https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
Germany is absolutely a great example, even if it somehow became the target for the weird cadre of nuclear boosters.
France is sending around 2 to 4 GW of electricity (so mostly nuclear) to Germany all the time, "except" when there is plenty of wind, then France is buying for a really cheap price (sometimes negative) what Germany can't use. See https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-...
2 to 4 GW is roughly 2 to 4 nuclear reactors at 100%, so one/two nuclear powerplants "on an average usage".
You can't say that you exited nuclear (or any other kind of energy) when you're massively, and really often, importing electricity from this source from across the borders.
And your graph is pretty clear. Germany didn't "removed fossil fuel", they replaced around 100GW of coal with 50GW of natural gas + renewable. To me natural gas is still a fossil fuel (with a lighter co2 impact than coal indeed).
And in the end the result is https://www.electricitymap.org/map 5 to 10x more CO² impact than France per kwh, even with 2x the nuclear plants setup in France (60GW of nuclear in France against 60GW of wind turbines and 60GW of solar panels in Germany).
No, wind at night!
Germany is also a net exporter of electricity and exported 13.7Twh more than it imported from France.
So when you have spikes of renewable productions (a lot of wind and a lot of sun) Germany sells it to "everyone around" at a really cheap price. Which means that on a yearly average Germany indeed exported a lot of cheap renewable electricity to everyone.
Now try to guess what is happening when everyone starts to do what Germany is doing for close to 20 years now ?
France is also leaning rather heavily on the capital expenditures it made on nuclear power in the 80s. Unfortunately its gonna be in for a whopping bill when its plants start aging out in 2025: https://www.france24.com/en/20170710-france-hulot-could-clos...
Germany, OTOH, will be able to coast on what it's already built in the next 10 years while the rest of Europe plays catch up.
Wind turbines lifespan is around 25 years (some 30 years), mostly limited by structural and physical issues. You can't reinstall a new wind turbine on top of an old one (the concrete base is also fragilized and new turbines are often way bigger than old ones).
Solar panels indeed have a way better lifespan and recent ones stay efficient even after decades of use.
So one question now: why is Germany building and importing so much natural gaz (~400g of CO²/kwh, it's around 10 for renewable/nuclear) if their renewable plan is working so well ?
I presume they will start scaling down natural gas plants at some point, but they're clearly aiming to shut down nuclear and lignite plants first.
Coping with increased electricity demand and switching off two forms of power generation entirely wasn't going to be quick but it is inevitable.
There is a cost to renewables that most advocates don't factor in - balancing. Most studies use the prevailing market rates for energy to prove that renewables are cheaper than coal or gas however, when renewables aren't providing power, something is and that something has a cost.
This is a cost paid for by consumers though it isn't attributed to the source of the problem - the variable renewable generators.
Similar argument for energy storage. You need storage precisely because renewables are variable and that cost should be factored in to the cost of renewable energy. At the moment, it isn't.
Hence all that electricity imported from, e.g. France in winter. Some people might be under the illusion that this was free but I can assure you I am not.
There's a reason Europe is super keen on country interconnectors. It really helps smooth out production.
Intermittency of renewables really has become the next Y2k. I suppose we can thank a decade of carbon and nuclear lobby fearmongering for that :/
Like Y2K as a problem it receives relatively too much attention relative to the problems it causes. The rolling blackouts germany was promised ~10 years ago never materialized, for instance:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/23/germany-...
I am not a huge fan of Germany's energy policy myself, I see it as misguided giving up nuclear first and coal second.
BUT, if everyone built out renewables like crazy, it would create a huge market for storage or electrolysis systems.
Batteries and HVDC to your nearest major desert are what I expect to be the solutions.
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...
What will happen is that people will learn to build an energy system that works well with this situation.
Which will likely mean things like industrial plants that shut down when electricity is scarce and get payed for that by the grid operator, because that's cheaper than having a lot of storage. It will mean new industries will be built by using excess renewables (likely hydrogen will be such an industry). I'm excited to see that happen.
False. In reality Germany often has a trade surplus with France. See, every country has multiple interconnects, and various areas send and receive power. On the whole, Germany sends more power to France than France sends to Germany. Which makes sense -- France's total power production is far below its peak power demand, and as is the nature of nuclear power, plants are very often offline. But sure, one area of Germany imports from France while another area exports to France...that isn't notable.
You're regurgitating ridiculous pro-nuclear propaganda. Telling that your argument has completely shifted between posts.
"Germany didn't "removed fossil fuel""
Who are you quoting? Further, Germany started their nuclear decommissioning in 2011. Natural gas + coal + lignite is *WAY* below that level now.
>And in the end the result is https://www.electricitymap.org/map 5 to 10x more CO² impact than France per kwh, even with 2x the nuclear plants setup in France (60GW of nuclear in France against 60GW of wind turbines and 60GW of solar panels in Germany).
Germany had a much dirtier power profile before they started decommissioning nuclear reactors. They have a much, much cleaner profile now, even if it still isn't as clean as France's. The "went back to coal" nonsense is ridiculous noise.
EDIT: I would love to know what's going on in the minds of people who downvote comments like this. Just upset with fact and reality?
Source ?
Nuclear is around 90% of Capacity factor in the USA, 75% in Canada, around 70% in France and UK. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto...
So close to 2 to 3x more than wind turbines and solar panels. And roughly the same numbers are other kind of plants (gaz, coal…).
This is a pretty facetious comparison. You install solar knowing that the sun won't shine all the time, and turbines that the wind won't blow. No one installs it expecting 100%. The cost to install is low.
