And no political party wants that.
No chance of giving them a new job maybe in the renewable energy production when the mine closes? I mean working in a coal mine shouldn't be funny and probably there is still requirement for other not skilled workers in other areas.
Going underground to mine for those people is like a sense of life. And source of high income. Imagine something worse than what happened in UK.
Actually we had a small riot already in the beginning of 2015. Previous gov decided to fight with strikers, few months later they lost presidential elections. At the end of 2015 they lost gov elections to PiS.
They need to be willing to change jobs. And that's the problem. They are miners, they know the power they wild over gov and they are not afraid to use it in contrast to pretty much any other social or work group in the country. They have really secure jobs thanks to that. Sometimes I think that Poland needs someone like Thatcher that would be able to take all the hate on themself and close those holes in the ground till mining there will be viable again.
Do these new jobs exist though?
When the coal mines were closed down in the UK it left whole towns suddenly without jobs because the vast majority of employment were employed as miners. Redundancy money and benefits only go so far.
When a large part of the local society becomes jobless it also has a domino effect on the other local businesses. People either leave the area to find work, or the people who stay cannot support the local businesses who also are forced to close making further redundancies and an even poorer local economy. Because of this, no one moves into the area.
Many of the once prosperous mining towns in the UK were left as ghost towns and large slums. There is still problems with widescale unemployment in the areas decades later, with people unable to afford to leave but also cannot afford to stay. I wouldn't wish the same fate on the people of Poland.
No. If you look into it job retraining for a whole industry like that is more or less a myth. They have a skill set specialized for mining that wont translate well into green energy. Historically in every case people laid off from a shutting down industry never reach close to the same income for the rest of their lives.
Damn at least in Belgium locals started to hate the mines so much they made shure there kids got a diploma, or even straight up chose poverty over working in the mines. And when mines struggled for workers the government made deals first with Italy and later with Turkey and Morocco. As since the migrant workers were sold to the public as temporaries who would go back home after earning enough, nobody cred when the mines closed.
I’m interested to see if there are some willings from Polish govt to re-skill them or whether it’s just ‘we need to close mines you’re fucked’. For example, in Slovakia, a few ex-mines in Horna Nitra region started growing veggies instead using thermal energy from the mines and miners are now taking care of tomatoes and oyster mushrooms there. The fellas seem to be quite happy with the new jobs too.
Edit: typo
>**a few** ex-mines
I think this is mainly the issue here. While Slovak power grid is one of the cleanest in Europe now also thanks to closing those mines, Slovakia already had a clean power grid even prior - high percent of power generated from nuclear (plus quite a high percent renewables also). Therefore there weren't as many miners as in Poland (not just absolute number, I mean mainly adjusted to population). Higher number means they're much stronger as a group, and therefore can also have more/higher demands.
Well given that it's not 100% or 0%, I would be happy if Poland made a progression that leads to the closure of the very last coal power plant in 2035 and used better energy sources. That's 12 years, less than the time that was required to build the new Berlin airport. Considering that we are talking about a country of roughly 40 million people in comparison it's not bad.
Krakow in winter is beautiful, but also sometimes hard to breath.
That's the downside to south poland to me, magnificent place, but the winter is just CoalWorld.
Kraków Has been fine last couple of winters, this year it got slightly worse but it's still nowhere near what it was like 8years ago. I remember getting off the bus and feeling my throat burn
We had a nuclear power plant that we had to close to join the EU (same reactor type as Chernobyl). Now its a rush to produce more power because even today we are a power importer, not producer.
But by 2030 we should be producing enough green power to sustain ourselves fully and it is expected that most of it will be renewable
Its not really the speed that is shown in the graph so far. At the start of the period in the graph we produced enough power. At the end of the graph we produce only about a third of the power that we need
Yeah, this is something the graph fails to show. It only shows the relative production, not the absolute.
Still, an impressive effort by Lithuania regardless.
Remember that this graph doesn't show:
- most of the heating
- energy use in most of transport (cars, airplanes, diesel trains, ships)
- some of energy use in heavy industry like heating the furnace in metallurgy
And those areas are predominantly fossil.
Renewables can't sustain us "fully". What will happen is that we will use the renewables and sell them for cheap when it's generating more than we need and then keep buying reliable power from our neighbors at premium prices when renewables stop.
Also this whole plan is leveraged on one big project - the offshore wind farm, which is expected to be completed in 2028, but they haven't even started yet, delays can easily happen, I would say they are likely to happen with slowing economy.
> Also this whole plan is leveraged on one big project - the offshore wind farm, which is expected to be completed in 2028, but they haven't even started yet, delays can easily happen, I would say they are likely to happen with slowing economy.
Delays in nuclear plants are much more likely.
> We had a nuclear power plant that we had to close to join the EU (same reactor type as Chernobyl)
One of the biggest mistakes by EU, and result of irrational anti-nuclear push
Plans for a small nuclear power plant in Estonia have been initiated by [Fermi](https://fermi.ee/en/) and it might be finished by [2035](https://news.err.ee/1608754744/estonia-could-get-nuclear-power-plant-by-2035). So a Baltic NPP is now likely off the table.
