This is a meaningless headline, which follows a regrettably common way of producing misleading statements.<p>If you look at the article, you'll find that solar generation accounted for only 19% of the total. It's the "biggest source" only as a result of their choice of how to group the other sources. If they had decided to have a "fossil fuel" category, that would have been the biggest. But they decided to split fossil fuels into brown coal, hard coal, oil, and gas, so it doesn't win. Similarly, if they'd split solar into subcategories according to exactly which technology was used, none of them would have been "biggest".<p>You should similarly ignore misleading statements about "disease X is the biggest killer of Y", and so forth. They're all meaningless when the division into categories is arbitrary.
Let's not forget that:<p>- CO2 emissions of Germany is still 5 times more than a comparable (similar GDP/flatness/weather) than France for <i>electricity production</i> [1];<p>- Electricity production is roughly a third of all final energy and CO2 emissions come mainly from coal and fuel [2]. Two threats for which Germany has done very little for now.<p>- Germany is spending around 2 billions of dollars [3] for renewable energies, whereas it would have cost more than 50x less with nuclear, allowing to spend the rest of this investment into building insulation and thermal renewable energies.<p>- PV investments were computed from past market prices, not with the negative price obtained with non controllable source of energy [3]. Germany is only at the beginning of energy subsidies.<p>Investing in photovoltaics is politically efficient, not environmentally efficient. Please let's stop to focus on renewable electricity. Let's start focusing on carbon-less solutions. The hard problem is about coal and fuel.<p>The situation could not be more urgent, since conventional oil has reached its peak. Not removing our dependency on oil is strongly damaging for our economies. Focusing on non controllable sources of energy is just accelerating the damages. Please see <a href="https://jancovici.com/en/" rel="nofollow">https://jancovici.com/en/</a> for more convincing arguments :)<p>[1] - <a href="https://electricitymap.tmrow.co" rel="nofollow">https://electricitymap.tmrow.co</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Energy_supply,_consumption_and_electricity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Energ...</a><p>[3] - <a href="http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP_Eye_watering_cost_of_renewable_revolution_2301121.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP_Eye_watering_cost_of_re...</a><p>[4] - <a href="https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-turn-negative" rel="nofollow">https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-...</a>
Seems like installations doubled in 2018 compared to the last few years [0]. That surprised me a bit, since, while there still are gov incentives, they only seem to go down after the big push ended around 2012. So that bump is likely caused by falling cost. That's great to see.<p>[0] <a href="https://energy-charts.de/power_inst.htm?year=all&period=annual&type=inc_dec" rel="nofollow">https://energy-charts.de/power_inst.htm?year=all&period=annu...</a>
My friends in Germany still have the most expensive electricity in all of Europe, including Scandinavia.<p>They should have stayed on nuclear until renewable would be cheaper since the households are the ones feeling the pinch while big corps negociate lower fees or import cheaper electricity from France that's big on nuclear.<p>It's cool to be ECO and all but that's just taking the piss on the middle class and my priority is putting food on the table for my family not footing the bill for political-corporate ECO circle jerk.
....brought to you by taxes /subsidies: <i>"Taxes and fees now amount to 52 percent of the monthly power bill for retail consumers....The renewable energy levy alone adds 18 euros to the average monthly bill."</i> <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/german-electricity-price-is-half-taxes-and-fees/a-17849142-0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dw.com/en/german-electricity-price-is-half-taxes...</a>