That's not how it went through. The Green party in Germany heavily pushed against nuclear energy and coal energy and for solar energy. Now nuclear has been phased out and solar is here. Energy prices have gone up. Possibly because solar is extremely expensive during the night or on overcast days, so expensive gas power plants have to be used during that time. The old nuclear and coal plants would have been cheaper than replacing them with solar and gas.
You can't really blame solar for phasing out nuclear. That was a political decision. Uranium mostly comes from Russia and China too, so it's not like it was geopolitically "safer" than gas.
> The old nuclear and coal plants would have been cheaper than replacing them with solar and gas.
Gas's share of electricity generation has not meaningfully changed in Germany since 2015. [1] It's ranged from 80 to 95 TWh. Last year it was 82 TWh.
That data also shows coal's share of generation reducing since 2022. If coal is really cheaper than solar and wind, why is Germany using less of it?
> Possibly because solar is extremely expensive during the night or on overcast days
Today gas power plants cover the shortage. As I've already showed you, Germany isn't using meaningfully more gas than it used to even during nuclear's heyday (which was in 2006, when nuclear generated 167 TWh and 74.6TWh came from gas).
Solar and batteries are already cheaper than gas in sunny climes. [2] It's only a matter of time before they're the cheapest source of nighttime power in Germany.
You're operating on information from 3 years ago and haven't changed your mind since then.
> You can't really blame solar for phasing out nuclear. That was a political decision.
You can't say solar "saves" Germany money when this is apparently not the case. You can't just selectively count the cases where solar replaced an energy source which happens to be more expensive than solar. Solar saves you money if and only if its implementation, including backups, is less expensive than what was used previously, whatever it was.
> Gas's share of electricity generation has not meaningfully changed in Germany since 2015. [1] It's ranged from 80 to 95 TWh. Last year it was 82 TWh.
What then explains Germany's high electricity prices?
> That data also shows coal's share of generation reducing since 2022. If coal is really cheaper than solar and wind, why is Germany using less of it?
Because the Greens and other environmentalists pushed for using less coal. Just like they pushed heavily against nuclear. And in favor of heavy subsidies for solar. It was a political decision, not an economical one.
> Solar and batteries are already cheaper than gas in sunny climes. [2] It's only a matter of time before they're the cheapest source of nighttime power in Germany.
Even if that report is correct (Ember is a solar energy company so that information could be heavily biased) that doesn't mean they would be cheaper than nuclear and coal would have been during the night in the past, or that switching from nuclear and coal to solar and backups didn't increase, rather than decrease, energy prices.
The higher prices are partly artificial: surcharges for offshore wind and special-grid-use surcharge, subsidies for 'co-generation of electricity and heat and to compensate for the burden caused by the Combined Heat and Power Act' , the concession fee, VAT. Except for the offshore wind surcharge, all the others would exist no matter the fuel you use. Together with 43% procurement charges - which would also exist independent of the fuel used, all of these explain your bill. Substituting the renewables with coal or nuclear would only marginally lower your prices.
Maybe if they would cut their $5.9B subsidies for coal, which are also in your bill, prices could go down a little more.
Edit: the numbers for subsidies in fossile fuels were wrong, not 1.9 but 5.9
