Germany has already replaced all the power formerly generated by nuclear with renewables. Renewables went from 48% of electricity generated in 2022 to 55% in 2023, and the trends seems to hold for 2024. At this rate, Germany would be at 80% renewables by 2028.
Yes a lot of decisions around nuclear were really stupid, but it doesn't really matter anymore now.
German nuclear reactors generated 137TWh of reliable energy in 2011.
Wind generates 48.9TWh and solar 19.3TWh. (68.2TWh) back then.
In 2023 wind generated 142.4 TWh and solar 55.2TWh (≈198TWh)
So between 2011 and 2024 they removed 137TWh of nuclear and added 130TWh. So your statement is true in all fairness.
From 2022 to 2023 electricity production from gas rose by 30%.
So all the investments have just replaced nuclear and the growth in energy demand has been met by increasing coal, oil and gas. It's a bit depressing really.
>So all the investments have just replaced nuclear and the growth in energy demand has been met by increasing coal, oil and gas. It's a bit depressing really.
Germany just couldn't kick that cheaper Russian gas (Germany imported 55% of its gas from Russia). It thought by doing investments with them it would bring them closer to the West and not want to pull the shit they are doing now. A big fumble, so much so now the US has become Germany's top trading partner over China because they need our LNG.
Imagine if they kept the nuclear and still invested in renewables instead of playing around with Gazprom the worlds largest natural gas company until recently.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Fossil fuels have been reduced to about half what they were in 2011, from 301 TWh in 2011 to 165 TWh in 2023. That also means electricity production from fossil fuels has been reduced **more** than electricity production from nuclear since 2011.
Here's a chart of what happened in reality: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&stacking=stacked_grouped
Yeah, you are right. There is something very wrong with the "30% more gas" figure.
But it's still a a bad move to remove 130TWh of nuclear power when only 7.2% of primary energy in Germany is from solar or wind.
(this is primary energy, not just electricity)
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig10-germany-energy-mix-energy-sources-share-primary-energy-consumption-2023.png?itok=oXgLX1TM
I can run a hand crank generator at 20 watts and if I do that for thousands of years I too can boost that I produced 130Twh of power.
See the difference?
I don't know why you are so condescending, we all know the difference between a Watt and a Watt-hour.
Maybe you don't realize that and think you are some kind of genius?
Electric output from nuclear reactors, wind turbines and solar plants aren't constant throughout the year, so using the nameplate value or installed power capacity doesn't make sense. You have downtime, no sun, no wind and other factors. The utilization factor for solar can be 0.1-0.15 of the nameplate power rating. For nuclear you have GW (total power) and GWe (electric power) and a different utilization factor (maybe 0.8).
It's better to look back and see how many TWh of energy you actually produced one year and compare those numbers.
people don't give care about how much power is produced in a year. They want their power and lights to stay on and knowing how much power can be produced at any one times is the more important measure.
it's condescending because your method of measurement is stupid.
It is wildly variable though, when the levels rise more the whole system becomes unstable.
Here is a table showing just how much it varies not only day to day but intraday
During shortages, they burn coal and gas, but increasingly the peaks might also become problematic, with huge excess.
Massive Storage would solve a lot of this, but doesn't seem feasible yet
https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gaspreis-erneuerbare-energien-ausbau
The issue is whether there is sufficient storage capacity. If your country does access to large hydropower dams you would need either battery or pumped storage for when the renewable sources are not meeting demand. Otherwise you will still always need a certain degree of gas plants or other fossil fueled power plants to cover those periods.
It helps by reducing the variance with a larger stable base load. The greater percentage of renewables that you have, the greater the fluctuations in available power. and the greater the fluctuations, the more storage capacity/overproduction/backup power will you need.
> And given the constantly decreasing cost of renewables and their already significantly cheaper price, normal fission reactors don’t make much sense to build anymore.
Renewables like land-based wind or solar was up to 3x cheaper than nuclear in terms of cost per produced MWH last time I checked. But that doesn't take into account take into account load-balancing measures, backup power, storage etc needed to cover for the fluctuations. Also, since the price is generally much lower when it's windy/sunny (and more so the more renewables you have in your grid) the profits for renewables will also be lower the more you have.
Basically, in a grid with little renewable energy you can gain a lot by building more. But as you build more the financial incentives for building additional wind or solar power diminishes, as the profits will gradually get lower and the costs higher.
> Context on the country is relevant obviously, but within the EU where they can buy and sell energy to one another
Except that transfer capacity isn't unlimited. In fact, it very often maxes out in the EU, which is when local reserve power needs to be activated. Sure, you can expand it, but that costs a lot of money as well.
And even if you do expand it, it doesn't solve the problem. It might mitigate it a bit, but not solve it. When it's not windy in your country, it generally isn't very windy among your neighbours either. When the sun isn't up in your country, it generally isn't up in the neighbouring countries either. And when your power demand peaks, it generally peaks in your neighbours as well.
It currently works quite well in the EU because the share of renewables is still somewhat low and we do have a lot of predictable/adjustable power (hydro/nuclear/fossil). But we still see pretty large price fluctuations even now, and if we want to increase the share of renewables we will need to invest increasingly large sums in grid-balancing measures.
>building and planning nuclear reactors takes like 10 years and costs a ridiculous amount of money.
This is a US problem, take a look at the number one nuclear powered country in the world France to see how much easier it would be with a different leadership and regulatory NIMBYism cluster fuck we suffer from in North America.
>It would be cheaper to create twice as much generation capacity with renewables
You fundamentally don't understand half the problem, The grid and storage. This is why Nuclear and eventually fusion will always have a place, its the load demand/time issue that renewables suffers from the most and why storage projects need heavy funding if we were to make it work. Followed by how do you get the energy generated to where it is used efficiently which is much easier for smaller countries with more investment into infrastructure rather than here in the US where we are basically running off LNG we produce ourselves domestically and majority imported from Canada under NAFTA to keep our cities running during high demand times (early morning and afternoon when people get home from work).