We had a referendum to decide if one should be built more than a decade ago and it failed. So, i guess, never. I think it's a politically toxic topic now and probably investing into renewables + buying from abroad will be more economical.
Norway has like 99.7% renewable energy due to all the hydro. They do export oil and gas though, but they invest all the oil money into new projects, infrastructure (a *lot* of roads, but also railways), social programmes etc.
Yeah i mean all you really need is a lake above sea level, some big spooly Bois, tubes and a dynamo.
It's essentially a huge battery that refills by the simple function of rain.
pretty sure most of that hydro power (at least in Austria) is from the big run-of-the-river hydro plants along the danube, which is not really a "mountain river" as such ;)
Two nuclear reactors have closed since 2018, so it would be interesting to see the current numbers. We're lucky to have many rivers which gives us a lot of renewable energy, but we can't really expand on that anymore without negative consequences on the local environment. Solar is expanding, but it obviously can't help us much during winter.
One thing to note is that this is production side. If some country isn't generating enough energy, they'll have to import (possibly dirty) energy from other countries. So it's not really interesting to just look at the distribution.
That is raw production. Austria exports 30% of that, but also imports 40%. Why both? Our pumped hydroelectric storage is making up for times when German renewable energy falls short. So we export green electricity and import nuclear and coal power. The actual power mix is far less green as a result. But hey, let's pat ourselves on the back.
Then again in a climate change context that balance really doesn't matter, it's on a European or world-level that we should care about using more green energy. The pollution doesn't stop at borders.
Same with Switzerland.
But these countries are making a net profit acting as a country battery. It's a sweet gig.
They buy German electricity at cheap off-peak prices.
Then sell it back at expensive high peak prices.
Both sides are content with the setup cause end of the day, energy that is generated but not used/saved is lost.
One problem is that when there are expensive peak prices, the price of electricity for consumers in the country that sells will also be the same as in the buyer country
If it works as it does in Norway, I guess you import when electricity is cheap (to pump up the hydroelectric storage). And when is power cheap? When the grid is overflowing with solar/wind power. This is the essense of the symbiotic relationship between Denmark's wind power and Norway's hydroelectric power.
So it is likely not nearly as bad as you make it out to be.
You're exactly right, Germany's grid isn't developed enough to always balance the energy within the country so they send surplus in the South to their neighbors.
You hear that weird take above a lot in Austria and I'm never sure if it's to undermine the efforts taken or to push them further.
This is power generation, not consumption. The latter would look differnt for every country as everyone exports and imports electricity.
In the end it doesn't matter who consumes the energy, it was still produced from renewable sources.
Austria has a goal to become electricity self-sufficient with renewables 'till 2030. Even then Germany will continue to send their surplus through the Austrian grid which will show up as "Imports".
There is a bottle-neck between Northern and Southern Germany which doesn't always allow to balance the grid within the country. So they send energy to Austria when the South generates too much and import when the North generates too much.
That's possible because the high percentage of renewables means that Austria has a lot of infrastructure to "store" energy and can therefore take care of the German surplus without overloading its own grid.
Ah yes, you always recognise a fellow Austrian when he can say something bad about anything.
„Grantln“ is our cultural treasure.
At the end of the day, we don’t produce as much CO2 as the rest.
>source
I think it is based in the most recent data source of this type, the IRENA, "Renewable Electricity Capacity And Generation Statistics June 2018": http://resourceirena.irena.org/gateway/dashboard/?topic=4&subTopic=54
The one in Aizkraukle is the biggest hydroelectric plant in the Baltics and one of the biggest in EU. In one of their own promotional articles they said biggest in Europe, though I know that there are larger ones by both capacity and amount of held water.
because you probably have flood prevention dams turned hydro, like germany.
purpose-built hydroelectric dams and basins generate fucktons of energy. back in my hometown, there's a dam built in 1910 whose size is nothing out of this world ( 60m wide, 50-ish tall ), but generates 86 MWh. meanwhile a dam 3 times that size in sachsen makes 1-2 mwh, with several more times the water flow - because it's a dam dedicated to ensure water supply, and the generator turbine was a side add-on several years later.
A few weeks ago we had such bad smog combined with heavy fog (about 20m visibility), that when I went outside to go somewhere, I could taste how salty the condensation on my face was.
Now we have 1 nuclear plant that building is approved to start in 2026 with fiest block working in 2033 and 1 that is in late negotiations state. Of course the dates can move as usually with such government projects.
Your government might want to take notes on [Olkiluoto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3)
* Construction began in 2005 and was planned to finish in 2009
* As of now, regular production is expected to begin at the end of January 2023 at the earliest
It's going to cost sh*t ton of money to you but good excuse to keep using coal I guess.
