The best way to increase the renewable percentage in a country's energy mix is to reduce the total amount of energy produced. The best way to do that is to shrink the economy. That is what the Germans have done. Climate alarmist tub-thumpers tout the renewable percentage increase without explaining the bad news at its foundation. Congratulations To Germany On Achieving More Than 50% Of Its Electricity Production From "Renewables"! August 29, 2023/ Francis Menton On the march to Net Zero carbon emissions from usage of energy, the key first step is to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation of electricity, replacing them with the magical “renewables.” Or so we are told. Once electricity generation is fossil fuel-free, then all energy use can be switched to electricity, without any of the evil emissions. Voilà — Net Zero! But somehow, in the places that have tried to go this route with wind turbines and solar panels, the push to get more electricity generation from “renewables” has seemed to stall out at around 40 - 45%. (Some small countries with lots of hydropower get higher percentages by counting the hydropower as “renewable.”). Countries may build more and more solar panels and wind turbines, but somewhere in the 40s the percentage that those things contribute to electricity generation just doesn’t seem to budge very much any more. And that’s why it’s so exciting that in the first half of 2023 Germany finally crashed through the 50% barrier, becoming the first significant country with little hydropower to achieve more than half of its electricity generation from “renewables.” READ MORE ". . . . Unfortunately, if you read deep into the Reuters piece linked above, you will start to get a very different understanding. It turns out that Germany’s percentage of electricity from renewables increased not because the production of electricity from renewables increased, but rather because Germany’s economy is shrinking. After decades of effort and hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and greatly increased consumer electricity prices, the contribution of wind and solar energy in Germany’s economy remains almost insignificant. Despite all its new solar and wind facilities, Germany’s production of electricity from those sources has lately been going down rather than up. Here is the story for the first half of 2023) (from the Reuters piece linked above: Renewables, at 137.5 TWh, represented 51.7% of total output, up from 46.4% in first half 2022, even as green power production volumes decreased by 0.6%. The 137.5 TWh of electricity that Germany’s “renewable” facilities produced in the first half of 2023 is a pitiful percentage of their supposed theoretical capacity. A chart at Clean Energy Wire here gives Germany’s generation capacity of solar, plus onshore and offshore wind as 130.8 GW as of 2022. (In a country with only about 85 GW of peak usage!). Add the new 8 GW of capacity added in the first half of 2023, and you would have 138.8 GW of wind and solar capacity, or 602.9 TWh hours of capacity (138.8 x 24 x 181) for the 181 days in January to June 2023. That would mean that the wind and solar facilities combined produced at a rate of only 22.8% of capacity over that period. So if production of electricity from “renewables” actually decreased, how could the percentage of electricity production from the “renewables” have increased from 46.4% to 51.7% of the total? Easy — the production from all other sources (fossil fuels and nuclear) went down dramatically: Conventional energy sources - nuclear, coal, natural gas and oil - provided 128.4 TWh of output, down from 160.0 TWh a year earlier. They ran the conventional generators less because the demand for electricity was not there: The fall in conventional production reflected the phase-out of nuclear energy by mid-April and operators cutting output to match weak demand. . . . "
