The anti-nuclear movement succeeded in Germany and they’re reaping the crops now. Nobody will go back to 1800s quality of life willingly if they can help it, be it by burning coal, trash, plastics, tires or paint cans for heat or electricity.
61.5% of Germany's electricity comes from renewable sources[1]. What nuclear generated has been replaced years ago, and they have a law to phase out coal completely.
The only weird thing about it is that they're being hated on so much from the nuclear-bubble, while the bubble simultaneously drags the shield of innovation and environment protection. Meanwhile, there is negligible innovation in nuclear and saving the environment 2024 means acting fast. Nothing about nuclear is fast.
[2] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/ausbau-erne...
PS. because it automatically comes up: no, Germany could not phase out coal before nuclear because there are much more jobs connected to coal and no politician would survive such a fast exit. How important it is, can be seen from the name of the commission tasked with the coal phase out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
An ICE car is 20-30% efficient, an EV is 90% efficient. Generally we are looking at a grid expansion, but it is not massive.
See this amazing chart on rejected vs. useful energy:
An EV is 85-90% efficient with power coming out of the batteries. However, the charging efficiency of the batteries is at about 80%. So the overall efficiency is 80% of 90%, or 72%.
Now. For years they switched to coal. Even today, Germany falls to the siren songs of the gas lobby, who promise a €1.5tn investment into gas infrastructure will be happily written off for the sake of the planet.
This simply isn't true. Coal use for electricity has been declining consistently in Germany and especially since the first shutdowns of nuclear plants (cca 2011). And the replacement was not natural gas as in e.g. the US.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?time...
Looks like coal usage for electricity production indeed only went up for ~3 years around 2011, probably we can consider that a mere blip within the downward trend.
Wind and solar indeed seem to pick up what nuclear used to bring to the energy mix. Gas usage is only slightly up over 30 years, which doesn’t look like it’s directly substituting nuclear — but surely it could have gone down had nuclear be kept around?
(Personally, I wish politics would have pushed harder against coal and simply ignored nuclear for a couple more decades. But political feasibility is important ofc, and I don’t know how hard of a sell that would have been in 2010.)
In general what I think is people make a pariah out of Germany and its energy choices, but this is mostly based on false data, which tells me enough. The debate is riddled with false data which lead to even worse conclusions. In the end the numbers are positive and that's all what's important for me. There are better candidates for criticism when looked at individually or even globally, what the individual strategies accomplish on a global scale. So when looked at globally, the German energy transition has accomplished a ton. E.g. the 600TW of solar this year never would've happened without it, which more than offsets the 10-15GW of nuclear they switched off, most of which was past its retirement age.
A point you certainly can argue about, is that coal should have been replaced by renewables before nuclear, but that discussion is over now.
For gas use electricity production is just a minor use. Most gas is consumed by industry and for heating purposes. Not enough happened in Germany in the last years electrifying them.
Right. Coal stayed online where it would have otherwise gone away. That was true for close to a decade.
> gas use electricity production is just a minor
And growing. Look at your own chart. The change in natural gas electrical generation is about as large as solar’s entire controbution.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...
As a result, Germany’s industrial production is falling. Which will be great for the environment if countries who previously imported goods produced by Germany’s clean nuclear power don’t just switch to goods produced by China and South East Asia’s far dirtier electricity.
Of course, China is steadily increasing its own nuclear energy production, so it’ll end up being clean eventually, and likely sooner than us given how efficient they are.
But it’s not like we’re reducing dependency on nuclear power. It’s more like we’re trading the risk of nuclear accident in our own backyards for something else. I tend to think that the something else is the risk that the eastern world’s factories stop accepting the western world’s increasingly worthless paper money, which they’ll be in a much stronger position to do once we’re no longer able to manufacture what we need due to environmental concerns.
The causality here seems debatable.
Cheap Chinese goods which take market share from German goods aren't just cheap because of cheap energy.
In Spain, where we didn's shut down nuclear energy nor have oil or coal, energy intensive industry is also threatening or shutting down (https://www.miningweekly.com/article/alcoa-threatens-to-shut...). The threats are barely hidden "subsidize our costs or else...".
(this was later un-done in 2009 and then redone in 2011 which is the cause of confusion).
IE. Germany got INCREDIBLY lucky that China went hard into renewables and dropped the price of them dramatically. Because they did basically replace or plan to replace all the nuclear plants with coal plants.
Lets have a look at how the German electricity production has shifted over the years:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/p...
- Fossil gas: 2011 -> 2023 = stable.
- Coal: 2011 -> 2023 = large reduction
At the height of the energy crisis when half the French nuclear fleet was off line due to corrosion issues.
Germany temporarily reopened a few mothballed coal power plants to keep the lights on in France.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
You should probably have started with a correct statement, not a falsehood that you had to rephrase into a correct statement.
As we've concluded it evidently was not. Both coal and nuclear power has been replaced with renewables.
I would suggest you stop spreading falsehoods.
Those require a large amount of baseload energy.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...
https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR...
Note that France has lost more nuclear generation than Germany over this period.
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/dedicated-sections/journ...
Maybe it's not always clever to use US-logic on the rest of the world.
Germany is not Texas.