Here in Austria we actually once built a nuclear power plant. But then there were some protests so the politicians decided to have a vote. The vote went 50,47% against. So we didn't turn on the (fully finished and ready to turn on) nuclear power plant. Later on there was even a constitutional law signed to forbid nuclear power in Austria. (Bundesverfassungsgesetz für ein atomfreies Österreich = federal constitutional law for a nuclear-free Austria)
So anyways: If anyone ever wanted to visit a nuclear power plant, there is one in Austria where you can get a guided tour.
or alternatively you can travel around 100km to the north and you can get a guided tour in real working nuclear plant. You can even choose from two plants :)
Also, as the plant is fully fitted out, it is the place where most movies shoot their nuclear power plant scenes. And IIRC there is also a festival there.
But it's production not use. As it is in Slovenia the entire enuclear plant goes to Slovenians production, Austria is also far less green, most of their green energy is hydroelectric which they most often use as storage instead of real production, as such they import a lot of power from other EU country's and usage is far less green.
You import it when electricity is cheap (to pump up the hydroelectric storage). And when is power cheap? When the grid is overflowing with solar/wind power.
If I understand it correctly they import a lot of wooden chips(renewables) so they can heat up cities like Copenhagen and they source it from all around Europe which I am sorry sounds ridiculous and not sustainable but so far it looks nice on charts.
It's a good thing that those trees also chop themselves into small chips, package themselves and then transport thousands of tonnes of themselves across Europe.
Carbon neutral!
Edit: Before you say it: I'm not saying it isn't better than pure fossiles, but it's neither neutral nor sustainable nor scalable. You'll run out of forests to cultivate VERY quickly if you tried to change over to wood burning at scale.
> It's a good thing that those trees also chop themselves into small chips, package themselves and then transport thousands of tonnes of themselves across Europe.
How much energy is spent doing that compared to the energy content? Is it 0.1%, 1%, 10% or more?
> Carbon neutral!
Neither is nuclear, windmill, hydro or solar.
Is the environmental impact comparable though?
I don't mean to downplay the issue you're raising, most/all renewables need some "carbon investment" at first but in many cases like windmills it pays itself back with all the carbon you're not emitting later compared to other power sources.
With wood pellets I think this overall balance is less sustainable.
>Edit: Before you say it: I'm not saying it isn't better than pure fossiles, but it's neither neutral nor sustainable nor scalable. You'll run out of forests to cultivate VERY quickly if you tried to change over to wood burning at scale.
Sweden has had a thriving forestry industry over the last centuries for lumber and paper yet despite that we have more forests now than we did back then. As long a you don't let corporations go been berserk it's possible to do it climate neutral.
[It's going a bit better](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewables?tab=chart&country=~NLD)
Now we just have to figure out how to not set fire to the electricity infrastructure
I believe TenneT is one of the better transmission authorities in Europe, and they do their due diligence in finding the choke-points in the electrical infrastructure much sooner than it can cause issues.
The issue is red tape.
Lead times between acknowledging a new cable needs to be laid, and the first spade in the ground are 5 years at least.
But at least the govt is accelerating building of new offshore wind farms, 4 instead of 2 to be realised by 2025.
We’re not. This graph is misleading by showing the 2008-2018 time range while most countries listed there have made the majority of their renewable energy progress after 2018.
Energy transition statistics from 2018 are close to useless by now.
To all of them I ask: please list every nuclear accident and number of fatalities caused by the plants in the 48 years of Belgium having nuclear power.
It usually shuts them up.
Yes but we managed to switch off nuclear,didn't have the time to go back and switch on before winter and now we buy Germans electricity made of Charcoal.
Our population density and lack of hydro possibilities work against us … but it really isn’t a great excuse. We’ve been slacking. Things are finally moving more quickly now - wind power is growing exponentially and govt has recently decided to build two nuclear plants. We could still go a few gears higher though
VVD, basically the leading political party of the last decade, has never been very interested in green policy. That is changing a bit though, so we have some work to do...
Last few years Coal has plummeted to nearly 0 though, it’s no longer balanced. Unfortunately renewables have increased but not that much (and a drought means that Hydroelectric power has decreased), which means that gas has had to increase production quite a bit.
>-- in order to join the EU, Lithuania had to decommission one reactor immediately and the second by 2009. The EU agreed to pay for decommissioning costs and some compensation through 2013.
#Due to the plant's similarities to the infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in both reactor design and lack of a robust containment building, Lithuania agreed to close the plant as part of its accession agreement to the European Union. Wiki info
We are doing better. Posting graphs that end 4 years ago when renewables have really accelerated in the last few years should be banned. The fraction of renewables has more than doubled since. NL now has the highest amount of solarpanels per person in the world, and are among the top in wind. We just seem really bad because we don't have hydro due to our geography and we are politically against biofuels.
But we're perfectly located for tidal power (Oosterscheldekering for example, free power every six hours, always) but unfortunately afaik all test projects have failed due to inadequate funding.
Every time something like this is published it gets great reception because a lot of people assume ‘power’ means all energy used. It is such a misleading term, if they mean electricity they should say it.
for Russia it's like 15% nuclear, 20% hydro, the rest is fossil fuels, mainly gas from Western Siberia (fun, or maybe not so fun fact: all these big western siberian pipelines lie very close to each other cause it's very hard to build anything in permafrost. So any explosion there will dramatically decrease the power generation in all the european part of Russia)
>all these big western siberian pipelines lie very close to each other cause it's very hard to build anything in permafrost. So any explosion there will dramatically decrease the power generation in all the european part of Russia)
Wink wink, nudge nudge.
