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Comment by baridbelmedar | Hacker News Reader

It's sadly not that surprising. Germany has a lot of heavy industries that require access to relatively low and stable energy prices. Furthermore, given the changed world situation regarding energy and the lack of developed nuclear power, they will need to rely on wind and solar power to a greater extent.

Regrettably, energy poverty is a new concept we will have to learn in Europe, I'm afraid...

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> lack of developed nuclear power

Well, Germany had a few (remaining) nuclear power plants, and the lasts were shut down this year for political reasons. Apparently, it's better to import gas from Qatar and burn coal in the meantime while enjoying a (partially) self inflicted recession.

Besides some random commenters on the internet, nobody swriously links the complex nuclear exit in Germany to the current recession.

? Sorry why?

The nuclear power plants that were shut down would’ve needed extremely expensive maintenance to keep them running.

It’s a really complicated issue, with lots of misinformation floating around on both sides of the discussion. After all, nuclear power plants aren’t actually economically viable either without heavy subsidisation and socialising the trash management (at least the ones we’ve had in Germany).

While I can’t say wherever Germany should’ve built more nuclear power plants… I’m however certain that most online discussions about the topic are extremely misinformed. The biggest reason for this situation is probably corruption, some of which has been proven and reported on going back decades with Schroeder for example.

That kind of corruption goes bavk to the likes of Strauss. Otherwise, fully agree.

> The nuclear power plants that were shut down would’ve needed extremely expensive maintenance to keep them running.

That's false. The reason for the shot down was not economical but political. We pay an extremely high price for our nuclear delusions.

It’s both true. Their maintenance was delayed for years because of that political decision to shut them down, which worsened the situation.

And for the record: I never claimed that the decision to shut them down wasn’t politically motivated, I just pointed out multiple reasons why it wasn’t completely bonkers. The way you phrased your point also makes it pretty transparent why misinformation campaigns work so well. You once heard one part of the story and now believe to understand a very multilayered situation.

Calling the situation multilayered is just an excuse to partly justify this terrible mistake. There is no doubt that the cost of shutting them down far exceeds the cost of letting them run, so the remark about "extremely expensive" maintenance is just false.

Maintenance to keep them running would have been prohibitively expensive, because non was done in last years due the decision to shut them down. So yes, the cost of getting them back into running shape was prohibitive due to that maintenance backlog.

Different question so, instead of complaining about spoiled milk, what is your proposal for the future? A realistic one please takong into account project lead times for new power plants.

Unfortunately, I'm not so sure there's a quick fix for this.

Both nuclear, water and gas have the advantage that they're pretty massive and can store energy while they rotate. In the past, these systems were great for the grid because they kept on spinning and were hard to slow down. So, when there was a big load on the grid, like when an industrial plant fired up a huge device that sucked up lots of power, these giant machines took a while to slow down. That meant they could pump some extra power into the grid, at least for short periods.

The realistic option is probably to expand solar and wind power and also set up hydro pumps for storing energy. Alongside that, also invest in SMR reactors and supercapacitor to handle sudden spikes in grid demand.

> Maintenance to keep them running would have been prohibitively expensive

No. It would have been very cheap compared to the long term cost of a) an energy and economic crisis and b) with replacing nuclear with other power sources.

The remaining nuclear power plants just had 4GW of output. Just this year alone 12 GW of renewables will come online.

That's a dishonest comparison as wind and solar are extremely volatile and can't replace a stable power source. You need something like coal for that.

You need peaking power plants such as Gas to cover volatility.

The comparison is a bit dishonest because it doesn't include the capacity factor of either technology:

Solar ~11%

Wind ~21%

Nucear ~90%

The lost generations of nuclear engineers in Germany is a concerning issue. Training a nuclear engineer requires a long-term commitment, from sparking interest in the field to building new plants in Europe. Without a new generation of nuclear engineers, Germany will struggle to maintain its nuclear power plants and develop new ones. It's crucial to invest in education and training programs to attract and retain young talent in the nuclear industry. Doing it today may result in a new power plant in like… 60-100 years.

But gas and power are now cheaper than they were before the war?

Financial markets are complex, and often have a long lag time. There are many compounding factors at play here.

Curious, won’t a recession do that?

It's spot prices, which:

1) Can change very fast, e.g. on potential strong China reopening or colder than usual winter.

2) Do not fully represent cost of long-term contracts.

Also, with reduced industrial output (especially in energy intensive production) you need less gas. If you try to return to the previous levels, the price will react sharply, thus making growth in those sectors difficult. Finally, a significant amount of electricity generation has migrated from gas to coal, which is not free of consequences...

Also spot prices reflect the storage availability. The storage will be filled by October according to the existing contracts. I.e. there is no much room to receive more gas if it will have to be brought to Europe in the next few months.

A really cold winter without Russian gas may bring the spot prices back to record levels as then the supply lines will be the bottleneck.

Long term Europe needs bigger storage to smooth price volatility.

