Currently at 80GW of solar and 66GW of wind with a goal of 215GW cumulative solar capacity by 2030. Roughly speaking, they’ll have over 300GW of wind and solar by the end of the decade assuming at least another 20GW of wind gets built. For comparison, this is five times more than all existing French nuclear generation capacity (61GW), and does not include hydro, pumped hydro, batteries, and interconnectors.
So the whole nuclear argument is frankly silly. This will be done before even a few GWs of nuclear were to come online.
Overproduction of renewables, transmission, and battery/pumped hydro storage negates the need for fossil gas for that last bit of power. Certainly, today, fossil gas is used to fill the gaps, but as the world begins deploying in excess of 1TW/year of renewables this year, that fossil gas will be rapidly pushed out of the mix. And it is arguably better to let those generation facilities become stranded and require decommissioning vs more nuclear (which is orders of magnitude more expensive to decomm due to the nature of nuclear fuel, spent, unspent, and anything it has exposed).
Once the world is awash in clean, renewable energy, we can then scale up direct air carbon capture, paying back the carbon debt we incurred through industrialization burning fossil fuels. No nuclear required.
It sounds great until you start doing the math. We can't decarbonise without nuclear, just look at Germany. It's a poster child for renewables yet it's barely doing better than Poland (where I live). Meanwhile France is (as of now) emitting 1/10th of Germany's CO2 per unit of energy generated.
By which metric is Germany barely doing better than Poland? In 2023, Poland produced 26% of its electricity from renewable sources [1], while Germany produced 52%. And that is with more than twice the amount of people living (and using energy) in Germany as compared to Poland.
Renewable energy is not the target, carbon neutrality is. German CO2 emissions per capita were only marginally better than Poland's in 2022 (8.0t vs 8.1t).