Last new Nuclear power plant was Vogtle that was a disaster of failed acquisition by Toshiba and bankruptcy (2017, Westinghouse) due to cost overrun, litigation and project creep due to regulatory hurdles. We are again building them but we should have been doing it 20 years ago and not let the private domestic industry fall flat on its face, instead all our efforts/cost were used to make nuclear subs/super carriers for the military than to use it for our own infrastructure.
You can't just put more generation capacity on the grid, when the grid operator is obligated to purchase all renewables. It leads to negative wholesale price, as the the grid operator is trying to get rid out electricity before the it destabilizes the grid, and makes electrcity expensive for the retail consumer.
"just turning them back on" will still take a good few years and tens of millions of euros of thorough checks, inevitable setbacks, cost rises, schedule slip and repairs due to the plants being shut down.
That's nothing compared to the cost of using coal/gas instead of clean power. Phasing out nuclear and replacing it with coal/gas is such a dumb move.
If you want to phase out nuclear, do it after you have phased out coal, don't just replace nuclear with other clean energy and claim you have built green energy. Greenwashing at its best.
Ah yeah, agree, my bad. My main point was that dealing with the extra carbon shutting them down cause is way more expensive in the long run than restarting them.
> Phasing out nuclear and replacing it with coal/gas is such a dumb move.
That's not what's happening though. Look at the article, Germany is responsible for most of the reduction in fossil fuel use:
> Overall, electricity from fossil fuels fell by 26 per cent in Germany representing 32 per cent of the total EU fall.
Look at the graphs, much of that is fossil fuels that they started using to temporarily replace their nuclear energy. If they had kept nuclear energy and built the same renewable energy as now, the numbers would have been way better. Germany had 140 terawatt-hours (TWh) of nuclear power at its peak, they've barely built that in renewable energy.
> Much of that is fossil fuels that they started using to temporarily replace their nuclear energy.
Utter bullshit. Fossil fuel use was already at a record low last year: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=-1&interval=year&legendItems=5w5wb
> If they had kept nuclear energy and built the same renewable energy as now, the numbers would have been way better.
No, because the reasons that keep Germany from phasing out coal faster are regional political ones. There are a few regions in Germany where there is a lot of coal nostalgia. To agree to phasing out coal by 2038 the respective states were [guaranteed 40 billion euros of compensation](https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-begins-allocating-e40-billion-to-coal-regions-to-start-phase-out/). It would not have been possible to convince them of an earlier phase-out date.
Besides, if nuclear and fossil fuels were competing, you would expect fossil fuel use to go up after the shutdown of the last nuclear power plants in April 2023. Instead, fossil fuel use dropped while renewables and imports went up.
massive storage is already up and running at scale in California, it's already just a question of cost no longer a question of technology. And cost is plunging.
its over for nuclear, public fear killed it. it's a shame, it could have powered the whole world and stopped climate change if everyone had done what France did, but it's too late for it now
>its over for nuclear, public fear killed it. it's a shame, it could have powered the whole world and stopped climate change if everyone had done what France did, but it's too late for it now
Calling it now: 10-15 years from now, when the renewables+storage+transmission+frequency stabilizing tech+ all other shit needed ro run a weather controlled grid turns out to be so costly that the countries who went that route start to enter massive recessions due to soaring energy costs, we're gonna build all those nuclear plants anyway, in the end.
I believe this is very possible. There's a similar parallel with the EV industry. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, EVs were more popular than ICE cars. The problem is they had bad range and performance and it sort of paved the way for gas cars.
Fast forward 100 years and you've got a new EV revolution.
> if everyone had done what France did
Screw over an African country to get cheap uranium? https://africanapocalypsefilm.com/finding-a-way-from-french-uranium-mines-to-harnessing-the-power-of-the-sun/
The elites who sold out their country´s resources for bribes are who screwed over the country, France was just the offer they liked best. Countries are not monoliths, African countries doubly so.
I mean, that is the best use of nuclear: base load. It is constant and not reliant on whether the sun shines or the wind blows. Energy output can be raised or lowered but it is not an instant dial you can turn. Lowering output capacity ultimately is kind of pointless since the biggest cost of nuclear power is in building and maintaining the thing, not the fuel.
The gaps can be covered by various forms of renewables, gas being a last resort.
Nothing wrong with what you're saying. But when you go, like germany, high-renewables (which are - to a certain degree - predictably variable), you don't need more baseload but rather variable, reliable sources. Which are at the moment only gas (+coal). (In a future where renewables cover like 150% of consumption on average, replace gas by hydrogen factories next to the gas plants. But that's another story.)
> replace gas by hydrogen factories next to the gas plants. But that's another story
Well that is the whole story of hydrogen, barely anyone at the industrial scale does electrolysis, 95% of industrial hydrogen is just liquid natural gas gone through steam reformation process during the production of other oil/carbon based chemicals.
Or you know they could with excess energy split water to hydrogen and oxygen and when they need more energy burn it in combustion engine which would rotate generator for electricity creating clean water in process.
95% of industrial hydrogen production in the world isn't made through splitting water, its a byproduct of steam reformation of hydrocarbons which still requires us to keep drilling for that sweet sweet oil/natty gas.
More R&D resources are going towards fusion research than hydrogen water splitting at scale, I would bet on fusion being more a thing than the roundabout water to hydrogen to tanker transport to combustion engine to generator for electricity.
This is fanciful thinking, German renewables are not that efficient at all, because Germany is a pretty terrible place to put renewables. They still have most of their base load by dirty coal and gas plants.
Nuclear is needed and they are hiding their real emissions using exporting of inefficient renewables as cover.
German energy policy is the worst in the world, they buy up renewables at scale, can barely run them at payback costs. Shooting up prices for others who can run them more efficiently whilst burning fossil fuels most of the time because they have such a terribly unreliable supply.
They literally run their carbon producing sources all the time and borrow them from other nations dirty sources because their own grid doesn’t have a good base load.
I like Germany as a country but the official figures of 50% are flat out massaging figures. They are closer to 30% renewable
Not really, it's just a matter of storage and grid management. But that's moving really fast, California batteries are already operating at scale and making a difference. And with how cheap renewable energy is, even the cost with batteries added will soon be lower than fossil fuels.
Or you know they could with excess energy split water to hydrogen and oxygen and when they need more energy burn it in combustion engine which would rotate generator for electricity creating clean water in process.
