If mass renewables (excl hydro for obvious reasons) is only gaining traction in the past 20 years and there is a solid goal to phase out fossil fuels and replace them with renewables, every year should be the fossil fuels' lowest share in the power mix right?
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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First of all weather changes and that can have a big impact in the EU as the share of wind and solar is high enough to overshadow that. That can also be true for hydro, if there is too little rainfall. Even nuclear was impacted by too low river waterlevels in France last year. Then you have economic growth or crisis. That can have a massive impact on electricity consumption. If you consume less you shut down the most expensive plants to run and that are fossil fuels due to fuel costs.
So it does not fall every year, but over a longer period of time it does go down.
So it does not fall every year, but over a longer period of time it does go down
A misleading claim since much of this is driven by deindustrialization. But the factories still exist, just in other countries:
https://www.iea.org/news/global-coal-demand-set-to-remain-at-record-levels-in-2023
Global fossil fuel consumption is still going to break records and will continue to do so.
Electricty generation in the EU is up since 1990 by 23%. The EUs consumption based emissions are higher then production based ones, both have fallen over the last three decades. .
We are talking about EU fossil fuel electricity here and that is indeed going down, not due to lower electricity consumption, but due to more low carbon electricity. At least long term it is.
That's incredibly misleading. 1990 is 33 years ago and a lot has changed. For one thing, nuclear is still carrying its weight when it comes to power generation. Many outdated power plants were shut down, especially coal being replaced by natural gas. Also, the overall economy had grown significant since then. So power consumption should have grown by a lot, but in reality it plateaued after 2008. And 2008 is telling, because that is about when the EU's economy began to stagnate. Deindustrialization really began about that time too.
Take into account non-electricity fossil fuel consumption and it's easy to explain where the emissions went. People will probably look back at that period and realize it was a major act of greenwashing and careful fudging of the numbers.
Meanwhile, Belgium is phasing out nuclear in favor of gas burning plants
I'm no supporter of nuclear but that's a bad move
The problem is that Belgium finished all, but one reactor within a decade and they provide about half of Belgiums electricity production. So with them aging and becoming less reliable as all old infrastructure does, they need to be shut down. At the time the reactors had a planned lifetime of 40 years and when shut down they are 50 years old. Also only three of the five reactors will be shut down by 2025, the other two will run until 2035, when they hit 50 years of operation.
So basicly a lack of foresight of Belgian governments for a long time, to not work on proper alternatives.
This was a great opportunity to quote Douglas Adams! :)
"This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."