There is a question at the bottom of this post - maybe you have an answer.
The
vast majority of French electricity is generated from from nuclear
and hydro-electricity. There are only residual amounts of electricity
generated from fossil fuels.
You
can see live data on French electrical generation Here At GridWatch.
Below is a snapshot taken today.
In
the snap shot, along with coal at 0.01GW (0.02%) France is using gas
to generate 0.68 GW (1.4%) and Oil 0.13GW (0.27%)
So
in France electrical generation from fossil fuels account for less
than 2% of production.
But
how does this relate to emissions?
For
simplicity I'll leave out the real nasties like Sulphur Dioxide and
Nitrous Oxide and just deal with Carbon Dioxide. When we compare
these figures with Germany (see below) the real nasties would be just
about in the same in country to country proportion as the Carbon Dioxide.
From The EIA FAQs here (and a little bit of maths) we know that electricity
generated from coal produces about one Tonne of Carbon Dioxide for
every MWh of electricity.
Over
the day, from burning coal to make electricity, France dumps 10 x 1 x
24 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. Or 240 Tonnes
From
gas (550Kg/MWh) they dump 670 x 0.550 x 24 or 8844 Tonnes.
Finally
today oil (816Kg/MWh) will dump 130 x 0.816 x 24 or 2545 Tonnes.
In
total today, from producing electricity from fossil fuels, France
will dump 11629 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. So say:
12000 Tonnes max.
Now
let us look at Germany. To reduce emissions and do away with its
nuclear fleet, Germany has invested hugely in a plethora of wind turbines and solar panels. But its generation
is still dominated by coal, with no real prospect of any significant reduction.
The
German daily generation data is presented as a graph and the live
graph can be found Fraunhofer interactive chart here. A snapshot is below
First
of all, notice that Germany is actually using the dirtiest fuel known
to man as base load (thats lignite or brown coal). Also its remaining
nuclear fleet still adds about 9 GW.
Useage
of coal and lignite averages out over the day at around 31GW. Gas
averages out at about 2GW.
Although
Lignite is significantly more polluting than hard coal I'll treat it
all as hard coal for simplicity. Although Oil use is significantly
above that in France we'll ignore it as it gets buried in the
rounding as the rest of Germany's fossils fuel numbers are so large.
31GW
of coal generation will over the day, produce 31,000 x 1 x 24 or 744,000
MWh and will dump 744,000 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide into the
atmosphere. Gas produces 2000 x 0.55 x 24 = 26,400 Tonnes of Carbon
Dioxide. So say 750,000 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide in total.
So,
today in the real world, Electrical generation in Germany will dump
somewhere around (750000/12000) 62 times more Carbon Dioxide into the
atmosphere than Nuclear France.
Of
course, Germany 82.5M has a larger population than France (64.5M) So
per capita the
emissions
ratio is less, at about 50:1
But
just think on that.
In
Energiewende obsessed Germany, every time an electric kettle is
boiled to make a cup of coffee, 50 times as much Carbon Dioxide is
released as when a kettle is boiled in nuclear France.
So
tell me, who has the more valid solution to the emissions problem?