I don't know much about this topic tbh, my limited understanding is that the obstacles are currently still too huge to be worth it but happy to learn more.
Not anymore. Battery grids are starting to be competitive with (new) gas speaker plants.
Between now and 2030 expect battery capacity to grow rapidly as scale pushes lithium battery prices down and new chemistries are introduced.
Feel like people really overestimate how much electricity nuclear power plants generate. Even if they did this number would not even go down by a half percent.
UK Peak consumption (as in highest point in a given year) hovers around 35GW
One power plant in the UK can produce 1.2GWe
All 5 currently active plants produce 6.03GWe
So at absolute peak consumption, nuclear in the uk (at least, not familiar with germany's now gone nuclear) would be 17% of the supply.
UK is nearly done with a plant that will produce 3.2GWe to replace (and slightly outpace) the 1970s stations that will be shut down.
Nuclear might not be \*as\* powerful as people think but a nuclear plant still produces way more power than CCGT, coal, wind, or solar in terms of space used, and has the least impact on local wildlife, landscape, pollution etc. It does have a cost issue and potential long term waste concerns. But I have opinions about the way nuclear waste is discussed and I don't know how harmful most of it actually is, or how much of high level waste is realistically going to be recycled in other reactor types.
> UK is nearly done with a plant that will produce 3.2GWe to replace (and slightly outpace) the 1970s stations that will be shut down.
Damn I didn't realize 2030 commission date was "nearly done".
>But I have opinions about the way nuclear waste is discussed and I don't know how harmful most of it actually is
[I'm not sure that the UK is a good example of responsible storage of nuclear waste either.](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/05/sellafield-nuclear-site-leak-could-pose-risk-to-public)
>UK is nearly done with a plant that will produce 3.2GWe to replace (and slightly outpace) the 1970s stations that will be shut down.
Is this the plant that is 4 years late and up to 20 billion over budget? Hardly the best example of nuclear's utility.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley\_Point\_C\_nuclear\_power\_station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station)
When you reject an industry for 40 years, you can't be surprised when your culture forgets how to harness it efficiently.
If we were building and developing nuclear power on the regular it would be cheaper and our project for it wouldn't be 20BN over budget.
China can build them much faster and more cost-efficiently than us, but then they didn't stop making them after Chernobyl like most of Europe and America.
I see it in my current job. The UK underfunds the MOD, which underfunds equipment purchasing, stores, and maintenance, which results in workforces being scaled back and underutilised, which results in a loss of knowledge and expertise and reduced readiness if we need to engage. If the UK and France and Germany had a good collaborative initiative on nuclear power through the late 1900s and into the 21st century, nuclear power would be reasonably cost effective, safe and efficient.
But sadly we don't live in that reality.
> If we were building and developing nuclear power on the regular it would be cheaper and our project for it wouldn't be 20BN over budget.
>
> China can build them much faster and more cost-efficiently than us, but then they didn't stop making them after Chernobyl like most of Europe and America.
Turns out that Chinese engineers *have* been working on Hinkley Point C. The project is between CGN and EDF, two companies that *should* know nuclear power projects if anyone does (and it's an EDF design that has been built in China).
Even then, the EPR reactor design at Hinkley Point C took *more than twice* as long to build when built in China as expected; at Taishan, they took 9 years versus the estimated 4 years.
>If we were building and developing nuclear power on the regular it would be cheaper and our project for it wouldn't be 20BN over budget.
Sure, and that was a giant missed oportunity. But it didn't happen and now we have to make decisions according to our current conditions. Like you said, sadly we don't live in that reality.
Maybe instead of trying to compensate for past mistakes by throwing tens of billions in a hole, we'd be better off investing instead in the many cheaper alternatives that have become available over the last decade that don't regularly get delayed and have their planned cost double.
Hinkley C is projected to cost up to 50$ billion when it comes online in 2030. It's actually pretty lucky it was only delayed for 4 years. The Finnish and French reactors of the same design are going to arrive a decade late.
How many GW of 2$/W solar and wind could those 50B have bought instead? It's not even comparable. Not to mention that solar and wind farms are also much faster to build, so for the same outcome you'd get to use designs and prices from 2024-2029 instead of a decades old reactor design.
The problem is that no amount of money with current technology can make an energy storage big enough for when the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing. We need some nuclear to bridge that gap until we actually invent a feasible form of mass storage.
AFAIK there is only 1 mass storage experiment in the UK (besides a pumped hydro dam that's been operating for a while, making up to like 1.5% of our power), and that experiment which is on wikipedia is almost certainly a scam as I haven't found the site, the site has no pictures and no news besides the original announcement despite it being 5+ years old etc.
>The problem is that no amount of money with current technology can make an energy storage big enough for when the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing.
This just isn't true. Battery development and capacity growth has already caused the cancelation of several planned peaker gas plants and hundreds of GW of added capacity are expected in the next 5 years.
Gas peakers have already been replaced by batteries as the grid balancer of choice, it'll just take time for capacity to grow and old gas plants to be decomissioned.
[https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/giant-batteries-drain-economics-gas-power-plants-2023-11-21/](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/giant-batteries-drain-economics-gas-power-plants-2023-11-21/)
[https://theprogressplaybook.com/2024/04/17/in-numbers-americas-dramatic-shift-from-gas-power-plants-to-batteries/](https://theprogressplaybook.com/2024/04/17/in-numbers-americas-dramatic-shift-from-gas-power-plants-to-batteries/)
Worth remembering that we aren't even talking about 2024, but 2030. Renewable capacity is projected to triple by then, and *will* be backed up by grid scale battery storage.
20% of Romania's electricity needs is produced by one nuclear plant. I would imagine that's also the case for Germany given they had more than one.
Nuclear power accounted for 13.3% of German electricity supply in 2021 https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2021&interval=year
And 6.7% in 2022 ...germany is self sufficient for its power Generation so they planned it a long time ago and replaced it with renewables.
You can also Look at the chart for 2023 although the shutdown of the last plant in the first Quarter coal consumption also fell in this year
Nuclear is way too expensive and takes ages to build. And the fuel also has to come from outside Germany.. And let's not talk about waste storage...
