Your energy prices are so high that century-old factories are shutting down and your export sector is collapsing. Yet you guys keep a (presumably) straight face while insisting that the truth is the opposite of what anyone with eyeballs can see.
Sad is the low intellectual level of this discussion where people draw conclusions from insufficient understanding of the data (or more likely, they believe what they read somewhere without even looking at data - which I assume is the case for you - as you do not provide logical arguments and merely repeat the talking points from political discussions, which are worded to evoke an emotional reaction "dying century-old factories" "collapsing"). The prices households or industry pays are only indirectly related to the generation cost and a lot more with fees, so this is something to study. Also, if you compare to France, EDF was renationalized and now contributes to the relative high amount of government debt compared to GDP.
The subsidy strategy is strategically reckless and economically doomed. What is it supposed to accomplish? The factories aren't profitable at today's energy prices. Since it's these factories that create Germany's wealth, their being unprofitable makes the country unprofitable, driving down standards of living.
If you subsidize electricity by capping consumer prices, then you have to either cap producer prices (creating shortages) or have the state pick up the difference. The latter option might make individual factories profitable, but it makes Germany even less profitable: now the country as a whole is paying not only to import electricity, but also for administrative overhead of the subsidy and the deadweight loss produced by non-market allocations of a scarce factor of production, electricity.
All these subsidies do is transfer wealth to the industrial and energy sectors from literally everyone else and impoverish the country as a whole.
A subsidy might be justifiable if it covered a temporary market hiccup. These high prices aren't shocks. They're structural. They're foreseeable consequences of state policies that decrease the supply of electricity and thereby make it more expensive than in competing polities.
Imagine the US trying to address oil shocks in the 70s by subsidizing gasoline. Wouldn't have worked. Subsidies cannot create more of a resource.
Also, given the 2028-2030 pension budget crisis you're facing, I'm not sure you guys can afford to impoverish yourselves with subsidies even in the short term.
If you guys want to remain competitive, you need to find ways to generate power under an affordable cost structure and stop lying to yourselves about how, any day now, the Energiewende will produce a cornucopia of electrons. It's just not happening.
Something has to break here. Maybe you accept declining living standards. Maybe you just burn an enormous ocean-boiling amount of barely-not-peat lignite from your western states. Maybe you become a Russian client state and return to suckling the Siberian gas teat.
Or maybe, just maybe, you see that nuclear power works for others and can work for you too if you get over your atomic phobia.
All you are discussing the wrong points. All your conclusions rest on the assumption that nuclear is the more cost effective solution, but this is not true (and we could discuss this). You did not notice the price drop in renewables? Germany still pays subsidies (technically there are not subsidies though) but those are far less than initially. The cost drop caused a huge amount of investments world-wide in renewables far ahead of investments in nuclear. The reality is that nuclear needs more government support than renewables. The EDF in France was renationalized because operating it as a profit-driven company wasn't exactly a success story (especially since the electricity price is kept artificially low in France and does not all EDF to make the profits to make necessary investments)
Since nuclear is more costly, that all your arguments about the economic issues turn around and go into the other direction.
Yes, and Germany's emissions for electricity production were double the amount a decade ago and are dropping as coal is phased out. So renewables do work. 1) Once the transition is complete it will also be close to zero. These numbers only show that if you move to a carbon-neutral production already in the eighties of last century your are done now. Please make a reasonable argument and not this nonsense comparison.
The sane and sensible thing to do would have been to phase out coal instead of nuclear, then Germany would have as low of CO2 emissions per KWh as France. What does Germany plan to use for dispatch-able power when wind and solar don't supply enough?
I agree that one should have phased out coal faster instead of nuclear. Also with nuclear one needs dispatch-able power because demand is also variable and one does not use nuclear for balancing. But one certainly needs more with renewables. For the time being this is gas (which is a small fraction of overall gas use in Germany). In the long-term it will be replaced batteries for short duration and likely back-conversion of synthetic gas if there is a longer period. Biomass and demand-side electricity management will also help. Overall, I do not see a fundamental problem.
French PWRs routinely load-follow, ramping 1-5% of rated power per minute. With ~70% nuclear generation, they had no choice but to design for flexibility. Their N4 and newer reactors can operate between 20-100% power on demand.
This is not about technical possibility, but about economics. The cost of nuclear is capital cost while operating costs are small, you want to run your plant at maximum capacity.
