I am afraid this thread is going to be heavy on strongly held opinions and very light on facts and figures. In a futile attempt to compensate, here is the history of gross electricity production in Germany [1]. And here is the electricity import/export statistics [2].
2. Germany has reduced the production from fossil fuels from about 70% to about 37% within 30 years.
3. At the same time it cut nuclear power from around 28% to about 10.
4. It looks like without reducing nuclear power it could have replaced the equivalent amount of fossil fuels (achieving less than 20% fossil fuels by 2020). However, energy consumption has also gone up since 1990, so it would have required building more reactors.
5. Renewables have replaced about 25% of energy production in the last 10 years.
7. Energy per capita has dropped by something like 20% from its peak in the 90s.
Germany is a great example that these renewable policies can't sustain an industrial lifestyle. Germany is something of a cautionary tale; adopting Germany's policies will make people worse off.
Arguing that energy sustainability changes have made people worse off because they've reduced per-capita energy use is blatantly begging the question. Maybe energy is being used 3x as efficiently as it was in the 90s and so people are 2.4x better off.
They'd still have a better lifestyle if they used the same amount of energy and used it more efficiently. The lifestyle Germans enjoy is falling behind a hypothetical world where they implemented a cheap energy policy.
How much energy they produce is much more important when assessing how their renewable transition is going. They have barely managed to tread water by doing less per capita and matching their old supply. This is a far cry from the optimistic touting that solar/wind was a viable market competitor to fossil fuels - the evidence here is that these forms of energy are worse.
Right but you can't jump from that to assuming that US homes are nicer to live in - the difference is at least partly because more solid construction, traditional styles, and environmentalist design mean that German homes passively hold a comfortable temperature better than US ones. Air conditioning is a very brute-force solution to the problem and it comes with a significant downsides (noise, dry air that you then have to add more appliances to address, ugly, have to keep your windows closed...).
Paying 41c/kWh for ökostrom / 100% renewable energy here, and doing some mining with two 150W Radeon 6000 GPUs to keep this computer room warm goes a long way to making it cost effective.
Your 100% renewable energy mentioning sounds like you believe this and use it as an excuse to make it okay.
Ignore my comment though if you would normally heat by electricity but you use an umlaut so i assume you are a german as well.
Just a few days/weeks ago we had an extreme price hike due to high demand. High demand should only come from consuming energy in a usefull way. Mining your shitcoins for nothing is not helping at all.
You still consume energy which wouldn't need to be consumed as we do have other and much more energy friendlih systems for transaction security.
You are basically an american who drives the biggest pickup truck available and using oekofuel and state its now okay to do this.
Exactly. All electric heating should be replaced by GPUs. If you need to heat up a room with electricity, at least do some proof of work along the way.
Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free" since you're using it for heat anyway.
Heat pumps require a significant capital investment which would have to be recovered on only their efficiency improvement, since they don't otherwise generate revenue.
The math is different for new construction. There heat pumps make a lot more sense because the capital cost is relative to some other heating system you don't already have. Then the higher efficiency will generally cover the relative capital cost even if it wouldn't cover the total capital cost. This might still be less profitable than mining cryptocurrency (depending on a variety of factors) but better than any other traditional heating system.
> Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free"
No it isn't. I know because I looked into it.
Assuming the price of bitcoin doesn't rise or fall, a cutting edge bit of dedicated bitcoin mining hardware will pay for itself in 3 years if operated continuously on free electricity, and will be effectively obsolete in 5 years, as difficulty increases and rewards drop.
So if you only operate the hardware 50% of the time it'll be obsolete before it's paid for itself.
That's because you're using Bitcoin, for which custom ASICs are a thousand times more power efficient than commodity hardware and so commodity hardware is useless, but custom ASICs are stupid expensive.
What you want is a cryptocurrency that ASICs are no better at than CPUs or GPUs, so can use an ordinary CPU or GPU that will pay for itself more quickly because most of the mining cost is electricity instead of hardware. (Hint: the hardware you want in this case has the best performance/$, not necessarily the best performance/watt.)
"Which cryptocurrency" will also vary over time since the prices are all over the place, but that's the other advantage of not-ASICs. You can switch to whichever one pays better this month.
If gas is used for both heating and electricity production, or share any other fuel source, the prices of electricity and heating will still be related.
7. Germany does not import a lot of energy ... but when it does it does so mostly from France [1]. I suggest that is because the french nuclear reactors provide an abundant amount of energy.
That's a very good argument for the need to build much more renewable capacity in Germany, since that would substitute the burning of natural gas that caused this price increase.
Sure, we'll see it when it happens. Renewables are like a trickle at best, all the low hanging fruit there is taken, and the required battery capacity is huge....
There is no battery capacity required for the simple effect of substituting gas power plant operation. Any MWh generated by another source will simply remove the need to generate that MWh from gas, where the price of gas is the dominating component.
Not really. This is overly simplistic since it's not accounting for reliability/predictability of supply. Natural gas can be turned into MWh on demand, at night, when there's no wind, during consumption anomalies, etc. It's clearly not interchangeable with renewables MWh for MWh like you're suggesting.
You also have to pay the gas. Gas backups for power are just stupid without any own supply.
In winter, we also need the gas for heating, that will not change in the next 30-40 years.
Do you only use electricity only some hours a day?
No it’s usage need to be constant, or you'll get black-outs in regions where the grids 50hz frequency cannot be kept - which a lot of communals in Sweden are dangerously close to.
And if you don't keep the network balanced, you'll get complete blackouts instead of regional blackouts.
> That wasn't theoretical installed base, it was actual power produced
That's not what I'm saying. On a windy day, then doubling your number of wind turbines will (roughly) double your power output. But if there's no wind, your output drops to zero. Contrast that with nuclear power, where doubling capacity doubles output always.
So with nuclear power you could say that based on what current output we have, if we build X more capacity we could retire all polluting energy sources.
Heating is largely natural gas based, so it's not substitutive. I don't think Germany should be shutting down its nuclear reactors, but that has nothing to do with Russian gas. (Unless perhaps they started making synthetic methane using the heat of a nuclear reactor, which is not a terrible idea but not something they are currently doing AFAIK.)
In Sweden natural gas is hardly used yet electricity prices have gone up astronomically compared to last year - daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time. Heating in Sweden is a combination of electric (resistive elements and heat pumps), wood in some form (firewood, pellets, wood chips), some oil and process heat from industry where available. The Swedish equivalent of the German Greens is proudly proclaiming they're the ones who have closed nuclear power plants long before their calculated lifetime was out, leading to an increased need for electricity imports from e.g. Poland (mostly coal-fired plants). Their "green" policy has led to oil-fired power plants which normally only come online in the deep of winter to be fired up in summer to prevent brown-outs.
"daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time"
Really? 10 to 20x? That's 1,000 to 2,000% Here in the UK we've had suppliers collapse due to some "issues" involving not buying with fixed prices and end users like you and me get bills that are about 150% last year but not 1,000%.
We have (had) quite a lot of innovative suppliers that offered "green" tariffs that were backed by variable suppliers. Unfortunately the shit hit the fan and the price charged back in the day wasn't enough to cover the current rate plus enough profit to cover admin.
Yes, really. The price of electricity is set through a controlled market mechanism at "Nord Pool", the electricity producers exchange for the Nordic countries. Nearly all producers and sellers have pages showing these prices, here's an example:
Timpris på elbörsen (on the first site, "vattenfall") means "hourly rate on the electricity exchange". Have a look at the rates for area 3 - Södra Mellansverige (south of the middle of Sweden) and compare with the same day last year ("jämför med - Samma dag föregående år"). You'll see that the rates average some 500 öre (5 sek, about $0.55) per kWh excluding taxes, levies, surcharges and value added tax. At the same day last year the rate averaged about 20 öre, i.e. a difference of 2500%. The rates fluctuate hourly and the last few weeks they've broken all records. The increase for the last month was +245%, averaged over the whole year rates have doubled.
I'm quite surprised that Scandinavia is having even more problems than say the UK because you have rather a lot of useful topological features (really big hills and mountains and lakes at elevation - ie potential energy). You are also closer to the Ukraine than us for gas so that should be cheaper too.
Our consumer energy market is a bit strange. We have a national grid for eleccy and then have multiple "suppliers" who supposedly compete. The ones who went balls out have gone bust. They generally offered fixed and flexible rates based on the wholesale cost plus their margin. Then the wholesale cost went up rather a lot and they lost their margin and without money in the bank, they went bust. The govt agency for energy then enforced other suppliers to take us on. So I was a customer of "Green" and now I'm a customer of "Shell Energy". You can be sure that Shell are not losing out in any way 8)
I've just noticed that you use the term Nordic countries - is that a better/preferred term to use than Scandinavia?
The Nordic countries include Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Finland
Scandanavia includes Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The common factor there is having closely related languages and cultures. However, speaking from experience as an American, we often use "Scandanavian" as a synonym of "Nordic".
We're not surprised by these problems because we saw them coming, it's just really disheartening to see the expected negative downfall of the policies enacted by the "green" party and its followers. Add to this the fact that this party hardly has any support - they are currently underneath the 4% limit and will most likely disappear from Riksdagen (the Swedish parliament) and it becomes even more incongruous that they have been allowed to have such an extraordinary negative effect on the future energy supply in this country. To add insult to injury they recently stepped out of the coalition (between the "green" "miljöpartiet" (which means "environmental party")) and the social democrats, less than a year before the coming elections. They're now in supposed opposition, acting as if the negative effects are all someone else's fault. May they never reach the threshold again so that those who care for the environment stop believing this party is the one to vote for.
10-12 years ago the UK govt signed deals with some companies that would be building the new nuclear power plants ie EDF that they would be getting a minimum price for generation which was double what it was back then. I often think we dont have a free market but a clever fixed pricing market. UK is also windiest country in the world hence all our wind turbines. Dont know if more Electric Mountains will be built to buffer the surplus wind power as more turbines come online, but the bigger the turbine the more that is generated which is the natural progression we are seeing.
Little know fact kept out of the media when we had all the flooding over winter a few years back, one nuclear power station had to be shutdown to avoid a meltdown caused by flooding.
Electricity consumption has gone up with the increase in consumer gadgets, ie computers, tablets, mobiles, big massive flat screens, sound systems ie personal cinema setups, its only natural to see electricity demands go up.
And there is not enough of some of the rare earth materials and other metals used to make or maintain electric cars on the planet unless some miners have been keeping deposits secret, so I expect some miners share prices to go up considerably in the future.
If that were true here in the USA my bill would go from $200 in the winter to $2000. I could afford that but poor people would just have to turn off the heat and suffer and some of them die, so this seems..... like there's more to the story.
Don't. Keep on pointing out this lie, not so much to smear electric vehicles - given good battery technology these are a good idea - but to make clear that the powertrain is as clean as its dirtiest link. Whether this is a browncoal-fired powerplant, a polluting Cobalt mine employing child labour or fields full of not recyclable wind turbine blades, these things need to be taken out of the chain for the technology to deserve the "green" label. Given that an increase in CO₂ will lead to an increase in biomass [1,2] you may as well apply a "green" label to fossile fuels, it would be just as disingenuous.
Not that many. Power from Poland or Germany is not that common in Sweden, Sweden exports most of the time. It can happen during periods of low winds, but it's not that frequent.
It has become far more frequent than it used to after the closure of Ringhals 1 and Barsebäck, two nuclear power plants in the south of Sweden. The power grid in Sweden is designed to take electricity produced mostly by hydroelectric plants in the north and middle and nuclear in the south. The closure of those nuclear plants in the south has led to an imbalance, especially given the increase in power use in the south. To make matters worse the "government" - between quotes here because they hardly deserve that term - allowed the establishment of several data centres by the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google, each of which consumes enough electricity to make it impossible for other industry to be established in the same area given the limits of the distribution network. To make things even worse those data centres got a really sweet deal on electricity, they're not paying all the taxes and surcharges which other consumers and industry have to. In return they provide a couple of dozen jobs, each of which was subsidised by the Swedish state (in addition to the mentioned deal on electricity) to the tune of 2.5 million SEK (around $275.000,-).
Here's some more choice words on the failures of the current Swedish energy policy:
To be fair, residential/commercial heating could be entirely electric, and heat pumps have additional benefits over natural gas heating (like being reversible in the summer).
Presumably people would switch if the cost of electricity was low enough for it to be more economical. Decisions that result in the price of electricity staying high provide political leverage to gas producers.
Though, eyeballing the numbers, it really should be very attractive to install heat pumps in the EU despite the high electricity cost. The cost of natural gas is quite high.
