Easy to blame someone else. None of this is new, she's had more than enough time to compensate and Sweden is in the EU energy market by choice.
"“I realise that nobody is happy when I say that ‘if we hadn't shut down half of nuclear power, we wouldn't have these problems’. But it's true and it needs to be said.”, Kristersson said, referring to the previous Social Democrat-Greens coalition closing several nuclear reactors between 2019 and 2020 as part of a policy shift towards greater reliance on renewable energy sources."
The Swedish Green coalition before them also did shutdowns like the German greens did. And now they have to suffer the consequences.
Note that a lot of people are very shortsighted and might think "energy prices were better with the previous greens/labour/etc". They need to be reminded the causes of the crisis.
The Greens do not get to have their cake and eat it when they are, in fact, directly one of the sources of the current german problem. Those 232g CO2/kWH as I write (and over 700 last week) is exactly what they asked for when they pushed for a full renewable energy grid backed by hopes and dreams.
Do you mean they are puppets of the Greens and as opposition to red-green government could not reverse policies they have considered harmful?
> directly one of the sources of the current german problem
From 2005 to 2021 it was Merkel & Co in the government making most of the energy-related decisions, yet you single out Greens as the primary culprits. Why? Did they sign Nord Stream agreements?
> It's also the greens today trying to exclude any nuclear project from benefiting from grants at the European level.
How not starting any nuclear project now is relevant to the current situation? It’s a strange claim given the time and costs needed to build a single nuclear power plant. It’s would not solve anything in the next 10 years at least, will be the most expensive energy on the market and add a dependency on a external supplier outside of EU (you cannot seriously suggest that we should get our uranium from Africa or Kazakhstan, so it‘s going to be an American one, same terms as LNG?)
You're incredibly defensive when all I have done is point out that saying "the greens aren't responsible for it" is a blatant lie. Especially when your purposefully ignore the next sentence, which still puts the blame on Merkel & Friends for continuing to implement it, in their case because it was lucrative to sign agreements with Russia for gas.(Especially this sack of shit Gerhard Schröder.)
>How not starting any nuclear project now is relevant to the current situation?
Aside from the fact that they have been on the offensive not just in 2024, but for close to a decade now (the Fessenheim closure has been demanded since 2016, green taxonomy started in 2020), because of this:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/24h
There has not been a _single_ day, a single month, a single year where the german electricity production has been under 200g eqCO2/kWh. Not a single one. The entire project has been slowly killing the planet, one day at a time, because technically illiterate and incompetent people have been leading your country.
>It’s a strange claim given the time and costs needed to build a single nuclear power plant.
While recent developments in Europe have been funny, to say the least (lol Flamanville/Hinkley Point C/Okilouto), half of these costs are caused by incredibly tight regulations, and another huge part has been caused by a gigantic loss of talent, which tends to happen when you demonize an entire industry for 30 years. There's also the fact that most of the recent constructions are new designs, which, yeah, require discovering flaws, unfortunately. China has 5-year construction speeds for nuclear plants using proven designs.
> It’s would not solve anything in the next 10 years at least
Considering renewables have not been solving anything in the past ten years alone, and will not solve anything in the net 10 years either, how about we start looking a little bit further than our noses and build _both_ ?
>will be the most expensive energy on the market
1/ lol lies 2/ lol renewables literally not working for a whole week in germany last week 3/ lol germany pushing for a common energy market where the price of the energy is based on the most expensive energy source available. Nuclear will never be the most expensive as long as we have gas burners for 400€/kWh.
>and add a dependency on a external supplier outside of EU (you cannot seriously suggest that we should get our uranium from Africa or Kazakhstan, so it‘s going to be an American one, same terms as LNG?)
Aside from the fact that I can _absolutely seriously suggest that_ and that I wouldn't take geopolitics lessons from Germany, thank you, we can also discover new sources of raw uranium (hell, even France is full of it, it's just cheaper to get it from Niger despite the instabilities), we can work forward on reusing and making nuclear "waste" useful (Breeder reactors have been an option, killing Superphénix was a mistake (but also the right choice from a financial perspective), keep it as a research reactor).
Germany has had an absolutely blind and ignorant world view of energy production, making it an absolute catastrophe of an energy market that gets covered by other european countries. It's not renewables OR nuclear. It's never been, and that a dichotomy that's been pushed forwards by morons. It's both. I'll be perfectly happy to turn off every single nuclear reactor in the world the day we guarantee all of our needs are fully covered by renewables ,which is going to require a _lot_ of overcapacity, or a globalized electricity grid (I thought depending on Africa and Russia was a bad idea?).
Renewables aren't the solution. They're part of it, and as it stands, aren't enough. Turn off your fucking coal burners and build nuclear, now.
And I didn’t say that. Who is defensive?
> Aside from the fact that they have been on the offensive not just in 2024, but for close to a decade now (the Fessenheim closure has been demanded since 2016, green taxonomy started in 2020)
2016-2020 - Merkel government.