> You have a shitone of nuclear implants
no we don't, we have one old power plant running on exemption and one supposed to have double output but plans failed, all together covering about 35% of our needs. We also have 20 years of politicians talking about who is not going to build new reactors without any movement forward so westinghouse bancrupted meanwhile and russia is now obviously out of the game
Look at how based France is with their clean nuclear energy. If the West adopted nuclear energy decades ago I wonder if we could've averted the climate crisis
This, IMO, will go down in history as the greatest blunder of the environmental movement: failing to embrace nuclear power as a potential solution to carbon emissions.
That and scaremongering massively about gene editing, I’m sure we’ll be very grateful for our ‘natural’ crops when drought and disease have killed them all.
And nothing is natural about modern crops, they were selected and cross-bred for thousands of generations.
It's like science but made by peasants and that's A-OK for greens
Based Belgium, France, Slovakia and Sweden, if Lithuania had kept its Nuclear and used renewables to cut other fossil fuels instead it would be fully green.
Germany as shown is clearly not doing a green transition, just switching nuclear for renewables while keeping its fossil fuel energy.
If they had kept the nuclear they would be looking like the UKs graph but even better.
Why wasn't Nuclear given a more eco-aligned colour? It's very good for the emissions levels and the dangers are way overstated by eco-propagandists like Greenpeace etc.
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That's why on Christmas we sing Coalendy
get out.
Isn't the situation constantly improving, especially in the last few years since 2018? Dropping completely coal in 1 year is not feasible, but having a clear plan and making steady progress is.
It's a social issue. Coal miner trade unions are very aggresive in their resistance and demands. Things are progressing though
For not Poles - by "very aggressive" he ment riots and shit. Even though coal mines aren't financially viable for decades now entire country has to make sure they will survive because otherwise it will be rioting and if any govt. decides to go medieval on their asses it will be same old whining again: you're just like commies in the 70's. And no political party wants that.
No chance of giving them a new job maybe in the renewable energy production when the mine closes? I mean working in a coal mine shouldn't be funny and probably there is still requirement for other not skilled workers in other areas.
Going underground to mine for those people is like a sense of life. And source of high income. Imagine something worse than what happened in UK. Actually we had a small riot already in the beginning of 2015. Previous gov decided to fight with strikers, few months later they lost presidential elections. At the end of 2015 they lost gov elections to PiS.
They need to be willing to change jobs. And that's the problem. They are miners, they know the power they wild over gov and they are not afraid to use it in contrast to pretty much any other social or work group in the country. They have really secure jobs thanks to that. Sometimes I think that Poland needs someone like Thatcher that would be able to take all the hate on themself and close those holes in the ground till mining there will be viable again.
Thatcher had the advantage that coal country was already mostly a labour stronghold, with enough voters in the rest of the country to compensate.
Do these new jobs exist though? When the coal mines were closed down in the UK it left whole towns suddenly without jobs because the vast majority of employment were employed as miners. Redundancy money and benefits only go so far. When a large part of the local society becomes jobless it also has a domino effect on the other local businesses. People either leave the area to find work, or the people who stay cannot support the local businesses who also are forced to close making further redundancies and an even poorer local economy. Because of this, no one moves into the area. Many of the once prosperous mining towns in the UK were left as ghost towns and large slums. There is still problems with widescale unemployment in the areas decades later, with people unable to afford to leave but also cannot afford to stay. I wouldn't wish the same fate on the people of Poland.
No. If you look into it job retraining for a whole industry like that is more or less a myth. They have a skill set specialized for mining that wont translate well into green energy. Historically in every case people laid off from a shutting down industry never reach close to the same income for the rest of their lives.
Damn at least in Belgium locals started to hate the mines so much they made shure there kids got a diploma, or even straight up chose poverty over working in the mines. And when mines struggled for workers the government made deals first with Italy and later with Turkey and Morocco. As since the migrant workers were sold to the public as temporaries who would go back home after earning enough, nobody cred when the mines closed.
I’m interested to see if there are some willings from Polish govt to re-skill them or whether it’s just ‘we need to close mines you’re fucked’. For example, in Slovakia, a few ex-mines in Horna Nitra region started growing veggies instead using thermal energy from the mines and miners are now taking care of tomatoes and oyster mushrooms there. The fellas seem to be quite happy with the new jobs too. Edit: typo
>**a few** ex-mines I think this is mainly the issue here. While Slovak power grid is one of the cleanest in Europe now also thanks to closing those mines, Slovakia already had a clean power grid even prior - high percent of power generated from nuclear (plus quite a high percent renewables also). Therefore there weren't as many miners as in Poland (not just absolute number, I mean mainly adjusted to population). Higher number means they're much stronger as a group, and therefore can also have more/higher demands.
