Pages of sourced arguments and analysis to consider and that’s all you’ve got?
One of the chief reasons Germany likes to use 1990 as a baseline for carbon emissions is that it allows Germany to take credit for the shutdown of the very dirty East Germany power plants. If you look at the German emissions since 1990 there is a huge dip form 1990 to 1999 as East German plants are shut down, then they are level until the Great Recession where there is another large dip, and then steady every since.
In some places the sources are the plain Wikipedia definitions when he gets close to the “paltry” argument regarding solar and wind, and then he misses a lot about supporting that point. He is actually missing what it is happening in the battery front that will complement solar, wind and other sources with intermittent issues. And I did notice that the National Geographic cite he uses is actually optimistic also about the Solar industry getting better on the pollution and waste front.
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It would also help Sam’s credibility if he were somewhat more candid about sourcing his rather carefully cherrypicked claims.
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Unlike your’s, right? 
Definitely the No Spin Zone™ going on here. It’s rather ironic that you point to the 2008 recession and fracking boom as if that somehow means the US cheated (or something) while ignoring (as your cites do as well) some of the similar reasons that German carbon emissions dropped and also that they started rising again in 2015.
At any rate, I found this article talking about why Germany has had issues reducing it’s carbon emissions despite a full court press on solar and wind renewables that some might find interesting.
The article goes on to talk about an auction system as well as the potential for a half a trillion dollar upgrade to Europe’s power grid that might defray some of this, but really the key factor in the short term goes along with the OPs theme…if Germany hadn’t had a knee jerk reaction to nuclear and started down the path to get rid of the things it would have the short and even medium term solution already. Nuclear power plants could be used instead of having to keep coal or other fossil fuel burning plants on standby due to the nature of solar and wind. Instead, they do have to keep those plants running on idle to step in when wind and solar can’t produce the energy needed. To solve this problem they need to get all of Europe on board with a smart grid and probably some sort of energy storage capability to solve a problem they already have the solution for and have had for decades but have decided to turn their backs on…nuclear energy.
I don’t see why certain types of left wing eco types fight so hard on this. Nuclear is the clear solution to at least mitigate global warming, and something we can do right now, today, as opposed to trying to patch in an energy source that doesn’t scale and has so many issues with demand and will require reworking our entire grid and how we distribute energy today. Yeah, smart grids and energy storage are going to be great…but they are going to take decades of small, incrimental changes to get there. We aren’t going to gut our current infrastructure and change to them in the next few years or even the next few decades, at least not in the major developed countries with their huge investments in the current grid. Nuclear we can do right now, today, and if you replace coal plants with nuclear and use nuclear to augment your renewables energy scheme we will start getting real benefits in a decade at most…instead of waiting around for a few more decades before, maybe, we have replaced enough of the grid and have changed how we distribute and process energy to, hopefully, make a difference.
I’m a pro nuclear liberal and would support the construction of more next gen plants. But as others have stated the regulatory requirements for nuclear are super expensive and deregulation wouldn’t be simple, cheap or timely. Given the rather benign impact of solar generation, I believe money would be better spent on building more solar plants and advancing solar technology. Oh what about solar’s intermittent nature, the high cost of battery storage, blah,blah,blah? I think that gravity power storage such as this: Let Gravity Store the Energy is the way of the future. No one has been able to explain to me how a float in a storage tank is too high tech and expensive compared to nuclear power.
I’m not actually opposed to building some nuclear power. Especially if we could build small-capacity, flexible nuclear power.
But the OP is way too pessimistic about the progress we can get with renewable power.
Now this I agree should be the core of the discussion. It’s clear that most renewable supporters and renewable support Websites are not engineers and tend to pass over the engineering issues when discussing building renewables. So as an engineer, I too go to those sites and think “oh, those liberal treehuggers”. But that doesn’t mean what they want can’t be done.
The engineering perspective (limiting the discussion to electricity, and ignoring efficiency…) is that we need to eliminate fossil fuel generation (not capacity) as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Keep around all those fossil plants, for use when there’s not enough renewable generation, but make sure to run them as little as possible. That’s the way to quick decarbonization without disruption. The quickest and cheapest way to achieve this is to build more and better solar PV and wind, along with making sure all fossil fuel generation is flexible and improving the grid.
At this point in time:
- Every kWh of solar or wind electricity that you can generate, can be and must be be a kWh of fossil fuel equivalent you are not burning.
- A kWh of solar or wind generation can be installed extremely quickly and cheaply.
Utility scale solar and wind these days is sold by generation (kWh), not capacity (kW) and the price per kWh is lower than any other form of generation (ignore that headline, scroll to last paragraph).
Most large solar projects that I read about go from close of financing to full commission in barely a year.
Also, there is nowhere in the world yet where rooftop solar has reached even close to its full potential. I had rooftop solar installed almost 2 years ago and from offer to installation took less than a month. My city has eliminated all permitting for the appropriate type of rooftop solar. So with good public policy, rooftop solar can be built very quickly and cheaply.
In contrast, there’s nowhere in the world today where you can build nuclear power either cheaply or quickly. Not in Great Britain. Not in Finland. Not even in China.
So as an engineer my conclusion is that renewable, in particular solar and wind is the quickest and cheapest way to make progress on decarbonization right now.
That is a… peculiar way of describing this graph (left side for the percentage drop in emissions), which I referred to in the final link in the quoted post.
