Turning on reserve coal power plants for unreliable French nuclear reactors does not help climate either. Germany meets its ambitious goals for expansion of renewables, while France fails the goals for keeping old nuclear reactors running, constructing new nuclear reactors and building out renewables.
I like nuclear, but honestly I think it will simply be completely knocked out by renewables in a decade or so. It's more or less a given that renewables will be the way many - if not most - countries achive zero carbon emission. It's simply the cheapest and easiest way. It's a given that energy storage technology will keep developing at a rapid pace, because it's essential to decarbonizing the transport sector, and for balancing renewables which we absolutely need anyway. Nuclear will not be able to solve the problem fast and cheap enough alone. And nuclear isn't good at balancing renewables so it doesn't let us avoid solving the energy storage problem.
As the oil/gas sector starts scaling down, I think a lot of engineers from that sector will go into advanced geothermal. We're already seening some very promising developments, and in a decade I'm willing to bet it will take off.
Why build new expensive nuclear reactors when there's a completely free fusion reactor already in the sky, and a free fission reactor under our feet? All we have to do is to harvest the energy, and if you run the numbers there's way more energy than we could ever possibly need.
Btw. A small consern about nuclear is that they are thermal power plants. They add heat directly to our planet that wasn't there before. I was honestly very surprised to learn how significant that is for the impact on global warming. Much less than CO2, but still significant. If we get the impact of green house gases down a couple of orders of magnitude, then if we still have a lot of thermal power plants they could actually put a break on further progress.
Should absolutely continue nuclear R&D to enable the exploration of space though. Or just for the advancement of technology in general. And to hedge our bets. Still many reasons to be pro nuclear to a certain extent.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1124448463/germany-coal-energ...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-coal-energy-electricity...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany#...
Someone somewhere has to maintain the requested load level or the network would desync.
By desync I mean that its frequency will deviate from 50Hz enough to turn off the over- or underloaded sectors.
Demand control: There are already some electricity tariffs offering prices based on hourly market rates. There are plans to make them more accessible for customers by rolling out intelligent meters faster. Heating and Car charging are massive users for electricity that can be moved off to better hours.
Batteries: already financially attractive today, even though there are senseless taxes and duties on it.
Biomass like biogas: currently this is driven mostly as base load because of incentives, but it could play a bigger role as a dispatchable electricity source.
Green hydrogen: Can be used for longer-term storage. Production can be turned off in low electricity supply times. This one is the one most far out.
Biomass and green hydrogen are utopian dreams. Hydrogen because it is so small that it always leaks. Biomass because it is not scaleable.
Demand control is the only viable option, but this means lower quality of life.
I guess we can also look at the data to find that out.
I will at any time sell 2x worth of solar + wind for 1x worth of nuclear energy, as long I can choose what day and time I get the 1x of nuclear and when I can sell the 2x of solar + wind.
With the European energy market being what it is, the price difference between high supply and low supply has gone well beyond 100x.
How it was done is another question, different from whether it was done—because it was indeed indisputably done—coal did never at any point replace nuclear power, solar + wind did. This is not a myth.
You have to ask somebody knowledgeable in German energy policy on how they replaced an intermittent energy source with a dispatchable one. I can think of a few possibilities, perhaps they enacted policies and pricing scheme based on the time of usage. Perhaps they patched up inefficiencies where load was greatest, perhaps they increased storage somehow. I don’t know, but all I know is that it was done, the data tells us that much.
Selling wind and solar when supply is high and importing energy when supply is low is naturally quite expensive, but statistically they are produce more wind than they are consuming. From a production perspective they are clean. From a consumption perspective, they are not.
An other popular method, deployed in germany, is to keep as much capacity of fossil fuel energy as possible. Fossil fuel subsidies are great to keep the power plant in a operational mode until the weather changes from optimal to suboptimal. This also has the big drawback of being very expensive, but in terms of production it promotes large numbers of wind and solar while keeping the fossil fuel production down to periods when the weather is suboptimal. Sadly there is a lot of periods of suboptimal weather so its not very clean strategy, but its better than operating the coal and gas plants 24/7.
Nuclear is struggling for the same reason coal is struggling. They're thermal power plants. They're slow to react to changes in demand on the grid. Gas power is doing well because they're exceptionally good at that.
That's a problem because it's pretty much a given that most countries will use at least 50% renewables. Even France is targetting that.
As costs of renewables come down further, the cost of energy storage goes down, and we get more and more flexible loads, renewables will keep getting more competitive compared to nuclear base load. EVs are extremely flexible loads. Hell, my electricity provider is controlling if my EV is charging or not, hour by hour, right this very moment. V2G is also a proven technology by this point. The hydrogen production we need for ammonia (fertilizer/fuels), long distance transportation and steel production will also be a very flexible load. Some of it might be fed back to the grid on rare cases of extremely low solar+wind. We can even use the very gas power plants we have right now with hydrogen instead.
It's inevitable that the cost of energy storage will keep going down, because getting good at energy storage and transformation is going to be the number 1 priority across many industries in the coming decades. It's essential for almost everything we need to do to decarbonize.
Thinking we NEED nuclear is basically equivalent with assuming we won't solve climate change. Because you have to basically ignore all the other problems we have to solve that are not related to electricity production. Or you have to bet heavily on carbon-capture-and-storage.. which is just a really dumb idea that yet again delays actually solving the problem, and could end up not helping much anway due to the difficulty of controlling methane leaks.
