There is no doubt that green electricity has advantages for everyone, even if these advantages are not immediately apparent, apart from the pleasant feeling of having an excellent ecological conscience and noticeably reducing your environmental footprint.
After all, green electricity reduces your carbon dioxide emissions by up to 80 percent. You can quickly determine how high your CO2 emissions are from your electricity consumption alone using the CO2 calculator from the Federal Environment Agency. For example, if you use 1,500 kilowatts of conventional electricity over a year, your CO2 emissions will be 790 kilograms. If you use green electricity instead, your CO2 emissions will be around 50 kilograms.
In addition, the proportion of green electricity in the power grid increases with each green electricity consumer. As a consumer, you, therefore, have the power to promote the expansion of regenerative power plants actively. The more consumers opt for green electricity, and the more green electricity has to be fed into the power grid, new regenerative power plants must be built nationwide. The more recent systems are built, the higher the chance that pure green electricity will come out of your socket.
The generation of green electricity is CO2-free, much more environmentally friendly, and safer than nuclear power. According to President of the Federal Environment Agency, CO2 emissions were reduced by around 184 million tons in 2018 due to renewable energies alone.
In short: By using green electricity, each individual actively helps curb environmental pollution and climate change and prevent severe natural disasters, such as accidents in nuclear power plants or nuclear waste. In the future, the use of renewable energies will eliminate the dangerous transport of nuclear waste across Europe and the search for and the high costs of safe nuclear waste repositories.
The drawbacks of green electricity
One of the disadvantages of renewable energies is that green electricity cannot be stored sufficiently. This is all the more noticeable because renewable energies are not always available, such as solar or wind power. If too much electricity is generated from solar or wind power, the sensitive power grids are overloaded. Occasionally, therefore, the electricity had to be forwarded to the grids of neighboring countries such as Poland. On the other hand, if there is insufficient regenerative energy available, a stable power supply cannot be guaranteed. The temporary storage of electricity in the batteries of electric cars is not yet the perfect solution, but an acceptable one. Some electric vehicles have a bidirectional charger. The electric vehicle can thus function as an electricity storage device and deliver electricity. This turns the e-car into an electricity storage device.
Another critical point with the giant wind turbines is that the turbines' blades still kill birds and bats. In the case of birds, the large birds of prey, such as the lesser spotted eagle, are particularly affected, as the nature conservation organization Nabu writes. In addition, there is the so-called scaring effect on resting birds, which occasionally makes itself felt in one or the other observer of the wind turbines in the middle of nature.
When generating electricity using biomass, it must be considered that the plants used are no longer available as food for humans and animals. In addition, it is not wrongly argued that the large factory farms in particular benefit from this with liquid manure. In addition, generating electricity using biomass causes very high operating costs.
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