As plainly shown on that graph, German emissions were not “level” but in fact decreasing overall from 1999 to 2007. Then they dipped sharply in the Great Recession, climbed back up to a bit under 2007 levels, and started dropping again. Note also that the current German emissions are well under what it was in 1990, while US emissions are still somewhat above our 1990 benchmark (and have started rising again).
Believe me, if increased US climate-change mitigation efforts can get us outperforming Germany on long-term carbon emissions reduction, I will be very happy to acknowledge it. But at present, that’s simply not what’s happening.
Those certain types were not much minded by the Obama administration. In any case I pointed already at the spin the Republicans continue to do, many times I pointed already at legislation regarding climate change that included support for nuclear power. Because the bills were about controlling emissions the Republicans did not lift much of a finger for them, except the middle one, and continue to toss the nuclear baby with the bathwater.
IMHO the executive should use the military and turn many of the nuclear missile silos to be converted to use medium or small nuclear plants. The government in my proposal will have the capability to act as a second layer of security, almost independent from the nuclear power industry that will have access to the site. What I think is that if the nuclear plant goes south we should be able to bury the site that is already deep underground and basically forget about it. The location of the small plants would also take care of many security issues that is an added cost to industry.
The Daily Caller didn’t mislead anyone. Hillary did, or at least tried to.
So she lied during the debates. Got it.
Regards,
Shodan
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Germany is giving the rest of the world a lesson in just how much can go wrong when you try to reduce carbon emissions solely by installing lots of wind and solar.
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Nonsense. There is nothing is wrong in Germany.
What is true is you don’t reduce carbon emissions “solely by installing lots of wind and solar”. You have to make sure in addition that both the fossil and the renewable generation is flexible, that the grid will handle it, and the dirtiest fossil plants reduce their generation first.
90% generation by renewable? Fantastic! Only 10% generation needed by fossil fuels. Can’t quickly throttle down and load-follow with those ancient, dirty coal plants? Too bad for them. Shut them down. Shut them down now. No, shut them down yesterday. Build better ones, if needed, but small and flexible ones.
But you don’t want to? Oh, but that’s politics…
Are you suggesting turning nuclear silos into small nuclear plants? Because from a size perspective you have to be talking orders of magnitude difference. Not to mention small plants scattered around mean much more infrastructure for transmission wires needing to be built.
I’ve always thought the overblown claims of the exaggerated ‘dangers’ of nuclear waste could be simply solved by everyone in favour of nuclear power adopting a bucket of waste and keeping it in their home.
I’m glad you changed the attribution there. 
You do realize that, in Germany today they are also having a similar debate about coal, yes? And that there is going to be a lot of resistance to even building ‘small and flexible ones’, right? And, again, that this could ALSO be solved by, you know, not shutting down current nuclear plants and instead building newer generation plants?
You are right, it’s all politics…and that the politics in Germany ARE an issue and one that is causing the problems they are having. They want to get rid of coal and nuclear at the same time without having the hooks in to replace them with a flexible and scalable alternative, and they are setting time tables based on unicorn wishes and dragon dreams. Being an engineer, as you say, should make all of this clear. Your own proposal here, while I think is viable (though I think less so than just accepting nuclear energy) is equally politically unpalatable to the German public, and basically isn’t going to happen. What I predict will happen is that the Germans will simply buy energy from their neighbors instead…energy produced by coal fired or nuclear powered plants.
This is a warning for personal insults. Do not insult other posters outside the Pit.
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When I started to respond to this, I didn’t understand how many levels of dumb is contained in this comment. Now I have an estimate.
Mainly is the issue that the US doesn’t reprocess it’s nuclear fuel rods. Reprocessing would create plutonium. But if we let the government process them and used the plutonium in well regulated breeder reactors we’d have solved most of the waste issues.
AFAIK, although that might be a loophole for the emissions reduction part of Germany’s energy plan, it would run afoul of the energy generation part. That is, I think Germany has set targets for how much of their total energy use has to be generated from renewable sources, no matter whether it’s produced domestically or bought from neighbors.
Of course, the mere existence of an official target doesn’t guarantee that that target will be met, but it does mean that Germany can’t pretend that “dirty energy” purchased from a neighbor just “doesn’t count” in their environmental accounting.
I don’t think nuclear is a practical solution because I don’t see the regulatory climate/political climate changing enough to see big Western nations start rolling out large increases in their reactor fleet.
I would also add one advantage of nuclear, if we were ever able to get significantly into roll outs of new reactors in the United States, is the companies that build these plants are usually extant large utility companies, which have a good relationship with the GOP. So nuclear power is something that can help fight climate change that also isn’t vulnerable to being reversed with Republicans in power, which is a nice thing.
What you told us what that we should not trust the democrat, and the Daily Caller pointed at Clinton. It did not bother to mention what she actually had in her site.
Not sure about that.
While nuclear power certainly has its virtues, from what I understand this isn’t one of them. To cover for shortfalls in wind or solar, you need a generation source that can be quickly and on short notice be ramped up or down. Natural gas and hydro can do this, but it’s my understanding that coal and nuclear can’t. Nuclear is an excellent replacement for coal, but neither is a good complement for wind or solar.
Ultimately, though, I think that the real solution to the intermittent supply of wind and solar is on the demand side, not the supply side. There are plenty of things that people use power for that doesn’t need to be completely consistent. HVAC, for instance, you can turn on when the wind is blowing and turn off when it’s not, since it’s only the longer-term averages you’re concerned about there. And plug-in electric cars are typically left unused for significantly longer than the time they need to charge, so you could just turn the charger on and off as needed. And HVAC and transportation are both big chunks of human power consumption.