Cheaper than immediately before the war. Far more expensive than the long-term average of the 2000s and 2010s.

Edit: also, immediately before the war, Russia already seems to have started restricting supply, driving up prices.

Why? How expensive is nuclear vs wind and solar at this point?

The cost of nuclear isn't important to this short term debate, simply having it is.

Right, solar and wind, although relatively cheap to produce, unfortunately, face challenges when it comes to energy storage. These types of industries require stability.

Electricity cannot be stored, regardless of source. Base load is a thing, sure. But there are ways ro cope with that, all energy hungry industries in Europe, and Germany, found ways to do so. That includes everything, from steel over chemicals to paper.

The lack, and price, of gas for things other than electricity was a problem for a while. But one that had nothing to do with nuclear power.

Electricity can be stored, mostly in pumped hydro storage, but also in e.g. battery storage, pressurized air or heated rock. But storage is scarce, expensive and doesn't look like it is going to be built anytime soon (for the usual reasons, NIMBY, environmentalism, YAGNI (correct or imagined), "energy abstinence is more virtuous", "we can manage by regulating demand", etc.)

Pumped hydro capacities are all but fully occupied, and few and far between to begin with. Battery tech os nowhere close, nor is battery capacity, to make as much as a dent overall.

The problem for Germany is that nuclear power plants, wind, and solar don't product natural gas.

Natural gas can be turned into electricity, but electricity cannot practically be turned into natural gas and German industry needs a lot of natural gas.

But with sufficient baseload nuclear, one could free up gas capacity because of the lower demand for gas peaker plants. Similarly, if electricity were as cheap as gas per kWh, many industrial applications could actually switch to electrical heating.

Nuclear is very cheap when you have an available power plant like Germany has... but instead decides to shut it down because that's not politically acceptable to use them

I think public opinion has shifted actually, but greens are still very ideologically opposed and a member of the coalition government.

The plants in Germany would have been due for expensive maintenance and they are old. (Maybe not EOL old but old)

Depends; a lot more expensive typically. But the real challenge is the process of getting any nuclear built in a hurry. This seems to be a process that is measured in decades; not months or years.

And given the cost, is not something that seems to be very popular in any case right now. Wind and solar are much more popular. The cost is much lower, plans are easy to get approved because there is very little controversy (other than some level of NIMBYism) and you can be up and running pretty soon after.

And a useful side-effect of investing in renewable technology is that it can be exported. German companies like Siemens and others are making quite a bit of money with this. That's a good thing in times of recessions. Germany's heavy industry will end up going cold turkey on fossil fuels because of cost and climate. This is short term very disruptive of course but that also means a lot of money is being invested in alternatives. Which of course is something Germany can export as well. Germany might come out fine.

> a lot more expensive typically

more expensive to operate existing plants that were already paid for a long time ago? i could never understand the shutting down part.

Nuclear is dirt cheap when you have your power plants already built. Most of the cost of nuclear is building cost and related capital cost for the loans you take to build one and teardown/disposal. All German reactors had already paid off, teardown and disposal are deposited up front. So just running cost for them, mostly people and fuel, which is in the 5ct/kWh range (for sources e.g. look at the last IPCC report, but good numbers are hard to come by for the usual trade secret reasons).

Wind is also in the 5ct/kWh range, solar at 10ct/kWh. However, to get both to a load factor of over 90% (which is typical for nuclear power plants) you would need a sufficient amount of storage and overbuild your capacity, which will cost an additional >10ct/kWh.

On the energy markets in Europe, at least the one Germany is connected to, the prices per kWh are calculated basedbon generation costs. Meaning investments and fox costs are not considered. CO2 certificates are so. With those being way too cheap the three cheapest electricity sources are: Wind, PV and coal. If memory serves well you have then hydro and nuclear, with has gas power plants usually being priced out more often than not.

That structure doesn't really make sense from a climate perspective. It does show so, that nuclear is far, far from being cheap.

> On the energy markets in Europe, at least the one Germany is connected to, the prices per kWh are calculated basedbon generation costs. Meaning investments and fox costs are not considered.

Nope. Definitely not.

Prices are based on a) fixed-price contracts that are negotiated with energy-producers and b) an spot-price auctioning model that is based on supply/demand. As an energy reseller, what you cannot get with your long-term contracts you have to make up with spot priced. With some additional provisions: Renewables get fixed prices (determined by bid) by lay by their regional reseller. And the highest spot price is always paid out to all lower-priced energy producers.

But in all that, no energy producer will leave out the building and financing cost from their price calculation. Otherwise e.g. renewables would be free, because their generation cost is practically zero, no people or fuel to pay for, just building and financing.

Fixed prices =|= fixed costs. And yes, spot prices actually do exclude those. Sure, companies do include those in their internal calculations. The energy markets don't care. And yes, the results of this are funny. E.g. closing down gas plants without a single opertional hour because they are just not able to operate economically.

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