In northern countries where the primary need is heating (and there is very little need for cooling), heat pumps at current electricity and gas prices are 2x more expensive per kWh of heat put into the property. They are also about 3x more expensive to install.
They only make sense in places that need cooling too, or when electricity gets cheaper.
Numbers from 1 hour ago... From the UK, and assuming UK climate for COP figures. ~True with both retail capped prices, and wholesale market prices.
There are still people in the UK installing heat pumps. Either they have a very rose tinted view of the future direction of electricity prices Vs gas, a rose tinted view of future government taxes/incentives, a rose tinted view of the environmental benefits (eg. By looking at aggregate CO2 emissions instead of marginal CO2 emissions), or they have been misled by installers/builders who make substantially more money if they install a heat pump.
Either that or I got my maths wrong. But I don't think I did.
from the UK - groundsource vs air-source heat pumps makes a huge difference. Last i checked:
- ground source was roughly parity with gas (with something like an 8x higher install cost)
- air source heat pumps were more expensive to operate but similar on install costs
However comparing on cost only misses the point, a heat pump is generally capable of cooling as well, which is becoming more of a necessity in the summer.
P.S. You can do silly things with ground loops like use excess solar power to cool during the summer or daytime storing that heat in the ground, then removing some of it in the winter/nighttime.
Thank you!
And I can venture a few more hypotheses (from least to most likely):
1. Altruism
2. Already committed
3. They have a pessimistic view of future gas prices.
4. They have solar.
5. They're in a long tail/corner case/different use case from the one you computed.
I'd put my money on 5, depending on how big a % difference. Eg. I've noticed more and more people switching to solar as prices come down and hit an inflection point for them in their use case. Wouldn't be surprised if heat pumps are the same.
Can you expand on the aggregate CO2 vs marginal CO2 part ?
I’m looking into installing a ground heat pump in a new house (coupled with solar panels) mostly for environmental reasons and all the critics I’ve read so far were about the costs.
If you turn on a light and use some extra electricity, some power station somewhere will need to increase power output to provide for you.
It's the CO2 production of that extra generation, known as marginal generation, you should care about, not the nationwide average.
Most of the time, in most of the world, that extra generation is combined cycle gas turbines at ~50% efficiency.
For most people, the only time a new use of electricity is eco-friendly is when all the energy in a country is already supplied by wind/solar/hydro, and therefore a newly switched on thing also gets supplied by wind/solar/hydro.
Obviously the decision to installation a heat pump depends on the marginal generation in 15 years when you are still using that heat pump. That's very hard to predict.
And when you say resistive, do you mean element within (an electric) boiler, radiators to work as normal, or something more direct, electric radiators/underfloor/etc.?
I think it doesn't really matter much what is meant throughout - point was about shifting gas demand on to the electricity supply, and whether the grid could cope with it if everyone did that to a meaningful degree.
Not necessarily, it's just uncorrelated since it's not what's doing the actual heating.
Similarly a gas boiler uses 1kW electricity (for the pump) to get potentially >1kW heat out of radiators (and pipes). Because that heat is energy conserved from the gas, not the electricity.
Anyway I didn't mention heat pumps or compare them to resistive heating so I'm not sure what I'm defending.
It should be done, but that's almost impossible. Retro fitting to a heat pump is very expensive, you have to replace all radiators with underfloor heating and the insulation has to be redone. While this is done, you can't live in your home.
Germany would have problems if not for French nuclear, and a great many, rather expensive, gas power plants. For exactly how much, just look at what has happened to the UK as they left the EU wide powersharing agreements.
Its also worth nothing that the rising power prices have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves and heating, which is a huge part of their total CO2, and pollution output.
> Germany would have problems if not for French nuclear
You could say that pretty much about any country in the European synchronous grid. Everyone needs everyone else.
> and a great many, rather expensive, gas power plants
The gas plants are actually quite cheap. It's the gas that's expensive.
> Its also worth nothing that the rising power prices have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves and heating
That statement makes no sense to me. Rising power prices are definitely connected to rising gas prices, which don't prevent people from moving away from using gas for stoves and heating but rather motivate them to do just that.
No not quite, burning fuel for heat locally will always be at least twice as effective as ideal conversion to power, followed by ideal conversion to heat, in practice its closer to three times. Therefore power prices need to fall substantially gas prices before the switch is worth it. That will never happen while producing power from gas or more expensive alternatives. In particular since the gas distribution infrastructure is in place and effectively subsidized/on a different budget.
But if they produced nuclear at the price they used to be able to in Germany, before regulations and investment insecurity drove up the price, buying gas just could not compete.
Sweden, notably getting half its power from nuclear, does not need anyone else. Same thing for france.
Heat pumps generally have a coefficient of performance (i.e., number of watts consumed vs. number of 'heat watts' moved) of ~4 with modern systems. So, compared to resistive electric heat (COP=1) it's roughly 4x as efficient. It gets worse in colder climates, (such as parts of Sweden...), but you should be doing better most of the time, as you aren't at super super cold temperatures all the time.
Much like insulation they help, and I would wager its cost effective in most places most of the time, in particular for individuals. But I am not sure how well it scales.
Compare building and installing 5 million heatpumps with building 2GW new nuclear power production ? The latter could include at least one city heated entirely by cooling water, but even ignoring that, using Finnish numbers for nuclear, and ballparking optimistically the heaters? They cost about the same, take about the same time to build and install... its unclear to me which would lower individual costs more, which would be better for the economy, or climate. I guess heatpumps win on individual costs, nuclear on the economy, and both being roughly equal on climate. The nuclear plant certainly wins on total maintenance resources/work, but the heatpumps on versatility of maintenance, i.e. you can just say fuck it with heat pump maintenance in a way you cant with nuclear. Nuclear wins on flexibility, while heatpumps win on rollout, giving its highest benefits very quickly, but taking as, if not far longer, to complete. There is often a benefit to mass production over individual small scale stuff though. If we could build at 1970ties + inflation prices though, the nuclear plant power would cost less than a tenth, and output more power than the total heating the corresponding 500k heat pumps provide.
Compare to how people buying and installing large supplemental home solar+lithium ion battery packs looks great, until you consider the cost and time to deploy a million such, and compare that to the cost and speed by which we could produce a large hydropower dam as energy storage. The latter wins by a landslide, or occasionally flood^^. Heatpumps are much better and cheaper, though, so its harder to tell.
Sweden is shutting down its nuclear all since a vote in the 1980s, although new nuclear is suddenly being seriously considered here it seems. It only took a major electricity price shock!
> No not quite, burning fuel for heat locally will always be at least twice as effective as ideal conversion to power
Except NOT having to heat is even more effective than burning fuel for heating locally. So the move away from gas heating to low-energy buildings is definitely stimulated by higher gas prices.
> Same thing for france.
I doubt that, since France seem to be actually using their interconnects. Can't comment on Sweden, though.
Actually, not currently. A combination of regulator-mandated nuclear plant stops, scheduled nuclear plant maintenance and fossil plant closures means that France currently relies on importing a lot currently.
Your statement is true generally, but France's situation currently contributes to high energy prices.
For cooking induction plates are much more efficient, transferring 90% of the energy as opposed to ~50% with gas stoves. Together with a gas plant efficiency of ~50%, they comes close in efficiency.
Gas stoves still come out on top price-wise, but part of that are asinine taxes, where gas is taxed less than electricity.
Thermodynamics says that it needs to dump heat somewhere, but maybe they can dump it into the atmosphere instead using hyperboloid cooling towers.
Those are huge though (at least "natural draft" ones are) and usually made of concrete, and making the concrete currently requires lots of carbon emissions.
Heat pumps change this a bit, doubling the efficiency (assuming its similar to Sweden), but it varies. So in the ideal case, its roughly the same, in practice slightly less, and with costs it gets complicated and dominated by subsidies and existing infrastructure.
Heat pumps require nearby reservoirs however, land essentially, which is available in suburbs, but can be quite a challenge in dense cities.
But the real problem is the cost of changing the infrastructure, remember its not just getting power instead of gas, its also switching out every heater from fluid based to power based. Switching stoves from gas to power, etc. Its not only a big investment, but a time consuming and inconvenient one.
Even if power prices dropped to half I would not expect this to be particularly fast, and worse still, historically Germany has subsidized directly(with rebates, taxbreaks, etc) and indirectly(nordstrom2... LNG harbors, etc) the gas prices whenever people complain, or just to prevent complaints.
I guess replacing gas in German households will require both electricity prices dropping to around one third or less, and substantial government support. Or a multi decade power price drop to say one tenth or less.
I'm guessing based on what I happened to know of heat pumps in practice in sweden, but I think it makes sense to assume this. The reason is that the temperature difference between sweden and Germany is probably less than 1%.
Temperature in sweden averages about 2 degrees C, and the temperature in germany about 3 degrees C, which can look like a 50% increase, but everything in thermodynamics works in Kelvin, not C. So the difference is between 275 and 276 degrees K, which is about 0.3% or almost nothing.
Its not enough to prove anything, just make it reasonably likely, which is then combined with the qualifier.
- why then, if we go by jhgb's source, is France missing 52 min of electricity per year while Germany is missing 12 min? Are they stabelizing the german grid at their own disadvantage?
- are nuclear power plants cheap? Isn't Hinkley Point C guranteed 10 ct/kwh + inflation. Wasn't it the new Finnish nuclear plant that cost 11 billion Euros? What do gas power plants cost, 20 billion?
> 'which have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves ...'
I would like a source for that. According to [1], 91% of german house holds are using electric kitchen stoves and 7% gas. For heating, they have a larger market share but gas kitchen stoves are not really widespread.
> Wasn't it the new Finnish nuclear plant that cost 11 billion Euros?
Olkiluoto unit 3 is a pretty extreme outlier in construction costs. The same amount of power generation capacity from CPR1000 plants (widely used in China today) would cost closer to 2.5 billion Euros, and construction times are about 5 years.
Yes, and so is the new Flamanville reactor. It's funny: out of the fifty or so commercial nuclear reactors that came online in the past decade, for some reason those still-under-construction debacles are the only ones most people have heard about.
Why is this always spread? Right now is a winter night (-6 celsius), this is the live electricity map for Europe: https://app.electricitymap.org/map
Right this second, Germany is EXPORTING to most of their neighbors. Are they charging the other batteries now or how am I supposed to follow your logic?
2. Sun and wind only produce a fraction of the time (40% [1] and 25% [2] respectively, and 7.5% (= 8.94/(63.2+56)) of installed capacity this very second [3])
3. Production capacity without sun and wind < peak demand
Germany's mix only work because of neighbouring countries. And their humongous amounts of still existing coal and gas.
Sure but carbon is carbon. If they are able to get that much more of their overall power output from renewable, that's carbon not going into the air.
The problem with the current generation of nuclear is that it's expensive to build, and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. If it's possible to get the same emissions reduction by building out lots and lots of renewable, instead of spending that money on nuclear, that's understandable for a country that can't just print money.
There will eventually be some limit to that strategy (i.e. how do you meet supply at night) and we'll have to see how the next-gen energy storage and nuclear pan out.
People say this as if reactors get build once and then stay the same way. These reactors get upgraded all the time. Here's an example: Isar 1 was one of the oldest reactors in Germany. When a German reactor gets new fuel rods it has to be certified again according to current regulations. Isar 1 needed new fuel rods in 2011, so it got upgraded and certified again. After that new fuel rods were introduced into the reactor. A few month later as consequence of the Fukushima disaster it got "shut down"[1], because it was now "not safe". Which is obviously bullshit, cause the rules on reactor safety for German nuclear reactor didn't change due to Fukushima, opinions did and politicians needed to show that they do something.
[1] It didn't really get shut down in 2011. It got removed from the power grid. So, Isar 1 continued to produce power, which was then promptly discharged into the environment as heat. Only after the fuel rods were burned down it really got shut down.
>It didn't really get shut down in 2011. It got removed from the power grid. So, Isar 1 continued to produce power, which was then promptly discharged into the environment as heat.
You can't decide when the wind blow and when the sun shines. And you can't either decide when people turn on their washing machine. So it is obvious there is a problem
> And you can't either decide when people turn on their washing machine.
Not completely, but you can make electricity almost free at certain times of day to encourage shifting usage.
Although there is a natural limit to this, since people have to be home to do laundry!
(Also electric driers are the real culprit, they use an obscene amount of electricity! I am not sure if Germany is big on electric dryers or not though, that is something which is very culture dependent)
Power is far to abstract and far to cheap for people to make even the slightest adjustment to their habits. After all, lets say you knew that making your morning coffe between 07-08 cost 10 cents more than doing so an hour earlier or later, would you get up earlier, or go to work latter? And in 1 cent is more realistic.
