Quickly becoming greener. Are you saying that Germany should stop their renewable buildout and keep their current emissions until the 2040s while waiting for new built nuclear power to ”save the day”?
That literally makes no sense at all.
Looking at wholesale prices all of continental Europe is quite similar.
Some countries, like Germany, taxes electricity a lot to promote efficiency.
Not sure what alternative you suggest?
The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power. So that’s not an option either.
Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program. The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
It didn't make sense to shut down nuclear before coal/gas for Germany. It should deploy both ren and nuclear, even restarts unless it wants to use gas firming.
Germany's low carbon twh is unchanged since 2015. What changed is it became net importer and demand dropped, hence a lot of coal closed.
Wholesale is irrelevant. Taxes are needed to fund infrastructure. In case of Germany a big chunk is transmission which will be subsidized from 2026 just like eeg already is. Example of why- sudlink, but that's just for redispatching, ren require by default more transmission due to distributed deployment
France is open to subsidize epr2 project. The challenge is, edf must first show a bill by EOY and, EC must approve state funding, unlike ren subsidies. Epr2 is expected to cost about 60-80bn, half being offered by the state as 'nice loans'. 40bn is about what Germany pours into EEG alone in merely 2y.
Germany can reuse own konvoi designs or try to make a deal with khnp and Westinghouse
French debt and electricity/edf are not connected. Most of the debt is from pension system because well, work hours, pension age and vacation days vs neighbors. Edf debt is peanuts in comparison. In fact it's debt to ebitda ratio is in normal range.
> ren require by default more transmission due to distributed deployment
Which has been calcualted by GenCost to add up to ~€10B for Australia. That is less than the subsidies a single reactor needs.
> France is open to subsidize epr2 project. The challenge is, edf must first show a bill by EOY and, EC must approve state funding, unlike ren subsidies. Epr2 is expected to cost about 60-80bn, half being offered by the state as 'nice loans'. 40bn is about what Germany pours into EEG alone in merely 2y.
This is very typical of nuclear bros. You can never look forward. The EEG is a backwards looking metric, a ton of extremely expensive solar was added 10-15 years ago which still get paid.
You can look at the historical cost of the EEG system to see it decreasing.
- 2019: €27B
- 2020: €30B
- 2021: €17B
Those payments support 153 GW of infrastructure. Again you do realize as soon as we compare with new built nuclear power, adjusting for capacity factors, it just becomes lunatic to suggest nuclear power?
The question is where we spend our money today. The subsidy needed for renewable deployment in 2025 is 0. As can be seen by the 16 GW built without subsidies.
> The installed capacity of renewable installations not eligible for payments under the EEG was 16.2 GW
That's just equivalent to a few nuclear reactors. Nothing big!
> Germany can reuse own konvoi designs or try to make a deal with khnp and Westinghouse
Or they can just let the French folly continue and see the state finances crash when loaning becomes even more expensive.
> French debt and electricity/edf are not connected. Most of the debt is from pension system because well, work hours, pension age and vacation days vs neighbors.
It becomes connected when the state subsidizes nuclear power to enormous amounts which could have gone to balance the budget.
> Edf debt is peanuts in comparison. In fact it's debt to ebitda ratio is in normal range.
I love this sleight of hand. Debt to ebitda is fine, when considering that Hinkley Point C gets a completely insane 17 cents/kWh. And that the state will subsidize the EPR2 program.
EDF is fine if the state takes all the costs. So funny.
Ah yet again a bunch of nuclear hating. It'll be my last reply to you since I don't wanna lose more time here.
GenCost predictions are already failing if you look at the state of current transmission projects in Australia (huge cost increases across the bord, and not just transmission). And for Germany it'll be even harder due to more nimbys (hello sudlink that was protested even by greens at some point) and different weather/generation patterns.
It'll be gradually the same with onshore and even some solar.
Nuclear has advantages beyond CF, like firm generation, less system costs. Even Fraunhofer/bnetza understand this, that's why both are pushing to expand gas to firm renewables(because well, nuclear is out of discussion for em)
French national debt is 3.5 TRILLION, most because of social system. EDF debt is 50bn while debt/ebitda ratio is about 2 (while EON/RWE have a worse ratio) To suggest EDF debt has any meaningful impact here is borderline insane.
HPC CFDs are smaller vs what Germany or UK offers for biomass, or what UK offered for greenvolt, and soon to be in line with what UK will offer for new wind projects in latest AR rounds https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6880d6f8f47ab...
