That's what I already thought was the case and the article adds it as the last paragraph. I get a lot of people want to focus on the nuclear angle but it's only one part of a frustrating string of poor energy choices by Germany's politicians.
Edit: removed a word.
Since building new gas plants isn't really an option anymore, and renewable can't produce reliable electricity by themselves regardless of cost, we are back to nuclear.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-needs-20-30-gw-...
I wanted to explain what's wrong with this statement, because that's simply not true. But I don't have to: You just need to read the text that you linked to:
"As Germany ramps up renewables and exits coal and nuclear power, it may need more gas power capacity, which would mostly be put to use at times of high electricity needs and little wind or sunshine – and not necessarily lead to more overall gas consumption."
Gas is different from nuclear in that it's easy to regulate the power generated, which is necessary to deal with demand spikes and generation dips (the latter due to wind/solar which may not always be available). Presumably Germany would only ever want to rely on gas for this purpose.
There are ways to adjust nuclear power output but they are quite expensive (on top of the fact that any nuclear power plant is already expensive).
To get rid of fossil fuel power plants you need to match their exceptional ability to regulate power generation levels. You could do this by using nuclear for base generation and supplementing renewables with storage techniques (e.g. pumped hydro storage), but nuclear is unfortunately not a "drop in" replacement on its own.
Probably biased but reminds me of a recent talk by a Polish nuclear scientist explaining how this gas infrastructure is much more expensive than most people imagine. And it has to be regularly updated. So, if we are to factor in that cost, then brand new nuclear infrastructure and nuclear conversion isn't that much more.
Was it perhaps because of some hidden actors who pushed for the gas pipelines deals?
I can imagine, that the Russian influences in Germany hasn't magically disappeared after the fall of Berlin wall.
(Opposition to) nuclear energy is an emotional topic in Germany, one that mobilizes people. In a democratic society that leads to effects like the phase out of nuclear.
It’s mind-numbingly simple and I do not understand at all why conspiracies are mentioned left, right and center in this thread.
Also, the fact that in most countries there are multiple hidden agents acting on behalf of other countries hardly seems to be a conspiracy theory as well.
There's a substantial age cohort in Germany who can remember when their parents wouldn't let them play outside, or remember the runs on iodine tablets - people who's earliest understanding of the word "nuclear" was either in reference to Chernobyl or to fears of nuclear armageddon.
We know now that Chernobyl was a big deal in the immediate vicinity and not that huge of a deal continent-wide. But the climate in those early days was one of fear - in the midst of the Cold War a massive nuclear accident of unknown real severity in an untrusted neighbouring country was blanketing the continent in an unknown amount of radioactive material.
You can make truthful and rational arguments until you're blue in the face but the issue is emotive - a lot of people's minds have been made up by frightening experiences early in life.
Fukushima incident had a big impact on German public opinion. Even at the time it was a obvious over reaction from the Germans.
Merkel already went against public opinion when she put in place running time extensions in late 2010 to delay the phase-out, that was massively controversial decision.
Then only a few months later Fukushima blew up, so her already unpopular and controversial position became ultimately untannable. Particularly as many faults with German reactors were found during the [atom-moratorium](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom-Moratorium) that was declared after Fukushima.
Prior to that safety inspections were not even mandatory for the operators.
Add Chernobyl, Fukushima and the nuclear industry refusing to pay for the disposal of their waste, and Germany is a prime example of how and why nuclear fission is neither economical, nor sustainable.
> Especially that it hasn't happened in the neighboring France.
It's also happening in neighboring France [0], half their fleet has been offline for most of the summer [1]. A fleet that's already underfunded by billions [2], that's why the French reinvestment into new reactors was a very conservative and modest one with basically no reference to how even that will be financed.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/edf-extend-civaux-nuc...
[1] https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/04/30/681274/French-autho...,
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear-idUKKCN0VP...
It would make a massive difference for this winter.
Every one possible should be installed, it just won't make a dent.
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/eur...
Saying “if everyone would do X” isn’t very useful if the incentives aren’t in place that would compel everyone to do X.
Hopefully people are stocking up on coats!