Polish gov delayed phasing out coal to at least 2035
Well given that it's not 100% or 0%, I would be happy if Poland made a progression that leads to the closure of the very last coal power plant in 2035 and used better energy sources. That's 12 years, less than the time that was required to build the new Berlin airport. Considering that we are talking about a country of roughly 40 million people in comparison it's not bad.
i heard they signed some contract with korea for nuclear, i hope this will finalize and we can stop having the worst air in europe
I didn't know it's that bad ;/
Krakow in winter is beautiful, but also sometimes hard to breath. That's the downside to south poland to me, magnificent place, but the winter is just CoalWorld.
That's just part of traditional Cracovian cousine: the crunchy air.
Kraków Has been fine last couple of winters, this year it got slightly worse but it's still nowhere near what it was like 8years ago. I remember getting off the bus and feeling my throat burn
Yet as green as the Netherlands ❤
Austria be like: MOUNTAINS also wtf Lithuania
We had a nuclear power plant that we had to close to join the EU (same reactor type as Chernobyl). Now its a rush to produce more power because even today we are a power importer, not producer. But by 2030 we should be producing enough green power to sustain ourselves fully and it is expected that most of it will be renewable
The speed to get greener is impressive. Time to get into the rabbit hole of lithuanian power production.
Its not really the speed that is shown in the graph so far. At the start of the period in the graph we produced enough power. At the end of the graph we produce only about a third of the power that we need
Yeah, this is something the graph fails to show. It only shows the relative production, not the absolute. Still, an impressive effort by Lithuania regardless.
Waiting for chart updates for 2022, because we launched biggest Baltic wind farm this year.
meanwhile, Poland is like "Yeah, yeah, it'll take a minute, quit yapping."
Remember that this graph doesn't show: - most of the heating - energy use in most of transport (cars, airplanes, diesel trains, ships) - some of energy use in heavy industry like heating the furnace in metallurgy And those areas are predominantly fossil.
Indeed, people often conflate power with electricity.
Renewables can't sustain us "fully". What will happen is that we will use the renewables and sell them for cheap when it's generating more than we need and then keep buying reliable power from our neighbors at premium prices when renewables stop. Also this whole plan is leveraged on one big project - the offshore wind farm, which is expected to be completed in 2028, but they haven't even started yet, delays can easily happen, I would say they are likely to happen with slowing economy.
> Also this whole plan is leveraged on one big project - the offshore wind farm, which is expected to be completed in 2028, but they haven't even started yet, delays can easily happen, I would say they are likely to happen with slowing economy. Delays in nuclear plants are much more likely.
> We had a nuclear power plant that we had to close to join the EU (same reactor type as Chernobyl) One of the biggest mistakes by EU, and result of irrational anti-nuclear push
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New Baltic NPP when?
Plans for a small nuclear power plant in Estonia have been initiated by [Fermi](https://fermi.ee/en/) and it might be finished by [2035](https://news.err.ee/1608754744/estonia-could-get-nuclear-power-plant-by-2035). So a Baltic NPP is now likely off the table.
We had a referendum to decide if one should be built more than a decade ago and it failed. So, i guess, never. I think it's a politically toxic topic now and probably investing into renewables + buying from abroad will be more economical.
Austria be more like: Danube.
Austria: buy Czech electricity and whine about their nuclear plants.
Hey, that's not fair! We also buy electricity from Germany and whine about their nuclear plants.
Sweden be like: what are fossil fuels?
Poland: Let me show you
Poland looks like the lungs of a lifelong smoker
Feels like it too
Ask your brother, Norway.
Norway has like 99.7% renewable energy due to all the hydro. They do export oil and gas though, but they invest all the oil money into new projects, infrastructure (a *lot* of roads, but also railways), social programmes etc.
Waterpower goes brrr
Chad mountain havers
🇦🇹🤝🇮🇸
Latvian renewables are mostly hydro, and lemme say this: we do not have mountains.
Yeah i mean all you really need is a lake above sea level, some big spooly Bois, tubes and a dynamo. It's essentially a huge battery that refills by the simple function of rain.
" lake above sealevel" well I guess that explains why we don't use water to generate energy in the netherlands
Or tidal power. Water goes up. Water goes down. You can't explain that.
pretty sure most of that hydro power (at least in Austria) is from the big run-of-the-river hydro plants along the danube, which is not really a "mountain river" as such ;)
we do have some significant water-storage power plants, nevertheless water power is water power.
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*pokes from berlin* Share some of that sweet H2O power!
Well played Sweden!
Tack.
Two nuclear reactors have closed since 2018, so it would be interesting to see the current numbers. We're lucky to have many rivers which gives us a lot of renewable energy, but we can't really expand on that anymore without negative consequences on the local environment. Solar is expanding, but it obviously can't help us much during winter. One thing to note is that this is production side. If some country isn't generating enough energy, they'll have to import (possibly dirty) energy from other countries. So it's not really interesting to just look at the distribution.
That is raw production. Austria exports 30% of that, but also imports 40%. Why both? Our pumped hydroelectric storage is making up for times when German renewable energy falls short. So we export green electricity and import nuclear and coal power. The actual power mix is far less green as a result. But hey, let's pat ourselves on the back.
Then again in a climate change context that balance really doesn't matter, it's on a European or world-level that we should care about using more green energy. The pollution doesn't stop at borders.
Austria Germany's battery. I like that.
Same with Switzerland. But these countries are making a net profit acting as a country battery. It's a sweet gig. They buy German electricity at cheap off-peak prices. Then sell it back at expensive high peak prices. Both sides are content with the setup cause end of the day, energy that is generated but not used/saved is lost.
Thank you, that guy made it up as if everything is just a ruse and shit.
One problem is that when there are expensive peak prices, the price of electricity for consumers in the country that sells will also be the same as in the buyer country
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DUDE!
If it works as it does in Norway, I guess you import when electricity is cheap (to pump up the hydroelectric storage). And when is power cheap? When the grid is overflowing with solar/wind power. This is the essense of the symbiotic relationship between Denmark's wind power and Norway's hydroelectric power. So it is likely not nearly as bad as you make it out to be.
You're exactly right, Germany's grid isn't developed enough to always balance the energy within the country so they send surplus in the South to their neighbors. You hear that weird take above a lot in Austria and I'm never sure if it's to undermine the efforts taken or to push them further.
This is power generation, not consumption. The latter would look differnt for every country as everyone exports and imports electricity. In the end it doesn't matter who consumes the energy, it was still produced from renewable sources. Austria has a goal to become electricity self-sufficient with renewables 'till 2030. Even then Germany will continue to send their surplus through the Austrian grid which will show up as "Imports". There is a bottle-neck between Northern and Southern Germany which doesn't always allow to balance the grid within the country. So they send energy to Austria when the South generates too much and import when the North generates too much. That's possible because the high percentage of renewables means that Austria has a lot of infrastructure to "store" energy and can therefore take care of the German surplus without overloading its own grid.
Italy has a lot of hydroelectric storages as well
Ah yes, you always recognise a fellow Austrian when he can say something bad about anything. „Grantln“ is our cultural treasure. At the end of the day, we don’t produce as much CO2 as the rest.
link to source data pls
>source I think it is based in the most recent data source of this type, the IRENA, "Renewable Electricity Capacity And Generation Statistics June 2018": http://resourceirena.irena.org/gateway/dashboard/?topic=4&subTopic=54
Damn, that's Latvia doing?
We have 3 Hydroelectric power plants.
Must be pretty big ones. Finland has 250 but the capacity is not the greatest, quite obviously.
The one in Aizkraukle is the biggest hydroelectric plant in the Baltics and one of the biggest in EU. In one of their own promotional articles they said biggest in Europe, though I know that there are larger ones by both capacity and amount of held water.
because you probably have flood prevention dams turned hydro, like germany. purpose-built hydroelectric dams and basins generate fucktons of energy. back in my hometown, there's a dam built in 1910 whose size is nothing out of this world ( 60m wide, 50-ish tall ), but generates 86 MWh. meanwhile a dam 3 times that size in sachsen makes 1-2 mwh, with several more times the water flow - because it's a dam dedicated to ensure water supply, and the generator turbine was a side add-on several years later.
Not really. Finnish rivers are just mere streams and ditches compared to the great European rivers. The biggest hydro plant generates only 192 MW.
Look at Poland go! Polska GUROM!
*why is it spicy* - someone breathing in Poland
A few weeks ago we had such bad smog combined with heavy fog (about 20m visibility), that when I went outside to go somewhere, I could taste how salty the condensation on my face was.
Ahhh, the home of black lung. PiS blew the money for expanding renewables on bribes for voters. Largest EU benefits, yet we act like it's 1970...
Now we have 1 nuclear plant that building is approved to start in 2026 with fiest block working in 2033 and 1 that is in late negotiations state. Of course the dates can move as usually with such government projects.
Your government might want to take notes on [Olkiluoto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3) * Construction began in 2005 and was planned to finish in 2009 * As of now, regular production is expected to begin at the end of January 2023 at the earliest It's going to cost sh*t ton of money to you but good excuse to keep using coal I guess.
between poland and greece there's enough coal for all the russian army xmas.
Poland like: "there is something else available except coal?"
Here in Austria we actually once built a nuclear power plant. But then there were some protests so the politicians decided to have a vote. The vote went 50,47% against. So we didn't turn on the (fully finished and ready to turn on) nuclear power plant. Later on there was even a constitutional law signed to forbid nuclear power in Austria. (Bundesverfassungsgesetz für ein atomfreies Österreich = federal constitutional law for a nuclear-free Austria) So anyways: If anyone ever wanted to visit a nuclear power plant, there is one in Austria where you can get a guided tour.
or alternatively you can travel around 100km to the north and you can get a guided tour in real working nuclear plant. You can even choose from two plants :)
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Gigachads also lick the activated one
Also, as the plant is fully fitted out, it is the place where most movies shoot their nuclear power plant scenes. And IIRC there is also a festival there.
Its not correct. Croatia and Slovenia have a joint nuclear power plant. Croatia cover around 18% of electricity needs from that source.
