HN is for some reason utterly obsessed with the Germany decision to close it's nuclear power plants, even though they only ever contributed a small percentage and were replaced with about the same amount of renewables.
If there is any reference to a disaster, a catastrophe or poor decision(which there always is in any thread about Germany, even if it has nothing to do with energy), it's ALWAYS about Nuclear.
My favourite was a comment which unironically described it as "the most catastrophic peacetime decision in human history".
> replaced with about the same amount of renewables.
That turns out not to be the case. You cannot compare electricity produced by intermittent/weather-dependent renewables with electricity produced by dispatchable sources. Different products.
So we replaced cheap, reliable, CO₂-free electricity with expensive, unreliably and also CO₂-free electricity. At a cost of € 400-600 billion.
Pretty bad.
> "the most catastrophic peacetime decision in human history"
That's actually pretty apt description. Since you think it is ridiculous, I am sure you will be able to trivially come up with a at least about ten that were worse. (If it's less than ten, it would still be in the top 10 of most catastrophic decisions).
Sabine Hossenfelder described it as "the dumbest thing the Germans ever did" in one of her videos.
(To the objection that there might be this other thing she replies that that was evil, not dumb)
Getting out of nuclear power. Getting out of coal power. Getting out of gas power. All before even the previous "getting out of..." was really done, understood and compensated. Blindly building renewables without regard for grid stability. Negative growth in necessary energy storage capacity. Negative growth in on-demand power. Decades of lag in building new transmission lines between the wind-rich, solar-poor, industry-poor north and the wind-poor, solar-rich, industry-rich south. All while having to vastly increase energy taxes (which make up roughly half of the energy bill in Germany now) to pay for all the getting-out-of and greening, while having to import liquefied gas and reactivate gas and coal power plants at massive costs.
What was the cost per MWh last week again? No, we're not "doing ok on renewables"
And no, it's not "too late to fix that". We have 8 restartable reactors, we don't need to build new ones to do that. (Isar 2 is probably restartable within a year or two)
Yes sure, I agree. It’s extremely expensive. I can only speak for my region (Berlin Brandenburg) but there’s solar going up everywhere around. Perhaps not fast enough, but movement is happening.
You want to change energy policies based on the price of power during a few days a year? That is rather short sighted.
Even with those 3-5 days of high prices, the average price is expected to be 30% lower this year compared to last year. This is also reflected in the prices consumers and the industry have to pay. Consumer prices are still trending downwards and the industry price has been very close to the lowest prices over the last 10-20 years, especially if you consider inflation (but only if you had to pay the EEG before).
The prices also only jumped about as far up as to match the current gas prices, which is somewhat expected if there is no wind or solar and the missing energy has to be produced by burning gas. This is not what will be the case long term. Germany is almost doubling the installed battery storage capacity every year and has been keeping that up for almost a decade at this point: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart....
This trend is likely to continue and will smooth out a few days of no renewables soon. Additionally so far biomass has been subsidized without it having to follow the load. This is expected to change this (there was at least one law proposed, don't know if that was decided on yet), which would make Germany follow a lot closer to how Denmark seems to operate its grid.
The big problems in the German energy grid are, that there is not enough transfer capacity, not enough storage and not enough renewables in the grid yet. More renewables make storage more attractive, but earlier conservative governments killed both solar and wind installations, because they wanted to focus on nuclear, only to then reverse course a short time later. Solar was on an exponential trend until the government implemented policies, that basically killed expansion around the 2012 time frame: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart....
A similar story applies to wind power, where additional regulation regarding the distance of wind turbines to living spaces made it almost impossible to build new wind turbines (around 2017).
Similar policies also prevented installation of new power lines or at least significantly delayed their installation.
Had conservative governments not implemented those, we would likely be at 100% renewables already most of the time in Germany and the average price for electricity would be significantly lower. But the distraction of nuclear and then gas and coal by conservative governments put us into the position we are in today. A completely renewable grid is possible and not too far off for many countries in the EU and elsewhere, but you need to actually build the infrastructure for it instead of sabotaging it.
Restarting reactors won't help in that regard. The few reactors that were still in the grid in 2022 did not reduce the record electricity prices that year. (They would also not have helped when they were at their peak with about 30% of the grid. Germany stopped constructing nuclear plants in the 80s after all and nuclear has been in a decline since then, even though officially that was only decided in 2002 and then 2011.) And the prices continue falling since the last nuclear plants were shut off in 2023. Today renewables are the cheapest source of energy. Storage is still a problem, but battery prices still half every few years, which makes battery storage economical today already and only cheaper in the long run.
For all intents and purposes Germany is doing ok in renewables. It could be a lot better, but there is a clear plan and if conservative governments don't reverse course next year (again) as well as stop sabotaging renewables in local governments (like Bavaria), prices will soon be the lowest they have been in 2 decades. This is backed up by plenty of data and studies. Nuclear plants are cool in theory, but they can't compete in price in the long term and trying to go back to them would be the same mistake the German car industry made, when it tried to push ICE cars and is now getting steam rolled by China in the EV market. Or when Germans invested into gas pipelines instead of renewables, because it was cheaper at the time. Germany can't afford to make plans only for the next 2 years, it needs to have plans for the next few decades.
> You want to change energy policies based on the price of power during a few days a year? That is rather short sighted.
No, I want energy policies that account for the need to support a reliable base load in all circumstances. The prices are an expression that got fucked up. And that baseload specifically includes heavy industry, which has limited ability to rely on batteries alone.
Simply, "most of the time" is insufficient. That means we need an answer for what happens until we reached the "next few decades" state.
This is not advocacy to replace renewables with nuclear, but to a) do the baseload thing, now, and b) cut the LNG cord, which is a very tenuous tether to hang yourself off.
I don't think you and I are disagreeing much about the long term (though questions around battery sustainability need answering for the long term baseload case). But there's need for fairly immediate action. Germany is massively deindustrializing right now, and it's due to energy supply issues, at least in part.
Why do you act like German electricity prices aren't high? Any source including the one you link shows Germany to be above average. Hard to take the rest of what you say seriously when you don't acknowledge this reality.
Regardless I'll be curious to see whether what you predict will happen (energy storage becomes enough to deal with bad weather periods). Doesn't seem smart though to rely on the sun in a relatively cloudy country.
Nope. Actually, none of the nuclear reactors in Germany are restartable. By now, all of them have had their permit to dismantle for some time. In all of them, they already started sawing apart the less radioactive components and flushing the rest with agressive cleaning agents and sticky goo to get rid of mobile particles that could endanger the workers. Which means that none of the reactor components are in any usable state and would need to be exchanged for new ones. Doing that in an old reactor is more expensive than building a whole new one, and would probably take a lot longer.
Actually, the energy sources that currently rake in the cash at 1Eur/kWh are gas and coal power plants. Because wind and solar are offline due to shitty weather.
The current system has created massive price variability which neither voting citizens nor industry are willing to accept. It provided a grid which eliminated nuclear and coal power which a large portion of the voter demographic wanted (for valid and non-valid reasons depending on who you ask), but it added a deep dependency on optimal weather, imports of natural gas and electricity from neighboring countries, which design has demonstrated high price variability based on supply and demand. The average price of energy has also slightly increased (20-ish%?) but it is really the variability that is the main problem when a single month can cost more than the sum of all other months. Average price isn't significant when there is an inelasticity of demand.
The outcome is political instability when voting citizens and industry demand that the government solve the issue, and people get more upset as the energy market get more unstable. A secondary effect is that most political solution to this problem results in significant government costs which get put on taxes and energy fees, which only infuriate people more when price variability continues.