There are roughly 40 million households in Germany based on some random numbers I found googling. If every one of them had a 1500 Watt space heater (woefully undersized for some, fine for others I imagine), and used them during the expected coldest day, you’d be throwing an extra 60 billion watt hours (aka gigawatts) of extra load on the grid right when renewables are least capable (typically).
That would also almost exactly double current German peak electrical energy consumption.
The grid would collapse.
As you might guess, in my current mood I’m not great at parties.
Together with significantly reduced electricity cost at night like in the past, this is probably the way to go if we wanted to go back to nuclear power.
This is already an issue in the UK with electric tea kettles during certain times [0], but those are only in use for a very short time, those German electric heaters would need to run a lot to get trough winter.
Yes.. it's a component. Yes I'm sure it will be employed. Yes it will stress the electric grid (but there is much more flexibility available). But it's not the solution to the majority of gas heating, because there simply isn't the capacity to get the required amount of hardware in the available time.
- Everything needs maintenance; nuclear plants are by no means unique in this regard. France may have planned badly, so that many plants are down at once, but this is not a systemic problem with nuclear power.
- Europe overall was unprepared for the heat wave, but we are not really concerned with energy demand during heat waves (which are short, and when sunshine is plentiful) but rather during the winter (which is long, and dark in EU).
So again, more nuclear capacity in Germany could offset gas-fired power plants throughout EU.
There had been plenty of warnings, because in the last 10 years it was quite common for the French grid to be borderline in the summer, cooling always was a tight spot.
And nuclear is a bad offset for gas-fired power plants, as they are rather used as quick power plants, that is something nuclear is the worst at.
The rest of your comment contradicts this.
>The French mostly suffers from the fact that it has become prohibitively expensive to build new reactors.
This is another red herring. You complained that French reactors are down for maintenance, I responded to that. Construction costs do not cause reactors to go down for maintenance.
To your second paragraph, again, the energy supply in the summer is not the central problem. Existing solar does well in the summer.
>And nuclear is a bad offset for gas-fired power plants, as they are rather used as quick power plants, that is something nuclear is the worst at.
Alone, this is true. However, batteries take up very little space and large installations can be put up quickly. Solar is nice in the long term but takes a long time to install at reasonable scale.
Germany is already the largest electricity exporter on the planet [0]. Germany is also the only economy of its size class that has an actual renewable share close to 50% [1], while comparable economies, like Japan or the US, hover at around 20% renewables.
In that context it's extremely questionable how Germany gets constantly blamed for all kinds of things related to energy, when it was literally were the renewable energy change was pioneered not just technologically [2] but particularly regulation wise [3].
[0] https://www.worldstopexports.com/electricity-exports-country...
[1] https://www.trade.gov/energy-resource-guide-germany-renewabl...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
This is not relevant, again, unless it would be impractical to install more transmission lines.
>renewable share
Using the wrong statistic is not a good comparison, what matters is the fraction of fossil fuels. The classification of "renewables" here is crafted to specifically exclude nuclear while for some absurd reason permitting hydropower (which is terrible for river ecosystems).
If you invent a metric specifically to support your ideology, it supports your ideology. However, it doesn't convince anyone who is paying attention to the facts.
>it's extremely questionable how Germany gets constantly blamed
It's not Germany that is truly to blame. It's the anti-nuclear movement which is to blame, and Germany is just one of its many victims. However, this movement led Germany to make bad decisions recently, and those decisions can be criticized specifically, regardless of what else was done.
It is very relevant, why should all the burden to fix all the worlds problems fall exclusively on Germany when Germany already has done so much and was literally the first to recognize the problem?
> The classification of "renewables" here is crafted to specifically exclude nuclear
Yes, because uranium is not a renewable resource, it's actually a very finite resource.
And if you want to see "wrong statistics" playing around with stuff like that, then you need to look at the UK who gets absurdly inflated "electricity from CO2 free sources" shares so it can act like its energy sector is renewable and sustainable, when it's really not.
> It's not Germany that is truly to blame. It's the anti-nuclear movement which is to blame
Just two paragraphs ago you were arguing for Germany to fix it, and now it's some "anti-nuclear movement to blame", all under a submission that comes from a rather questionable source, with its very own lobby, to begin with [0]