Closing down all nuclear plants was first decided on in the year 2000, 24 years ago. It were the Liberals (FDP) and Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) who rescinded that decision in 2010, only to later reinstitute it in panic after the Fukushima meltdown happened.
Those reactors that got shuttered hadn't had any safety inspections in years, they had no viable fuel left and not even the owning energy companies wanted to operate them any longer than absolutely necessary, so they would have been shut down even without the Green party in the current government.
That the now missing nuclear baseload had to have been replaced with coal, well.. Thank the Christian Democrats for that. They're the ones that favoured building out coal, slowing down the build-out of renewables as much as possible, at every chance they got.
True. However, as I experienced it, there was negligence regarding a base load problem among those favoring renewable energies.
I got into emotionally charged arguments for even asking, "Will Germany produce enough electrical power after shutting down nuclear power stations?" People told me base load was an outdated way of looking at the energy market and a conservative talking point to justify cutbacks in subsidies for renewables. An often repeated argument was that Germany has been a net exporter of electrical power for many years, so reducing capacity should not be a problem.
Personally, I feel that neither side engaged in an honest public debate. I remember very well a leading Green politician, Jürgen Trittin, declaring that the transition towards renewables would cost each German citizen as much as an ice cream cone. Yes, politics must create positive momentum, but being off by orders of magnitude signals fundamental incompetence. The usual counter is, "Had everything gone according to plan, it totally would have worked out." That is childish and not a way to do serious politics.
Closing down all nuclear plants was first decided on in the year 2000, 24 years ago. It were the Liberals (FDP) and Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) who rescinded that decision in 2010, only to later reinstitute it in panic after the Fukushima meltdown happened.
Those reactors that got shuttered hadn't had any safety inspections in years, they had no viable fuel left and not even the owning energy companies wanted to operate them any longer than absolutely necessary, so they would have been shut down even without the Green party in the current government.
That the now missing nuclear baseload had to have been replaced with coal, well.. Thank the Christian Democrats for that. They're the ones that favoured building out coal, slowing down the build-out of renewables as much as possible, at every chance they got.