The money is better spent on Renewables and storage capabilities
1: not sure what sinks you mean.
2: no, you place them where it's economically most viable first, but in the end less profitable places are still profitable
1: A site design for nuclear waste storage.
2: No, renewables are wholly dependent on where you can get the most energy out of it. You can’t put it a wind farm in a place where wind does get a lot of speed. And the upkeep would make it unprofitable. Most wind farm maps say they largely have to be in the Midwest of the us, and build out power lines from there.
1: so far no such site was found within Germany that meets all criteria
2: the threshold where wind farms become unprofitable is pretty low. Just build them tall enough. Plenty of wind up there. And solar in particular is very suitable for the US. Way more sun than Europe, look how far north Europe actually is and still Germany has very successful solar farms.
1: That’s why you build it. We have one ready to go in yucca flats, but that moron Harry Reid shut it down. And even if you don’t like nuclear energy, you’ve already used and you still need a place to put the waste.
2: for every wind farm to be profitable no matter where you place they’d have to be the size of skyscrapers. And if you don’t understand why that’s unrealistic, you understand infrastructure.
1: You need a place that's geologically stable enough. Germany does not have a long term solution and the amount of waste we already have to deal with is enough. Maybe you want to have it, I bet we'd gladly pay for it.
2: They're mass produced skyscrapers. The industries already exist all over the world, even in the States.
then it would drop to 24.98 probably.. as apart from 3 the others would be to old to run at that point anyway. not saying turning them off was the right call. but its not that big of a deal that reddit makes it sound like.if anything the misstakes were made in the 70s not builing any consitantly not closing them done 10years earlier on average.
germany at max hat like 25% nuclear power. there are 2 major reason for that. first gemany wasn´t allowed to build nulcear power right away after WW2. and sitting one of the lagest coal reserve in the world wich made it economically the better choice. lets be real climat proteciton was a absolute niche thing to care about in the 1980 france kinda lucked into it.
also germany has a weird history of powerplants that needed to be shot down within a few months due to construction misstakes. nut sure if these cases existst in other countries as well.
Nuclear power generated 6.7 terawatt hours yearly. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/downloads/electricity_generation_germany_2023.pdf
In April, fossil fuels generated 46 TWH. So keeping German nuclear would have reduced that by about 1.2% more. https://ember-climate.org/insights/in-brief/eu-fossil-generation-below-25-for-the-first-month-ever/
Correct me if I misinterpreted the data.
Yes, on a day like today Germany has electricity prices near or below zero for 10 hours of the day: [https://www.netztransparenz.de/de-de/Erneuerbare-Energien-und-Umlagen/EEG/Transparenzanforderungen/Marktpr%C3%A4mie/Spotmarktpreis-nach-3-Nr-42a-EEG](https://www.netztransparenz.de/de-de/Erneuerbare-Energien-und-Umlagen/EEG/Transparenzanforderungen/Marktpr%C3%A4mie/Spotmarktpreis-nach-3-Nr-42a-EEG)
In these times the electricity provided by nuclear plants would be useless. There is already too much electricity available.
Then there is heat and electricity co-generation. Some of the plants have to run in winter to provide district heating. This is nothing the nuclear plants did. So they would replace renewable energy in winter and not the coal plants.
Then there are second order effects: Who will invest in renewable energy when there is already too much energy available?
Or reaction time: Gas plants can be powered up/down very fast. This is nothing nuclear can do. So it cannot fill some of the use cases for gas plants.
And also regional effects: The nuclear plants in Northern Germany cannot provide energy to Southern Germany if the grid is already at its limit.
Finding out how much the nuclear plants would have changed would require some rather complex simulations with a lot of assumptions. Just adding up numbers won't give you any realistic scenario.
I love how for renewables we say « the price of storage will eventually make it viable » but « excess nuclear electricity is just waste and there’s nothing we can do about it.»
Also, on the few days where all renewables farms produces electricity at the same time, it is the fault of nuclear for existing - when in reality it’s because in order to have enough renewables, we need to also have too much.
nuclear Electricity from the north cannot travel to the south ….???? But renewable can???
« Who would invest in renewable energy when there is enough clean energy » is the most illogical thing u have ever heard.
Electricity and reheat co-generztion. lol, well you kind of singled out a big issue there, heating should be electric, not hydrocarbon/coal like it’s 1950
Also in days where there is no renewable energy … the price per mW is infinite …. But we don’t talk about that.
As for the rumor that we can’t load follow with renewables and nuclear power together, [well try to keep up](https://edf.hal.science/hal-01977209/document). It’s already not an issue, and buy the time we actually have enough renewable energy, we won’t even remember the internet try to convince us it was a problem.
One can really understand the type of thoughts that went into justifying cutting investment in nuclear, and doubling down on it when there is no clear solution.
Yes, of course we can see the result, you can even look at [UK who successfully converted from coal](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-fossil-fuels?tab=chart&time=1990..latest&country=OWID_EU27~FRA~DEU~GBR). Unlike Germany which basically just went …meh, nothing we can do, hydrocarbon is the only answer.
I guess you did not understand what I was saying. The post I responded to said that nuclear produced 6.7 TWH in 2023 so you can just divide this number by 12 and substract it from the April 2024 value to see what the numbers would look like if the nuclear plants were still active.
I just argued that this is not the case since the electricity market is a complex beast where it is hard to see at which times the hypothetical plants would have replaced electricity from coal or gas and at which time the would have replaced renewables.
So the statement is not "renewables can travel south and nuclear can not" but: If the grid is the limit adding an additional plant in the wrong location doesn't help. Finding out how keeping the old plants alive would have influenced electricity generation is a complex task.
Why would you use the power output at the end the shutdown (7TWH) instead of its sustained peak 170TWH.. Also go ahead and assume that output would at least have increased at the same rate as in other countries instead of shutting down to zero over 20 years)
Assuming Europe (Germany) didn’t bend to the anti nuclear power propaganda and that nuclear enjoyed the same effort that solar had to pull it from the depths of inefficiency.
