No, only if your grid is composed of "slow" power plants, you have to. That is why for a long time, all night-time energy usage was encouraged, to raise the base load. Ironically the outcome is used as an argument against renewables as it "but what about the base load"? :p

And if not completely dominated by slow power plants, there is always enough load on the grid to keep it stable. Especially in a day and age where there is a lot of storage, which can absorb some excess power production.

If I understood correctly, I don't think it's a good idea to waste energy to cover base load. It can be used for useful things instead.

No, but you can power something like 70% of a country with wind power alone. Add in some solar and a few hours worth of storage and you can go 90+%. Add a few days of storage and you reach two nines. A few weeks for more nines.

If you build enough renewables, then there comes a point when at times you're generating more than is needed immediately. That surplus electricity can be used to make hydrogen gas by electrolysing water. The gas can be stored indefinitely and burned to generate electricity when needed. So with enough renewables, no fossil fuels are needed.

This isn't true.

You could even power the world just from renewables

https://innovationorigins.com/en/researchers-agree-the-world...

That's false. You can't power a country with one source of wind power in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Which is the same justification for so many bad things throughout history, be it wars for resources, to making battery-farmed workers pee in bottles because Jeffrey couldn't bear to have one fewer personal yacht.

If people had grown up with variable supply of electricity, they would have no problem with it today. It's only the transition from something better to something worse that causes riots.

Wind, solar and pumped storage gets you a long way, to be fair. We definitely need some nuclear, but it's far too expensive to rely on.

You could if there was an energy efficient, cheap, and widely available storage.

Such storage is right now domain of unicorns and pixie dust.

Other solution include near loseless transmission of power between sunny and shaded side.

So you think Germans will not blame Russia for problems caused by the lack of Russian gas?

> Most of that inevitably is going to be wind and solar. Gas is a complete non starter at this point. And coal is quite expensive and coal supplies also are a bit tricky as most of that actually also came from Russia.

Wind and Solar have the drawback of not being a constant or reliable source of energy. Yes, they provide cheap and clean energy but not always when you need it.

Yes, the solution would be to save the energy when you need it BUT we don't have that, yet. I really hope we will figure something out but we need not face reality: The tech is not there yet. It might take decades that we don't have.

This is so frustrating to argue with people. Like, I really like your optimism but we don't have a saving solution. We have some ideas but scaling them up towards the scope that we actually need is not easily done.

I really wish you were right but the facts don't add add.

> However, that will cause industry to respond by investing in reducing their dependency on those energy sources.

Since when do they know that they should be transitioning to other sources? Decades? What have the done? Nothing.

As long there are other countries with cheap gas I am not so optimistic. Yes, some will make the transitions, other will move production to other countries and lot's of them we will simply lose. The next years will be brutal.

Only when the international community actually starts to take climate change and dependence on gas more serious will we see some change.

This is revisionist history and your completely false accusations put it near Russian propaganda territory. I challenge you to find even a single proof for what you wrote.

The Greens were the only party calling for embargoes against Russia to stop importing Russian gas all together in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea. They also opposed Nord Stream 2 from the beginning. They inherited the clusterfuck the conservatives left them when they got elected in 2021 and now have to deal with what they have.

The conservatives killed the German solar industry (world leader at the time in the 2000s) and also killed the wind turbine industry shortly after. Reason? China was cheaper.

The Greens were also the first to call for weapons for Ukraine while other parties struggled to even make statements.

> The Greens have not been in government for the last sixteen years.

While this is true, they have always been in favour of shutting down nuclear power plants and now they would have the opportunity to reverse this course, but they don't.

The Greens have been founded as an anti-nuclear party. In the 80s, they even demanded to replace nuclear power with coal (https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/143529774448733801...). Shutting down nuclear power plants is obviously more important to them than the climate.

> and just look at France just how catastrophic nuclear power actually is.

What's so catastrophic about France? Despite all the troubles they currently have, their CO2 emissions per kW are still a fraction of Germany's.

Can you elaborate on the problems with France? If I were in government in France I'd be thrilled with nuclear power as an investment right about now

"look at France just how catastrophic nuclear power actually is"

I assume you are referring to power plants that has to shut down due to low water levels?

If the powerplant is designed with a source of eater in mind, it will have tp shut down when the water is gone. It does not matter if the plant is oil, coal or nuclear.

Plenty of nuclear powerplants use seawater for cooling, and none of them had to shutdown.

I'd say it's the fault of neoliberalism (which certainly has a foothold in parts of the CDU/CSU and all major parties really, not just the FDP) that most infrastructure projects of the past decades have been limited to a few failed prestige projects (powerlines just aren't as sexy as a massive airport nobody can use) but it's the fault of the Greens (not specifically the party but the general political movement it stems from) that we're at a point where we are stuck with coal because nuclear is no longer an option.