So, like, you know, yeah. My dryer has a delay start function on it, if late night prices are 1/2 peak, then I'd save 75 cents a load. Let's say 3 days a week of laundry, $9 a month in savings.
Again, my dryer already does this, it isn't new tech, it is just nudging me to make use of the existing button that is already there!
US electricity prices are so low, eh, not really worth it for the state I live in.
Most people in Germany do not have an electric dryer.
Also, electricity prices are not the same everywhere. My parents for example pay only 20 ct/kwh (I have no idea how they got that contract, especially since they moved only last year. They have low overall usage though (2,000 kWh/a, with fixed cost being like 30% of the total bill)
Having a dryer is not the same as using it for all loads. Sometimes you need quick access to clothes. Work, spilling accident, not enough room for natural drying. In summer, if you can dry safely outside, that is a far better option.
I don't think this is true. My (Dutch) mom used to wash at night and in the weekend because of reduced tariffs. She is very energy conscious on general. Not everyone is oblivious to these things, especially less well off people.
This is a syllogism and masks a complete mismatch of both demand and risks of windless days. There is no insurmountable problem if you accept a market in electricity in Europe, demand management (which already exists in the market in air-conditioning, freezing and thermal mass industries) and overbuild of supply. Not to mention storage.
It's not just a syllogism, it's a really weak one. You actually can decide when people "turn on their washing machine". It's called controlled supply, it's existed since the 1950s. Mainly for water heating but in principle any function.
So the thing about the earth is that it's big. If you have a big enough grid, it will be sunny and windy over a fairly consistent portion of that area.
It does not work that way. Long distance extreme high voltage transfer loses about 5% per 1000km, with the transformers adding another 10%, under ideal circumstances. In practice its higher, and thats on land. Sea cables lose 100x per km around 50% per 100km, again under ideal circumstances. In practice double the losses per distance, and if using existing grids, double it again, because most places dont build top end voltage grids.
Looking at maps for power prices with large hydropower dams you can easily see how most countries grids dont transfer more than around 1000km, and often quite a bit shorter. In practice this is the point where it becomes more cost effective to build new powerplants, than bigger infrastructure for transfer.
We could build grids designed for this, but never across oceans, and we are talking about an absolutely gargantuan investment, and its generally not considered as a solution for the unreliability of solar and wind. Its also why no one ever suggests to use the big empty oceans for truly large scale wind or solar etc, its always places very close to land.
Its also worth pointing out that superconductors cannot solve this, even if price and the gargantuan cooling energy requirements are ignored. This is because while superconductors transfer power without loss, they can only do so up to a limited effect, as the power interferes with the superconducting ability after that, essentially breaking it.
> Long distance extreme high voltage transfer loses about 5% per 1000km.
That's an incredibly low amount. Taking Berlin as an example, even 5000km lets you reach plenty of hot, sunny desert areas where any losses will be easily offset by vastly increased solar efficiency. Or you could spread out your wind energy sources to get more consistent coverage.
In fact that's pretty much what Singapore is doing: building a solar farm 5000km away in Australia.
this was true with ac power cables, but isn't with hvdc ones. they don't have the same capacitance issues, and add such undersea cables are becoming more prevalent. a 1400km between Egypt and Greece is expected to be completed in 2023
The oceans kill it completely, remember two oceans of 100km reduce transfer by 0.75, and thats ignoring all the other problems with the grids on the way.
We don't have a planetary grid (yet, at least). If there's a high pressure system across Europe, the whole continent can have low wind. This usually comes with either very high temperatures (in summer) or very low temperatures (in winter) which further stresses the system.
What do you consider acceptable? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad... puts the loss for HVDC at 3.5% per 1000km. That would imply 4000km with 15% loss, which is pretty good considering that wind and solar are significantly more than 15% cheaper than nuclear.
Specifically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... puts the cost of wind/solar at roughly 1/3rd the cost of nuclear, so it's more (cost) efficient to spend as much on transmission as you do on generation and build a really well connected massive grid than to use nuclear.
We can transport it a fair bit further than that, but only under ideal circumstances that are rarely met, and its very rare the grid is built for it, its never been needed after all. For instance, regulatory issues usually mean that every country border crossed tends to have a transformer station, which makes minor changes at a 10% or so efficiency loss.
transmitting energy from other half of the earth (where is daylight when you are sleeping) is probably not best idea (not sure if even economically or technically possible). Also would be wise to turn off nuclear energy once you have this 'big enough grid'.
Is day and night really the problem here? Because I thought demand usually peaks at certain times of the day (e.g. early in the evening in California: https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o...), and actually bottoms out during the night. You would mostly use an interconnected grid (and storage) to compensate for this.
In most of the Europe the biggest use of energy for family will be heating except summer. In the future probably also charging electric car. This kind of power demand you need mostly at night when sleeping - during the day you are probsbly in the office.
Transmitting power also consumes energy - you cannot have a electric wire across pacific to transmit power from US to EU without transformers - electric power line is not a fiber optic that transmit just signal.
I also doubt we have enough rare earth minerals to make all those magnets for wind turbine and and electric car enough for whole planet. Remember also you have to decomission those windturbine after some years which is expensive
At least in The Netherlands we mostly use centralised (gas-powered) heating, so nuclear energy is a tangential factor. Also there seems to be room for improvement in insulation and centralised thermal storage (warmtenet in Dutch). Electric cars seem both like both a problem and an opportunity, because you could charge them while being at the office and partly use their batteries for powering your home at night (in case you don't need a full charge to get to work in the morning).
Regarding rare earths, we will need them regardless of using nuclear or renewables for electric cars, so that seems partly tangential. For wind turbines their reliance on rare earths seems troublesome. It's geopolitically ironic that we (Western Europeans) get our gas from Russia and our rare earths from China.
Electric cars are currently mostly charged at night (since that's when electricity is cheaper), but as solar becomes more prevalent, that will swap. Charging cars during the day is pretty easy, just require office parking lots to have chargers (and possibly subsidize).
You are right that you can't have an electric wire across the Pacific to get power from the US to the EU, but more because the EU doesn't border the Pacific. On a more serious note, Novia Scotia to Ireland is about 2600 miles, so it's on the edge of doable with HVDC, but it would be a massive project and slightly hard to justify.
I'm interested to know what rare earth metals make up so much of a wind turbine. According to https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/66861.pdf (page 65), around 99% of a turbine is accounted for by steel, fiberglass, iron, copper, and aluminum.
Whats funny about this is, that the wind farm will not even be connected to Iceland itself! I guess they have such great geothermal resources that they don't really need more power.
Well, it is obvious, that the renewable production needs to be paired with some on-demand sources. Short term, gas is great for that, as gas power plants can be switched on and off quickly, long-term the necessary storage options are needed (some of that can be power2gas, which can be burnt in the gas power plants).
Still an unacceptable CO2 emission in my book. Natural gas is at 55,82 [kg CO2 / GJ], when coal is at 94,6 [kg CO2 / GJ]. [1]
So that's only 40% less pollution, and there are still huge quantities of coal that has yet to be replaced in Germany.
What's missing from your view is how you provide for baseload. Right now, what is baseload in Germany? It is coal: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
Going to chime in with my usual statement, "baseload" as a concept only applies if you have energy sources which are cheap to run but can't scale up and down quickly. That is no longer the case.
What you mean to say is "we need to provide power all the time".
Gas is better than coal in a strict sense, and a combo of gas and renewables will vastly reduce emissions, and in a way most people can deal with. Over time battery prices will fall and renewable install base will rise so that gas peaked eventually become unnecessary.
> 4. It looks like without reducing nuclear power it could have replaced the equivalent amount of fossil fuels (achieving less than 20% fossil fuels by 2020). However, energy consumption has also gone up since 1990, so it would have required building more reactors.
Coal exit is not related to nuclear exit in Germany. Germany would have the exact same amount of coal plants if they'd kept nuclear.
Coal is about jobs (and votes) in regions which are already troubled by unemployment. This is why the name of the commission which decided how the phase out will work was: "Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment"
2. Yes but ~1990 is not a good baseline as back then lots of highly inefficient industry and power plants of former GDR were still running and on the brink of being demolished due to economic collapse. It makes Germanys efforts look much better than they were.
Germany's wind and solar is only possible because neighbouring countries compensate for when there's no wind and sun; which happen a lot of the time. On top of that wind and solar production must be bought first on the EU market, effectively ruining CO2-free capital that was there beforehand (read: nuclear).
So these charts that you show only demonstrate that Germany was first to jump on wind and solar production. Great for them, but now wind and solar in neighbouring countries are much less profitable when they'd be less correlated to Germany's huge wind and solar capacity.
Perfect play in a game-theoretic setting, but damaging to the neighbours and the actual goal of CO2 reduction.
> I'd imagine that somewhere there is always enough wind and sun in Europe.
* wind: wind power production scales with the cube of the wind speed [1], so actual production only occurs about 25% of the time [2]. Also huge areas produce at the same time: the size of the average depression [3] can often be as large as the continent.
* sun: solar panels don't produce at night. I don't think I need to source that claim. Cloudy weather is not good either.
And the nice thing about nights is that they are quite predictable. So not a very difficult problem to solve.
Tesla power wall (I'd argue overpriced...): $10k [1]
Cost of an average nuclear plant today: $20bn [2] (+operating costs)
So you could buy and install 2Mio powerwalls for thr price of one nuclear plant. How many powerwalls (or more cost-effective solutions) would you need to balance the demand vs availability of electricity at night?
Nothing in the article you linked to supports your claim that "Cloud is not really such a problematic factor". In fact, the article explicitly states:
> However, clouds can block light from the sun. So, do clouds affect the creation of energy by solar panels? Yes, but it depends on the types of clouds and where those clouds are in the atmosphere.
> When sunlight hits low clouds, a lot of that light – and heat – is reflected back into space. […] So, if you live in a place that commonly has a lot of low clouds, solar panels might not be able to produce as much energy as they would somewhere else.
——
> And the nice thing about nights is that they are quite predictable. So not a very difficult problem to solve.
Non-sequitur. The fact that it's predictable doesn't mean it's not a difficult problem.
What is the lifetime of a Tesla power wall? Do we even know?
New nuclear reactors are expected to run for 60-100 years.
This is one of the neglected parameters of such calculations. CAPEX for nuclear is high, but the resulting structure is long-lived, much more so than solar panels (25-30 years) or wind turbines (20 years).
I'd imagine that somewhere there is always enough wind and sun in Europe.
The problem with this approach is that you need to overbuild the total installed capacity massively, so that every "somewhere" could, in need, play the role of an energy producing and exporting center for all the other regions.
If 70 % of Europe is calm and dark at one point, the remaining 30 % would need to produce enough energy for the entire continent. (This also means having very high capacity cross-continent links to move that energy around from anywhere to anywhere else. Not easy to build or maintain.)
It would be great to have that infrastructure of course, but if we're going to say "OK we need to do mammoth projects which require lots of up front capex and ongoing administrative competence", that same argument applies to old-school nuclear reactors too.
The most grating thing about the renewable fad is that "herp durp churn out more wind and solar at the margins decentralized" and "massive coordinated grids and/or huge batteries" are utterly different modes of infrastructure production. There is no sense in which getting really good at the former makes one any better at the latter.
No. Currently (20:56 UTC) there is no sun shining in Europe.
As for wind, in the UK (it's the country where I know where to find the real-time data easily), wind is only producing about 1/3 of its capacity--about 7GW of 24GW capacity. https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live Overall renewables are generating about 1/4 of total generation.
In simplified terms, most EU countries have either ample sun (Mediterranean area), wind and ocean (north, west ) or wind and space (Poland & neighbors). Most also have a coast, mountains or both so some hydro potential. Even Luxembourg managed to find thermal power for heating.
With wind turbines improving steadily and available in different sizes there is also no big barrier to having them interspersed. Germany or the Netherlands are in large parts densely populated but still manage to put up wind turbines everywhere.
Ummm, Europe is close enough together that night falls over the whole continent before it rises again. So no there's not always sun somewhere in Europe.
So germans are still buying (some) Russian gas for heat, while shutting down nuclear plants? That just seems wrong.
> biomass" often gets hidden in the "clean energy" part, but that just means burning something other than oil/coal/gas.
That's usually CO2 neutral if it's waste/wood pellets etc. Whether it's "clean" or "sustainable" is a hot topic, but in terms of climate it's a lot better than fossil fuel.