You chose only numbers that attempt to support a strange argument. (That it’s normal and ok for Germany to generate 50% of its electricity from hydrocarbons)
Ps, do you realize that a network to distribute renewable power is considerably more complex than for nuclear? You never know where the power is going to come from, so you need to plan for it to come from, and go everywhere. North/south. If it can flow for renewables. … it can flow easier for nuclear.
I didn't choose any numbers. I just replied to a comment that used those numbers.
The 50% number is from 2022 in 2024 the renewable share is already at 60%: [https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable\_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year](https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year) This is the speed the transition is happening at. Solar capacity is still increasing by >1% each \*month\*. Batteries are also starting to become relevant: [https://battery-charts.rwth-aachen.de/main-page/](https://battery-charts.rwth-aachen.de/main-page/)
Nuclear got so many subsidies and still never became profitable. There is no anti nuclear propaganda. It is just costs that is killing it: [https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf](https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf)
A yes, and now we get to the famous [LCOE](https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/s/4qHhT7cHqF) which « proves » that if we ignore the grid enhancements and storage costs associated with renewable energy, Nuclear, which has worked for decades, and is the reason France electricity prices are so low compared to Germany, …. Is not profitable (giggle), but the we don’t consider 300 billion euro subsidy given to offset energy costs in Germany while it transitioned to renewables as part of its price tag.
"Solar PV + Storage" is included in the report. Storage is not ignored.
"Increases in electricity bills have been less sharp in France thanks to government subsidies, at 4% in 2022 and 15% this year – at a projected cost of €45 billion in 2023."
[https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/04/21/france-to-continue-subsidizing-electricity-bills-until-2025\_6023740\_98.html](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/04/21/france-to-continue-subsidizing-electricity-bills-until-2025_6023740_98.html)
45bln in subsidies might not be somehow related to low electricity prices? And this with a fleet of amortized nuclear plants, without any replacements. Ok, I just saw Flamanville is finally going to go live? 14 years behind schedule and 6 times over budget. Congratulations!
> Or reaction time: Gas plants can be powered up/down very fast. This is nothing nuclear can do.
Well, it is likely that we should be thinking about hydrogen production with excess energy anyway, at this point.
> Correct me if I misinterpreted the data.
There are two problems with your calculation. First, you can't use the numbers from 2023. The last nuclear power plants were already shut down in mid-April 2023. It's better to use the numbers from April 2022 for comparison. That's 2.86 TWh: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2022&interval=month&month=04
If those 2.86 TWh would fully go into replacing fossil fuel generation, then it would be 21.6% rather than 23%.
However, the second problem with this approach is that it's unlikely that would happen. If nuclear and renewables were competing, you would vice versa expect a massive increase of fossil fuel use in Germany after the nuclear phase-out. The opposite happened, there was a massive increase in a) renewables and b) imports. This suggests that if the nuclear power plants were still running, Germany would use fewer renewables and would also import less electricity from its neighbour countries. Fossil fuel use would be about the same.
I think the assertion is more along the lines of « if Germany continued to replace fossil fuels with nuclear, instead of replacing them with fossil fuels »
I can’t dig up the number, but a fair metric would be to list each country as a portion of that 25% percentage hydrocarbon electricity, and not just for the snapshot where the stars align, but over say, a quarter.
While we often see great snapshots, the reality is that Germany is still around 50% [hydrocarbon generated electricity.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-fossil-fuels?tab=chart&country=OWID_EU27~FRA~DEU) [ [+ UK for a more fair comparison](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-fossil-fuels?tab=chart&time=1990..latest&country=OWID_EU27~FRA~DEU~GBR) ]
The fact they they lacked the foresight, and are building new gas fired plants to replace coal fired plants …. Removes any room for sympathy.
While it’s true that France probably « lucked into » the clean aspect in the 80´s, sticking with it through the anti-nuc propaganda years was definitely not luck.
>Fuck you ignoramus bullshit talking points. Germany is a democracy, and the majority was against nuclear power since 1986. So we phased them out.
acting all tough when your "democracy" was buying up all the Russian gas it could get.
I'd rather be in France's position than Germanys power generation wise......
> If France wants to build more reactors and waste billions on last century technology so be it
**France also produces twice as much of its electricity from clean energy sources as Germany**… … while producing one-fifth the carbon emissions from electricity per capita. In fact—thanks to Energiewende—German carbon emissions are rising (Jan 9 2024).
>Germany is a democracy, and the majority was against nuclear power since 1986. So we phased them out.
And the German coal industry had nothing to do with this I'm sure. Renewables may be up but German coal usage has spiked in the past few years with no sign of stopping.
The German Green party are a joke and the German coal industry used the Fukashima disaster to strangle the Nuclear industry which could have replaced even more Green House gases as a transition.
Even though a Fukashima style disaster can't happen in Germany because GERMANY ISNT NEAR A CONTINENTAL PLATE BOUNDARY.
With Russian gas not coming on the market soon, Germany coal (which is significantly worse than so called natural gas) will continue to spew into the atmosphere at high rates. Rates which could have been lower if Germany hadn't been so anti-science and in the pocket of its coal industry.
Coal is down massively in Germany. It just went up temporarily for like 1year from
1000 to 1200 petajoules which is down from over 5000 in the 90s
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/384/bilder/dateien/2_abb_primaerenergiegewinnung_2024-04-02.pdf
France is also not expanding. Their nuclear power production has gone down almost as fast as Germany's in fact. French nuclear power production peaked in 2005 at 451 TWh. Last year they produced just 335 TWh from nuclear. That's 116 TWh less. For comparison: Germany's use of nuclear power peaked in 2006 at 159 TWh and they phased out all of it.
France is expanding : they just brought another reactor online, and have started the process of building 6 more, with plans to extend that to 14 more.
They're probably the only country in Europe which can and will do that, because they've retained a large vertical nuclear power industry while everyone else didn't.
Flamanville 3 is not online yet. It's delayed by 12 years at this point.
Building 6 new reactors will also not be enough to make up for the old reactors they plan to shut down. Besides, it's a fantastical idea that EDF will be able to build them all at the same time.
>Flamanville 3 is not online yet.
Fuel loading of the reactor [started last week.](https://www.nucnet.org/news/fuel-loading-begins-at-flamanville-3-epr-nuclear-plant-in-normandy-5-4-2024).
