Germany did two things to cope with the loss of nuclear plants.
First they simply use less power than before.
Second they import nuclear power from France for reliability.
Seems kinda silly to me.
First they simply use less power than before.
Second they import nuclear power from France for reliability.
Seems kinda silly to me.
In general I don't see a problem. Germany doesn't want nuclear because it considers it a bad deal. France thinks it's good so it sells it to Germany, and Germany buys it because it's cheaper than producing from coal domestically. Everyone should be happy.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
Anyway people that talk about import from one country to another just show that they don't what they talk about. For example Danemark is a net importer for 2023, so it doesn't make any sense to say that most of Germany electricity import comes from Danemark, it actually comes from Norway and Sweden and Danemark is just passing it through. You would have to use flow tracing to get how much each country provide, but if there is 2 way to count flow there many more to do flow tracing. What is important is net position.
> The physical electricity flows do not provide any information on whether the electricity was actually consumed in the country or whether it was forwarded to neighbouring countries as transit electricity.
So when people talk about imports and exports, they usually talk about who paid who (electricity trade).
Sweden and Norway are already listed. I suppose it's possible someone in Denmark was buying from the Scandinavian countries and sold it to Germany, I don't know how the markets, bidding zones etc work in detail. But even in that case it was not really buying that much French nuclear.
And again, even if it was I don't see a real problem. Germany thinks it's a bad deal to have them running, but if France thinks it can make it work, sure. Sounds like a win-win.
Some numbers at:
neither are silly.
How large are those power lines going from scandinavia to Germany? Afaik we already have issues getting north and south Germany properly connected. It doesn't help that there where reports of "greenwashing" in the past where power companies would trade local coal power for hydroelectric power from the other side on the planet so they could put a 100% green energy seal on their offering.
But that's the beauty of climate activism: As long as the emissions are happening somewhere else they don't count.
You kill your own industry and just import everything from China, where they use dirt cheap and very dirty energy from brown coal, but, hey, it does not count towards our carbon footprint.
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Edit: Removed a false claim on my part that Germany exported more to Poland than it imports. I maintain however that the amount imported from Poland is not significant.
>A considerably strong increase of electricity imports to Germany is seen from Poland. Starting at a lower level, the Polish electricity import rose by 400 percent in 2021, compared to previous year. [1]
..and that was / is coal power.
Media critical of the nuclear exit here in Germany pointed out that the immediate solution to the disappearence of German nuclear power from the network was to increase energy imports, namely more nuclear power from France and more coal power from Poland, which made the whole move even more questionable.
[1] https://www.eupd-research.com/en/conventional-electricity-im...
However, if you look here: https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=... you'll see that in 2023, Germany exported 3.57 TWh of power to Poland, and imported 3.05 TWh, which is not very much.
For context, Germany imported 63.7 TWh of electricity in total in 2023, so the amount coming from Poland is indeed quite small.
That's the effect of strangling their heavy industry via higher energy prices.