Energy Secretary Chris Wright shows his ignorance and tells lies about the tremendous effort Germany has done to convert from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Chris Wright does not know that Texas and California are making the same successful energy transition as Germany.
Chris Wright does not know that the reliability of the German grid is the best in the world. It has not been degraded by the energy transition and is more than 10 times better than that of USA .
Read the article and see how ignorant Chris Wright is about Germany’s energy transition over the last 25 years.
No logic or facts behind your statements. The electricity generated by renewables is powering more of our country than nuclear power. Coal is dead, oil does not power crypto or data centers, and renewables are cheaper than natural gas.
What neither Chris Wright nor Germany’s energy transition leadership acknowledge is that dealing with the tough news about energy and global warming required and requires difficult policy decisions. Wright seems to think GCC is just another anti-capitalist nut job, while Germany’s shutting down their nucs, keeping their extreme dirtiest coal (lignite) going (also destroying the extraordinarily valuable last standing remnant of the westernmost section of the ancient European forest ecology while getting at it).
Note that the above chart is in terms of capacity and needs to adjusted by capacity factors. Solar, for example, looks huge in the above graph but the capacity factor for solar in Germany is dismal, some 10-13%.
They are, and coal/lignite make up about 20% of Germany’s electrical production. As flyerboys wrote, “keeping their extreme dirtiest coal (lignite) going”
The United States was estimated to have had lignite resources amounting to 1.37 trillion metric tons in 2022, making it the country with the largest lignite resources worldwide. Russia ranked second, with lignite resources totaling 541.4 billion metric tons.
Lignite is also known as brown coal and is a soft sedimentary rock formed by compressed peat.
One reason why Germany’s power grid might be considered unreliable is because Germany relies so much on imports. Not only do they import electricity, a net 24.8 terawatt-hours in 2024, but Germany also imports natural gas that is often burned in power plants to produce electricity.
In the last year reported, 2023, Germany domestically produced 3.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas. But that year, Germany consumed 75.7 billion cubic meters of gas. Germany must import 95% of its natural gas.
Let’s suppose that Germany was importing large amounts of natural gas from Russia, and then the Russian leader decided to invade one of his neighbors in a military conflict. That might put Germany in a tight spot if the German leaders were critical of Russia’s invasion. But that is just a hypothetical situation that probably would never happen.
Not only does Germany import large amounts of natural gas, it also imports coal. According to the Statistical Review of World Energy, in 2023 Germany domestically produced 0.92 exajoules of coal energy, but consumed 1.83 exajoules from coal. That is about 50% imports.
So, to review…
Germany imports electricity because it can’t produce enough at home.
Germany imports natural gas, much of it sent to power plants to produce electricity.
Germany imports coal, which is fed into power plants to keep the lights on.
“Unreliable” might not be the best description of this situation. Perhaps better to call it “dangerously vulnerable”.
With that bogus reasoning we can say that China, India, Japan, South Korea, and many other countries have unreliable grids because they import massive amounts of fossil fuels.
However, grid reliability is actually a measure of how often and how long the grid fails to provide electricity due to equipment failures, power plants stopping, transmission lines down, and other such failures on the grid.
Asia Pacific Region and Europe do not have adequate natural gas resources. Therefore, the countries in those regions import more natural gas than they produce.
But US generates much dirtier electricity than the EU or Germany.
EU imports of gas and coal fell significantly since the peak in 2022, and oil imports have stayed level. Good work EU!
According to the EIA, in 2023, 60% of electricity generated in the United States came from fossil fuels, with natural gas being the primary source, accounting for around 43% of utility-scale electricity generation, followed by coal at 16% and a very small amount from petroleum; this means that the majority of US electricity production still relies on fossil fuels.
The EU accelerated its shift away from fossil fuels in 2023, with record falls in coal, gas and emissions. Fossil fuels dropped by a record 19% to their lowest ever level at less than one third of the EU’s electricity generation. Renewables rose to a record 44% share, surpassing 40% for the first time. Wind and solar continued to be the drivers of this renewables growth, producing a record 27% of EU electricity in 2023 and achieving their largest ever annual capacity additions. Furthermore, wind generation reached a major milestone, surpassing gas for the first time.
That is not what the data show. Germany’s electricity is actually dirtier than the United States’, in terms of CO2 emissions…
Carbon Intensity of electricity, 2023
Germany: 381 grams CO2 per kwh
USA: 369 grams
Click on the Chart view to get an interactive look at the countries and regions you want. As of 2022 (last year reported), the EU-27 was at 292 grams/kwh. The lower number for the EU is helped by the large nuclear power fleet in France, as well as nuclear and hydro resources in other countries (Sweden, Finland, etc.)
For the countries without much domestic fossil fuel production, France showed long ago how to get the electricity system off of fossil fuels. It was called the Messmer Plan, and began back in the 1970s. Today, France has some of the cleanest electricity of any of the developed nations. The Messmer Plan worked, but today no one wants to consider doing anything smart and effective.
Even if that were true, electricity customers here in San Diego, California (for example) pay as much as 56 cents per kilowatt-hour during the afternoon and early evening hours. (TOU-DR1 pricing plan for SDG&E Electric Generation and Delivery.) During off-peak times, the rate goes down to around 40 cents/kwh.
As more of the system is dependent on the intermittent renewables and batteries, the price of electricity here in California will just keep skyrocketing upwards. How much do you want me paying for electricity? $1.00 per kilowatt-hour? $1.50 maybe?
You did not read my post properly. I pointed out the tremendous progress made by Germany in 2024 in their reduction in use of coal and natural gas. So when comparing CO2 emissions in 2024, I estimate that Germany will have cleaner electricity than USA.
You could also compare data for Germany and USA in 2024.
In the meantime, USA had dirtier electricity than Germany in 2024 and in 2025 (January and February) .