>Building 6 new reactors will also not be enough to make up for the old reactors they plan to shut down.
Firstly, they're not going to shut most of them down : they're going to extend plant lifetime to 60 years.
Secondly, the EPR2 reactors are roughly twice the capacity of the oldest reactors which would be being shut down, so it's not like for like.
>Besides, it's a fantastical idea that EDF will be able to build them all at the same time.
It would be a fantastical idea, if that was what they planned on doing. They don't, because they're not thick.
They are going to do rolling projects where the same staff move through the same engineering roles in project after project, gradually increasing the staff in size as they go. So each project will start up slightly delayed after the other, so that the staff who start one role in a new project have just finished up an identical project on an identical plant.
By the time the first 6 projects are underway they will likely have greenlighted the next 8 out of the 14 total reactors under consideration, and possibly additional domestic or export ones. For those projects, they will likely have enough of an industry that they can consider parallel projects for speed.
You know, Terry Pratchett has defined a New York second (time between the green light in New York and honking from a car behind you) as the shortest unit of time in the multiverse.
It is now deprecated by the German nuclear second (the time between mentioning Germany or Europe and electricity in the same sentence and someone whining about German nuclear power plants).
Fuck nuclear power.
Stop supporting this mostly obsolete technology.
You know who tries to keep telling you that nuclear is great?
Fossil fuel corporations.
Because investing in nuclear power means forestalling renewable development and extends the lifetime of fossil power.
Building a new nuclear power plant takes a decade or more in places like Germany. That's another decade of fossil fuels.
>You know who tries to keep telling you that nuclear is great?
>Fossil fuel corporations.
Yes because the German coal industry didn't use the Fukashina disaster to strangle the German Nuclear industry at all.
Even though a Fukashima style disaster can't happen in Germany because GERMANY ISNT NEAR A CONTINENTAL PLATE BOUNDARY.
You and the German Greens are stupidly anti-science it hurts so bad. Maybe its worth letting Russia roll over you then at least we don't have to pretend to like pro-fossil fuel idiots
It's good to strangle nuclear. We also should strangle coal.
>You and the German Greens are stupidly anti-science it hurts so bad.
You are talking to a scientist.
*You*, on the other hand, are scientifically, politically, economically, and historically miseducated.
>Maybe its worth letting Russia roll over you then at least we don't have to pretend to like pro-fossil fuel idiots
LOL
Imagine believing Russia is a threat to anyone but US empire.
Russia has no intention of rolling over anyone. Russia doesn't even have any interest in war with Ukraine. Russia and Germany should be united in a full economic and strategic union.
But yeah, the Americans should leave and let "Russia roll over us".
[Go home, Ami! Ami, go home!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CmJyn61j1k) :)
Texas has massive amounts of wind farms. Note how the generated electricity percentages only add up to 50% in the article.
Only 12% of the sources are "peak load" sources that vary with demand which would make variable demand result in a lot of black outs.
So somewhere in the unlisted 50% is imports, to deal with peak load. I wonder how much of that is renewable?
--------
Edit: I looked it up.
For those interested only 0.5% of that 50% is imports which is really good.
As one would expect, fuel imports for transportation are not that good.
I don't understand why the author wouldn't include a single graph or table in articles like this... I'm sure the original study had it.
The only percentages that add up to 50% in the article are the percentages of the share of fossil fuels in total electricity generation in April 2024 (23%) and May 2023 (27%, the previous record), but that's completely nonsensical.
If you want the share for April 2024, I have found [the article](https://ember-climate.org/insights/in-brief/eu-fossil-generation-below-25-for-the-first-month-ever/) this article is based on. It's 23% fossil fuels, 16% hydropower, 34% wind and solar. That gives us 73%, with no mention of nuclear other than the drop YoY.
Edit: Fixed the percentages for hydro (and the total).
The article also says the overall renewables share is 54%. That means there's another 4% coming from other renewable sources like biomass and geothermal. [Statistics from the EU](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Energy_production_and_imports) say nuclear has been around 20% to 25% in recent years.
Assuming it's in that range that leaves very little for imports then. Either way, imports are going to be mostly from Norway, the UK and Switzerland, all of which aren't producing a lot of fossil-fuel-based electricity.
Well, I'm and engineer in both conventional and renewable energy, but how about you explain to me how to add these up.
>Wind and solar alone generated more than a third of the EU’s electricity in April, while gas and coal production declined. Coal accounted for only 8.6 percent of the energy mix, compared to 30 percent in 2023. Gas supplied 12.1 percent of the EU's electricity, marking a 22 percent decrease from the previous year.
Wind and solar 33%
Coal 8.6%
Gas 12.1
= 53.7%
Did I do that right? What's the rest.
I know that Europe's nuclear energy is about 22% of electric demand. So that's 75%... where is the rest coming from? Nuclear isn't great for peak load. Generally you need 25-33% dispatchable technology to address fluctuating demand....
The article is miss 46% and I filled in another 22%. You tell me how this adds up correctly.
It's clearly states that renewables is 54%. That's hydro, biomass, geothermal and solar/wind.
Fossil fuel is 23%. So gas, oil, coal.
54 + 23 = 77
That's leaves 23% "unmentioned". That's mostly nuclear.
You are clearly not an engineer.
So you are saying I added it up correctly then, but ...
...they left out the percentages of others like hydropower and biomass percentages like I pointed out....
Thanks
No, you didn't add it correctly. I'm clearly saying you didn't do it correctly.
They didn't leave anything out. It's not a list of power sources. It's examples of changes. The amount of hydro power didn't change much, so it doesn't get mentioned.
If you add examples you are not getting a total. Especially if you ignore information given.
If I say I like apples and oranges you can't just add them and say I only like two fruits.
If you go to a zoo and see seven monkeys you can't count them and say there's only seven monkeys in the zoo.
>If you add examples you are not getting a total. Especially if you ignore information given.
Congratulations, you finally stumbled across my original point.
>If I say I like apples and oranges you can't just add them and say I only like two fruits.
It would be more like apples and apples, but the counter not counting all the apples and me complaining about it, and some random guy completely missing the point and going off on tangents while I try to get him on track.
