Analysis of renewable energy and economic growth of Germany

Abstract

The study aims to investigate the effect of energy use, renewable energy consumption, nuclear energy consumption and air transport freight on CO2 emissions in Germany. Auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) technique was used to establish the short and long-term correlations between the dependent (CO2) and independent variables (Energy use, nuclear consumption, renewable consumption, air transport freight) on a time series data from 1970 to 2021. The results demonstrated the dependence of energy use on non-renewable energy sources by revealing a significant and positive relationship between short and long-term energy use and CO2 emissions. Similar to energy use, nuclear energy use and air transport freight was also found to be positively correlated with CO2 emissions. On the other hand, despite the fact that there is a strong negative connection between carbon dioxide emissions and renewable energy, the results reveal that the correlation between the two is not statistically significant. The study aims to investigate the effect of important economic factors on Germany’s CO2 emissions in order to move further in a sustainable manner. The data reveals an astonishing increase in the usage of nuclear energy for power generation between 1965 and 1985, which was followed by a fall in 2012 as a result of the Fukushima tragedy and growing social unease in Germany, which ultimately led to the phase-out of nuclear power. Nonetheless, BAU projections revealed that even with 200 nuclear power plants, CO2 emissions would still be reduced to 278 by 2070, in part because of the additional power produced by other energy sources.