You are repeating talking points without understanding. First, there are different prices which also change in time. Also, the price households pay does not relate to generation cost. But even the wholesale price is does not necessarily do this. In France, the problem is that EDF is required to sell electricity from old nuclear plants very cheaply, but this is not even good for the nuclear industry, in fact, it one reason (the other are why it now has a lot debts and is not able to do the necessary investments. But even without these historical rules, it is difficult to fund new nuclear power plants using the expected price levels for electricity in Europe.
I'm not German and very pro-nuclear energy and think Germany's energy policy is very VERY stupid. Shutting down perfectly good nuclear reactors while importing nuclear electricity from France is just insane. Germany emits about 10 times as much CO2 per kWh as France!
I see you edited your comment. But the CO2 emissions between a completed transition away from fossil fuels (France last century) and Germany (still ongoing) can obviously not be compared. With the roll-out of renewables there is a corresponding drop of emissions (and the electricity sector is the one saving Germany's climate targets by overachieving its goals while transport and building is behind). Once the transition is done, it will be essentially done. It would be same if Germany had decided to move to more nuclear, which would take even longer because building nuclear takes much.longer.
"But the CO2 emissions between a completed transition away from fossil fuels (France last century) and Germany (still ongoing) can obviously not be compared"
Isn't that convenient? The truth is that Germany could already have completed the "transition away from fossil fuels" that France did if it wasn't so irrationally afraid of nuclear electricity.
"Once the transition is done"
It will NEVER be done due to the intermittency of wind and solar.
The truth is that you need to set the decline of CO2 emissions to the progress of the transition. If you do this, you will see that emissions decrease accordingly to the rollout of renewables. If Germany had decided to build out nuclear, it would also not have low emissions the next day, but only decades later depending on how much coal is replaced by new nuclear. This not difficult to understand. In fact, it is very obvious.
This is misrepresenting what Germany did. They shut down their perfectly safe nuclear reactors with 20 to 30 years of remaining life instead of their filthy coal plants, all because of a deeply irrational and anti-intellectual fear of nuclear energy.
By what criteria can Germany's energy transition be considered a success? It has made german electricity some of the most expensive in the world while also emitting 10 times as much CO2/kwh as France. You are getting the worst of both worlds.
You are not addressing my comment and again instead switch topics and resort to rhetoric ("deeply irrational", "most expensive", "worst"). You should also say which price you are referring to, there are many different ones.
Germany'a decision to shut down their perfectly safe and young nuclear reactors was a deeply irrational and very expensive decision. Shutting down functional low-carbon plants while operating coal plants during a declared climate emergency is difficult to defend.
Multiple studies estimate the climate and economic cost in the tens of billions of euros.
German culture, especially their "Greens" seems to have mentally fused nuclear power and nuclear weapons into one category unlike most other countries.
Please cite studies instead of making random claims. You again just repeat your rhetoric. But let's first agree that you CO2 emission comment was an invalid argument before we go on to discuss other issues.
"let's first agree that you CO2 emission comment was an invalid argument "
It is absolutely NOT an invalid argument, if you think climate change is a real thing it is by far THE ONLY argument that matters. And it quantitatively proves how terrible Germany's decision to shut down perfectly safe nuclear reactors was.
"renewable energy remains the most cost-competitive form of generation."
Not if you want it to be as reliable as nuclear. Again you never explained what Germany is going to use as backup when wind and solar don't produce enough.
Debating you feels like debating Tesla fanboys about Waymo. Waymo actually has hundreds of self-driving cars RIGHT NOW while Tesla keeps saying they are going to have self driving cars any day now yet they all still need a safety driver.
Nuclear energy can power entire countries with almost zero carbon energy RIGHT NOW.
Again, you are not even addressing the argument I made. I never said CO2 emissions are not an issue, I said comparison of the results between a completed transition and and ongoing transition is obviously invalid.
Obviously nuclear power can not make CO2 emissions of any country go away right now, because you would need build more plant first, which also takes decades - just the same as with renewables.
And your ad hominem arguments does not help. Also writing something in caps locks does not make some non-sense valid. These things just make it clear that you have no actual arguments.
LOL. The wonderful thing about reality is that it's deaf to this kind of motivated reasoning. Enjoy your lignite and industrial collapse. When you're shivering at night, your children can't get jobs, and your country has no voice in global affairs, you can console yourself with the idea you at least tried reduced global carbon emissions by 0.1%.