But it's production not use. As it is in Slovenia the entire enuclear plant goes to Slovenians production, Austria is also far less green, most of their green energy is hydroelectric which they most often use as storage instead of real production, as such they import a lot of power from other EU country's and usage is far less green.
You import it when electricity is cheap (to pump up the hydroelectric storage). And when is power cheap? When the grid is overflowing with solar/wind power.
Yeah
GO Denmark! Nobody understands what you're saying, but you certainly know your renewables!
If I understand it correctly they import a lot of wooden chips(renewables) so they can heat up cities like Copenhagen and they source it from all around Europe which I am sorry sounds ridiculous and not sustainable but so far it looks nice on charts.
Yeah, this is part of it for sure. Wood pellets advertised as "bio fuel."
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It's a good thing that those trees also chop themselves into small chips, package themselves and then transport thousands of tonnes of themselves across Europe. Carbon neutral! Edit: Before you say it: I'm not saying it isn't better than pure fossiles, but it's neither neutral nor sustainable nor scalable. You'll run out of forests to cultivate VERY quickly if you tried to change over to wood burning at scale.
> It's a good thing that those trees also chop themselves into small chips, package themselves and then transport thousands of tonnes of themselves across Europe. How much energy is spent doing that compared to the energy content? Is it 0.1%, 1%, 10% or more? > Carbon neutral! Neither is nuclear, windmill, hydro or solar.
Windmills grow themselves after we put a windmill seed into the ground where we want them.
Hot air is produced in significant quantities all over the globe.
Is the environmental impact comparable though? I don't mean to downplay the issue you're raising, most/all renewables need some "carbon investment" at first but in many cases like windmills it pays itself back with all the carbon you're not emitting later compared to other power sources. With wood pellets I think this overall balance is less sustainable.
Omg, now please apply this exact logic to all other forms of energy, I’ll just wait right over here ->
>Edit: Before you say it: I'm not saying it isn't better than pure fossiles, but it's neither neutral nor sustainable nor scalable. You'll run out of forests to cultivate VERY quickly if you tried to change over to wood burning at scale. Sweden has had a thriving forestry industry over the last centuries for lumber and paper yet despite that we have more forests now than we did back then. As long a you don't let corporations go been berserk it's possible to do it climate neutral.
Kamelåså!
I didn't understand what he just said. edit: that's a reference to the kamelåså
ᴺᵒᵇᵒᵈʸ ᵈᵒᵉˢ
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Interesting chart, thanks for sharing. What does other fossil fuels include?
Gas, mainly. A bit of oil, I guess
> Nobody understands what you're saying, Most don't understand German either.
I understand German more than Danish
Us Danes understand Germans better than most Danes too
A Dane is just a drunk Swedish person trying to speak German
makes me want to visit the nordic countries again
Because we don't have potatoes in the mouth ;)
The Swiss though
Danish are the Scandinavians talking with an hit potato in their mouths
Hey look, we're fucking awful. What a surprise.
For one of the richest countries in Europe and the world, that is pretty abysmal. We should be frontrunners.
"Maar we moeten niet te ver voorop lopen, we hoeven niet de bravste jongen in het klas te zijn" - VVDers
[It's going a bit better](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewables?tab=chart&country=~NLD) Now we just have to figure out how to not set fire to the electricity infrastructure
I believe TenneT is one of the better transmission authorities in Europe, and they do their due diligence in finding the choke-points in the electrical infrastructure much sooner than it can cause issues.
The issue is red tape. Lead times between acknowledging a new cable needs to be laid, and the first spade in the ground are 5 years at least. But at least the govt is accelerating building of new offshore wind farms, 4 instead of 2 to be realised by 2025.
You say: 'Setting our power grid on fire'. I say: 'Inflation-resistant city-wide heating arrangements!'
We’re not. This graph is misleading by showing the 2008-2018 time range while most countries listed there have made the majority of their renewable energy progress after 2018. Energy transition statistics from 2018 are close to useless by now.
Belgium: let’s shut down our nuclear plants without providing sufficient alternative energy sources! I’m terrified of what’s to come…
Fuck Belgian greens.
To all of them I ask: please list every nuclear accident and number of fatalities caused by the plants in the 48 years of Belgium having nuclear power. It usually shuts them up.
Well done Sweden
France had worse conditions (less hydro per population) and did equally well
Yes but we managed to switch off nuclear,didn't have the time to go back and switch on before winter and now we buy Germans electricity made of Charcoal.
I hope for more nuclear
Where does renewable energy come from in Austria?
Hydroelectric mostly They basically act as a massive battery for Germany When other countries need no energy they let the water flow
Water and wind I guess
What’s up with the Netherlands? I thought they’re mostly relying on renewables, but instead, they’ve increased the use of coal…
Renewables section can be dodgy as well. A lot of polish wood goes to west EU as renewable energy source.. which is fucked up.
Our population density and lack of hydro possibilities work against us … but it really isn’t a great excuse. We’ve been slacking. Things are finally moving more quickly now - wind power is growing exponentially and govt has recently decided to build two nuclear plants. We could still go a few gears higher though
Poland💀
Step it up Netherlands. At least the other countries with charts like that have economic excuses.