There are some wild numbers there for some tech, HPC looking cheap in comparison
EDF is not subsidized by France, yet. You can consider a one off 9bn nationalization but that's peanuts vs eeg and hardly a subsidy considering debt/ebitda. In fact edf is subject to profit tax called arenh (the one that caused high debt in 2022), soon to be replaced with another profit sharing mechanism. Arenh was mandated by EU so that EDF doesn't erase competition. EDF financials are public and there aren't any mentions about state pouring money except renewables sector. As said, EPR2 will get some subsidies, but make no mistakes, compared to EEG it'll be peanuts.
Mind you, Germany already spent on EEG alone almost 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet (looking at public numbers from court/DE) but it still has worse emissions. In a similar timeframe (messmer) france almost finished the job.
On the other hand, both the praised California and South Australia, leaders in ren deployment, do have both worse emissions than France and higher household prices
It's indeed funny to me how people are so concerned about the costs of nuclear but are just fine with full system costs of renewables that strangely, are not that cheap as predicted by orgs like aemo/csiro in Australia and even more so in other markets.
Trying to predict the future based on it is a backwards looking metric. Your link says that it may increase to €23B by 2029. While the EEG in 2020 was €38B in 2025 euros.
It is already rapidly falling as expensive old contracts fall out.
> Offshore in Germany is already facing challenges like in UK and DK.
Love trying to change the topic to off-shore wind. Pretend that onshore and solar faces the same challenges.
Off-shore wind is right on the cusp of viability. With low infrastructure costs and a comitted customer it is. The Danish and German auctions were "negative bid" styles. The developers had to pay for the privilege to build off-shore wind.
The UK capped the CFD too low as per recent increases in interest rates and material costs. An issue which nuclear power is affected by to an even larger degree.
> It'll be gradually the same with onshore and even some solar.
Of course ignoring that 500 GW storge interconnection queue. But that would be daring to lift your eyes.
> Nuclear has advantages beyond CF, like firm generation, less system costs. Even Fraunhofer/bnetza understand this, that's why both are pushing to expand gas to firm renewables(because well, nuclear is out of discussion for em)
I love this magical nuclear plant that soaks up an entire grid load. In reality all grids with nuclear power has tons of peaking since trying to go above the baseload with nuclear power just becomes stupidity.
That was before zero marginal cost renewables entered the picture. Now nuclear itself are becoming peakers. As evidenced by nuclear power all over Europe being forced out of the markets or having to bid negative.
> French national debt is 3.5 TRILLION, most because of social system. EDF debt is 50bn while debt/ebitda ratio is about 2 (while EON/RWE have a worse ratio) To suggest EDF debt has any meaningful impact here is borderline insane.
I love how adding ~€100-200B from nuclear handouts to build the EDF2 fleet is "trivial. A 2.5 - 5% increase in the already extremely bloated French debt is insignificant! Move along!
> Arenh was mandated by EU so that EDF doesn't erase competition.
Because the entire French fleet was built with state aid. But that you conveniently ignore.
> Mind you, Germany already spent on EEG alone almost 2x the cost of entire french nuclear fleet (looking at public numbers from court/DE) but it still has worse emissions. In a similar timeframe (messmer) france almost finished the job.
Again looking backwards. You know we live in 2025? What you're telling me is that 2012 solar was expensive and thus required large EEG. Do you understand that we're not building 2012 solar, we're buiding 2025 solar.
Also love the victim complex.
> On the other hand, both the praised California and South Australia, leaders in ren deployment, do have both worse emissions than France and higher household prices
They're not done yet? Are they claiming to be done?
> It's indeed funny to me how people are so concerned about the costs of nuclear but are just fine with full system costs of renewables that strangely, are not that cheap as predicted by orgs like aemo/csiro in Australia and even more so in other markets.
Because these "full system costs" have never been shown to materialize? They are fossil shill and nuclear bro talking points because they can't deal with reality.
We need to 1.5x - 3x our grids to decarbonize society and industry. The extra costs coming from a renewable grid when already having double or triple the grid size are trivial.
Just like you nuclear bros never talk about nuclear unreliability. It is apparently 100% reliable except when it isn't. And then it also needs fossil gas peakers to manage the peak load because load following nuclear power simply becomes stupid.
You also have the issue of trying to force it on the population. Why should a home owner with rooftop solar and a home battery draw electricity from the grid?
Explain to me how you would deploy a nuclear plant in this grid:
