Picking and choosing which power plants you want to say your power is coming from is only relevant on the spreadsheet... not reality.

No it is not. As that is the way how power trading works.

When you import that nuclear power the places you imported it from can't use that nuclear power because YOU took it.
And that place had no need for it anyway otherwise it would not have been on the market ... (*facepalm*)

Which means they have to rely on other power sources.
No, it means they had an overproduction and it was more cost benefit or earning benefit to sell it instead of ramping down a plant.

If I have a nuclear plant running at 85% max and now face a situation where I'm overproducing 20% for 4 hours, it would be pretty dumb to power down the plant. Because in 4 hours when I need the power again I can not ramp up the plant due to neutron poisoning. So it is cheaper for me to sell the power at a loss than losing 6 more hours of power production after the 4 ones I consider to schedule.

Similar for a coal plant, when I know I either can sell surplus for a certain amount of hours or run the plant at inefficient (more expensive) power levels.

What is more, I suspect many of the other countries are double counting non-fossil fuel sources by rephrasing the question or the statistics to say something in one case that outputs one number and then say something that sounds the same but is different and outputs a different number.

Would not work. No idea how you come to so brain dead ideas.

Imagine the simplest grid: a consumer a producer and a power line. The consumer has a meter and knows what he consumed and gets a bill. The producer knows what he fed into the grid, surprisingly the two numbers match, Hence we know if the power plant is a coal plant how much CO2 it produced. Actually we know where the coal is from. Also we know the efficiency of the plant.

And guess what, all grid feed ins, regardless from where and by whom are announced hours if not days ahead by the power producers, so the grid operators know how much "reserve", "balancing" or "compensation" energy they have to provide.

So as I said in another post, there is no "greenwashing". Everyone involved knows europe wide which plant produced how much power at what time of the day. Hence statistics of http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/ and others are accurate down to less than a ton of coal.

The only people who don't all know this are the idiots writing the FUD web sites against renewables in the USA.

(And: grid operation in the USA works exactly the same as in Germany/Europe. You also have preannounced "feed in" schedules and accumulated "grid schedules")

The idea that Europe wide where a coal shifting mafia producing more CO2 than "we publish" is completely idiotic. After all everything is billed, taxed, has tariffs, and is recorded by the WTO.

Without any comment on your links I don't know what you want to say with them :D And I guess the rest of the readers feel the same.

Perhaps your german is bad? All the links support the positions of people arguing against you.

You claim Poland is building new coal and nuclear plants to export the energy to germany, which is wrong.

Third link, first line of text: "Polen droht bereits 2016 ein Energiedefizit"

Translate.google.com is your friend ... can't be so hard to accept that most of your ideas what is going on between Poland and Germany energy wise are wrong.

Sorry, you are mistaken, very mistaken.

But you have no idea how much coal power you're sucking down unless you appreciate where your power imports come from?
That is exactly what we are doing. How can you be spo dumb and reiterate the same wrong stupid argument again and again? If I'm a grid operator, buying Polish power *now* for 4 hours: I know exactly from which power plant it comes!!! So I know exactly if it produced CO2 and how much.

what is more this notion that the renewables are not a fucking nightmare to manage in the grid is nonsense:

Who cares about american FUD links?
Go to this site: http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/d... switch to english. Read it a for a month or so, and feel free to ask questions.

How can a renewable grid be a nightmare to manage when Germany already produces 34% of its energy with renewables? An Portugal and Denmark even more so?

WTF, learn something about the topic and stopp falling for every dumb denier link.

Sorry, all wrong.
The wrongest part is the claim that german "utilties" would fund the polish new plants. Especially it is a dumb ass claim as you can google who funds them, (*facepalm*)

I'd be shocked if you're getting less than half your power from coal.
Why would you be shocked? What actually do you want to say with that? Getting 50% power from coal is better than getting 80% from coal.
Germany is right now producing 34% of its energy with renewables, and 15% with nuclear power, so obviously coal is pretty exactly 50%

Tell you what. Physically cut the cord between Germany and the rest of the grid and german's grid will be able to claim whatever it likes internally. If it is connected to the european grid then there is no such thing as german power. It is european power. Period.
What would be the benefit of that?
Power produced in Germany obviously is german power, regardless to where it is shipped and consumed. You have pretty nonsense ideas.

If you want to talk about energy, then you have to look at the whole grid
That is actually how it is done. Why do you believe other wise?

The amount of power supplied by coal is vastly under estimated because it has become politically incorrect to source your power from coal.
That is complete nonsense. For every MWh power produced we exactly know from which power plant in Europe it came. Hence we know exactly where which coal from where how efficient was turned into CO2. Your are completely delusioned how power production and grids work.

As I said now several times: you are wrong :D

Especially when you link articles that describe Germans NUCLEAR POWER imports and argue: we would import CO2 power ...

I suggest you read the three articles you linked, rofl. They support my standpoint, not yours.

In much of the world, a mix of anti-nuclear lobby and anti-proliferation lobby declare this 96% spent fuel "waste". In France, they recycle it into fuel.

The only place on the world where spent fuel is called waste is the states. And they do that to distract from the true waste problem.

The actual waste is all the stuff that came in contact with the fuel or other stuff that came into contact with contaminated other stuff and so on.

Also your 96% idea makes no sense ... you seem not to know how nuclear fuel works. Especially: no, it is not fissionable. It is the wrong isotope. To reprocess it you need to enrich it again. And for that you have to reduce that 96% "left over" to half of it, and refill the gap with highly enriched fuel (uranium). So even during reprocessing "half of the spent fuel" is left over as waste. Actually a no brainer.

... but the Poles are building coal fired power plants as fast as they can to keep up with G^He^Hr^Hm^Ha^Hn^H Polish demand and they're talking about building two nuclear power plants just to feed t^Hh^He^H THEIR OWN demand.
FTFY

hmmm... I can only speak to what I've heard of the US grid. And what they say is that you can't really fire a coal plant up that fast or shut it down. You have to use oil if you do that. Those are the only power plants that can shut down and ramp up again to compensate for the wind/solar problem.

That is nonsense. You balance the grid with pumped storage and gas turbines. Not with "oil" plants. On top of that a oil plant works more or less like a coal plant. The reaction time is similar.

You never should have gotten rid of the nuclear. That was silly. Nuclear is great.

At your place perhaps but not in Germany. No one wants it. That is enough to get rid of it. We don't know where to place the waste. 50% of the reactors are still running by the way, so you are again shouting out your ignorance. On top of that most nuclear plants are build at geological dangerous places.

Remove power imports from eastern europe and the decarbonization program in Germany would collapse.
No it would not, as you got told now dozen times. Your first mistake is to think we had any significant CO2 based energy imports from east europe, which we don't have.
On top of that you completely forget that Germany is a net energy exporter. So bottom line europe wide the CO2 production definitely shrunk.

Start to understand that import and export in a europe spanning grid is usually a monetary decision at two points, and not a by politicians orchestrated grand spiel.

That means import and export varies over daytime and simply makes it for the plant operators cheaper to utilize their plants. E.g. a load following plant, mainly used during peak time, can be brought online earlier in the morning and and can ramp up its power output quicker by exporting power to Germany (which is geographically one hour behind Poland). The same in reverse: when evening starts in Poland and the peakers are no longer needed, they can be shut down quicker and some power is imported from Germany.

US coal exports to Germany have more than doubled.
Germany imports coal from all over the world. That the US could increase their export to us, even double it, says noting about the coal consumption in germany ... a pretty silly argument.

Poland is massively expanding their power generation capabilities and are looking to to shift to nuclear because demand is so high. High in Poland!!!

The problem with your renewables is that they're not reliable. Wrong, they are not dispatch able that has nothing to do with reliability.

They need reliable back ups. And you buy those at a premium from eastern europe mostly. Both wrong. Premium prices on the spot markets don't happen because of "unreliable wind/solar" but sudden problems in the grid and unexpected demand.

Long term power contracts at set rates are much cheaper than drawing from Peaker plant contracts. No, they are not. As long term contracts also rely on peakers or how exactly do you think the contract is fullfilled during peak time? [...]

The shift to green power is premature. We should have doubled down on nuclear and waited until we had economical power storage sufficient to store several days worth of power per generator. That would smooth the power out and negate the need for the coal and gas peakers. But people wanted it now before it was ready and so... the clusterfuck continues
I suggest to draw a simple grid on paper, perhaps with 4 plants only and one storage. Then you figure quickly that the idea of storage the general public has, and especially you have, is completely wrong.

Also I suggest to let experts work on restructuring the grid, instead of your simplified imagination ... which is unfortunately in nearly every regard simply wrong.

Yeah you claim that now a dozen times. However: it is wrong.
Poland is phasing out its old brown coal plants till ~2020. They get partly replaced by more modern more efficient plants. Also Poland is still a "developing country" and not a first world industrial nation.

All that has nothing to with Germanys change in the energy world

Your idea what a spinning reserve is, is completely wrong.
Sorry ... wind power is not backed by 100% spinning reserves, that would be retarded. As wind can not vanish 100% ...

I'd like to know why this matters in the context of my augment that Germany overstates its CO2 reductions by manipulating statistics by shifting carbon debt to eastern europe.
Any proof for that :D ...

and now has problems bridging windless times.
There are no windless times.
Germany is about 1000km long in north - south direction and roughly 700km wide east to west.
Care to explain how on such a land mass possibly could be zero wind? It is physically impossible!
As most new wind plants are off shore plants those always will have wind.

without destroying civilization some winter week in Europe when the wind doesn't blow,
And this is completely retarded. When does the wind blow strongest? Most continious? Hm? Any idea?
It is winter.

The option to export has nothing to do with capacity factors or overproduction.

People should grasp that exports are not done by "countries" but by "companies".

They produce power and export power or import power when it makes economical sense.

Comparing the "earinings" makes no sense at all as you don't know the production price.