Germany's Energy Catastrophe

The total number of deaths due to the nuclear energy production works wide is less than the animal number of french people dying due to air pollution by German coal plants.

Is Germany still capable of mining enough of its own coal for its own needs during such emergencies?

Of course the flip side is that Germany is going cold turkey on coal and gas in the next few years. Once that process is completed, it will have a huge head start on other countries looking to slowly transition to being carbon neutral. That's actually a good thing.

Short term it's disruptive for sure but it is already leading to huge public spending. Which of course also is the classic recipe to mitigate the risks of any potential recession and might actually set Germany up for huge economic growth soon after. That recession is arguably already happening. I don't think it will stay limited to Germany either. We've experienced those before. It will be fine.

Russia may or may not pull the plug on German gas revenue. Hard to tell right now and they don't seem to be very rational right now. But by merely putting the threat on the table, they've set a few things in motion already. Their gas revenues are going to shrink a lot as the result of their recent actions. It's just going to be a function of how badly they need the cash by how quick that process will go.

It's more than a little bit academic for me as I live in Berlin which is very dependent on Russian gas for heating and warm water. There's a very real chance I will have to deal with some level of heating and shower issues in the coming winter. I'm fully confident that whatever happens, Germany will figure it out though.

Now that it has come this far, I'm actually in favor of ripping off that band aid and get it over with. Putin is threatening me personally with a cold shower. I'll take that cold shower when/if it comes to that. Putin might be good chess player but his poker game sucks. His bluff has been called. And now, we'll see if there ever was more than that. So far it just looks like a country self destroying its economy for no good reason at all.

Oh is that why Germany pressured the EU to qualify gas as "green" energy and block nuclear energy from getting the same qualification?

AFAIK nuclear output can be controlled only in a certain range, but if you go below a certain threshold it shuts off and you then have to restart it, which takes a lot of time.

Coal has a similar issue, these plants also can't be turned on and off quickly. In fact, the term "base load" originally was driven more by the minimum amount of power that has to be consumed to keep a plant running. Only now with the move to renewables with varying output the meaning has shifted to the consumption side of things.

Gas plants however can be turned on and off and easily, they work similar to aircraft engines. In Germany, the heat produced is then used for district heating, which gives these plants almost perfect efficiency. It's not a coincidence that Germany picked gas as supplement for renewables during the transition to 100% green energy. Gas (in the form of hydrogen directly ~ methane made from hydrogen) is also a key contender for very long term energy storage (in Germany, you have to save energy produced in the summer for use in winter, the batteries needed for that would be roughly in the order of ~50 million Tesla Model S (100kWh) batteries). The cost of overbuilding renewables and storing the energy in gas, with a lower round-trip efficiency, seems to be lower than building the big battery that would be needed. Wind is also better in winter than solar, which is why wind is such an important and hot topic in Germany. Solar doesn't bother anyone, but wind turbines are huge and people can see them in the landscape. Solar does not have this problem, but during the winter, the output goes down to almost nothing.