Nuclear was previously providing 22 GW (2022) to 20 GW (2010) of capacity, down to 12.1 GW (2011), then 8 (2019): currently (2023) lignite can output 18.6 GW of capacity, and hard coal is providing 18.9 GW.
For output (per first link), at its peak nuclear provided ~150 TWh, while coal (lignite+hard) provided 120 TWh in 2023.
So AFAICT, coal capacity could have been cut in half (perhaps even not running that often) if existing nuclear was kept around. (New nuclear did not have to be constructed, just keep around the current stuff longer until (a) fossils are retired, and (b) more renwwables are built out).
I was recently arguing with a German who thought burning coal was completely fine as long as you were burning less than you used to. He didn’t see the reason for nuclear at all.
Aside effects of the Ukraine war, it feels like the bill people actually pay has not risen too much in recent years. Germans famously do not have air conditioning in their homes and most switched all the lights to LEDs, leading to substantial bill reductions in many cases. Electricity for cars or for heating can be obtained at about 25% lower prices and modern houses are, in general, quite energy efficient. So I'd say that the high energy prices are hindering the construction of new factories/keeping the old ones (which can turn out to have bad effects soon), but everyday life is not too much bothered by them.
While that covers only the second half of 2023, the prices since then have come down significantly.
Germany was never cheap, it was and is still in the top 5. What you also need to consider in those charts, what is the average salary. While it is comparable to Italy, take a closer look to Hungary how expansive it is there.
Any of them? Coal is far more dangerous to human health and life than nuclear.
Pick your quasi-legitimate source, but they all agree that coal is ~10X more deadly than nuclear.
> Coal-fired energy chains are estimated to cause 12 times more deaths per gigawatt-ampere-year than nuclear energy chains, and coal is estimated to cause 820% more deaths per terawatt-hour of electricity produced than nuclear
The long-lived stuff throws off mostly alpha particles (blocked by a sheet of paper) or beta particles (thin aluminium). The first few years (6-10) of spent fuel throws off the riskiest particles (gamma), and so the fuel sits in cooling pools for that period.
The co-founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, Geraldine Thomas, has no problem with nuclear power: "Look at the science – smoking and obesity are more harmful than radiation":
Have there been catastrophic failures of fission reactors in Germany built by Siemens?
Are you familiar with functional safety classification and how this affects the development of systems? Would you draw conclusions from the failure rate of Siemens vacuum cleaners to the company's capability of building fission reactors?
It doesn't really matter as long as they can deliver what you ordered. Which you have to check regardless. So it's the skill of the buyer that decides the result.
Even if they had wanted to, it would not have been possible, as the required fuel rods could not simply be ordered.
The operators were therefore also against continued operation
Nope, it is "problem" of past decisions. The past decision were, that 2022 should be the end date. All companies planed for that. You simply cannot change such decisions in an empty market. BTW the fuel is mostly coming from Kazakhstan. Does that ring a bell?
Scary Kazatomprom as a fuel source is an invented problem.
Nuclear fuel market is global with many producers. Fuel price is a tiny fraction of the nuclear electricity cost. Agree to a long-term contract at double today's price and there will be a line of companies running to sign it.
Cameco (and others) put some of their nuclear mining into conservation because there was not enough buyers. Uranium is one of the most abundant elements, the only reason for the shortage of fuel is the politicians reluctance to make nuclear a pillar of the energy production.
So buy it elsewhere? All I hear are excuses and why the current situation is someone else's fault, either previous governments or other countries because they wouldn't just shut up and die so Germany can have cheaper energy. Which they use to overproduce stuff and dump it in the rest of the EU, while calling everyone else lazy. Here's a hint, if your economy doesn't work unless you have the lowest energy prices in history, it's broken and needs to change.
Nuclear is a legacy technology which is on the way out. German society didn't want to be stuck with it and footing a tremendous bill for subsidizing and later dismantling the technology in the end. Pretty much all industrialized countries with the exception of China is going in the same direction.
> Nuclear is a legacy technology which is on the way out.
Don't tell that to Ontario-Canada
> Demand for electricity across Canada is forecast to double in the next 25 years, and all the signs from Ontario Premier Doug Ford's government indicate that nuclear energy will supply the biggest portion of the province's additional power needs.
