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Comment by Zoadian | Hacker News Reader

nonsense. the economy didn't even notice the shutdown. and those plants were more costly to operate than renewables are, so we're enjoying cheaper electricity now. it also wasn't an ecological disaster, in fact it didn't change anything in that regard.

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1. Renewables have currently offset less than half of year 2000 nuclear generation -- https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/energy-mix

2. Industrial energy prices seem to have risen pretty consistently since 2000: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

I'm pro renewable build-out, and a lot of new nuclear projects seem to my layman's eyes uneconomical, at least at today's cost (maybe we'd get better at doing it cheaper again if we invested, I don't know), but your claims seem false.

Renewables are very cheap if you only consider LCOE and not the systemic costs - which is what people like Zoadian love to do. Just ignore all those grid and backup costs. The grid fees alone have been increased substantially and Germany pays out an additional 7 cent per KWh through a fund that is not shown in the electricity bills anymore.

> Renewables have currently offset less than half of year 2000 nuclear generation

This is simply incorrect. You cite the iea as source, which is of course incentivized to creatively present the facts. In this case, by counting created heat (instead of electricity generation) for nuclear plants, and comparing this with purely electrical output power of PV/wind energy.

Actual power from nuclear plants in Germany, year 2000: ~180TWh, Solar + Wind now: >190TWh. Note that total electricity demand has decreased. Electricity from biomass has also grown significantly (also renewable).

no cause cheap Russian gas and oil replaced it, now with the war on the economy is cratering with expensive energy

actually mostly coal was used to fill the energy gap, increasing pressure to expand rollout of renewables. The media pitch making all this highly political is that fossil fuels from Russia should be / must be used instead of nuclear power, framing the choice to be either pro-Russia or pro-Nuclear (discarding renewables or potential pan-European energy coalitions).

In reality the impacts of the shutdown are foreseeable transitional pains. Of course Germany wasn't producing a massive surplus of energy that made it seamless to switch off their nuclear power-plants, so now they need to compensate the gap and make plans to close it.

Let's hope they're not all giving up again half-way thanks to politics and revert the decision...

Is this true? This chart[0] says otherwise.

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/electricity-price

Did you miss the natural gas crisis? All of Europe has been scrambling to replace Russian gas with LNG. If I remember correctly Germany even decided to postpone some nuclear reactor closing because of it. European industry and especially Germany industry is facing major stress due to high gas and energy prices.

Is that why Germany is pissing and shitting itself over issue of energy from Russia, America and NS2? This is not symptomatic of a healthy and secure energy economy.

how much is the cost of a kW in Germany?

According to eurostat [1], Germany has one of the most expensive electricity (if not the most expensive due to a negative tax in Ireland) in Europe at ~0.35 to 0.40 EUR per kWh.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/8/...

And an additional (!) 6-7.5 cent per KWh is payed by the "Klima und Transformationsfonds" to the producers of renewable energy.

it's for households. Energy prices for industry is much lower and in 2024 actually cheaper than 2017 (2024: 16,99, 2017: 17,09) Source: https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/bdew-strompre...

Production cost share for industry:

2017: 08,02 Cent 2024: 15,50 Cent

Total cost is only less, because there are fewer levies and taxes.

28.72ct/kwh is the cheapest for my location and 45.51ct/kwh if im in the Grundversorgung(if i fall out for whatever reason out of my regular contract this is the fallback)

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