> “The cost of new nuclear is prohibitive for us to be investing in,” says Crane. Exelon considered building two new reactors in Texas in 2005, he says, when gas prices were $8/MMBtu and were projected to rise to $13/MMBtu. At that price, the project would have been viable with a CO2 tax of $25 per ton. “We’re sitting here trading 2019 gas at $2.90 per MMBtu,” he says; for new nuclear power to be competitive at that price, a CO2 tax “would be $300–$400.” Exelon currently is placing its bets instead on advances in energy storage and carbon sequestration technologies.
(passage from Dec. 2018 Physics Today; Texas natural gas is even cheaper than that now)
The yearly balance (imports - exports) is key.
2023 (last full year): 9.34 / 8.92
Source: https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=...
Moreover FR/DE isn't the main path anymore, and as DE sometimes plays as a gateway we have to take the complete balance into account.
As the other commenter wrote: trading, transfers, etc. is normal in the EU grid. You buy cheap, you sell expensive. Just because Germany imports electricity, doesn't mean it has to. The German grid, even in its unfinished state, allows turning off power generation where it doesn't make sense financially, and they can do that fast because they don't have those slow nuclear power generators clogging up the grid.
We'll see what comes of it when the year is finished and official sources release their information. Until then, you can translate this page here from the Federal Network Agency: https://www.smard.de/page/home/topic-article/444/213848
In the last paragraphs they write on in/exports and that they've bought cheap from France and Belgium in the last quarter. Why shouldn't they? France needs to have their reactors running. They are a constant deficit on the French taxpayer. Therefore, it is cheap on the EEX.
Nope. Albeit being shock-full of nuclear reactors... France always maintains fossil fuel active in order to load-follow. Add 'peakers' (needed during peak-demand) and here is the result: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+...
Details: there are safety-related limits (power modulation proportion, duration of a pause needed after each modulation, modulations frequency...) to nuclear load-following capacity, and the very combustible status is a major parameter.
Pertinent document (French ahead!): https://www.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
« un réacteur peut varier de 100 % à 20 % de puissance en une demi-heure, et remonter aussi vite après un palier d’au moins deux heures, et ce deux fois par jour »
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
> Edf indeed needs to sell as much as they can
No. EDF always needed to sell as much as they can, even before AREHN, because maintaining a high load factor for their nuclear reactors is financially key. An idle industrial reactor is a financial disaster.
472g of C02 per kW/h as we speak[1]. 20 times more than France and its nuclear.
A resounding success…
Ironically there was a spike in coal usage in 2022, that was caused both by the war Russia started against Ukraine and even more so by France having to shut down too many nuclear reactors for repairs - German coal had to fill part of that gap.
They aren't “optimistic”, nuclear simply doesn't emit CO2 directly, and indirect emissions are dwarfed by direct emissions of fossils fuel plants.
> What can and is being done is to replace coal as quickly as possible and that is happening.
It has been happening for the past 13 years, and there's no end in sight. We'll be able to have the same discussion in 13 years with only marginal progress (maybe they'll be around 200g/kWh at that point if we're being optimistic…).
> and even more so by France having to shut down too many nuclear reactors for repairs - German coal had to fill part of that gap.
And so what? French nuclear has been filling the gap for defunct German nuclear for more than a decade now … And Germany could have filled this gap with coal even if they had much less regular coal use thanks to their nuclear.
There has been a strong decline in coal usage in the last years, both because the CO2 prices have started to move the balance and also because the buildup of renewables has been accelerated again. And no, France hasn't been "filling the gap". Until very recently, Germany had been a constant net electricity exporter.
It may cause a “lot of emissions” per kilogram of enriched Uranium, but it is very low compared to the amount of energy it produces because you really need little Uranium to produce tons of energy (that's also why all French nuclear fuel waste over 60 years of nuclear industry fit in a single room).
> There has been a strong decline in coal usage in the last years
This has been the narrative for the past 10 years, yet here we are. And in ten years Germany will still be producing way too much CO2 from its coal plants…
> And no, France hasn't been "filling the gap". Until very recently, Germany had been a constant net electricity exporter.
So is France, but that doesn't mean there's no gap to fill when the wind isn't blowing…
Centrifuge enrichment and improved extraction techniques (high quality ore in Canada or else in-situ leaching) mean CO2 emissions are very low.
Would you care to provide references for CO2 emissions from already built nuclear power stations (preferably not the infamous StormSmith and Sovacool papers)?
For new-build, Hinkley Point C "not an EPD" make interesting bed-time reading. https://www.edfenergy.com/sites/default/files/hpc_-_life_cyc...
What can be done and what is being done are miles apart. Investing into new fossil fueled power plants is not what the best thing Germany could be doing, nor is it what they should be doing. In 20 years there will be a large fleet of fossil fueled power plants and people will be again arguing that historically they burned too much of it but nothing can be done retroactively. Changing the current plans of new fossil fueled power plant would not be a retroactively change today, but it will be in 20 years.
No, the Fukushima accident was decisive. Just before, at the end of 2010, the operating life of nuclear reactors has been extended by law. The Fukushima happened and public opinion reversed, wanting an as-quick-as-possible nuclear phaseout. Not a single political party could save those reactors: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561