You make an argument that only works in theory. In reality you cannot switch heating modalities like underwear for whatever seems reasonable at the moment. Most houses are build with gas and oil heating systems. In some places like Berlin the gas infrastructure is very old and established. Even streetlights run on gas in some places and houses have generators in the basement to combine heat and electricity supply.
But this argument has been made for years. For decades. We are talking about banning the sales of combustion engine vehicles within 10 years. Surely in 10, 20 or 30 years one should be able to see pretty significant progress in the conversion of building heating systems?
I’m assuming old multi story houses with gas heating typically use a water system (radiators) and only a single basement furnace? In that situation, switching the boiler to anything else or even better just using central heating should be a reasonably sized investment.
It’s not like German cities are unique in how they are built and heated. Lots of other cities have done this conversion in the latest decades.
Gas infrastructure was old and established in all major European cities. Now it’s electrical stoves and central heating in many places.
> Now it’s electrical stoves and central heating in many places.
What's "central heating"?
I believe Germany already uses central heating in most places. The question is what powers it. Can it be efficiently replaced by renewable-energy (!) electric heating vs. fossil? Other commenters have posited "no".
The way I see it, investing in nuclear should have been part of the plan, instead of replacing it with renewables (vs. doing so for those uses of fossil where renewables make sense). The fear of nuclear energy in Germany is just ridiculous IMO, and arguably has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With nuclear power on its way out know how and effort to research and to maintain existing plants and investment in it are at a minimum making continued operation now a liability.
Central heating is the distribution of hot water from a central location. Best case it’s leftover energy from nearby industry, worst case it’s just a place where something is burned, such as biogas/biomass/trash or fossil fuels. But many cities have some heavy industry that can supply waste heat for a lot of buildings.
Centrally burned fossil is better for the environment than burning in residential buildings, especially in cities. For the climate it makes no difference though.
Even though it’s a waste of high grade energy, one could imagine powering heating plants with electricity in a pinch. If there is so much surplus electricity that reactors are closed then perhaps…
The Stockholm City gas system, although much smaller than Berlin’s was swapped to a renewable gas (biogas) 10 years ago.
That’s a much less acute problem as it’s possible to stockpile or get from elsewhere. Gas pipelines would require new pipelines to replace (or gas ports and storage etc) which won’t happen this winter.
In my opinion I think biomass can be considered cleaner since the burning of it releases only recently stored carbon as opposed to taking huge carbon reserves from fossil fuels that might not have ever seen the atmosphere again. In my mind biomass is "carbon neutral" where fossil fuels are "carbon positive"
It is not neutral, it takes tens of years for standard sources of biomass to accumulate to useful amounts. Fast biomass would use something like hemp or other grass but it's still problematic.
And it does increase CO2 and NOx levels when burned, not to mention soot - it's dirtier than quality coal. The growth itself does not capture nearly enough to cover for it.
Biomass is mostly wood. If the forest is in steady-state (as is the case in Germany), this is carbon neutral. The main issue is that plants are much less efficient at light harvesting than solar cells. This means that there is probably not much scaling potential left.
Yes, heating and transportation are huge and almost entirely fossil fueled. Low-tech solutions such as heat pumps and better insulation alone could probably make a large impact.
Primary energy consumption isn't a great metric for comparing with renewable electricity, since for conventional plants it includes the unused energy lost as heat.
A fossil power plant wastes ~60% of the energy, a nuclear plant ~75%, a small petrol engine ~75%. Once you take this into account, the stats look a little better.
There's a reason why electrification of transportation and low-energy buildings are major topics in Europe. You see them on the top and on the left of your chart, respectively.
I understand that energy consumption includes things that aren't electricity so the proportion of oil is higher but everything else is different too. For example, in the parent comment, more wind than biomass is produced but in this comment the consumption is the other way around. Is it because biomass is used for cars as well (ethanol)? Maybe wood for heating too?
Yes, I think it's a mix of Biodiesel and wood stoves. Not sure why the rape seed production wouldn't count into the biomass production then. It makes sense that you see private-only things like wood stoves only on the consumption side.
I think another factor is that private sector (heavy industry) production of energy (with private coal plants etc) probably doesn't count into the production side either.
One wonders how much better those charts would have looked with a rational investment into a climate-neutral, self-reliant form of electricity production, i.e. dozens of new nuclear reactors.
I think the merit of this idea will become clear among the public when the price of electricity becomes an election issue.
[1] more than half of their power comes from burning something and releasing carbon.
It would be better to keep nuclear and remove carbon sources, especially any gas from russia.
When shaping public policy, narratives are more important than data.[1]
From my observation, it seems that the procedure is to set the narrative up, make it simple, broadcast it from as many channels as possible and censor, threaten and insult people who present data that contradicts the narrative. Works really well.
"A good narrative soundly beats even the best data."
Sweden seems the long term success story, despite the more northern location presumbly needing more energy for heating. They have the highest carbon fees in the world, and like Germany seem to have been a bit stop'n'go when it comes to nuclear, changing the date when they intend to phase them out a few times, but generally closing them being the trend.
It's worth noting that we pay for both, import and export of electricity in Germany. This is due to the failed* energy transition ("Energiewende") into renewable production. We pay for our overproduction on sunny and windy days, because the electricity _has_ to be bought by network providers.
One important thing to notice is that uranium is a finite non-renewable resource. The Red Book says there are about 3.3 million tons that are extractable for a price of 130 USD/ton. In 2017 the total uranium production was 60.000 tons. Thats about 55 years of uranium left at the current production rate. The Red Book assumes there are another 2.1 million tons likely to exist from geological data, but not found yet and another 4.8 million tons assumed to exist but yet to be discovered.
Now imagine that nuclear power production would be greatly increased. How many years of uranium supply would we have left?
We have basically unlimited uranium. There’s no risk of shortage. The average cubic meter of crust has more breedable fuel energy in it than a cubic meter of coal.
Fission is effectively as unlimited as renewable energy is, about a billion years’ worth of crust. Even if we stick with typical U235 reactors, sufficient uranium ore exists for hundreds of years, although no one will bother to formally “prove” the reserves for a constraint 100 years in the future.
What’s limited is the atmosphere’s capacity for CO2. Not much else matters in the mid/near-term, except perhaps for ensuring we have enough energy for civilization to function.
There is, however, no reason that fission power need be restricted to uranium as a fuel source. Use of breeder reactors would allow power consumption at our current levels longer than the sun is likely to exist.
Even if fission power is not the long-term solution, it is the desperately needed current solution. Running out of power would definitely kill us slowly. Current rates of CO2 production will kill us quite quickly.
This is where fast reactors can help. Fast reactors can be fueled with reprocessed waste from thermal-neutron reactors. This produces many times the energy for the same amount of fuel. We can meet the US's energy needs for well over 100 years with the nuclear waste that we've already stockpiled, and the ultimate waste products have a half life measured in decades and not millennia.
> One important thing to notice is that uranium is a finite non-renewable resource.
One important thing to notice is that place on earth to put wind turbines and solar panels is limited. Now imagine that electricity needs greatly increased ...
We could provide for all the needs of our current power consumption by use of a single very large solar array in central africa or the middle east. The problem is no the availability of wind and solar- those can provide a monumental amount of energy. The problem is that energy and power are not the same thing. We need to be able to store energy widely throughout the grid and make massive transmission system improvements to facilitate the movement of energy from place to place.
Both of these are not fundamental problems, only financial / political ones. If we decided tomorrow that we really wanted these things we could have them.
They are though - we know how to build high capacity transmission, we know how to build complex dispatch control systems, we know how to build energy storage. All we need is the money and factories and brains and hands to build a lot more of them. All that requires is powerful entities to decide it's important - i.e. politics.
Politics is not powerful entities. Do you mean politicians, or governments?
Either way this is a category error. Tesla needs those things and used venture capital. A correct thought would be: governments are one way to do this.
That place is much larger than you'll ever need at the very least in this century (maybe in a thousand years we'll be in trouble, but I imagine that in that era, we'll have completely different issues anyway).
From what I've read[1] it looks like we should be able to use nuclear fission for a significant amount of time (>1000 years). This would involve using uranium and thorium as well as breeder reactors.
> Uranium-235 is a finite non-renewable resource.[1][3]
> As of 2017, identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg were 6.14 million tons (compared to 5.72 million tons in 2015). At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply. The identified reserves as of 2017 recoverable at US$260/kg are 7.99 million tons (compared to 7.64 million tons in 2015).[9]
They mention multiple (more or less optimistic) scenarios in respect to finiteness of U235, plus, they talk about the experiences using fast breeders and their current state with respect to market needs.
They calculate 130 years of supply at current consumption rates. Nuclear power supplies something like 5% of the global primary energy, so scaling this to 100% would deplete the estimated reserves in a few years.
Breeders would help, but have so far not been very successful. For example, the German Thorium breeder THTR-300 is considered one of the greatest technological failures in postwar history.
Scaling nuclear power supplies to 100% of global primary energy would change the economics of extraction, do you claim you can predict these things? BTW, scaling it to 100 % is not necessary.
AFAIK, THTR-300 is only one of the different breeder models, CEFR from China <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Experimental_Fast_Reacto...> seems to be working, as a new model <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600> is being built since 2020, sure, recycling uranium is not needed at the moment, so you could argue this is not demonstrating the interest of breeding though it seems to be working to a certain extent.
I think you are missing the important part. Lowballing it, a typical 50 year old reactor produces about 10^7 megawatthours or 10^6$ in power per kilo of uranium. And that actually leaves most of the fissile unused. So... How much uranium can be extracted at a reasonable fuel price like 10% of the end user price? i.e. about 10^5$ per kilo?
Its silly to consider availability at 0.03% of the end product price.
Those links suggest that peak uranium is driven by lack of demand, and not lack of supply, or renewability (including suggestions that we could create more uranium for as long as the sun lives)
I'm not an expert so please forgive me if this is a stupid question, but how is exported electricity wasted electricity? My intuition is that (assuming the exported energy is used) it would both prevent the generation of electricity by other (less environmentally friendly) means, and it would generate income. What is wasted here?
You should understand the source of that exported electricity.
Electricity is exported from the capacity that is inflexible, as you cannot scale it up/down. Common low flexibility electricity sources - coal, nuclear, hydro.
I was under the understanding that coal and hydro were more flexible and hydro even being pretty responsive (just reduce the flow rate and build up the water level in the reservoir). But in any case, wouldn't the surplus just cause the price to drop, causing other power sources to just dial down production thereby stabilizing the price?
These graphs are misleading. Intermittent and non-pilotable sources are a nightmare during shortages. Which is the biggest threat Germany faces right now.
This is insane to me. Nuclear is the best long-term option for ecologically-friendly energy generation. This is absolutely a bad move, and the coal industry has done a great job of demonizing nuclear power.
Well, Germany's wind was done without a thought about how to implement storage; it did not have to; it was a perfect egotistic game-theoretic play:
The EU energy market mandates that wind and solar production must be bought before everything else. What happens at the moment is France's nuclear reduces production when Germany's wind is over-producing; there is no energy storage at all.
So right now, on top of wind uselessly adding to max production capacity, it thrashes zero-CO2 nuclear-allocated capital's effectiveness. That's a form of capital theft.
And on top of that, Germany's huge coal baseline continues producing just as before:
While yes, Germany profits from the European grid to offset some of its over or under production, it doesn't really affect Germany's or France's nuclear energy production.
As you can see even at time when wind provides more than half of Germany's total energy production, the red nuclear bar remains nearly unchanged.
> The EU energy market mandates that wind and solar production must be bought before everything else.
Not exactly. Operators can bid a price for generation and markets dictate the cheapest generators are bought up first. Renewables tend to have zero marginal cost and are therefore often cheapest. Nuclear also has low marginal cost, but not zero.
Renewables being favored is not a rule but effect of how the market works.
What's so sad is wind and solar being so concentrated in Germany. If it were more spread out over Europe, it would have lower correlation; and help with production peaks.
There's egotistic, and there's egotistic + harmful.
> Germany intends to take all coal-fired generation offline by 2038
Good if they actually mean it maybe?
> leading to a likely increase in renewable-power assets in the long term... Yet in the short term, coal is helping to bridge the supply gap.
This just seems asinine. But what do I know...
Is there something impassably / chronically dangerous about nuclear power or is it just public fear that pushes us away from it? It seems like a solvable engineering scenario from an outside perspective. I just dont get it.
First of all, the new German government adjusted the phase-out of coal power to be as close as possible to 2030. 2038 was more a bad compromise by the previous government.