Overall most of what you say here can and should be attributed to conservative/socialist parties which were in charge and use green agenda opportunistically rather than strategically. Making greens as a root source of all problems is a lie, simply because they did not make most of those harmful decisions. Regulation is mostly not on them too. I am not big fan of German greens myself, but things should be made straight on this matter: German problem are not greens, German problem are boomers which do not care about change. Most of mainstream politics in Germany is captured by special interests groups, old dudes from some Verein, Kammer or other medieval guild, lobbying to preserve their moats and privileges. Nuclear power has lost the game to Fukushima fears and Chernobyl fallout, but it is a secondary matter. It could have been useful or not, that’s a matter of calculations deep in strategic documents. Last document I saw considered them unpractical. You are right, we do need energy strategy, but honestly I think Germany is incapable of producing it. EU should take it over, it has more momentum and political diversity to figure this out. And it makes sense anyway, not just to regulate the market, but to build.
Regarding the uranium production, yes, there are some expensive deposits in Europe. We have high population density so even if environmental concerns are addressed, they will cost a lot. Post-processing of the waste is going to cost a lot. It is by no means the same price as 20-40 years ago. Can it fully replace gas? I doubt so. Is it the only alternative? I doubt so. We are talking about 20-30 years, the horizon on which we may really see the effects of nuclear scale-up. The renewables will be much more advanced by then, grids more robust and efficient. We may not have the same problems as we have now to be solved by nuclear. So the question is really, does it make sense to commit to fossil fuel for another 50-70 years again?
I now see that you have been arguing in bad faith since the beginning and should not have wasted time, down to repeating exact arguments from the greens that have, so far, proved to be wronged and dragged Germany into one of the worst emitters of Europe.
Good luck with your dreams, knowing you're dragging all of us down with you.
I‘m not acting in bad faith, I just don’t see how is your argumentation relevant to my original comment above. What I would expect to agree with you is the causal link making greens primarily responsible for current situation. As I pointed out, I do not see it simply because other parties were long enough in the government not only to undo things, but to build something on their own.
And I honestly, being relatively familiar with the topics, cannot see how nuclear power industry could save us if it were restarted couple years ago. The reports from German research teams show otherwise. If you have more data on viability of this approach, please feel free to share.
Please avoid tit-for-tat spats in the future, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, and please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post respectfully and thoughtfully in the future. If you had edited out the swipes from your comments, as the rules request, they would have been fine.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN in the intended spirit from now on? We'd appreciate it. Also, please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42433724 downthread.
That said, it would had been better in Sweden if they hadn't phased out nuclear too! There is a electricity shortage in south of Sweden where industries are denied establishing new initiatives.
Sweden started phasing out nuclear in 1999 and has since closed 6 of 12 reactors.
- Barsebäck B1 and B2 was closed in 1999.
- Oskarshamn O1 and O2 was closed in 2015 and 2017.
- Rinhals R1 and R2 was closed in 2019 and 2020.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4rnkraft_i_Sverige#Avvec...
Sweden has an overproduction of energy, it is just generally generated in the north (where the hydro is) and consumed in the south (where the people are).
The 'shortage in the south' is just a political lens for explaining the high prices from the introduction of energy zones in 2011. Before then, there was one price for electricity in Sweden and this worked to the benefit of the consumer.
Stepping back, do we really want the south to invest in _generating_ electricity? And if so, at what granularity? At the kommun level, or the län? At what point is that granularity ok but the whole-of-Sweden granularity that we had before the privatisation push is not ok?
Yes, that's because all the industry had to move because of the no energy in sweden.
There is no energy shortage in Sweden. They can export as little or as much power as they want. But of course with prices being high that means they export a fair bit and that causes prices to rise. Which is causing Sweden to make a lot of money from this business.
If they want lower prices locally, they should look at their local energy market, infrastructure, and regulations instead of blaming the Germans for being able to pay market rates for energy to Sweden.
This statement definitely needs a source.
The EU have laws that require 70% of the produces electricity to be on the market.
Source, in Swedish: https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/om-elmarknaden/export-oc...
The last government at least put in place windfall taxes to pay us back during the massive cost increase in the first winter after Russia invaded Ukraine. We got compensated a few months later the prices went insane. The current government already said they won't do that, which is rather absurd since a lot of our electricity is generated by Vatenfall, a state company.
End users should not suffer under government / market fuckery.
Can you explain?
Now the situation is different, and physics applies once more, everybody is screaming, but reality be a harsh mistress- she careth not for the sobbing.
Despite it being entirely their doing from almost 15 years of the Conservative government.
Especially if the country shut downs their nuclear power plants in middle of energy crisis, while there are laws in place that mandate energy exchange between different EU and EU adjacent countries(Norway).
Did they have time to handle it? No, adjusting your grid to be resilient to such bad actors takes more time.
When war in Ukraine started and sourcing cheap gas has become a problem - energy is is more than just electricity, although some of gas was also used for that.
Please, don't tie your economy to cheap gas from one source and try to bring everyone down with you when the access to it is constrained.
A nuclear reactor takes much longer than she's been at the office to build, and the Germans would still siphon off most of that electricity driving the price high nevertheless.
Wind obviously wouldn't solve it (since, you know, the energy prices were so high because the wind didn't blow).
The other actual solution would be something drastic like break away from EU energy market, is that what you're suggesting?
Either way, she's responsible. The Germans are not. Their actions are an external factor she should have compensated for.
She is not at fault for Swedens disastrous energy politics.