> In December 2021, BWXT Canada signed an agreement, valued at up to $1 billion, to build key components in Ontario to support the deployment of Small Modular Reactors in Poland.
120bn EUR would be more than Germany spends on electricity generation in total (considering that Germany generates a bit less than 600bn kwh p.a. in electricity and wholesale electricity prices were €95.18/MWh in 2023)
"A 2020 report by IRENA9 tracked some $634 billion in energy-sector subsidies in 2020, and found that around 70% went to fossil fuels. Only 20% went to renewable power generation, 6% to biofuels and just over 3% to nuclear. “This overwhelming imbalance of subsidies between fossil fuels and clean energy is a drag on us achieving the Paris climate goals,” says Taylor, who wrote the report. The balance of these numbers varies from year to year, because fossil-fuel subsidies swing around depending largely on the price of oil, he adds."
It seems hard to evaluate that in isolation. They’ve been planning on shuttering their nuclear plants for the last 20 years or so, right? Would they have invested as much in renewables if that wasn’t the plan?
The plan was to talk about renewables while buying Russian gas, since solar can't possibly cover the consumption.
It's not a coincidence that the German prime minister from the era when they decided to phase out nuclear now works for Gazprom and Rosneft. He literally said the West caused Russia to invade Georgia in 2008 (what a fucking moron).
In normal countries this is called treason. In Germany it's "developing trade relations".
>
In normal countries this is called treason. In Germany it's "developing trade relations".
You must not forget that Gerhard Schröder won the 2002 election by promising that Germany won't join the USA in invading the Iraq, a promise that many German citizens venerate him for. For basically everyone in Germany it was obvious that Putin is a criminal, but the mood in German society at that time was that the Iraq invasion of George W. Bush was to be considered a genocide. So, having a choice between continuing being aligned with a nation/president who wants Germans to join a genocide vs seeking alignment with a criminal, Schröder's politics of seeking rapprochement with Russia/Putin was rather well-regarded in the German society.
> If nuclear was kept around, would its capacity allow for fossil fuels to be reduced more?
No. Germany is not even using its full potential for electrical energy at the moment.
> Nuclear was previously providing 22 GW (2022) to 20 GW (2010) of power, down to 12.1 GW (2011), then 8 (2019): currently (2023) lignite is outputing 18.6 GW of power, and hard coal is providing 18.9 GW.
Those numbers are irrelevant, they are not telling the usage. You can't freely replace one energy-source with some other. You need to look at the application and which energy-form it can use. And in Germany, the big historical problem is that the conversion to electrical applications was slow.
Again: "cannot replace"! Coal is providing a very different form of energy, used with very different applications. Directly comparing the numbers, is comparing apples and bananas. Your case has no foundation.
Grid energy sources vary in how dispatchable and dependable they are. Fossil fuel plants are generally quite dispatchable and dependable, in the sense that you can spin up or shut down the generator (there are different types of fossil fuel power plants actually, the some of the worst ones environmentally are called “peaker plants,” they only turn on when there is very high demand, so they tend not to be very efficient).
Renewables obviously have some dependability problems (the sun might not be shining one day, the wind might not be blowing). These can be dealt with, but it isn’t free, it should be seen as an engineering opportunity.
I did an EE degree, but was more interested in digital and electronics stuff. But they talked enough about the grid a bit in my intro classes before everyone specialized… I’m confused that somebody would respond “as an EE” and ignore the grid. Everyone knew we were hiding a lot behind the circle with the little sin wave on it.
> I’m confused that somebody would respond “as an EE” and ignore the grid.
This thread is generally talking about electricity, and give that most 'traditional' methods of generation involve boiling water to make steam, there's nothing special about coal or atoms generating the heat.
Dispatchability is an important element of the grid, but that is also possible with nuclear: one can keep the reactor thermally running, but have mechanisms to divert the generated steam away from the turbines and quench it. Given the up-front capex (and low marginal cost of megawatts) of nuclear this is not economically ideal, but it is not technically impossible.
That’s fair. Looking at the other comments in the thread, I think I gave your comment an unfairly pessimistic read and the other comment an unreasonably optimistic one.
Really? You've never learned about chemical processes, heat, conversions of energy? Isn't this something you would learn in school?