And yes, nuclear power can be dangerous as Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown. Those dangers could probably be addressed by new reactors, but those are very expensive. The big problem are the existing old reactors. They are not as safe and require a lot of maintenance. A few years ago, Germany only had 4 nuclear power plants running through the whole winter as 4 others were down for longer maintenance. Then there is the problem where to plut all the nuclear waste, Germany doesn't have a long-term storage facility (though search started in the 80ies).
I don't really understand why the Chernobyl or Fukushima disasters should be considered evidence of nuclear power being dangerous.
The Chernobyl plant had severe design deficiencies, and the operators were apparently not properly informed about the dangers of operating the plant the way they did at the moment. The Soviet Union was not exactly the epitome of environmental responsibility. Lots of things went wrong.
The Fukushima disaster was precipitated by a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami that pretty much leveled the entire area and stopped the emergency generators. The backup generators also failed. Pretty much everything that could go wrong went wrong.
People were displaced, and the radiation leakage should be considered significant environmental damage.
The number of people displaced was tens of thousands. Although few deaths have been confirmed, if you're pessimistic, you might be able to come up with a larger figure.
However, the Fukushima disaster was a once-per-several-decades event. Coal causes hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths every year through direct air pollution, not to mention the indirect effects from climate change. That's not a rare accident. That's business as usual.
Yes, nuclear power has risks, and sometimes something goes wrong. Lots of work has been done to minimize the risks, as should be. But it's entirely emotion-driven and intellectually untenable to consider nuclear to be a major risk, comparatively. The damage caused by accidents that apparently should happen at most once per several decades in well-managed (or even less well managed) plants is still a fraction of the damage that coal-fired or other fossil-fueled plants cause every year as part of their normal operation.
If anything, the lesson to be learned from the Fukushima disaster should be: "consider carefully whether to build nuclear plants in an area where major earthquakes and tsunamis are statistically to be expected; design and manage plants responsibly; other than that, it's probably fine".
Nuclear waste is still be a problem but it's hard to imagine it being anywhere near the magnitude of the problems that burning fossil fuels causes.
However even those old reactors are several magnitudes safer per MWh than coal, over 20 000 people die each in Europe due pollution emitted from burning coal that as much as several Chernobyl's each year (even if we use the most pessimistic estimates).
For me it's not an engineering problem but a human one. Since the waste from a single power plant during one year of operation is enough to kill hundreds of millions of people we have to ensure no madmen get their hands on the waste for thousands of years after we have spent all the watt-hours the waste has produced.
We're leaving that problem to hundreds of generations to come, who will get no benefit from it, just so we can have cheap energy today. That seems unfair. It's equivalent to Julius Caesar building the aqueducts using some technology that France would still have to pay for today.
I think investing in energy storage - hydrogen, ammonia, pumped storage to mention a few - would be vastly better. Solar and wind already generate more electricity in Germany than nuclear ever did, if it could be stored during the proverbial cloudy days, the problem is solved permanently and in a much better way than with nuclear power plants.
"waste from a single power plant during one year of operation is enough to kill hundreds of millions of people"
You know what else can kill millions of people? Pesticides, and anyone can buy them.
Bhopal disaster killed thousands of people and left 500,000 with debilitating injuries when a pesticide factory operated by Union Carbide Limited had a leak due to lack of maintenance. The CEO is wanted man in India, but has fled to the US and theybare refusing to extradite.
> Since the waste from a single power plant during one year of operation is enough to kill hundreds of millions of people
Chances of that happening is minuscule and if left uncheck, global warming will kill more than that.
> who will get no benefit from it, just so we can have cheap energy today
Or they figure out better ways to use it that don’t involve killing people.
> proverbial cloudy days
According to this website[0], Germany had about half a years worth of sunny days in 2020. 50% is a long shot from proverbial and according to tfa it’s being bridged by other EU nations and coal.
The issue is that radiation is a silent killer, so it is extremely easy people with vested interests in (say) fossil fuels to exploit our inability to access risk. Coal hurts people every single day, but it doesn't have the same poetic weight as radiation so this is lost on the general public.
Nuclear power is expensive, however. Dealing with the waste is also an issue but firstly, forcing us to deal with the waste seriously is potentially not such a bad thing (assuming we need nuclear in the long run, which unless storage comes a very long way we presumably will), and secondly this is the kind of question where a government with a lot of political capital needs to just find some deserted land to build a long term solution.
It's mostly expensive due to artificial reasons. If we invested the effort we have in renewables into nuclear, the price, availability and reliability would increase in a similar fashion.
We experienced fallout from Chernobyl (radiation levels of wild boar meat and some mushrooms are still under surveillance today) and we were designated nuclear ground zero in case that the Soviets tried to invade Europe. What attitude towards all things nuclear do you expect to arise from that?
Oh, come one! I spent most of my childhood in Minsk, 380km north-west to Chernobyl. Now in Europe my only worry is the blackout plan in case of power shortages, not the nuclear plant 60km on the east.
I am always amazed how Germans are irrational about nuclear while nearby countries have a mostly pragmatic attitude. Even in Belgium the nuclear phase out is fake and every politician knows it can not be enforced until Netherlands build two new nuclear powerplants 20 years from now.
Nearly all the people I know in Poland who were children at the time of Chernobyl have thyroid issues, including my partner. It’s not accurate to say that it had zero health impact. Of course, coal has plenty of health impact, just not a good look to be so flippant about a major nuclear disaster.
Chernobyl was also a political/PR issue, and in typical USSR fashion, the general public wasn't even informed until over a week after the incident. Consider the half-life of iodine-135, by the time people were being recommended and provided with the necessary medication most of the damage was already done.
How do you know those issues thyroid issues were not caused by fossil fuel pollution? Many more people have serious health issues or die every year due pollutants emitted from burning coal (and other fossil fuels but coal is by far the worst) than the total death count related to Chernobyl was, its not even comparable.
Poland is especially bad in this regard. It consistently has one the highest PM10 and PM2.5 levels in Europe (and I assume it should have been much worse in the 80's)
Because there is a well studied link and a clear biological pathway has been identified. [1]
I’m not in favor of coal, I know it has health consequences, but the existence of coal pollutants does not negate the existence of health consequences from nuclear disasters. I’m also not against nuclear, but it is clearly dangerous, both to health and environment and for proliferation. Considering and balancing these risks as well as climate risk is good governance.
Indeed. We should also not forget that coal ash significantly contributes to radiation exposure in humans. Every winter it's the same all over Poland. There are places like Krakow that consistently rank among the most polluted towns in the world during winter [1].
I was forbidden from including a smoke detector in a school show-and-tell (UK, circa 1993) because of the radiation symbol, even though there was a detector just like it on the ceiling of the same classroom.
> Being target for nuclear bombs isn't related to nuclear power in the slightest.
There's a reason nuclear power plant technology is strictly controlled as "dual use": the same technology used for power production can also be used to produce the material for a nuclear bomb. So you can't say they're completely unrelated.
Nuclear waste from commercial reactors in the US is not fissile. Reprocessing would change that (producing plutonium), but that's why we don't have fast breeders in the US (personally, I favor changing that). I'm aware of no enrichment facilities co-located with nuclear power plants, certainly not in the US.
It's a bit more nuanced than that as there's just a subset of all possible nuclear power plant designs that needs the same enrichment facility than for military (bomb making) usage.
Well, one small accident 35 years ago and far away, that could have been much worse - is still the cause that large areas are contaminated here.
It is rational, to be sceptic of such a technology.
Most discussions about it are not, sure. Anti-nuclear is a strong dogma in green circles and not to be discussed about - but there are still real reasons, why it became a dogma in the first place.
Because nuclear energy is not as save and easy as it was promised. It is heavily subsidized, but socialised the risk - and the current storage solutions to the waste are sub-optimal. So expensive and dangerous.
I am open to have them run a bit longer, and rather close the coal plants, but they are not a magic bullet solution.
It's democracy. We were much closer to Chernobyl, than all the Americans promoting yesterday's easy future here. Some parts in Germany are suffering the fallout still, when mushrooms and wild game make the Geiger counters beep in the news.
Germany is extremely population dense and nobody wants to live next to radioactive waste. Especially in rich Bavaria were all the AKWs have been build (and where they had suitable rock to bury it).
No one here wants nuclear power. Not even the energy producers. There is no lobby, no support, no future for Atomkraftwerke.
It seems irrational as sealed high profile waste doesn't leak any radiations beyond the natural ambiant radioactive noise. The problem may arise in a very long time due to water molecules progressively entering and exiting the enclosure during thousands of years.
One could live and sleep every night in a nuclear waste storage building and nothing will happen to them. Similarly, one could swim in nuclear fuel cooling pools everyday and won't have any problem either.
It's way more problematic for health to live next to a coal power plant.
> The problem may arise in a very long time due to water molecules progressively entering and exiting the enclosure during thousands of years.
Or you know, after a couple of decades because the storage containers really don't like salt water and start to corrode. And as recovery of the waste was not foreseen initially, it gets really difficult and expensive now.
If you think that Germans are capable of making multiple terrible political decisions in the space of a century, then why do you trust them to operate and regulate nuclear reactors and safely store their waste for thousands of years?
Unless there is a higher risk of war. Can you imagine if WWII had been a bit more technologically advanced, with bombing raids on nuclear reactors? Here’s a report on their vulnerability in a modern war.
If WWII had nuclear technology in play, bombing raids on nuclear reactors would've been one of the smaller problems. Then again, if MAD had been around pre-WWII it may have never happened.
Nuclear fission is definitely not environmentally friendly, and will probably be obsolete in 30-40 years. Then the future generations have to deal with the problem that comes with nuclear fission power plants.
And that thinking is insane to me, long-term best is to have renewables and not pollute - nuclear is no alternative but just another bad with too many problems, bad economics, and waste produced.
Nuclear is fantastic economics, its just regulated to death. The real effect of suppressing nuclear has been a slower transition to a sustainable carbon economy, and increased power prices limiting innovation and productivity. Solar and wind have benefitted, but its still a minor player, and without a revolutionary new battery tech, and gargantuan infrastructure investment, it simply cant replace a majority of current power production, much less satisfy the massive suppressed demand.
You can tell because for profit(if staterun) companies are building them across the world. France is drawing significant profits from existing nuclear, and constructing new. Nuclear has been ridiculously profitable for most countries which built them, with the sole exception of countries which started building them, then forbid nuclear. Many countries in Asia are building them because its cheaper than coal power. Most countries impose nuclear specific taxes, in addition to long term disposal fees, which exceed the price of production by several times. Sheer state profit. Despite this, the main reason nuclear does not get built in Europe is regulation, the the risk of losing the investment due to changing laws on nuclear. Which has happened several times.
Byproducts, aside from nuclear weapons, which most countries do not have, are a negligible part. Sweden for instance built ample nuclear early, but never built the kind of reactor which is used in nuclear weapon production. Sweden also didnt subsidize it, but rather has been taxing it at an additional 300-500% in addition to long term disposal fees(so little of which actually went to long term disposal they introduced a second free named exactly the same 40 years latter). Despite also discarding the cooling water heat into the ocean completely needlessly, all it took for these plants to be profitable was not forcing them to shut down when public opinion turned. It took a while sure, but plants have been profitable for 30 years now, and could have continued to be so if they hadn't by law been prohibited from upgrading and researching.
Nuclear regulation in most places goes as follows: is nuclear profitable? if yes, increase safety until it stops being so. If technology improves so that the same safety can be achieved using less cost, further improve safety. If this happens while building a new plant, force them to start over. For what that looks like, look to the 3 complete restarts due to previously approved safety measures suddenly being retracted and increased during the construction of the Finnish plant.
Its this idiotic idea that they must guarantee zero percent risk which is the main culprit. Flying kills more people, and more people need power than flight, yet we require far more of nuclear. Many countries built dozens of perfectly safe plants during the 60ties for pennies on the dollar. If we could build those again, you know the ones where less than 0.25% had an serious accident over a 60 year history, and removed the massive taxes, we could have power prices at a fifth of what they are today.
Umm, it's not the safety regulator's task to promise the results will be sufficient if you use a specific methodology: "Scrum methodology is fine, so the resulting software quality will be fine too."
Nuclear is much cheaper when built at scale, with multiple copies of the same design. Serial production of nuclear plans in the 70s produced plants at a cost of about 2 billion per GW of capacity. And bear in mind that nuclear's capacity factor is over 90% as compared to 25-35% for wind and solar. And it's not an intermittent power source, eliminating the need for storage.
The reality is that we don't have the capacity to fulfill energy demand without controllable sources. You can't just say, "well it's cloudy and not very windy. Guess plumbing just isn't going to work today because we can't power the pumps." Well, you can but you'll immediately get voted out of office and replaced with someone who will build fossil fuel plants to keep the country alive.
GP probably meant Russian gas. They are also going to become net buyers of coal electricity from neighboring countries as a result of this. It's not a good move for the environment.
even if, it's not because of that we have no coal. it's just not a good idea to use lignite (besides the co2 it also destroys tons of ecosystems which is probably beyond co2) and deep mining is basically dead in germany
It won't accelerate anything. And in the meantime it takes a huge amount of reliable, non-carbon-producing, 24/7 generation capacity offline. Which is a very bad thing.
You can’t start up the equivalent of “half a country’s nuclear reactors” in 2 weeks. For this to happen you must already have an excess of renewables, which they obviously don’t have.
What will happen is that more coal will be burned because coal always works and is instantly available; Sun and wind isn’t.
Actually is not that difficult: three reactors out of six remaining are closing.
Not saying that the closing is right, but the heading is a little click-baity. Reactors are only about 2-3% of installed capacity, about 6% of production. It's not good, but it's not a catastrophe either.
"We no longer produce electricity with coal or nuclear! We just buy it from other countries and then browbeat them about environmental responsibility!" doesn't seem like a sustainable energy policy.
Germany is a net exporter of electricity. But Europe has a joint spot market for electricity, which is a good thing for all involved. No longer every country has to supply expensive peak power when surplus of neighbours can be used. And Switzerland and Austria are kind of European storage providers. A 1GW line to Norway went operational recently, which uses Norwegian water power for storage.
Oh, it is. Right now it exports all its coal and gas and wood burning production to neighbors; while only using 7.5% (= 8.94/(63.2+56)) of its installed wind and solar:
The great question is: how can Germany manage anything with no baseload from nuclear or coal? With current gas prices, it is going to get very expensive.
Fun fact: when electricity prices from Germany are negative (when there's big spike of intermittent electricity from renewable production) French grid operators strategically lower nuclear output and import this profitable energy.
Will Germany remain a net exporter without their nukes, and by getting rid of their nuclear capacity will they be forced to delay shutting down their coal plants?
Ukraine wants to charge high transit fees, Russia wants Germany to turn on Nord Stream 2, which bypasses Ukraine. Russia also wants long-term contracts to lock in natural gas consumption-- phaseout of fossil fuel consumption is an existential threat to fossil fuel exporters.
If Putin was shutting off gas to flex it would been great, but he isn't, what is happening is Russia is not having enough gas even for themselves, if this was just diplomatic strategy, diplomacy would convince him to supply more gas, the real fact is, there is not enough gas in first place, you can do whatever you want, there won't be more gas.
Merkel herself said that Russia has fulfilled all her contractual obligations. The ones who shut the gas down are the in between countries (hence why Germany was in favor Nord Stream 2)
'Energy and electricity prices are at record levels due to Europe’s over-reliance on renewables, inadequate supplies of nuclear energy, and shortages of oil and gas due to under-investment in oil and gas exploration and production. Carbon emissions in Germany rose 25% in the first half of 2020 due in large part to a 25% decline in wind, underscoring the unreliable nature of weather-dependent renewables. In response, both France and Britain have promised a major expansion of nuclear energy.'
Not sure whether I agree with the "over-reliance on renewables"-bit. Renewables are a relatively small part of EU energy production. The vast majority is fossil fuel (which is mostly imported from the Middle East or Russia).
I can't speak for the rest of the EU, but energy policy in Belgium has been an absolute shitshow for decades now. No one wants to invest in anything. There's NIMBYism everywhere. No one wants any kind of energy production in sight, which is an impossibility in a country the size of paper towel. No one wants to reduce demand. And no one wants to rely on imports; which is ironic, given that we import uranium, oil, and gas ... ?
Second that. As much as I disagree with N-VA, I am tempted to vote for it because it has consistent environment policy and people like Zuhal Demir to enforce it.
It is extermely unlikely that The Netherlands will build two new reactors. My interpretation is that two political parties keep bringing up nuclear power to basically derail the discussion on how the Dutch government is not doing enough with respect to green energy.
Given the costs at Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3, it very unlikely that any political party will actually sign off on building one.
Furthermore, starting to build a nuclear power plant doesn't help the 2030 goals one bit. And those are already hard to reach.
The nuclear reactor that we have has been operating at a massive loss and can not compete in the marketplace, decomissioning costs are the only reason it is still switched on.
'Rolls-Royce, the British jet engine maker, said on Tuesday that it was forming a business to build a series of smaller, cheaper nuclear reactors as Britain looks for ways to cut carbon emissions and to reduce the costs of nuclear energy.
The kind of reactor proposed by Rolls-Royce would cover about two soccer fields, or about one-tenth the acreage of a conventional nuclear power station, the company said.
These plants would generate less power — about one-seventh the output of the giant nuclear installation being built at Hinkley Point in southwest England.
But Rolls-Royce said it hoped to reduce construction costs to around 2 billion pounds ($2.7 billion) each, compared with an estimated £22.5 billion for the Hinkley Point plant. Some of the savings would come from building a large number of plants and making modules in factories that can then be assembled at sites.
The company hopes to build 16 of the plants, known as small modular reactors, and said each could power around one million homes.'
That's a bit premature. We are not 'building two new reactors', there is a coalition agreement that two new reactors will be built but that's a far cry from it actually happening, and it may well never happen because there is a ton of opposition to this which will at a minimum delay construction. The proposed dates for starting operations is after 2030, which means that from a climate accord perspective this is a meaningless gesture.
The sentiment on HN on this topic has traditionally been negative, and comments that support the move get downvoted.
The fear of nuclear energy is deeply rooted in Germany and cannot be simply ignored. The "Anti AKW" (anti nuclear power) movement was huge since the 80s, it predates the fear of global warming, and it was at the core of what became the Green party. And Merkel, who has a doctorate quantum chemistry, came to the conclusion that nuclear power is too risky. And this sentiment had the backing of the parliament. And the parliament had the backing of the population. These are the facts. It is likely that her party, traditionally pro nuclear, will change its opinion now that she's stepped down. But they're not in power for at least the next 4 years, and the new governing coalition has agreed on nuclear being a non-option for energy policy.
Merkel... Did not come to the conclusion that nuclear power is too risky.
She wanted to do more nuclear, well aware of CO2, but Fukushima happened (killing zero victims, but hey) and she saw her policy would get her voted out office, and no potential replacement was going to do better, so she folded, in the hope that large investment in renewables would help. It didn't, because a renewable world is a 18th century world, and now we're going there
This seems to be your opinion when one can read it also differently. After Fukushima she and her government (backed by the coalition partner FDP) started a risk re-assessment process that involved two commissions (the reactor security commission and an ethics commission) that resulted in the government declaration below. Hence, the assessment was not done on a whim, it was backed by several months of work by experts. Could it still be a mere power play? Possible, but unlikely - she ran the risk of alienating her own party and to be seen as a flip-flopper.
> The sentiment on HN on this topic has traditionally been negative, and comments that support the move get downvoted.
Just because this is a popular move within Germany doesn't mean we need to support it. Research has shown nuclear to be clean and safe when managed properly, _those_ are the facts. I'm glad the government is listening to its citizens, but I also support using nuclear power and personally think this is bad move with the information I have at hand.
> The fear of nuclear energy is deeply rooted in Germany and cannot be simply ignored.
It's not being ignored. We're all here complaining about how short sighted it is. What's their plan for renewables again? Aren't we in the middle of a low sunlight, low wind winter where nat. gas demand is through the roof? So Germany's plan is Nord Stream 2, buying from Russia trying to invade Ukraine?
Merkel wanted a pipeline that just happened to terminate in her district you forget to mention.
She may have a physics degree but she is a politician and I have a feeling she used her political education more than her physics on this one.
The public debate was polluted by misinformation. I remember a poll showed most Europeans think Fukushima killed thousands and nuclear emits massive CO2.
Does "Green" have the same set of meanings in Germany as in the US?
Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder . . . served as the chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, during which his most important political initiative was Agenda 2010. As Chancellor, he led a coalition government of his Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Alliance 90/The Greens. . . . Schröder has been chairman of Russian energy company Rosneft since 2017.
PJSC Rosneft Oil Company (Russian: Росне́фть, tr. Rosnéft', IPA: [ˌrosˈnʲeftʲ] stylized as ROSNEFT) is a Russian integrated energy company headquartered in Moscow. Rosneft specializes in the exploration, extraction, production, refining, transport, and sale of petroleum, natural gas, and petroleum products. The company is controlled by the Russian government through the Rosneftegaz holding company. Its name is a portmanteau of the Russian words Rossiyskaya neft (Russian: Российская нефть, lit. 'Russian oil').
> The nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl (in today’s Ukraine) in April 1986 caused widespread fear of nuclear power and strengthened the anti-nuclear sentiment
That was a really unfortunate point in the history of our species. Not only because of the lives that were lost or the land that got irradiated, but that event will be indirectly responsible for countless deaths over decades. Not because of anything related to the radiation, but for putting the brakes on deployment of nuclear reactors. We could have safe and plentiful energy by now, with very little downside.
If that sounds ludicrous, consider this: imagine someone saw the wright flyer and said "we'll be using those things to transport millions of passengers at hundreds of miles per hour". That would sound insane as those things were dangerous. Not so much now (although we have paid a price).
Similarly, nuclear tech has advanced significantly. We have designs that cannot meltdown. We have designs that don't cause weapon proliferation. We can reprocess the 'waste'. We can use different types of fuels, some more plentiful than uranium. Instead, we are stuck operating old clunkers. There are still RBMK reactors in operation today (although they have been retrofitted, but still).
Chernobyl was a criminally flawed design one step above what the radioactive boy scout managed to build. That abomination should have never seen the light of the day - and if it did, it should have had a contention building.
If we were really worried about safety and health we should have a planetary-wide ban on coal plants. Not just for global warming, but for all the health issues they cause. Including radiation.
I am a huge fan of renewables (specially solar) and very hopeful on battery storage technologies. But we do have extremely power intensive processes (think aluminum plants) for which we need reliable power that's difficult to satisfy with renewables. Fusion is always 10 years away. Hydro is not available everywhere and can be disrupted as the climate changes.
And parents replacing the sand in their children's sandpits. There are parts of southern Germany where you are not supposed to collect mushrooms or hunt and eat game, because there is still enough residual nuclear contamination to be harmful to humans.
Proponents of nuclear energy like to pretend that it is almost completely safe. But if we look beyond the, admittedly relatively low, confirmed number of immediate casualties of nuclear accidents, there are serious long-term consequences that remain an issue for decades and more. And Chernobyl was still far from the worst case scenario as most of the fallout hit sparsely populated areas.
Germans love to be panicked though, I think that's a much larger part of it than actual fallout. The recommendations for self-harvested mushrooms and game are to not eat them excessively in the areas that were affected more strongly.
Contrast that with the damage that was done by decades of coal power plants polluting the air you breathe. Coal is more damaging each year than chernobyl was, it just gets much less attention.
In many countries, roughly 30% don’t want vaccines, citing the 1:10,000 side effects, ignoring the roughly 1:1,000 fatality rate (as a fraction of global population, 1:55 of infected[0]).
Same deal with playing lotteries in the expectation of getting rich, or fearing terrorists more than dangerous drivers.
Certainly, but imminent doom is essentially a hobby in Germany. We have the term Angstlust which I always found quite fitting: deriving pleasure from fear.
It's an interesting realization when you've grown up in Germany and then live outside of it for a while and realize that not everyone is constantly worried about the world ending tomorrow.
Curious, I’ve not noticed that moving to Berlin from the UK. Where did you go? In wondering if the U.K. is just as bad, or if Berlin is unusually chill.
I often wonder how different perception would be if people ran around with the equivalent of a Geiger counter for air pollution. It's easy to argue that parts of Germany are still contaminated by nuclear radiation, but they are by air pollution too, which is also incredibly dangerous. But no one would think about not letting their children play outside because of it.
Depending on how things go with what is widely believed to be an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, with hostilities potentially spilling beyond that sphere, I have to wonder if this will go into the history books as another historic strategic blunder for Germany. Surrendering a large amount of your domestic energy production, placing your fate in the hands of a hostile power is a real head scratcher.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that nuclear doesn't ramp up/down very well either. Most nuclear plants use fission for the base load but gas or other fossil fuel generators for the variable part. Since in Germany green power in the form of solar/wind are even more variable, this makes Nuclear + Solar/Wind a bad combo.
Wind and solar don't even make sense for Germany given their climate/geography.
Germany should ditch the green and use its amazing engineering to build better nuclear reactors, IMO.
52% of Germany's energy production in 2021 was from renewables [1], which are productive now, don't need decades of planning and construction, have zero costs for waste and a perfectly clear risk profile for the next centuries.