Nuclear, on the other hand, is a massive capital expenditure. When nuclear is down, that is a major problem because you don't overbuild. An unplanned outage can be a disaster.
This whole conversation is a bit rich given that many of France's reactors are nearing EoL and France has no plans on replacing them.
Regardless, I soundly and overwhelmingly debunked the nonsense that Germany "went back to coal" so now it's on with strawmen and shifting goal posts. Such is always the nature of any discussion involving the magical panacea of nuclear.
Germany is not going back to coal, I never said that ;) Germany is indeed planning to phase out coal "by 2035" (lets see how this goes, there is an election going on). Germany is currently building natural gas plants on the other hand. Gaz that is mostly (around 45%) imported from Russia, a nice diplomatic thing they're getting into.
Bullshit. Nuclear died outside of China because it was oversold and an economic calamity. You can't even install nuclear without massive government subsidies (not least a huge liability waiver where the state basically takes on all liability, not done for any other energy source). The cost to build, operate, retrofit and decommission is always massively over the expected, and it has only gotten worse.
There are places where nuclear is by far the best option, and its extreme costs and safety needs are acceptable. There are many others where it just never yielded the promise.
"Germany is not going back to coal, I never said that ;)"
That is the root of this thread that you jumped into, making several seriously wrong claims that you either just shifted goal posts or edited out along the way.
Add in that the latest nat-gas installation in my state from start to finish cost 1/4th the price of our last wind turbine installation, if you compare actual power produced over the year instead of simply comparing max rated production.
That's when I realized that you literally can't have enough wind to replace CO2 producing power and nuclear is the only reasonable answer.
"That's when I realized"
You understand how utterly ridiculous this sounds, right?
"That's when I realized that spacecraft should be made out of aluminum foil"
I based my opinion on real world data, and only real world data could change it. Maybe that sounds ridiculous where you're standing, but I'll never know.
And like my man Richard Feynman would say if he were alive today, p-hacking, cargo culting, and outright fraud are alive and well - endemic in the life or death sciences - and super-saturating the more politicized sciences. Takes 5 minutes to get a rough estimate of something to see if a study is even close to being accurate. Try it. Pick a small wind market in ideal conditions, pick an established utility with public records, and do the work yourself.
The implication here being that air conditioning will be using lots of power? Surely using solar PV for air conditioning is the most obvious pairing out there. It's rarely hot and not sunny.
Did you perhaps confuse wind and solar with nuclear? The design of a nuclear plant is precisely the opposite of what you describe.
You understand they have to take the plant offline to do major maintenance, even refuelling, right? In April, 75% of New England's nuclear power plants were offline, for instance, most unplanned.
When a single plant costs billions of dollars and becomes a significant or overwhelming contributor to an area's power mix, it can be a problem.
A typical nuclear plant isn't designed to be cycled regularly. What you are suggesting is that most nuclear plants are not generating power for more than 50% of the time.
A cursory search of capacity factors will show that this is the opposite of reality. A typical wind or solar installation on average, generates zero power for more than half the time.
Please be a bit serious about what you're saying, you don't have to actually turn of a plant when you need to refuel. If any kind of plant (including hydro) need to be completely turned off for maintenance its really because you had a major design flaw.
Here's a nuclear industry blog post explaining the practice: http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-happens-dur...
It's remarkable how much power these plants generate with a relatively small footprint.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy/bloc-2...
Things change and over the span of 10-20 years, things can change dramatically. The life span of many of these decisions is 30 years or more.
I do wonder what happens in case there is no wind and no sun all over Europe and the demand is higher than the supply. It's probably very unlikely to happen but then countries will prioritize their own citizens (as we saw now during the covid crisis) and then we could have blackouts. I assume scenario's like these have been researched but I don't follow this subject, maybe someone else here knows?
Wind speeds are actually greatest around sunrise and sunset, which corresponds more or less with peak energy demand.
Coal mining is dangerous/destructive, burning coal is poisoning the oceans and has killed many, many people. For example, an estimate is that over 20,000 deaths are caused per year due to burning coal in Europe. I am not sure how many of these deaths Germany is exporting every year to countries downwind, but it isn't zero: https://news.mongabay.com/2013/06/burning-coal-responsible-f...
A NASA estimate is that the use of nuclear power has saved approximately 1.8 million lives in the years 1971-2009:
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
Of course the above is just the immediate damage from coal - future generations will have to live with the effects of all that CO2 being added to the atmosphere from Germany burning lignite and hard coal to produce ~130 TWh of power. How many deaths will come from that? (Burning natural gas produces less CO2 than burning coal, but the production and distribution of natural gas leads to enough losses to the atmosphere, it is estimated the climate impact might be similar to coal.)
Choosing to eliminate nuclear power when you are still burning fossil fuels is truly a horrible decision.
For comparison, 1 person died from radiation exposure after Fukushima. https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
A small group of well meaning "activists" have cost many lives bc they did not look at the data.
the weird cadre of nuclear boosters
Sure from a Ukrainian point of view NSII sucks. But it isn’t even close to an existential thing for Germany. The gas dependency is temporary (<15 years) and could also be filled by US LNG. Which is why the US is against NSII
So yeah from a geopolitical point of view this is all very interesting. From an ecological point of view the net impact is close to zero
Until they reach the lower limit with all the gas plants deployed, then they'll really have to think again about how they will definitely remove those plants.
Gas is really the best backup for renewable. It's cheap (for now), really adjustable (perfect for the renewable intermittence, on the contrary of nuclear), easy to deploy (not that easy with nuclear plants). The only issue is that it still emits a lot of CO²… and that you strongly depend on other countries for your energy (gas cannot be store as easily as uranium for example).
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/04/23/china-wil...