Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power
Every time there's a thread on the topic, I like to share this fantastic realtime map of the carbon intensity of electricity production in various countries :<p><a href="https://www.electricitymap.org/map" rel="nofollow">https://www.electricitymap.org/map</a><p>As I write this, the UK's intensity is 326 gCO₂eq/kWh, which is nothing to write home about.<p>This is better than the worst European offender (coal-loving Poland : 652g) as well as Baltic countries, the Netherlands and Germany (373).<p>But it's far from the best in class : Nordic countries (around 20-30, thanks to hydro) or for a more comparable country, France (around 60, thanks to nuclear)<p>Germany is interesting because it consistently has one of the worst carbon intensity figures of all developed countries, in spite of a record-setting share of renewables that its green activists like to boast about, and hundreds of billions of € in subsidies poured into them in the past 20 years.<p>That's of course the consequence of its decision to phase out nuclear power in the early 2000s. Wind/solar are intermittent and there's no way around that (battery storage isn't nearly mature enough).<p>That leaves 4 options for handling the base load : nuclear, hydro, gas or coal. Only 2 of those are low-carbon. And if you don't have the geography for hydro (like the Nordics do) but still decide to go nuclear-free for political reasons, guess what you're left with ?<p>IIRC, German coal power plants have 7 spots in the top 10 worst air pollution emitters across the EU. Coal-related air pollution causes an estimated 10.000 extra deaths each year across the continent. Radiation caused one direct death in Fukushima. Thanks, Die Grüne.