> I don't see how wind and solar don't make sense.
Wind and solar make total sense. All we need to do is overbuild wind/solar generation + invest in energy storage capacity. This can be done relatively quickly, certainly much more quickly than building new nuclear plants.
Not really, a reactor is operational in 10-20 years, while expanding lithium mining and battery production will easily take much longer. Not to mention the energy and CO2e cost of manufacturing the batteries.
hydro, but thats also something we do not built because it's not environment friendly (takes a lot of space and kills species living there and might need to move people). keep in mind we are not china they basically do everything lately to grow their energy, hydro, nuclear, wind, solar the full mix, something which would not be possible in germany, because people would go full madness, heck even wind already is something that some people do not like.
There is no excess battery manufacturing capacity available. It is constrained by both facilities and raw materials. Capacity will increase but at a slow rate. More capital can't solve that problem, it's like pushing on a string.
Eventually yes, but that will take many years. It won't do anything to prevent power shortages in Germany over the next 5 years or so. I don't think you understand how long it takes to ramp up production across the entire supply chain, and that allocating more capital won't significantly accelerate timelines.
Interestingly the energy consumption from renewables is at 43%, ie. considerably lower than production. I guess the difference is accounted for by the exports at peak wind/sun at the expense of other sources. Probably french nuclear plants as some other poster here noted, ie. Germany takes the cream of the top and lets others provider the expensive base load or just burns dirty lignite and coal.
> Germany should ditch the green and use its amazing engineering to build better nuclear reactors, IMO.
Well, if they start that plan today, it may be done in 30 years. Which is way, way, way too late.
Imo, the more sensible path here is to keep the existing nuclear plants running, decommission the that awful lignite power generation asap, while building out energy storage capacity (grid scale batteries - there are many kinds of approaches, e.g. electrical batteries, reservoir storage and some seriously weird ones involving lots of blocks of concrete). That could be done in the space of a decade.
Any new nuclear plants would not even be out of the design stage in 10 years.
I never understood the argument that nuclear takes too long, so instead we implement new technologies that have never been done at scale.
What if we run into unexpected problems with energy storage that push their timeline out even longer than 30 years? Seems better to do both, and accept the risk that we paid for too much clean energy in the end.
I know they generate a moderate fraction now, that's the point of my post. I think they are backing themselves into a corner.
The problems to date include very high energy prices. Even larger challenges await; these will grow as renewables they become a larger fraction of total output. Renewable variability isn't a problem when they are a small fraction, but a very large one when they are a large percentage. These are unsolved problems. Land use is also an issue.
This is wrong. Nuclear reaction output can be modulated on the order of milliseconds, practically visible as the temperature of the core, which varies on seconds to minutes. They can be used as peaker plants if so designed. In the US at least, the issue is that energy output must be telegraphed 4+ hours in advance.
If I had to guess this is a constructed incentive to make nuclear less desirable than coal or gas under the guise of safety.
The technical ramp up/down issue is often conflated with amortized capital cost.
Nuclear, in order to provide electricity at a competitive rate, needs >90% capacity factor. That means it can't ramp up/down and stay in business, not that it can't ramp up/down. Since the fuel is trivially cheap, ramping down does not provide any economic savings. The opposite is true for an CCGT plant.
... and that is the fundamental reason why there isn't any pressure to build new nuclear in the US (I am less familiar with PPAs and grid regulation in the EU).
Nuclear plants can adjust reasonably quickly in theory, but most plants don’t have the equipment to do in practice.
This is because nuclear has a very low marginal cost of power - a kJ is very cheap if you’ve already built the plant - so the plants are intended to run full-tilt to make the most of your very expensive asset.
Nuclear reactors actually produce a family of decay products as they run, some with longer decay times and neutron absorbing cross sections than others... things get less stable as you rapidly ramp levels up and down, so it is avoided at all costs. Uranium based fuel generates about 1/10 of its operating heat for a very long time, which is why it has to be kept in cooling ponds after removal from the reactor.
Coal plants take time to get to temperature and pressure, furthermore the generators themselves have a limited number of stop/start cycles, as cracks radiate outward from the center of the rotor shaft over time. (They are cast in a centrifugal fashion, in a vacuum, to reduce voids to). Periodically the center of the shaft is bored to remove the cracks, but there is a finite amount of material that can be removed.
Gas turbine spool up/down quickly, but cost 2 or more times the cost of other fossil fuel sourced generation.
Hydro is awesome, if you have it, but global climate change is causing precipitation patterns to shift.
Nuclear reaction output can be modulated on the order of milliseconds, practically visible as the temperature of the core, which varies on seconds to minutes. They can be used as peaker plants if so designed. In the US at least, the issue is that energy output must be telegraphed 4+ hours in advance.
If I had to guess this is a constructed incentive to make nuclear less desirable than coal or gas under the guise of safety.
It is fascinating to see how Germany is shutting down nuclear and encouraging natural gas (while still using lignite, of all things, phasing it out only slowly), while the Netherlands is starting to reduce its use of gas and investigating building new nuclear plants.
Much of Europe is following in Germanys steps I am afraid.
I can only speak for Sweden. We had for the longest time the most solid energy base with hydro power in the north and nuclear in the south.
Policy has since decades been anti-nuclear though but it really accelerated 2016. Basically nuclear power gets heavy tax and fee penalties while wind gets the reverse treatment.
Nuclear and hydro still supply all power - but we now have an erratic additional source of wind power that has such volatility that it can spike its production and reverse in just a day. It's completely uncontrollable and so can't provide a stable base for industry nor homes or offices.
Meanwhile, with nuclear plants now being taken offline, southern Sweden is paying a multiple of higher prices than Northern Sweden.
This is exacerbated by other countries in Europe making similar faulty decisions - notably Germany - meaning that even if Sweden produces energy to export on a good day, prices are high. Northern Sweden is for now safe because there is no bandwidth to transfer the energy produced in an efficient way.
I only hope that the election this year will see policy change to normal again, with a renewed focus on nuclear. Nuclear needs no subsidies, it just needs to not be penalized by inane policies, taxes and bureaucratic nonsense.
During the summer, when less energy is needed, Sweden even had to start its old oil based power plant. The solution is similar in Europe where reliance on natural gas from Russia is becoming normal, in particular for Germany.
In Sweden we have at least come far enough to recognize this as a crisis and the so called environmental party will probably be booted out of the Riksdag come September.
> Much of Europe is following in Germanys steps I am afraid.
There's still hope, it is to be expected than the gas price surge and geopolitical implications of dependencies will make people realize than it's not conceivable to shut down nuclear power. That's not even taking into account the global warming considerations.
After closing a reactor to please the greens, the French government will hopefully come back in it's right mind by finishing it's EPR and building more (complete nuclear plants replacement is needed right now to anticipate the end of life of the current fleet).
The United Kingdom is expected to have a new EPR to enter service. Finland finally powered theirs two days ago. Nuclear phase out of Belgium seems unrealistic and The Netherlands is evaluating the possibility of building two plants.
France, Poland and Hungary are in favor of including nuclear power in the green taxonomy. It's a big deal because nearly all of Poland's electricity production is from coal.
Since building new plants is expensive and takes time, it should starts right now and be subsidized like new renewables, as Europe will need to replace it's old reactors in just some decades, while committing to CO2 emissions reduction.
The strangest thing is that it got so far. We had a nuclear-friendly prime minister, or at least one that could judge the benefits of nuclear, and he happened to forget all about it as time passed (Löfven)
The obvious reasons this is bad are that it increases German dependence on Russian oil and burning fossil fuels for energy. What are the arguments in favor of it, from the point of view of the German politicians and/or activists that are pushing for it? It has to be more thought out than "Nuclear bad". I'm just trying to understand.
Averages do not matter when you need to keep the heat and lights on. Wholesale electricity rates are already 5 times as high as last winter. What matters is what generation can produce electricity when you need it and starting here in 10 days you will need more production.
Indeed, that's a consequence of how the price is artificially calculated within the European electricity market. To avoid providing advantage to electricity resellers having providers with lower production costs the price is calculated according to the price of the last connected plant at any given time within the interconnected grid. It's most of the time natural gas or coal plants because of the "flexibility" needs.
The cost of electricity production in France is currently lower than Germany, but the resell price is currently close due to those market rules.
r u aware that france is paying for the wokeness of germany? just like americans paid for biden wokeness until he woke up and decided to reopen the old polluting coal plants
Concrats, you've discovered that we have a (somewhat) unified electricity market in Europe, so of course prices are highly correlated. So what game do you think can be played all day long? Pretend that everything is good because we have the momentary luxury to pay absurd premiums on Russian gas so that Mr. Putin can pay for his power play?
Convert EVs to have 10kw+ of grid intertied inverters. Build GWhr capacity batteries at the old nuclear facilities. Those facilities should at least be kept in warm standby. Machines switched off will rot and the whole steam and electricity aspect of a nuke plant is the same regardless of where the steam comes from.
Non-starter? It's the actual grid battery storage solution a decade from now. EV owners will be able to pull and push electricity to the grid, incentivized by $. When the grid needs base load, $ paid to EV owners pushing electricity to the grid will keep rising until market equilibrium. Users can get notifications on a mobile app for certain $/kwh they'll be willing to receive to have their car go from 100% -> 60%, especially as battery storage gets larger and many people end up with 400 mile capacities where 90% of the time they use 50 miles during the day. Have a long trip coming up? Don't push electricity those days...
Especially with WFH (charge EV during day, give to grid at night, end up making $)
Also I suspect private car ownership will dwindle as full self-driving replaces human drivers. In this world (10-20 years from now) future-Uber will own fleets of self-driving EV taxis. The company will derive additional profit from acting as grid storage.
One aspect of nuclear that is almost never mentioned is the disposal of the waste. The owners of Germany's nuclear power plants paid 24 billion in 2017 to rid themselves of the responsibility for it. It will cost the country an estimated 170 billion for temporary and permanent solutions, and the money is now invested in a fund to grow it. It was criticised by Greenpeace as insufficiently small. The government and even the Greens accepted this as there was a danger the companies would try to weasel out of paying anything. What happens if a company goes bankrupt? The management of the waste becomes the responsibility of the society. A lot of countries (even the US) don't have a permanent solution for the storage of nuclear waste and some of the temporary ones were already reported leaking.
Germany could reduce its total CO2 emissions by 10% simply by shutting down only three lignite power plants: Neurath, Niederaußem, Jänischwalde. These three alone produce 81 Million tons of CO2 per year:
It is really unclear to me why everyone is talking about shutting down nuclear power plants, but nobody talks about shutting down lignite power plants.
Will the reactors be mothballed, converted, or torn down? Ideally if political winds change and the reactors are mothballed, could they be restarted?
I live near the Fort St. Vrain Generating Station, a nuclear plant converted to gas in the 90s, and I often think about what could have been if it had been made commercially viable earlier in its life.
It seems to me that that the harms from power generation increases only in logarithmic proportion to the amount of energy generated for nuclear (adding a few more hundred tonnes of waste to an existing storage facility doesn't really increase harm all that much), in linear proportions for renewables (more hills must be covered with wind turbines to generate more energy), and for fossil fuels the harm is to some degree in an exponential relationship due to the feedback effects of increasing carbon dioxide. Unfortunately I don't think the world is in a position to give up nuclear just yet, and Germany certainly isn't.
Unfortunately Germany's medium term decarbonization plan relies on Russian gas. The Greens could throw a wrench into this plan and sabotage it like they did with nuclear energy. But then the question is what do they put in its place? And the answer is almost always: coal.
The nuclear issue is fascinating to watch unfold, over the years. I didn't expect the rational pro-nuclear to be almost as religious as their opponents. Which makes them also refuse to engage in debate.
So, here is one of the thoughts that crossed my mind (and I am well aware there are counter arguments to it ).
With its high density of energy and perceived higher potential to harm its surrounding environment, nuclear power requires a level of State Capacity and stability that is not found over half of the planet.
It is not obvious that it can be a widespread, long term alternative for most of the world economies.
With that in mind, isn't it better if some of the wealthier countries basically front the cost and explore completely alternative (nuclear-free) systems for all the others ? Even if we globally end up with an energy mix ?
Curious to hear opinions with that point of view in mind.
Unpopular opinion: I do not think it is possible to get rid of the inherent risk of nuclear proliferation, even without building nuclear reactors in non-wealthy countries. Multiple reasons :
* Non-wealthy countries wants to be first-class countries, at some point, they will desire to move on to "energy upgrades", beyond international community (read: wealthy countries), who has the right to refuse them to build such infrastructure?
