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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Germany, in the meantime, decides to shut down three remaining nuclear plants. No news about major electric storage capacity yet, so I wonder how solar + wind would fare.

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Germany is part of the broader European grid, and solar/wind is backed by interconnections to hydro etc etc.

I was just listening to a podcast on battery storage and apparently continental Europe is behind on grid-scale battery installations because the power market design isn’t there to support it yet (as compared to the UK, the USA and particularly the Texas grid, and Australia).

Germany is apparently doing pretty well on “behind the meter” home battery storage, and to be honest as long as there’s storage in the system it’s OK to do it with either 100,000 10kWh home batteries or a gigawatt-hour in a single grid battery facility.

Batteries don’t make a lot of sense for long-duration storage however; for seasonal storage you want some other technology (hydro, hydrogen, demand management etc).

German has among the highest electricity prices in the world. This is not a success story: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/#:~:te....

$0.55/kWh is in line with California PG&E peak residential rates.

These are the prices for end customers and contain various taxes, surcharges for transmission and various other things. All of these costs are real and it's good to have them as a part of the actual price. You know what it actually costs and it's a good motivation to be energy efficient.

Compare it to France which has the highest market prices in Europe right now [1] (and also last year) but allegedly the customers pay just 22c. It can't work - the nationalization of the EDF was started last year [2] and it posted a 20 billion loss [3]. The true price will be paid one way or the other, through taxes in this case.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/energy_charts/status/163859905194...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/19/france-to-p...

[3] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/17/france-s...

The US indeed has a similar cost level but it just puts that out in tax form or takes on more debt. Result: lots of outdated infrastructure and plants like this and companies that leave their mess for tax payers to clean up rather than investing themselves. Like in this case with a nuclear plant that was bought last year and promptly shut down by its new owner. Why would they buy such an old plant at the end of its life?

Now instead of taking the cost of decommissioning it (which costs lots of money) they are now looking to reopen it using public funding. So, they are happy to profit from this deal but not without public funding. The permit is probably less of an issue than finding the hundreds of millions needed to refurbish this plant. Kind of weird if you look at it like that. Until of course you realize that the prospect of public funding was the whole reason for this company to buy this plant. Basically, tax payers and consumers take all the risk. They take the profit. That's how the nuclear business works. Never mind that this plant still needs to be shut down and decommissioned eventually. Who is going to be paying for that?

They're just importing nuclear from France now.

Solar or wind plus storage is significantly more expensive than conventional nuclear and worse for the environment. [1]

[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9

The only way you can pretend nuclear is "better for the environment" is if you ignore most of its supply chain and only point a finger to "what comes out of the stack." The fuel supply chain is incredibly energy-intensive, expensive, and environmentally unfriendly, and unlike the materials used for rare-earth magnets and lithium ion batteries which everyone here loves to bleat about...the material is not recycled (nor can it be without significant changes that will take decades) whereas rare earth magnets, lithium ion batteries, and now windmill blades, are all recyclable.

Nuclear has never been economically viable. It's been subsidized, enormously, for close to a century as the stepchild of the "defense" nuclear weapon and propulsion industries. It continues to get more expensive, whereas wind/solar/energy storage are plunging in cost.

Nuclear would also still require energy storage because it can only fulfill base load; nuclear takes days to change power levels, and running at anything other than full capacity drastically impacts its economic viability.

You can point to research all you like. US power companies are buying wind, solar, and energy storage. Not only are they not buying nuclear, they're shutting down plants because they are not economically viable.

It's funny how HN is all "free market!" when it comes to things like renewables and decarbonizing transit (ie "why muh tax dollars going to this?!")...but nobody seems to acknowledge that the nuclear industry is massively subsidized and Biden is proposing throwing billions more at the industry because of lobbying.

Also, that paper was published four years ago, which means it was based on even older data, and the cost of renewables and energy storage is plunging while nuclear goes up in cost...

Energy and emissions wise it's still fine even using a filthy open pit mine fuelled by coal and diesel in Nigeria.

An order of magnitude worse than the shills claim, but still fine.

Much worse for locals than imaginary cobalt mines for LFP batteries though.

Well, maybe not right now. Last summer France had 32 of their 56 reactors shut down for unplanned maintenance due to safety concerns. And also do to a lack of cooling water do to the drought. In 2022 France was a net importer of electricity.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/electricit...

Yeah, one year in nearly 40 years of massive nuclear use there was a problem that required maintenance and suddenly Germany's megatons of coal pollution are not a problem. Note that the maintenance is almost completely over (just a few reactors are off), but still.

