I don't want you to feel gaslighted, but you are objectively very lazy and have an opinion without checking any data. This Reuters article doesn't deal with it, but with a short term situation in the summer. You probably didn't even read past the headline. If you had, you probably would've noticed this quote: "Since Destatis started compiling statistics in 1990, 2022 will likely be the first that Germany will be a net exporter of electricity to France, not the other way round, it said.". Thus it's easy to figure out the uptick in coal in the summer of last year in Germany has very much to do with the fact that half of France's nuclear plants were offline at that point, half of those because of unplanned maintenance. The dirty coal uptick was used to keep the lights on in France. Oops.
Nuclear shutdowns started in Germany in 2011. It should be easy to see that coal went down significantly since then and is at a historic low. Which brings me back to my original point:
Renewables have been pushed for 20 years and have started to accelerate only 10 years ago, yet they are already displacing fossil fuels in many countries.
And then we will look into Germany's CO2 per kWh and it is one of the dirtiest in Europe. That's probably because they have so much renewables. Or so little.
Germany went up last two years, but have otherwise been on a steady decline along with the rest of the continent. In 2011 Germany was at 473 g CO2 per kWh of electricity. In 2022 this was down to 386 g CO2/kWh but went down to 333 g CO2 / kWh in 2020.
I will leave it to you to figure out if there was any world event going on in 2020 which would have made it particularly low (i.e. allowed renewables to take up a greater portion of the electricity production), as well as in 2022 which could make it particularly high.
Here is the official data for Germany for every year in the past several decades https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38...
The bottom three are:
black coal in magenta
nuclear in gray
brown coal in brown
Nuclear shutdowns started in Germany in 2011. It should be easy to see that coal went down significantly since then and is at a historic low. Which brings me back to my original point:
Renewables have been pushed for 20 years and have started to accelerate only 10 years ago, yet they are already displacing fossil fuels in many countries.