Every Sunday, in "Zoom in", Axel de Tarlé projects himself on an economic or societal fact.
While all the countries are getting out of coal, Germany has just inaugurated a new coal-fired power station, near Dortmund.
It's incomprehensible. Germany promises to come out of coal, and the country has just inaugurated a brand new, brand new power plant in North Rhine-Westphalia. Its name: Dattlen 4. Its power: 1.1 gigawatt, the equivalent of a nuclear reactor. A coal-fired power station which will therefore operate for tens of years. Yes, but the German government points out that it promised to get out of coal in 2038. And the authorities add that this new plant is more modern and therefore less polluting than the older generations.
However, this remains incomprehensible. 29% of electricity in Germany is still produced with coal, the most polluting energy. It breaks the whole energy transition. Because what good is it to promote the electric car, if the electricity which is used to run this car is produced with coal. We are just moving the problem, pollution is no longer produced in the car, but in the power plant.
Especially since it is entirely possible to massively produce electricity, without coal.
Of course ! Example: France with nuclear power. Certainly, nuclear power produces radioactive waste which we do not know what to do with. But nuclear does not emit any CO2. So in France, when you drive in an electric car, you don't emit CO2. This is not the case in Germany.
But even in Britain, a historic coal country, the country has been getting electricity for two months in a row, without any coal. It hadn't happened since the first coal-fired power plants in the 1880s. Even in the United States, Donald Trump's country, coal has gone out of fashion and renewable energies are now in the lead for electricity production. . Simply because they have become more competitive.
But then, why is Germany trying to keep its coal plants?
What do you want, they're Germans. It is a country still very industrial in mind, with coal mines that have not closed and factories that smoke. Coal is industry, these are jobs. And, apart from the Greens, nobody has the political courage to turn this page, to close the coal mines and the plants that go with it. This is the very "twentieth century" side of the Germans: cars, mines, smoldering power stations!