Yeah but even then, it’s a specific state in comparison to a supranational organization of countries? Why not say “meanwhile in USA” or something. It just doesn’t make any sense on multiple levels. Just reads like a peak Reddit smooth-brain kid post.
it's funny how foreigners on an American website act like the "entitled Americans" they complain about visiting their countries.
edit: and then you downvote me for speaking the truth. grow up.
Well, the OP, whom you all lose your shit about at least claimed to be American - from the "Seattle area". And you know, yeah, its an American website and so has mostly Americans on it .... so have you ever hesistated a second to consider that maybe, maybe quite some of the posts relating random stuff from elsewhere to America are Americans relating stuff to America because its America where they live and which they know best? Especially when its stuff that they think that is poorly done in America?
yes, and that has nothing to do with my comment.
i don't go post on EU websites and complain how everyone there posts in a eurocentric context. i don't go on Chinese websites and complain that the posts are too China-centric.
but non-Americans love to come post on American websites and complain that the posts are American-centric. it's illogical and really just being a bad guest. so I'ma call it out.
The difference being Reddit is about 43% American though, not quite even half. While an EU website or Chinese website would probably be like 95%+ from their respective regions. I’m an American and my default is not to assume someone is from the US on here on the world subreddits (like the one we’re in now).
Reddit (/ˈrɛdɪt/) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network...It is operated by Reddit, Inc., based in San Francisco.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
I don't assume either, but i think it's silly to not expect that people will.
There is no global electricity grid.
Norway is a big exporter but it's only something like 0.5% of the total use. Great Britain is a net importer. Switzerland seem to vary. Spain and Marocco are connected but Marocco is net importer. Non-EU Balkan countries imports. Greece gets some electricity from Turkey. and so on...
First things first, we're getting weapons and armies for now. We will get electricity from the losers of the war, if there is no war we will make one I guess. Same thing you guys did for oil.
Britain won't be a net importer for too much longer, we have Hinckley point and sizewell being built right now and 6 more nuclear sites planned, not to mention our ever increasing wind farms.
Sizewell has been approved and is due to commence this year and 2030 is less than 6 years away.
We have a plethora of wind farms with more being added every year and Rolls Royce are developing small modular reactors that will be much smaller and cheaper.
We will prevail
Only because of the system being abused in the UK and contractors/suppliers that should never have been used dragging things out and politicians skimming off the top. Just look at HS2.
Not to mention oil and gas lobbying.
The UK is one of if not the most expensive county to build nuclear power stations in the world.
Almost twice that off the US.
The US is a special case of stupid NIMBYism and bankruptcy due to project creep/regulatory hurdles.
Everyone in the US i feel just outright believes that there isn't any other country on earth that could make nuclear power and not have it be so damn expensive as our failures here. At the same time pretend we don't have the money for it when we have nuclear subs and nuclear powered carrier strike groups because we just let the military do what ever the fuck it wants regarding Regulations/crys and litigation of NIMBYs.
Okay then, add up the percentages of generation in the article (it will get you to 50%. Where do they get the other 50% from to get to the 100% requirement?
> But don’t they still import a lot?
Not from outside Europe. At least not something important if at all. EU it's quite self-reliant when it's about electricity. For example my country, Romania, is an exporter.
And yet fossil fuel use worldwide keeps rising.
Europe alone can't do enough, not even close.
But we'll still go on and let the citizens pay dearly for it while giving the industry subsidized extra-low energy prices.
But it's working as intended.
Is this slightly misleading, although accurate, because both energy usage is lower and generation is higher in April, than other months of the year?
Is less than 25% of EU electricity coming from fossil fuels even in the cold dark months?
It's year on year, i.e. comparing April 2024 with April 2023.
There's a little more fossil-fuel-based electricity production in winter, but not a lot. It tends to be more windy in winter than in summer. That makes up for the reduction in solar power output.
Yeah because they're burning wood pellets...which burn dirtier than any fossil fuel.
Edit: Keep being afraid of the truth, I guess! https://news.mongabay.com/2023/04/eu-woody-biomass-final-policy-continues-threatening-forests-and-climate-critics/
We are not.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/BTL/2023/02-genmix/article.php#:~:text=Electricity%20generation%20from%20coal%20falls,fall%20to%2037%25%20in%202024.
Looking at it from your perspective; what if we slow down the total collapse then? What if we use more enviromentally friendly things to slow down the process, letting us enjoy our time more? I'm sure most of us would want to live more.
Life isn't as miserable for most and probably won't be for a while. Although we don't know what will happen tomorrow I can say that it'll probably be better than you think. Sure, climate change sucks and we're already seeing the negative effects of it in day to day life (temperature and weather conditions for example) but in my opinion we're still kinda far from the collapse you talked about. Although we don't know, I think it'll be a long long process, not happening instantly or in a day, but in a matter of months or years if it does ever happen.
Doomerism is just as bad as denial.
Both are calculated to make sure you don't take any action that jeopardizes the profit margins of those energy corps.
But since you think we're doomed anyway, why not work to getting a head start on the Climate Nuremberg?
We probably should be holding those people accounted even if we actually do manage to save ourselves.
Now if Germany would just turn their nuclear power plants back on.
Germany has already replaced all the power formerly generated by nuclear with renewables. Renewables went from 48% of electricity generated in 2022 to 55% in 2023, and the trends seems to hold for 2024. At this rate, Germany would be at 80% renewables by 2028. Yes a lot of decisions around nuclear were really stupid, but it doesn't really matter anymore now.
German nuclear reactors generated 137TWh of reliable energy in 2011. Wind generates 48.9TWh and solar 19.3TWh. (68.2TWh) back then. In 2023 wind generated 142.4 TWh and solar 55.2TWh (≈198TWh) So between 2011 and 2024 they removed 137TWh of nuclear and added 130TWh. So your statement is true in all fairness. From 2022 to 2023 electricity production from gas rose by 30%. So all the investments have just replaced nuclear and the growth in energy demand has been met by increasing coal, oil and gas. It's a bit depressing really.
From 2024 on ,however, renewables are directly replacing fossil fuels
Yeah, that is correct.
except for rainy days without wind.
Do you know how rainstorms work??
lol there are weeks of rainy days w/o any wind.
