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Comment by hannob | Hacker News Reader

> It's absolutely insane they want to shut down Nuclear and replace it with fossil fueled plants.

That's not what's happening...

Nuclear has been mostly replaced with renewables, while fossil fuel generation has been in slow decline as well. You may disagree with that policy, but please get your facts right.

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Please get your facts right. Coal is rising in Germany.

https://www.dw.com/en/coal-and-fossil-fuel-share-of-german-e...

Nice source. What I dont understand is: How did nuclear power grow so much last year—and how was there so little growth in renewables?

This is a short-term development over a couple of months. You will always have ups and downs of all sources of energy and if you look into a short amount of time you can find any energy source growing or declining to support your argument. But the relevant question is what development is happening in the long run.

The third graph here gives you a good idea of the longterm developments of electricity generation in Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

What I'm seeing in those graphs is the same. Coal use rising from 2019 to now.

That's just Q3 2021 compared to Q3 2020.

https://energypost.eu/germany-2021-coal-generation-is-rising...

The money quote:

Similarly, by the end of June 2021, generation from coal-fired power plants was 39 percent higher than in the first six months of 2020. However, generation from coal-fired power in the first half of 2021 was still below the levels seen in 2019.

The power at night and when the wind doesn't blow comes from either:

1. Batteries (insignificant) 2. Hydro 3. Nuclear 4. Fossil Fuels

Germany killed number three, and they did not build sufficient hydro or batteries to compensate. That means that they replaced nuclear with fossil fuels.

Now, they might not have built a new cool power plant for every nuclear power plant that they decommissioned, but had they not decommissioned that nuclear power plant, they could have decommissioned those fossil fuel plants instead. That is just as much a replacement in my mind.

Specifically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschland.sv... shows 1990–2020. There _is_ a slight uptick of fossil fuels in the immediate short-term of the 2011 phase-out plan, but it's they're now below the levels they were at then.

But, as others have said, if they'd maintained the level of nuclear generation the CO2 emitting fossil fuel plants could've been shut down instead.

Coal might not be rising as an industry but last year i'm pretty sure they had to spin up previously-closed coal plants because wind/solar wouldn't produce the required energy.Now in what universe is permanently shutting down all fossil fuel based energy sources a good strategy?It just becomes a national security risk.

And by the way for the climate-caring crowd: why haven't germans stopped N.S 2 with russia if they care so much about the climate?This is both an environmental and geopolitical hypocrisy: let's stop the entire continent more or less consume fossil fuels while we ourselves get it;oh yeah: and also becoming more reliant on russia while criticizing them at every step because that riles up our citizens and we earn easy poltical capital.

> Nuclear has been mostly replaced with renewables, while fossil fuel generation has been in slow decline as well. You may disagree with that policy, but please get your facts right.

Do you have a good source? I believe you are correct that the total share of fossils has decreased, but I also suspect that the OP might well be correct in that in the end a decent chunk of nuclear plant provided capacity will have to be replaced with fossil fuel plants, because Germany does not and will not have enough hydro (or storage) to compensate intermittency for other renewables. I'm also curious how legit the "biomass" share under renewables actually is, i.e. is it really net?

I think the correct formulation would be that most nuclear production over the year has been replaced by renewables, but on gray wind-less winter day like today I can see you are taking in all the Swedish nuclear power you can get [0].

[0]: https://energinet.dk/energisystem_fullscreen (Danish grid only, couldn't find any similar tools for the wider grid).

https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

"Nuclear has been mostly replaced with renewables, while fossil fuel generation has been in slow decline as well."

That's another way of saying, the German Gov't have decided to shut down nuclear power, while they still run fossil fuel power plants and bringing renewables online.

Given we're in a climate emergency, we need to shut down fossil fuel power plants first, while bringing up renewables online. Nuclear shouldn't have been prioritised.

Actually, we have been building and using coal and gas firing plants more excessively ever since the decision to shut down nuclear power. Right now, at least 19 gas-firing plants are being planned, most of them new plants[1]. It is true we also increased the amount of renewables, but those cannot provide the base load capacity continuously.

German Greens want you to believe we (Germans) are heading into a "right" direction and go 100% ecological, but they conveniently forget about that.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_geplanter_und_im_Bau_bef...

The cost of renewables increase as their fraction of the overall mix increases, i.e. When the fluctuations become harder to be balanced by other sources, and more and more energy storage is needed to handle the fluctuations. Energy storage in that large of a scale is very costly and impractical. In reality what will happen is more and more natural gas usage, which is a bad thing.

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