Should hedge our bets though, I'm actually very positive to keep some level of R&D and investments in nuclear. Just skeptical that it'll be important in the end.
Sadly everything I hear tells me the opposite. Last winter during the Swedish election, those working on the green steel project was asked if and when they thought green hydrogen would start showing up in the energy grid in order to solve the current energy crisis. Their estimated was that we would see the first storage solutions first in 40-60 years from now. Green steel is just about to break even (assuming they get enough subsidies), and they are still very much in the initial phases of testing the technology at larger scale than inside a lab. They also explained in details why current gas power plants and natural gas infrastructure will not be suitable for switching to hydrogen.
The official strategy of the German green party, which is also the same strategy that the Swedish green party has, is to increase the use of fossil fuel energy capacity and subsidies to that industry. During a political debate over an oil fueled power plant in south of Sweden, the green party representative argued in keeping it while the opposition wanted to replace it with a nuclear plant.
Politics is about trust. We don't need nuclear, but we can't continue to increase use of fossil fuels. We can also not continue with the geopolitical situation with Russia. Even with all the sanctions, Europe is still indirectly dependent of the massive exports that Russia do in regard to the global fossil fuel market. The economy of Europe need to decouple itself from fossil fuels, which can only occur if our dependency on fossil fuel decrease. The past strategy of using natural gas was a bad plan that failed, and we need to accept and go past that conclusion.
To make matters worse, the hydro power energy in Europe is both maxed out and in dire need of modernization, with research saying we need to reduce capacity in order to avoid ecological collapse and extinction of several species. This will worsen the already strained storage problem.
In other words, instead of fully removing coal by nuclear, they replaced nuclear with solar+wind.
How fast they did and could have weaned off coal is another question. I don’t know how fast they could have if they had kept the reactors running, perhaps more perhaps less. The energy market is a very dynamic system and one should avoid overly simplistic models and predictions.
We could just as easily be arguing that Germany could have spent it’s excessive GDP to fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries, and there for prevented even more green house gasses from polluting our climate. By several factors greater than by cleaning their domestic energy production. But they didn’t, so why would we talk about it?
Starting point: nuclear + coal
Option 1: nuclear + renewables
Option 2 (selected): coal + renewables
While this is true, that yes, Germany didn't replace nuclear with coal directly, the delta between option 1 and 2 (which was the choice made) is (-nuclear, +coal).
I’m not aware of any specific policy about coal (which would be a justifiable criticism of German energy policy which has nothing to do with nuclear) but coal is down nonetheless even as nuclear power plants are being shut down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
Above it was stated that Germany replaced nuclear power with coal. We both agree this is false. So what are we arguing about now?
I disagree right here. The coal was reduced insignificantly, definitely not sufficiently to reach any climate goals. The reduction of the nuclear energy prevented that. Due to the latter, Germany simply has insufficient energy generation to fully exit coal, although they could probably do it, if chose nuclear.
> We both agree this is false. So what are we arguing about now?
I argue that, in the big picture, the consequences are the same as if Germany replaced nuclear power with coal.
A reduction from 45% to 30% of the whole German energy market in less than a decade is certainly a sizeable reduction, I would even call it significant. However I agree it wasn’t sufficient, anything above 0% is insufficient, we are in a climate emergency after all. But I fail to see how keeping the nuclear powerpants open is a guaranteed strategy while faster rollout of renewables isn’t. We have proof of the latter, and we also see different energy markets such as France where the renewable rollout is a lot slower, and so is coal reduction.
This is a false dichotomy. Nuclear powerplants should not have been stopped. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464.
a) Coal did not replace nuclear power
b) Coal was reduced during a policy to shut down nuclear power
c) The policy to shut down nuclear power has nothing to do with coal
The first two are facts you can see in the data. The third one is a matter of simple policy. If it were up to me I would have replaced this policy with. “Nuclear power will be shut down as well as all coal power plants”. The data seems to suggest this is possible.
Looking at different energy markets whether they decided to keep their nuclear power plants (like USA) or to do away with them (like Germany) coal is down everywhere. Nuclear policy seems completely irrelevant to coal usage. What seems relevant is renewable policy and coal policy. Countries which have a policy to reduce coal do so faster, countries that have a green energy policy replace coal with green energy, and countries that don’t (like USA) replace coal with gas.
From the data, what I can gather, is that nuclear policy is simply a decision about country’s willingness to keep operating these plants. Germany didn’t want to so they got rid of theirs. If a country wants to get rid of coal, they do so with a different policy. Alas Germany has a renewable policy, so you see that the nuclear power was replaced with wind + solar. And now that the nuclear plants are all gone, we shall see coal increasingly being replaced by these two power sources in the coming years.
Between 2021 and 2022 Germany's share of electricity from Nuclear declined from 12.6 to 6.3%, coal increased from 30.2 to 33.3% [0]
In a hypothetical scenario where Germany didn't reduce nuclear generating capacity what do you think is the likeliest amount of electricity generated from coal?
a. higher than 33.3%
b. lower than 33.3%
If you think that answer is (b) than decision to shut down nuclear did indeed increase coal usage as compared to hypothetical 2022 with nuclear not closed
If you instead think that answer is (a) I would be interested in hearing the reasoning.
[0] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2023/03/PE23_090_43312.html