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Comment by king_phil | Hacker News Reader

This ("there's no alternative") seems not to be true at all:

In Germany, 13% of our energy is nuclear energy. Only 13%. We're a net exporter of energy, big time, so we could (almost) disconnect nuclear power right now, if we didn't want to export energy to our neighbours. We're at 52 TWh (tera whatt hours) export per year right now.

In the last 18 years we've gone from 143 TWh (2000) to 92 TWh (2018) per year nulcear energy generation. In the same time, wind energy alone has added 160 TWh per year, so that alone is more than enough to compensate. There is another 105 TWh from water, sun & bio gas that we added. But wind energy alone is not even close to fully captured.

Thing is: each nuclear energy plant in Germany right now makes more than 1 million € per day in profits. Each plant. If you'd have that plant as an energy producer, would you take it offline?

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This summer germany fired up coal to deliver energy to Denmark because there was no wind. Germanys energypolicy is a disaster in so many ways.

France gets around 70% of its energy from nuclear, they not germany should be applaused.

Agreed entirely. Also Germany is experincing massive swings in wholesale cost as wind and solar resource comes and goes, with huge negative prices in summer especially.

Negative prices may sound good but in reality it is causing chaos with backup generation and the economics of the grid.

Also keep in mind that the carbon mass per kWh in Germany has been rising recently, because of all the dirty brown coal that is getting burnt when wind and solar generation is low (instead of nuclear). Add this with some of the most expensive consumer prices in the world and very few people would recommend following Germany's model.

How is it the fault of german energy policy if Denmark needs electricity?

France is not free from problems either: https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-power-supply/germany-...

First of all the germans could have used nuclear energy, but since they are closing them down this is only going to increase. Second of all if the alternative energy system was so solid as many of you seem to believe why did they need to use coal? Its amazing to me that people cant see the issue with thier so called green position.

The use of coal is very much a political issue. The social democrats see themselves as the workers party. And historically their strongest base was the coal/steel workers. they have some problems shutting down coal, because this would go against "their own" people (even if there are not many coal worker left). Also some coal mines are in eastern Germany which already faces some unemployment issues and has a lack of industry. But still coal is being phase out. The highest ratio of electricity from coal was 46,9% in 2013. In 2018 it is 38.4%. Not going down fast enough, but still going down.

You are right, that there needs to be some sort of mechanism to stabilize the grid in case renewables are not available. But nuclear energy is not an option for this since it takes days to start a reactor. So what are the options?

* Gas turbines (in the short run, known technologie, fast start-up times, but still creating CO2 even if less than coal)

* Batteries (e.g. https://www.ewe-gasspeicher.de/en/home/b4p )

* Smart Grid (electric cars for example are often flexible in their charging times).

* Pump storage

Nuclear is the ONLY option as it would provide the baseline energy needs and then you can add the others on top.

That's how you do it properly instead of using nonscaleable energy solutions to solve an exponentially growing demand. Again wind and solar is doing around 1% of the worlds needs. They are not even close to being able to solve the basic energy needs.

Coal is used because solar and wind is insufficient not because it's political.

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