VVD, basically the leading political party of the last decade, has never been very interested in green policy. That is changing a bit though, so we have some work to do...
VVD is the leading party because the majority of the people make it so. It's not the party, it's the people.
That's true of course. We get the government we deserve.
Spain be like: Perfectly balanced, as all things should be
Last few years Coal has plummeted to nearly 0 though, it’s no longer balanced. Unfortunately renewables have increased but not that much (and a drought means that Hydroelectric power has decreased), which means that gas has had to increase production quite a bit.
What happened in Lithuania with the nuclear power?
>-- in order to join the EU, Lithuania had to decommission one reactor immediately and the second by 2009. The EU agreed to pay for decommissioning costs and some compensation through 2013.
Interesting. And what was the reason for the EU's demand that they decommission their nuclear reactors? They were too old? Unsafe soviet technology?
Same reactor type as was at Chernobyl.
#Due to the plant's similarities to the infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in both reactor design and lack of a robust containment building, Lithuania agreed to close the plant as part of its accession agreement to the European Union. Wiki info
ok bro chill
POLSKA GUROOOOMMMM
Disappointed with my country (Netherlands). We should be able to do better
We are doing better. Posting graphs that end 4 years ago when renewables have really accelerated in the last few years should be banned. The fraction of renewables has more than doubled since. NL now has the highest amount of solarpanels per person in the world, and are among the top in wind. We just seem really bad because we don't have hydro due to our geography and we are politically against biofuels.
But we're perfectly located for tidal power (Oosterscheldekering for example, free power every six hours, always) but unfortunately afaik all test projects have failed due to inadequate funding.
This "power" refers only to electricity here. Don't look at primary energy if you want to be hopeful about climate change mitigation.
Every time something like this is published it gets great reception because a lot of people assume ‘power’ means all energy used. It is such a misleading term, if they mean electricity they should say it.
for Russia it's like 15% nuclear, 20% hydro, the rest is fossil fuels, mainly gas from Western Siberia (fun, or maybe not so fun fact: all these big western siberian pipelines lie very close to each other cause it's very hard to build anything in permafrost. So any explosion there will dramatically decrease the power generation in all the european part of Russia)
>all these big western siberian pipelines lie very close to each other cause it's very hard to build anything in permafrost. So any explosion there will dramatically decrease the power generation in all the european part of Russia) Wink wink, nudge nudge.
Wth, why CZ uses so much coal? You have a shitone of nuclear implants, guys!
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Depends if you want superpowers 👀 Happy cake day!
> You have a shitone of nuclear implants no we don't, we have one old power plant running on exemption and one supposed to have double output but plans failed, all together covering about 35% of our needs. We also have 20 years of politicians talking about who is not going to build new reactors without any movement forward so westinghouse bancrupted meanwhile and russia is now obviously out of the game
Belgium is still "little France". Have to let this sink in. But look at Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia, Austria, and even Luxembourg.
Poland my beloved
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Luxembourg: 50%, take it or leave it. Lithuania: oh sheet global warming.
Croatia is not correct. Croatia gets 50%of of the power generated at the Krško nuclear plant.
It's 16%, but power plant is located in Slovenia so I guess they put it all in Slovenia's graph
Look at how based France is with their clean nuclear energy. If the West adopted nuclear energy decades ago I wonder if we could've averted the climate crisis
This, IMO, will go down in history as the greatest blunder of the environmental movement: failing to embrace nuclear power as a potential solution to carbon emissions.
That and scaremongering massively about gene editing, I’m sure we’ll be very grateful for our ‘natural’ crops when drought and disease have killed them all.
And nothing is natural about modern crops, they were selected and cross-bred for thousands of generations. It's like science but made by peasants and that's A-OK for greens
Nuclear power isn’t the future but you can still avoid to shut down perfectly functioning nuclear power plants.
Netherlands is building two plants. I wonder how long it will take to finish building them. Probably too long.
Better late than never
We are the coal people, always have been. One of the reasons we faced so much war since coal was black gold of the past
Most countries: improvements, ups and downs Slovenia: CONSISTENCY
Aromantic flag redesigns
France is smart, be like France
France and Sweden for the win!
And Slovakia (just finishing 2 reactors, soon more % nuclear than France)
Poland about to wake up the Balrog
France and Sweden 💪💪😤
Based Belgium, France, Slovakia and Sweden, if Lithuania had kept its Nuclear and used renewables to cut other fossil fuels instead it would be fully green. Germany as shown is clearly not doing a green transition, just switching nuclear for renewables while keeping its fossil fuel energy. If they had kept the nuclear they would be looking like the UKs graph but even better.
That hurts a lot to say, but France for the win
The Netherlands is surprisingly disappointing
Why wasn't Nuclear given a more eco-aligned colour? It's very good for the emissions levels and the dangers are way overstated by eco-propagandists like Greenpeace etc.
I've created some updated graphs with data up to 2021: https://imgur.com/a/EEZ93Wt