With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I’m more depressed than when I posted this
They’re burning coal to produce the energy they otherwise would have done using nuclear so I don’t think there’s anything wrong about what I said. If you turn off a nuclear power plant you’re going to need to produce that energy by some other means. They’re not building new coal plants to replace nuclear but they’re continuing to use/reopen coal plants that shouldn’t have to be used anymore. Germany is the world’s 4th biggest coal consumer.
“Replacing” implies that there is usage of coal plants, that before weren’t used. And that is not the case. In the first half of 2023 the share of both lignite and normal coal went down by 21 and 23%, while the share of renewables increased.
So renewables took up the slack, not coal. If you want to say, that the nuclear plants could be replacing coal plants, that is a different argument, but that does not imply the reverse relationship.
https://www.energy-charts.info/index.html?l=de&c=DE
Source
While this all isn’t necessarily directly linked to the phasing out of nuclear energy and is more related to the war in Ukraine it still shows that Germany is continuing to use coal plants it didn’t intend to anymore.
Germany is firing up old coal plants, sparking fears climate goals will go up in smoke
Germany to reactivate coal power plants as Russia curbs gas flow
Energy crisis fuels coal comeback in Germany
Germany Reopens Coal Plants Because Of Reduced Russian Energy
Yes. And as you see these articles are from 9 month before the nuclear plants were phased out. But since Germany didnt start the war in Ukraine i don’t think it can be considered a failure of the German energy policies in general. And incidently, if it wasn’t for the resurgence of nuclear in the 2009 government, the original plan to expand renewables that was formulated with the decision to phase out nuclear power by the 2002 government, would have made it much easier for Germany to react to the Ukraine war.
It is always painted as if the debate and political alignments would make it coal vs. nuclear. But the reality of German politics and economic interests in politics is that nuclear and coal are both on the same side and acting against renewables. It is the existing fossil lobbies and energy companies heavily invested in fossils that are against renewables. For them it doesnt matter, if they can run a nuclear plant or a coal plant longer, as either is an otherwise stranded asset form them. The argument, that we could reduce the amount of coal plants this way was only coming up, when the general debate started to acknowledge climate change as a serious danger and mitigation as necessary, so around 2015-2018. But it is not a sincere interest of the pro nuclear factions in German politics.