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Angst mounts over Germany’s green transition

Meeting its targets looks hard

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  • Yes, all of that is also true, but it does not negate the points I made. Yes, gas was (and ironically still is) too cheap compared to electricity, but that does not change that at least using all of our nuclear power plants until their 40 year end of life (and it can be argued that they could have been used beyond that, but that is open to debate, of course) would also have helped to lower electricity prices and therefore benefit adoption. Ideally, both should have been done. More expensive gas AND cheaper electricity.

    • The operators would not pay the money to maintain the plants after 40 years. Nuclear is mostly baseload. I know that is can be throtteled, but that does not decrease the cost of the plant at all and is only necessary for grid stability. So the most comparable electricity form is lignite. There is still a lot of it in the mix, but we are talking about some massive declines compared to last year already. This and the last quarter were or are among the worst ever for lignite. If this continues, lignite is basicly dead in five years. It could be dead today if nuclear would be allowed to operate however.

      The big issue in this is Rosatom. Right now they enrich a lot of uranium especially for the US. If that stops for some reason, the Western price for nuclear fuel would skyrocket.

      • Nuclear is mostly baseload. I know that is can be throtteled, but that does not decrease the cost of the plant at all and is only necessary for grid stability.

        There is no need to throttle nuclear, it is already low carbon and does not need to be replaced by renewable energy quickly, unlike ALL fossil fuel energy sources. That is the main problem I have with German Greens and climate activists, they act like nuclear and renewables cannot work together in a grid for no reason. In a scenario where there actually is too much electricity in the grid, throttling coal, gas, oil, hell, even biomass would be preferable before throttling nuclear. If that cannot happen, you can still try to export the excess electricity, which usually should not pose a problem, because both existing nuclear and subsidized renewables have a margin cost of basically zero. And if that does not work, finding ways to use excess renewable electricity (power to heat, power to gas, batteries, whatever else you can think of) is STILL preferable to throttling nuclear.

        The big issue in this is Rosatom. Right now they enrich a lot of uranium especially for the US. If that stops for some reason, the Western price for nuclear fuel would skyrocket.

        TBH I do not have enough insight into the uranium market to comment much on that, but even if true: The same situation already happened to renewables and their inherent (no, we do not have storage or H2 plants yet) gas backup plants. The need to diversify your energy sources unfortunately seems to be a lesson that the EU needs to learn the hard way. And fuel costs are such a small part of nuclear costs that even skyrocketing uranium prices would not change a lot.

        It could be dead today if nuclear would be allowed to operate however.

        You're basically seeing my point here.

        In any case, thank you for your constructive comments! We might not totally agree, but I enjoy debating and you made some good points. Since not much can be changed about the German nuclear exit anymore (maybe we can still save 6 plants, but highly unlikely), this is all the effort I will expend on this topic. I just hope German climate activists (and our government ffs) will stop to block nuclear on the EU level, because I really am of the opinion that it can contribute to climate change mitigation. In ADDITION to renewables, not instead of. We need all the low carbon energy sources we can get, we have to replace the energy system of the whole fucking globe!

        • The issue is we actually are sometime shutting down renewables plants, due to electricity overproduction. That is usually on weekends with great production capacity, so rarer on not much production is lost, but with nuclear we would be at that border on weekdays as well. So in five years, you propably end up shutting down something on a regular bases.

          As for renewables on EU level that is France really needing a lot of low carbon electricity today, due to its aging fleet.

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