Well, ok, then here is an ELI5: If you have a stove, running with coal, then you can't use electricity to fuel it. You need to buy a new stove, which is able to run with electricity. And if some of those stoves are very expensive stoves, running in an industrial complex or a chemical plant, then you need to invest a very high amount of money to replace the parts of the complex or plant.
> As someone who lives in Ontario, Canada, we got rid of all of our coal in 2014 and have lots of nuclear:
Is that the same Canada who sold their uranium-mining or nuclear rod-productions to Russia?
> Coal is providing a very different form of energy, used with very different applications.
What are those? Nuclear and renewables uses are indeed very different. Nuclear and coal for base load -- not so much. At least this is what I heard for decades. I would be interested to read a refutation.
The importance of the base load is a fairy tale, not the numbers. Nuclear plants idling are a burden for the grid. Without them, you can manage it far more flexible, it seems.
Coal is used for chemical processes, heating (locally and remote) and also generating electrical energy (also locally and remote). From those, only remote electricity can easily be replaced, remote heating might be replaceable, but would take some investments and not sure if this wouldn't be more expensive and quite inefficient. Anything locally working can't be replaced easily, and forget chemical processes.
And yes, coal is also used to compensate for fluctuations, but those are only very little numbers. AFAIK the harm from having nuclear plants idling around is far bigger.
Gosh, is this the level of your understanding? Not everything in the energy-sector is about burning down something and getting electricity from the heat.
Coal is using in chemical processes for smelting, producing steel and other metals, creating concrete and other chemical compounds.
> If coal seems to be special/different, and not replaceable by other generation forms, why is the plan to get rid of it?
Because the plans are about replacing whole processes, fabrics, plants, devices, products... It's not as simple as just switching a cable or making a new contract with a new provider. You basically have to build a new house, and that's time-consuming and expensive.
> Coal is using in chemical processes for smelting, producing steel and other metals, creating concrete and other chemical compounds.
Canada has lots of steel/metal production, and yet Ontario and Quebec (two largest local production centres), have managed to either not have coal in the first place or get rid of it.
Ontario gave a timeline to retire coal, and there's no reason why Germany could not have done the same:
Use of coke in smelting is not energy production and therefore outside of scope for the coal sourced energy discussion. Energy for smelting seems like base load to me since you can't just turn off a smelter randomly and instead they run for years at a time.
The nuclear exit was a stupid idea, but how bad it was its also overstated a lot by pro-nuclear types and understated a lot by anti-nuclear types.
Germany has built a tremendous amount of solar and wind in the past few years, but the amount of energy they're generating is exaggerated a lot when one talks about percentages.
In reality, over the past 5 or so years as the last of the nuclear reactors were decommissioned and solar/wind installations have ramped up, the total amount of electricity produced in Germany has decreased, and Germany has moved from on average being an electricity exporter to being an electricity importer.
The reduction in total electrical power generated in Germany is about equal to the power lost from nuclear reactors, while the reductions in fossil fuels was more or less balanced by the increase in renewables.
This is pretty promising, and in my opinion, it's actually somewhat good that Germany is a net electricity importer rather than exporter. They shouldn't be selling power generated with coal when they could be buying power generated with nuclear (France) or hydroelectric (Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Austria).
That's actually false. Germany increasing their ability to import electricity from their neighbouring european countries is good for their national security, because it reduces their dependence on fossil fuels from Russia, the USA and the middle east, shifting those dependencies from rivals to their closest allies, and members of the same super-state union.
The more electrified Europe becomes, the less reliant they are on fuels imported from rivals outside the EU.
Besides, climate change is *also* a gigantic national security risk, more pressing than any regional rivalry.
> climate change is also a gigantic national security risk, more pressing than any regional rivalry.
Then, they should not have gotten rid of Nuclear because it's way more efficient than Wind and Solar. No need to give up arable land either to put in giant solar and wind farms.
As I said, the decommissioning of the Nuclear reactors was a stupid idea. My point above was that people who feel they must be "team nuclear" often like to overstate how stupid it was with comments like yours.
> Germany increasing their ability to import electricity from their neighbouring european countries is good for their national security, because it reduces their dependence on fossil fuels from Russia
National security != Europe security. There is no European Military. It's a loose confederation each with their own borders. Its not like the US.
There is no German national security without European national security. Everything revolves around NATO and deepening military partnerships with neighbours (e.g. Germany and the Netherlands have a bunch of shared, integrated units).
There is no EU military, but there are mutual defense pacts, and the development of a real EU military is something that is being pushed for by Germany.
"Everything revolves around NATO and deepening military
partnerships with neighbours (e.g. Germany and the
Netherlands have a bunch of shared, integrated units).
here is no EU military, but there are mutual defense
pacts, and the development of a real EU military is
something that is being pushed for by Germany."
That sounds counter to what you said above
"reduces their dependence on fossil fuels from Russia, the USA and the middle east, shifting those dependencies from rivals to their closest allies"
The US is one of their closest allies. It appears you are conflicting yourself.
The EU isn’t a country but they are basically a unit of national security, if they don’t defend each other the whole project will fail.
Putting the US in the list of rivals is a bit of a silly rhetorical flair I think. We aren’t rivals. We are close allies. But the EU as a whole is a friendly competitor to the US. Germany has a shared destiny with their EU partners. The US, we’re very close allies to Germany and the EU. But we aren’t conjoined.
Yes, the USA is one of Germany's closest allies, but the reliablity of that partnership is now being put into question due to the USA's increasing protectionism (on both the left and right), and people's concerns about the potential of a second Donald Trump term (or someone Trump-like).
Because of this, EU countries are working rather hard to try and insulate themselves from potential changes in their relationship with the USA (hence the big focus on an EU military and strategic autonomy).
I mean, you put the US in the list with Russia and the Middle East. I suspect it was either unintentional or a bit of rhetorical flair, but that’s not a list we belong in, haha.
I get it, as I responded in the other comment the Germany and their EU partners share a fate. It’s definitely closer than EU/US. But the US/EU relationship is more like friendly competition than rivalry.
The reason I put the USA in that bucket is not because I thought the USA is some enemy of Germany or the EU. I put it in that list because the USA *is* a country that the EU needs to worry about withholding vital trade for its own political gain.
Because of that, it is a national security risk for EU countries to rely on the USA for critical energy inputs, in the same way as it is a national security risk for the EU to rely on Russia or the Middle East for energy inputs, in a way that just isn't true of fellow EU or EEA countries.
Germany has I think around 80GW of capacity in coal plants so it can cover its own needs just from that if push came to shove. In terms of national security, nuclear plants are their own security risk, as evidenced in the Ukraine now.
Importing isn't bad in of itself. When a country leans towards relying on another country for energy, then that is generally accepted to be negative towards national security.
I don’t think general observations apply in the usual case of extremely close and geographically nearby alliances like the EU. Importing from other EU members has no national security implication because their national security fate is conjoined anyway. Similarly trade between the US and Canada, there’s no future in which we fight each other or don’t fight together in any serious war (Canada even comes along for our bullshit bad idea wars most of the time).
> it's actually somewhat good that Germany is a net electricity importer rather than exporter.
Considering the enormous variability and unpredictability of the German market, this doesn't seem like a big deal. In this regard, Sweden has refused to build a new energy connection.
"We can't connect southern Sweden, which has a large deficit in electricity production, with Germany, where the electricity market today does not function efficiently," Energy Minister Ebba Busch said in a statement.
"That would risk leading to higher prices and a more unstable electricity market in Sweden," she said.
Whenever power in Germany comes up, I have a hard time interpreting anything because of the reaction the HN crowd has against the Germany's resistance to Nuclear.
But from what I can tell, they're doing a pretty good job reducing their usage of fossil fuel? Can someone clarify.
Yes, power is more expensive in Germany. Yes they have periods where they don't produce all the power they consume, yes the import nuclear power. But for their goals of reducing fossil fuel consumption and not building nuclear power plants they seem to be doing well?
It comes up frequently, but the price of electricity in Germany is not high in reality, mostly because traditionally the costs have been covered by the actual bills paid. The exception now is the renewables surcharge which will in the future be covered by taxes. The surcharge fills the fund for cases where the guaranteed price for renewables is higher than the market price. But even this used to be on the bill. There are hundreds of companies that sell electricity and it has a market economy there.
On the other hand France as the complete opposite example, it has a nationalized electricity company because it can't survive otherwise. They lobbied hard (successfully) for rule changes in the EU so they are able to fund their nuclear plants through government subsides. We are talking hundreds of billions for their plans to keep old plants alive and build new ones. This will not be on the bill, so the prices are not a realistic comparison.
But even with all that, the price in France is 24c as far as I know. In Germany you can get it for as low as 19c per kwh [1], but you only get a two month price guarantee and can get hit if the market prices spike again. Your choice.
One of my favourite pages on the internet is https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany . It suggests Germany's electricity production was at a 40 year low last year. And I've seen elsewhere that Germany is competing to have the highest cost electricity in the EU (possibly globally? I don't recall how they stack up globally).
That tinges the interpretation of this press release. It isn't all smiles and sunshine in the German electricity market.
EDIT In fact, you can add China to the graphs and note that OWID thinks China generates more electricity per-capita than Germany does as of last year. Who'd have thought that was possible 40 years ago!
1) Looking at Germany's domestic electricity production without accounting for cross border trading is not meaningful. Germany is in the centre of the biggest international electricity grid in the world. There's an insane amount of electrical connectors between Germany and all of its neighbours. In particular, Germany has gone from being a net exporter of electricity to a net importer, particularly from France, Switzerland, Austria, and Sweden (through Denmark). Total electricity used in Germany has barely decreased.
2) Germany's electricity prices have come down and stabilized. They're actually lower than before the war now. No longer the highest in the EU, though there is still room for it to come down more, but it'll take time as more renewables, batteries, and long-distance grid connectors are built out.
If we're going to assess Germany's energy policy - and the title of the article suggests we are - then their domestic energy generation is quite meaningful. It'd be like a country importing all their manufactured goods - that would reflect badly on a country's manufacturing sector even if their overall quality of life was high.
Although in the case of Germany I'll be impressed if their QoL stays high. The trends are bad.
The reason I brought that up is that often the implication people are hinting at when they suggest that total electricity production is significantly down, would be that Germans are using significantly less energy which has some quite worrying implications.
The thing I wanted to point out though is that the amount of energy used by Germans hasn't actually changed very much, it's decreased a little, but nothing like what would be suggested by the generation figures. This is just because mainland europe actually has a more integrated and interconnected electrical grid than the USA does, and Germany is importing a lot of energy.
> It'd be like a country importing all their manufactured goods - that would reflect badly on a country's manufacturing sector even if their overall quality of life was high.
In this case, it'd be like if a country decided to do something about the fact that some manufactured good they were producing was toxic, and so they lowered the amount they produce of that good, and substitute it with imports while they also rapidly ramp up their ability to produce a non-toxic alternative.
Reducing fossil fuel is a good thing for the climate, hence for humanity. This will help to avoid very costly consequences. So the fact that germans pay their electricity costlier should be seen as an investment.
And electricity is now sold by private companies. Let's change that to make prices lower.
25% of humanity lives in China and India. They've benefted more from increasing fossil fuels than they've suffered from poor climate. The sky over China sounded like a scene from a Tolkien novel for a while there (which, well, such scenes were probably what he drew inspiration from). And they've made more meaningful progress on renewable and nuclear tech than Germany managed.
Between Germany and China, I feel I'd rather be copying China's policies.
This is incorrect. The "authors" of the article also run Energy-Charts.info where you can see how much was imported/exported. In all of 2023 Germany imported just 0.4TWh net electricity from France. Most of the import imbalance came from Denmark, Norway and third place Sweden the only other country with a significant nuclear percentage. The numbers are skewed by last winter when Germany did most of the exports to France, but at the same time it will continue to increase renewables capacity and decrease the imports.
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.
Now switch to physical flow and France is the top exporter for Germany. Note that cross border trading is day ahead and not complete, it misses at lot of the daily flow, anyway trading and physical are completely different because of Kirchhoff law.
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.
It's not the relatively clean nuclear you needed to replace it's the coal and gas. You effectively neutralized your renewable energy efforts by shutting down nuclear.
> we imported renewables from the alps and scandinavia
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.
Germany does not import a significant amount of electricity from Poland.
___________________________________
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.
Nuclear energy exit did not lead to more coal consumption - that was due to sudden switching off of Russian gas in response to their illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.