Also, do you know how many people died in France over 40 years due to a nuclear power accidents? 0.

How many died due to German coal pollution? It's at least in the tens of thousands.

It was only a small jest on the word “now”. France certainly made the correct choice back in the 70s to go all in on nuclear.

Though they have a rough road ahead of them. The fleet is getting old. Most likely the share of nuclear power in France will drop going forward.

Again we should all applaud France for making the right call in the 1970s.

It's not like France would have excessive 'base load' nuclear generation in the first place. The base load power plants are not designed to respond to demands or serve as reserved capacity.

Nonsense. France became a net importer last year [1] because of faulty pipes in a quarter of their plants, and the problems are continuing this year [2]. Their output has been low this year again [3].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...

[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/03/08/france...

[3] https://mobile.twitter.com/LionHirth/status/1635363963058950...

Their output is low due to a strike.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/strikes-hit-french-n...

Fair enough, but it still doesn't mean Germany will import electricity from France, at least not on a level that is important for the system

My understanding is that that over the period of 2015-2022 Germany has imported anywhere from 2-8 TWh per year from France, which is up to 1.5% of total annual power draw. [1] I don't know if you consider that significant or not.

While the generation is fairly constant, if there is an excess of power (which there historically has been) then you can import a variable portion based on the European grid and electricity market pricing right?

I could be missing something.

[1] https://www.energate-messenger.com/news/223699/nuclear-power...

At the same time Germany was exporting to other countries and was overall one of the largest exporters of electricity in Europe. Even France imported from Germany, but overall France exported more.

What people sometimes like to do is take a snapshot at a certain date and time and try to make a broader point, but overall Germany has been a net exporter of electricity for years and years in a row.

Renewables don't need more "storage" than nuclear grids, though this is a bafflingly common belief.

See France, for example, which tops up its nuclear grid with gas, hydro, import/exports etc.

Storage only becomes an issue when you get to the last 20% or so of decarbonisation and if you're down at 5% you're better to focus on electrification of fossil fuel using industry than worry about that last 5% of gas used for electricity.

And yet I saw an article only today about the Czech Republic suffering from a lack of storage, on a grid which is only 18% renewable

https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/04/14/sunshine-vs-the-gr...

They've been publishing stories like this for years. They'll generally not mention that they are still burning fossil fuels.

You'll notice the headline isn't "Czech Republic runs on 100% carbon free energy", which would be a much more interesting headline.

I'm not sure how to check Czech Republic generation mix at that time but I wouldn't be surprised to see fossil fuels still being burnt for "contractual reasons". (edit: I'm estimating that there was at least 1.5GW of coal generation at the same time this solar was curtailed, so about 10x as much coal being burned as solar curtailed)

But, even if it was curtailed for genuine reasons, that still doesn't mean storage would make financial sense. See France, where they 'curtail' nuclear power. Does that mean they "need" batteries?

"E.ON Hikes Energy Prices 45% As Germany Winds Down Its Last Nuclear Plants". Note that the news title may intentionally muddy the water and I don't have enough knowledge to tell if the price hike and the shutdown of Germany's last nuclear plants have any causal relationship. That said, I know E.ON has already hiked its price due to the Ukrainian war. It looks at least the green energy didn't help enough.

>have any causal relationship

nope given that nuclear has been a negligible part of the German energy mix for a long time now. (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...)

According to the article where I guess that headline came from E.ON even says that the reason is that they cushioned prices last year during the height of the energy crisis and that this is higher prices from wholesale markets from last year coming through.

It's muddying the water. The hikes are for the so called "Grundversorgung" where providers are required by law to provide you with electricity (and gas) basically without a contract. For instance my local provider hiked prices to 42-43 cents for regular customers at end of last year and "Grundversorgung" to 80 cents. I noticed various nuclear lobbyists were very active spreading false news in recent days, these people have no morals.

Also the prices in Germany vary between hundreds of providers, you can get electricity from any one of them. They supply it by purchasing electricity on the market, some had long term contracts to weather the storm last year, some didn't and hiked prices early, some went bankrupt etc. The problem right now often is that it's difficult to switch contracts - my local provider is not taking on new customers, my guess because they are losing money and hoping the situation will improve.

Germany is digging up coal and increasing coal power production short term. They have longer term plans to go green, but most of those are highly optimistic.

Not true at all: https://twitter.com/LionHirth/status/1642786817681379328

Renewables have replaced every joule of nuclear and some.

https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

The recent uptick in fossils is largely to make up for the combined shortfall of hydro and nuclear elsewhere.

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