I'm not saying it's bad they protested nuclear. Nuclear needs to go, too. It's just bad that they hyperfixated on nuclear because it's easier to scare people about it and that they didn't ensure we get rid of coal first. Scaring people about nuclear was child's play after Chernobyl if the threat of the Cold War wasn't enough (as the public already conflated nuclear power and nuclear weapons). The coal industry's political power is much greater in Germany tho and taking it on would have meant finding a way to bridge the cultural gap between blue collar Kumpels and the more college educated Birkenstock crowd.

Hopefully FFF and XR are finally doing some of the work now but sadly the opposition has also gotten better at its game and that Kumpel at his Stammtisch beer will most likely make bad jokes about "Greta" despite not batting an eye if you ask him to sign a petition to shut down all nuclear plants.

If you blame them for everything you will be at least partially correct more often than not.

Shutting down the German nuclear power plants does not help the situation obviously but right even turning them on now is not going to help us at all over the winter. First of all not enough energy gets generated from there in the grand scheme of things, secondly they would not be operational in time.

If you want to look for more nuclear to turn on, have a look at France where less than 50% of nuclear power plants are currently generating energy.

Homes are heated with gas, not with nuclear power. Industrial processes run on gas, not on nuclear power.

> they don't have public pressure against it

There _is_ public pressure against nuclear, but it's at 50/50 vs support for nuclear. It has become a mostly partisan topic.

> We are not far away from a new Fukushima, but this time in Europe.

Except we technically _already_ had "Fukushima in Europe" 40 years ago, and for most people, life just went on.

I agree that if anything goes bad a the Ukrainian plant (FSM forbids), the politicians who have been pro-nuclear in the past few years will have a hard time keeping face, and the sentiments would change, and the experts would spent some unconfortable interviews.

However, I can not blame government for being even more scared at Union-wide blackouts than at a local incident at a plant.

The latter is horrible, and puts you at the mercy of winds, but _has been managed in the past_.

The former gives me worst nightmares (than the other scenario that also gives me nightmares.)

Let's all remember it made _sense_ to live in Pompei in 79.

> Currently we think about the nuclear fleet in the Ukraine which is literally under fire from Russia.

The 1938 Yellow River flood (Chinese: 花園口決隄事件, literally "Huayuankou embankment breach incident") was a flood created by the Nationalist Government in central China during the early stage of the Second Sino-Japanese War in an attempt to halt the rapid advance of Japanese forces. One million dead.

So by that logic you should be against hydroelectric dams, becauae they've been used in warfare for centuries.

One would think the chief problem in that equasion is war, not infrastructure

Hasn't Zaporizhzhia been under Russian control for a while now? Why would they be shelling themselves? That doesn't even make sense.

>Currently we think about the nuclear fleet in the Ukraine which is literally under fire from Russia.

It's hilarious how the Western politicians and mass media seriously blame Russia for shelling a nuclear plant which it controls for a number of months. And a lot of people either blindly trust this narrative, or intentionally spread misinformation with the sole goal to demonize Russia as much as possible. It reminds me how Donetsk rebels were blamed for shelling of civilians in territories which they control.

It clearly shows how far we are in the post-truth world. Even a tiny bit of critical thinking is enough to understand who truly does the shelling, but titles like "Ukrainian Army shells a nuclear plant" are too inconvenient for the current political climate.

As far as I know, the goal of shelling (which for the time being does not target the reactors or the spent fuel storage) is to discourage Russia from disconnecting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant from the Ukrainian grid and connect it with the Russian grid instead.

I think both can be true and it might be more region specific. My girlfriend was born in the Ruhrgebiet and a lot of her family and friends family worked in the coal industry and were well taken care of when the plants were shut down. While they're not pro-coal or wouldn't poll that way I think there probably is more of a sentimental connection to it than to nuclear which that generation tends to associate with Chernobyl.

That's not a contradiction though. Yes, there is broad popular support for renewables and until earlier this year gas probably also had a better reputation than it deserved, compared to coal.

But culturally, especially in the Ruhr region, coal has the benefit of nostalgia whereas nuclear has always been scary. Of course nowadays most "coal" is actually lignite and there is some resistance against lignite mining destroying large swathes of the landscape whereas the industrial architecture of "black coal" mining has become a national heritage. But lignite is still benefitting from some of that "black coal" nostalgia.

It's probably worth adding that these perceptions not only vary by region but also by socioeconomics and politics.