In the end, there is exactly ONE reason why Germany really went through with leaving nuclear and it is not the anti-nuclear crowd. It is simply cost and money in the face of much cheaper, less risky and heavily abundant renewable energy.
You cannot make an argument for building new plants which will take 10-20 years of realization and billions of Euros when nobody is going to insure it and when we can add massive amounts of MWh of cheap, reliable and safe energy in the mean time.
It is economically irresponsible and makes no sense at all. The mistake of leaving nuclear before coal was made long ago, and yes it was a mistake based on anti-nuclear ideology. But it is equally irrational to try and fix that now in face of clearly better alternatives. You have to actively deny cost analysis data and developments in energy tech over the last decade to keep arguing for nuclear power.
> It is simply cost and money in the face of much cheaper, less risky and heavily abundant renewable energy.
Adding to that, Germany still has no suitable location for a final depot for storing nuclear waste, and the unquantifiable cost to maintain such a depot for tens of thousand of years is often swept under the rug by nuclear supporters.
I guess with renewables, their growth can be a lot faster than nuclear because building nuclear power plants is a massive centralized undertaking, where as renewables, especially solar, is nimble and incrementally deployable.
So while nuclear seems good, it is logistically a nightmare and it is inflexible.
Reading the article, I'm not able to answer your question. But the decrease in fossil fuels consumption doesn't seem to have any link with the abandonment of nuclear power. They cite other things as the driving factors. Archived article is here https://web.archive.org/web/20240515172653/http://ise.fraunh...
> The analysis covering the period from mid-April 2023 to mid-April 2024 shows that the loss of nuclear power in Germany could be well compensated. Contrary to claims, the increase in imports was not due to a lack of generation capacity in Germany, but rather due to the favorable electricity generation prices of renewable power plants in the Alps and Scandinavia.
see sibling comments for access to the article.
also
> "In fact, electricity generation from nuclear power was replaced by renewable electricity generation. In the first year without nuclear power, around 270 TWh of renewable electricity was generated, 33 TWh more than in the same period last year. Our electricity mix is cleaner than ever before," explains Prof. Bruno Burger, who is responsible for Fraunhofer ISE's energy-charts data platform. Between April 2023 and April 2024, renewable energy accounted for 58.8 percent of the electrical load, the sum of net public electricity consumption and grid losses, in Germany.
I am not a German and while I have been in the country many times things look different from the outside, so take my impressions with a grain of salt.
First, the Germany indeed has significantly reduced its reliance on fossil fuels.
But this is not a one-parameter optimization for the country. For decades, Germany was also a center of advanced manufacturing in Europe, one of the very few places able to compete with Chinese manufacturing due to the quality of its manufacturing. It was everywhere: national champions, large factories, small companies, interconnected into a web of excellence.
That, I think, is slowly unraveling and expensive energy is a strong reason for it although definitely not the only one. I have recently met (on hikes and trips) three former owners of small-ish German manufacturers who sold their businesses "because running manufacturing in Germany is not great now" and expected the new owners to move production overseas. New owners bought for established, multi-year orders and being able to stamp the old company name on the products.
This is a very slow process that runs over decades and while the numbers in the study are undoubtedly correct, the reduction in availability of inexpensive, predictably priced energy from the nuclear exit likely accelerates the reduction of Germany manufacturing might. I would love to be wrong, we shall see in another 10-15 years. My 2c.
The decrease in fossil fuels is likely caused by geopolitical factors moreso than policy ones. Between the conflict with Russia and the Houthis shutting down the Suez, prices are up.
Going by this chart:
* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
* Also: https://www.iea.org/countries/germany
* Also also: https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/emissions#what-are-the...
Nuclear was previously providing 22 GW (2022) to 20 GW (2010) of capacity, down to 12.1 GW (2011), then 8 (2019): currently (2023) lignite can output 18.6 GW of capacity, and hard coal is providing 18.9 GW.
For output (per first link), at its peak nuclear provided ~150 TWh, while coal (lignite+hard) provided 120 TWh in 2023.
So AFAICT, coal capacity could have been cut in half (perhaps even not running that often) if existing nuclear was kept around. (New nuclear did not have to be constructed, just keep around the current stuff longer until (a) fossils are retired, and (b) more renwwables are built out).
reply