* Villains will move on to harder targets, but will move on, even if it requires using countries already using nuclear and are actually "non-wealthy" (for some reasonable definition)
It might not be feasible to guarantee the right levels of security for these scenarios, but we can take them in account and work out nuclear reactor models which limits as much as possible the inherent risks.
Consider this bad metaphor: as we are writing more and more software, some of them are increasingly critical to users, therefore, we invest in different levels of guaranteeing software is working as intended (e.g. formal methods, etc.).
I see no absolute reason to not pursue the same avenue here, indeed, I even learned about nuclear reactor startups which are applying modern technology to a safer nuclear ecosystem.
Thanks for the answer ! I'll continue the debate because I think it's worth exploring.
The problem is effectively nuclear proliferation. And in my opinion the two links you provided are embryos of solution.
In the future, it will be legitimate for any medium size city in a developping country to have its own nuclear reactor. At that point the whole procurement process becomes a matter of national security for every neighboring country. Like who is deciding which design is better ? Who gets to pick the winning offer ?
For exemple let's say Germany propose a safer design to a small country with the one time refuel feature, but Turkey propose another design and the buying country has better relationship with Turkey. What standing do you have to make them pick what you deem the better design ? The only recourse is to extend the legal framework and coercition power we use for arm sales. Same regarding nuclear material smuggling.
Except those framework work at the moment because, few country have any use for nuclear material and even fewer want to make a go at it. Once it becomes
business as usual to trade nuclear material, it will simply exhaust the monitoring capacity of any international framework. ( At least that's my opinion )
As for the second part of the argument:
>> Consider this bad metaphor: as we are writing more and more software, some of them are increasingly critical to users, therefore, we invest in different levels of guaranteeing software is working as intended (e.g. formal methods, etc.).
The question is who the we is ? Energy plant maintenance is closer to server farm maintenance than software building. To twist your metaphor, if many countries were to handle the data infrastructure their economy depend on, they would collapse. That's the crux of the issue, and one of the subliminal teaching the public got from Fukushima.
If Japan, the country of the famed six sigma, made a serie of decisions that led to an accident, chances are it's bound to happen to most other (developping ) countries, given long enough time. And I am intentionally not delving into the specifics of those decisions.
With these two sides of the issue in mind, it feels unreasonnable that so many commenters on the web at large are rooting for Germany to fail in the nuclear free direction.
Edit:
>> Unpopular opinion: I do not think it is possible to get rid of the inherent risk of nuclear proliferation, even without building nuclear reactors in non-wealthy countries.
I just wanted to add that I commend you for that (blunt) sentence and it really should be part of the standard issues discussed when talking about nuclear.
> In the future, it will be legitimate for any medium size city in a developping country to have its own nuclear reactor. At that point the whole procurement process becomes a matter of national security for every neighboring country. Like who is deciding which design is better ? Who gets to pick the winning offer ?
I definitely agree that's a core question. I believe we are in an instance of public policies and proper evaluation of proposals.
IMHO, deciding if a design is better is not the hardest part, but getting the actual design implemented and not something else is complicated.
In France, there is an organization called ASN — Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire, a strong independent (theorically) organization which is here to ensure nuclear matters are handled with almost absolute safety. As I see, France has been running nuclear more or less fine, of course, there were some hiccups (and there are still some, arguably, nowadays, it is complicated to attribute them to ASN, politics did not help a lot).
Regulation bodies seem to be working, so we are reducing this problem to protecting these regulation bodies and ensuring they are not broken, which is a hard problem, that, we share with many other issues we are tackling (e.g. competition).
Now, I see an even worse concern to "who gets to pick the winning offer ?" related to the previous question. Decision makers can have a bad habit to select solutions which are made by market leaders, e.g. tech guys buys some IBM because no one gets fired for buying some IBM.
Therefore, selecting winning offers has to be done with more than paperwork and financial health: orgs like ASN has to take an example, a demo reactor, check it, try it, verify it, etc, etc.
Though, I am deep in speculation at the moment, there will be many more specific challenges which I cannot know about.
> For exemple let's say Germany propose a safer design to a small country with the one time refuel feature, but Turkey propose another design and the buying country has better relationship with Turkey. What standing do you have to make them pick what you deem the better design ? The only recourse is to extend the legal framework and coercition power we use for arm sales. Same regarding nuclear material smuggling.
That's a correct concern, one which would exist, as per my unpopular opinion, no matter what, we give up on nuclear or not as an energy source.
> Except those framework work at the moment because, few country have any use for nuclear material and even fewer want to make a go at it. Once it becomes business as usual to trade nuclear material, it will simply exhaust the monitoring capacity of any international framework. ( At least that's my opinion )
I am not sure to what extent the dynamics of international framework can be scaled up, but that is also a right concern to have.
I would say that starting with very strict measures and trying to uphold them might be a start, the objective is to make it obvious that trading nuclear material must be done with the utmost care and no money can be saved up in that concern. It might help to keep the monitoring capacity to be enough.
In the case where we have no monitoring capacity left, I would argue this is the responsibility of everyone (read: citizens and politics) to reinforce these, as we are all gaining from that, otherwise, there is an unknown risk to run into unforeseen consequences.
Thankfully, this kind of responsibility is also here when elections can put dangerous people in office. :-)
We should be able to exercise it better and more, though, it is no silver bullet.
> The question is who the we is ? Energy plant maintenance is closer to server farm maintenance than software building. To twist your metaphor, if many countries were to handle the data infrastructure their economy depend on, they would collapse. That's the crux of the issue, and one of the subliminal teaching the public got from Fukushima. If Japan, the country of the famed six sigma, made a serie of decisions that led to an accident, chances are it's bound to happen to most other (developping ) countries, given long enough time. And I am intentionally not delving into the specifics of those decisions.
I would argue that the case of Fukushima is particularly special, so specifics would be needed, but I will try nevertheless without delving into it.
Nuclear plants require more than just maintenance, they also require dismantlement, construction, etc. The fact you require humans to perform these operations, collect samples, etc. is quite outdated, and we can build software and technology (read: use dumb robots that go through a plant and monitor some metrics, come back to a lab and upload their files).
What is annoying is that each step is hard and bothersome, so we try to extend the lifetime of our plants, making maintenance harder, etc.
Server farm maintenance is easier at some FANG companies (and more) because they can rely on technology / robotics to alleviate bothersome tasks. This can rely on stupid machines, but, sometimes, on some non-trivial software.
Therefore, I claim that server farm maintenance up to a scale require some software building.
Now, sure, countries do not have the ability to handle the data infrastructure of their economy. Nevertheless, this is a challenge that many countries (including France) will have to partially tackle, the reason for that being: data sovereignty, at least, for citizen data (health, etc.).
France already failed multiple times, is that reason to stop trying?
With this in mind, we can devise a strategy where we strengthen our technology infrastructure aiming for a sophistication level of FANG companies, with the funding of public bodies, while thinking about how to make safer, sounder nuclear plants and letting experts in international matters handle the negotiations with the neighbors.
Where we := society, precisely, everyone plays a part: (public|private) research, software companies, government, "interested" citizens (through Open Data for example).
> With these two sides of the issue in mind, it feels unreasonnable that so many commenters on the web at large are rooting for Germany to fail in the nuclear free direction.
Of course ; I believe this is true in general BTW: no one should wish for a country to fail because they made apparently "bad" decisions, truth is: things are always more complicated and harder.
Though, I can get the feeling of these commenters, looking at Europe energy landscape, reading reports from electricity public bodies, it is frustrating.
But I would rather use this energy (no pun intended) to see how we can move forward taking in account these decisions, rather than wasting time on wishing fellow humans to suffer from electricity issues.
> I just wanted to add that I commend you for that (blunt) sentence and it really should be part of the standard issues discussed when talking about nuclear.
I think simple, safe and small reactor should be possible to build. It just matter of proper engineering.
In richer countries solar power works well but requires elastic grid and storage investment. In Poland many people get it and new homes get heat pumps as well plus good insulation to reduce demand.
But in rich countires all that matters in production needs in the end. I think China will lead in this as they are most pressured.
I was on Kos/Greece recently and was surprised that they have 0 PV panels but everyone has solar water heating. Maybe they have some other good elecricity source and that makes it uncompetitive.
Most poor countries can rely on solar as it's aboundant there. They will also want nuclear though to desalt water -> see in 20 years.
Nothing is important here except the price. Markets are based on supply demand. If the demand is not going to diminish the supply must increase. If this does not happen there will almost certainly be harm to the economy.
What if we raise price of energy to the level where mining cryptocurrency is barely profitable and even that only in times of peak production from renewables and subsidize consumers directly so they can purchase reasonable amount of energy priced that way for their own use?
Who is a reasonable consumer? Industries like steel refinement are basically just energy cost arbitrage just like Bitcoin but you get steel instead of Bitcoin.
Plus crypto dynamically changes the mining difficulty.
I wouldn't split customers in reasonable and unreasonable ones.
I'd just estimate how much energy each person uses on average, both for heating or running devices and in the products they purchase.
Then I'd bring up energy price to a level where it's barely profitable to mine crypyo. I'd do that by taxing energy manufacturers.
Then I'd calculate how this increase will increase cost of living to average person. And pay out every person basic income at level high enough to compensate for this price hike.
Taxes might be used to steer energy sector rowards greener energy sources.
Companies can adapt to any energy price. Subsidizing exports might be needed to keep your exports globally competitive. Taxing imports according to energy consumed in their production might be needed to provide fair competition between imports and locally manufactered goods locally
Why are so many here pro-nuclear? How do you solve the problems that come with increasing use of nuclear reactors?
1. handling nuclear waste
2. knowledge transfer of breeding technology which is also used for creating plutonium for atom bombs
It's so lopsided you'd think every hacker news reader moonlight as an engineer at a nuclear plant. I count 5 "insane" on that page already. German policies are insane, California is insane,... you get the drift.
German energy policies are insane. Shutting down nuclear energy without replacing source. Already planning shut down of coal plants, also without any plans for replacement. And with Green Party in power it can only become worse.
But we shouldn’t worry as long as we can import expensive dirty energy from other countries and complain it’s them and not us not doing enough to stop global warning.
> “From a pure emissions perspective, it was always a questionable idea to shut down German nuclear before the plants have reached the end of their lifetime,”
That's very questionable. Unless they have audited and found uncorrectable design flaws, it really doesn't make sense. A lot of the push seems to have come after Fukushima - an entirely different design, in a different country, with different regulation constraints(some of which were actually violated) and in a region subject to severe natural disasters.
It's not like the risk to German plants suddenly increased after that event.
Oh, interesting. I wonder if Germany is more reliant on France for providing a baseload when renewables dip while France relies on Germany for peaking and supplementing daytime loads.
Thanks for the website. It'll definitely come in handy.
Edit: With Germany shutting down their nukes, I'm curious if them being a net exporter remains true.
When looking at live data we should keep in mind that currently 14 reactors are stopped in France for various reasons (maintenance delayed to winter season due to COVID, safety measures of several reactors due to investigation in a deterioration of a comportent in one).
In normal circumstances France should be exporting to Germany right now (it would make no economical sense for German grid operators to use the very expensive gas if neighbors could deliver lower cost indigenous production). Sadly right now France can't deliver and it increases tension even more on gas demand.
Thanks to it's nuclear power, France is the first electricity exporter in the world, Germany is a close second.
In 2020 Germany exported 18TWh of energy and produced about 61TWh of nuclear. How much renewable capacity has been added in the past year and how much capacity is being taken off line?
How much can you narrow it down to derail the topic even more?
Yes, they didn't do much last year. This is because the last Government didn't care or rather even sabotaged the Energiewende but last year wasn't representative for the whole programme. Also, the new Government will push where the last one slept. Everybody who's even remotely interested in Germany knows that. Didn't you?
Germany is a net exporter. But the collaboration with France is very useful for both sides. Whenever there is free capacity of French reactors, they are exporting to whole Europe. In other times, France becomes an importer. Just a few days ago, 3 reactors had to be taken offline for repairs as some faults were discovered in one of them.
The insane part is only that not enough is done to boost energy distribution from renewables. So many subventions have been dumped into nuclear and the cost for disposal, it makes sense to move out beyond safety concerns. About the time: to there could have been better times but there was a political momentum and I think a majority of German are in support of the transition.
> but there was a political momentum and I think a majority of German are in support of the transition.
Majority of German media outlets are in support for transition. German private households already pay one of the most expensive electricity in the world. With prices going even more up, I'm not so sure many would be happy to pay even more.
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[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Energymi...
[2] https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Infografiken/Energie/stroma...