Whoops! Germany's "Green" Plan Burns More Coal

#GreenFail: Germany's Green Policy Leads to More Burning of Coal

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government says RWE AG (RWE)’s new power plant that can supply 3.4 million homes aids her plan to exit nuclear energy and switch to cleaner forms of generation. It’s fired with coal.

The startup of the 2,200-megawatt station near Cologne last week shows how Europe’s largest economy is relying more on the most-polluting fuel. Coal consumption has risen 4.9 percent since Merkel announced a plan to start shutting the country’s atomic reactors after last year’s Fukushima disaster in Japan.

and it's not a temporary thing:

“Angela Merkel’s policy has created an incentive structure which has the effect of partially replacing nuclear with coal, the dirtiest fuel that’s responsible for much of the growth in the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions since 1990,” Dieter Helm, an energy policy professor at the University of Oxford, said by phone Aug. 17. Building new coal stations means “locking them in for the next 30 years” as a type of generation, Helm said. 

and of course natgas is so expensive in Europe and the price ain't coming down because fracking is either banned outright or difficult

Much of Europe’s gas, however, lies under Poland, where Exxon Mobil said early results suggest extraction may be unprofitable, and France, which outlawed fracking in July after environmentalists and wine producers raised alarms about water pollution....

Not so in Europe, where environmental concerns about fracking persist even after a study commissioned by the EU concluded that current legislation is adequate to protect the environment. 

Oh well, enjoy that coal.