Cover image Nobita and The Fury Road by Bung Carol
Germany finally gets rid of all of its nuclear power plants, all for the sake of sustainable energy transition as a means against climate change. Otherwise known as nuclear phase-out, this policy is also the main instrument of Bundestag’s commitment for a clean energy future as stipulated by its Energiewende. However, is the nuclear phase-out a clear step towards a cleaner and more sustainable energy future?
Nuclear Phase-out in The Energiewende
In my previous article titled Energiewende: A Moral Problem? I have stated that Germany’s decision to get rid of their nuclear power plant as a response to the Fukushima Daiichi incident has less to do with morality and more to do with an anti-nuclear sentiment. The main reason for such a position is that as a response to the nuclear incident in Fukushima (Energiewende – BMBF, 2012), the fear-triggered position from the German government is never since sufficiently re-evaluated based on how safe the current nuclear technology would be had it been placed in the German soil with significantly less geological activity.
The stance is then gradually muddied with the push for a cleaner energy system at a national level. While it is plausible that Germany is one of the countries with the most advanced renewable energy system worldwide, pushing for a cleaner energy system while leaving out nuclear fission is a decision which requires further clarification. It is necessary to investigate how clean the German energy system is compared to her neighbour which also pushes for a clean energy system, albeit with heavy use of nuclear power. We will therefore compare the Bundestag with the Hexagon, France, as regards their energy production, energy consumption, population density, and carbon emission.
Germany’s Current Carbon Emission Compared to France
In order to know how much carbon each individual emits in the country for their energy consumption, we need to know the amount of energy produced by the country, the CO2 emissions from these different methods of energy production, the amount of energy consumed by the country, and then divide the number to each individual. As stated before, the comparison is between Germany and France.
We do not divide the national energy production to each individual per capita since the produced energy does not directly translate into consumed energy. Both Germany and France export some amount of energy to other European countries and also import some themselves. That said, the energy production inside the country also results in carbon emission along with other activities. The number of carbon emissions mentioned above comes from the energy production which is then attributed to each individual. While it is admittedly true that more detailed calculation of CO2 based on different sources of consumed energy is more representative to understand per-capita carbon emission, such calculation does not exist yet, at least on the international level. On the contrary, calculating CO2 amount from produced energy paired to individual energy consumption is still reliable in general since this rough calculation still provides answer to the question: how much carbon each individual emits for their energy consumption given the mix of primary energy production and the export-import of energy at a national scale?
The International Energy Agency notes that by 2020 – the most recent data that it has so far – Germany produced 4045.7 Terra Joules (TJ) of energy, 278.36 Million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe) of total primary energy supply, and consumed 526.7 Terawatt Hour (TwH) of electricity, all while emitting 589.99 Million tons (Mt) of CO2. The country’s population in that same year was 83.2 million people (Germany – Countries & Regions, 2021).
Translating it into individual use, each individual in Germany consumes 6,306 Kilowatt Hour (kWh) and emits 7.09 tons of CO2 throughout the year.
In comparison during the same year, France, its neighbour, is not so different in terms of the energy production, electricity consumption, and the number of population, except when it comes to the CO2 emission. The Hexagon produced 5019.1 TJ of energy, 218.28 Mtoe of total primary energy supply, consumed 450.8 TwH of electricity, all while emitting 260.94 Mt of CO2. France’s population in that year was 68.22 million people (France – Countries & Regions, 2021).
Translating it into individual use, each individual in France consumes 6,702 kWh and emits 3.08 tons of CO2 throughout the year.
Figure 1. Germany’s energy statistics from the 2021 International Energy Agency.
Figure 2. France’s energy statistics from the 2021 International Energy Agency.
We can therefore say that while the energy consumption of both countries are roughly the same, the number of emissions produced per individual for their consumed energy are different. The French population emits less than half of CO2 emitted by the German population for a roughly equal amount of energy production. But how can it be so?
Unrealistic Promise?
As stated in the first section of this article, Germany is one of the countries with the most advanced renewable energy system in the world. However, it is curious that as one of the national leaders of innovation in renewable energy, Germany is worse off than France in terms of its carbon emissions.
This situation can be explained not with the Bundestag’s ambition to further renewable innovations, but with its Energiewende whose pivotal point is to do away with nuclear fission. The 2010 Energiewende was done with an underlying assumption that the country could rely on Russian gas for an extended period of time to provide the base load of electricity in the case of no sun and/or wind. It turns out that the Russian-Ukrainian war took place in February 2022 when Germany was halfway through the nuclear phase-out. One of the consequences of this situation is the closing off of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline which delivers Russian gas to Europe (“Germany,” 2023; Wrede, 2022).
Germany needs a reliable base load to supply sufficient energy, and this comes from burning more brown coal from its own source, the Rhenish District in North-Rhine Westphalia, the Lusatian District in Brandenburg and Saxony, and the Central German District in Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. Apart from these coal mines, the country also imports some hard coals, 34% of which comes from Russia between January and October 2022 (Reuters, 2023).
Overall, there is an increase of coal burning in Germany to obtain more energy. Germany increases both its coal production and import. From 2020 to 2021 period, lignite production increased from 979,200 TJ to 1,151,368 TJ while hard coal import increased from 882,984 TJ to 1,151,998 TJ. Hence it is plausible to expect a rise of carbon emission in a short-term future given the need to replace the loss base-load from nuclear fission with more carbon-intensive coal, particularly lignite.
Figure 3. Germany’s coal production by type from the International Energy Agency.
Figure 4. Germany’s coal imports versus exports from the International Energy Agency.
Combining the anti-nuclear spirit of the Energiewende with the ambitious target of all-renewable energy without accounting for the reliability of the energy market seems to result in pumping more carbon into the atmosphere. The target or promise for a zero-carbon future by 2050 seems to be unrealistic at this point due to lofty ambition of a complete renewable energy system which is also independent of nuclear fission to retain the baseload.
So What Does Germany Value Actually?
Nuclear energy has its pros and cons in the discourse of energy and sustainability nowadays. One of the contextual problems to the German energy system is the availability of geological storage, more likely due to a strong anti-nuclear sentiment shared among German citizens. While it is entirely possible to speculate about the cause of this opposition, the fear of nuclear risk is at least traceable on the Energiewende as a reflection on the Fukushima Daiichi incident.
That said, fear-based public decisions will always face a harsh reality which in the German context is an unrealistic ambition to go all-renewable and zero-nuclear (fission) all at the same time. As the statistics have shown, combining both fear and lofty ambition only result in a counterproductive factual result. Germany pollutes twice as much compared to its neighbour, France, and its chance to keep up in the clean-energy race entirely relies on the hope that its renewable innovations could substantially be more reliable to meet the energy consumption.
At a more meta-level, this begs a question whose answer still eludes my mind. So what does Germany value actually? The country explicitly states its commitment to clean energy technologies. However, it practically produces more carbon and would likely be so after the end of nuclear phase-out. On top of that, the fact of the increased carbon emission also seems to suggest that the nuclear phase-out is rationally untenable. At the moment, it seems that the Bundestag’s position is to pollute the atmosphere more by burning more coal in exchange for feeling safe via the nuclear phase-out. This is a trade-off which at least seems inconsistent to its climate goal, and appears at most hypocritical in my view.
At last, I do hope that this rather critical examination of the current state of the German energy policy is wrong. I can only hope that the innovation for the so-labelled ‘clean energy future’ can really keep up without having to rely on some societal nudges such as pressing the public to consume less, drive less, or any other social enforcement.
The German government does need to revisit and ponder on this question carefully: so what does Germany value actually?