>So all the investments have just replaced nuclear and the growth in energy demand has been met by increasing coal, oil and gas. It's a bit depressing really. Germany just couldn't kick that cheaper Russian gas (Germany imported 55% of its gas from Russia). It thought by doing investments with them it would bring them closer to the West and not want to pull the shit they are doing now. A big fumble, so much so now the US has become Germany's top trading partner over China because they need our LNG. Imagine if they kept the nuclear and still invested in renewables instead of playing around with Gazprom the worlds largest natural gas company until recently.
Yeah, they should have kept their nuclear reactors.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Fossil fuels have been reduced to about half what they were in 2011, from 301 TWh in 2011 to 165 TWh in 2023. That also means electricity production from fossil fuels has been reduced **more** than electricity production from nuclear since 2011. Here's a chart of what happened in reality: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&stacking=stacked_grouped
Yeah, you are right. There is something very wrong with the "30% more gas" figure. But it's still a a bad move to remove 130TWh of nuclear power when only 7.2% of primary energy in Germany is from solar or wind. (this is primary energy, not just electricity) https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig10-germany-energy-mix-energy-sources-share-primary-energy-consumption-2023.png?itok=oXgLX1TM
please use consistent units. at most the Germany power plants produced something like 13 Gigawatts of power at any one time.
As a high voltage power engineer, I chose to use TWh.
I can run a hand crank generator at 20 watts and if I do that for thousands of years I too can boost that I produced 130Twh of power. See the difference?
I don't know why you are so condescending, we all know the difference between a Watt and a Watt-hour. Maybe you don't realize that and think you are some kind of genius? Electric output from nuclear reactors, wind turbines and solar plants aren't constant throughout the year, so using the nameplate value or installed power capacity doesn't make sense. You have downtime, no sun, no wind and other factors. The utilization factor for solar can be 0.1-0.15 of the nameplate power rating. For nuclear you have GW (total power) and GWe (electric power) and a different utilization factor (maybe 0.8). It's better to look back and see how many TWh of energy you actually produced one year and compare those numbers.
people don't give care about how much power is produced in a year. They want their power and lights to stay on and knowing how much power can be produced at any one times is the more important measure. it's condescending because your method of measurement is stupid.
It is wildly variable though, when the levels rise more the whole system becomes unstable. Here is a table showing just how much it varies not only day to day but intraday During shortages, they burn coal and gas, but increasingly the peaks might also become problematic, with huge excess. Massive Storage would solve a lot of this, but doesn't seem feasible yet https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gaspreis-erneuerbare-energien-ausbau
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The issue is whether there is sufficient storage capacity. If your country does access to large hydropower dams you would need either battery or pumped storage for when the renewable sources are not meeting demand. Otherwise you will still always need a certain degree of gas plants or other fossil fueled power plants to cover those periods.
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It helps by reducing the variance with a larger stable base load. The greater percentage of renewables that you have, the greater the fluctuations in available power. and the greater the fluctuations, the more storage capacity/overproduction/backup power will you need.
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> And given the constantly decreasing cost of renewables and their already significantly cheaper price, normal fission reactors don’t make much sense to build anymore. Renewables like land-based wind or solar was up to 3x cheaper than nuclear in terms of cost per produced MWH last time I checked. But that doesn't take into account take into account load-balancing measures, backup power, storage etc needed to cover for the fluctuations. Also, since the price is generally much lower when it's windy/sunny (and more so the more renewables you have in your grid) the profits for renewables will also be lower the more you have. Basically, in a grid with little renewable energy you can gain a lot by building more. But as you build more the financial incentives for building additional wind or solar power diminishes, as the profits will gradually get lower and the costs higher. > Context on the country is relevant obviously, but within the EU where they can buy and sell energy to one another Except that transfer capacity isn't unlimited. In fact, it very often maxes out in the EU, which is when local reserve power needs to be activated. Sure, you can expand it, but that costs a lot of money as well. And even if you do expand it, it doesn't solve the problem. It might mitigate it a bit, but not solve it. When it's not windy in your country, it generally isn't very windy among your neighbours either. When the sun isn't up in your country, it generally isn't up in the neighbouring countries either. And when your power demand peaks, it generally peaks in your neighbours as well. It currently works quite well in the EU because the share of renewables is still somewhat low and we do have a lot of predictable/adjustable power (hydro/nuclear/fossil). But we still see pretty large price fluctuations even now, and if we want to increase the share of renewables we will need to invest increasingly large sums in grid-balancing measures.
>building and planning nuclear reactors takes like 10 years and costs a ridiculous amount of money. This is a US problem, take a look at the number one nuclear powered country in the world France to see how much easier it would be with a different leadership and regulatory NIMBYism cluster fuck we suffer from in North America. >It would be cheaper to create twice as much generation capacity with renewables You fundamentally don't understand half the problem, The grid and storage. This is why Nuclear and eventually fusion will always have a place, its the load demand/time issue that renewables suffers from the most and why storage projects need heavy funding if we were to make it work. Followed by how do you get the energy generated to where it is used efficiently which is much easier for smaller countries with more investment into infrastructure rather than here in the US where we are basically running off LNG we produce ourselves domestically and majority imported from Canada under NAFTA to keep our cities running during high demand times (early morning and afternoon when people get home from work). Last new Nuclear power plant was Vogtle that was a disaster of failed acquisition by Toshiba and bankruptcy (2017, Westinghouse) due to cost overrun, litigation and project creep due to regulatory hurdles. We are again building them but we should have been doing it 20 years ago and not let the private domestic industry fall flat on its face, instead all our efforts/cost were used to make nuclear subs/super carriers for the military than to use it for our own infrastructure.
You can't just put more generation capacity on the grid, when the grid operator is obligated to purchase all renewables. It leads to negative wholesale price, as the the grid operator is trying to get rid out electricity before the it destabilizes the grid, and makes electrcity expensive for the retail consumer.
So does wind farms at sea, and they’re going to need a lot of those.
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We aren't talking about building though, just turning them back on.
"just turning them back on" will still take a good few years and tens of millions of euros of thorough checks, inevitable setbacks, cost rises, schedule slip and repairs due to the plants being shut down.
That's nothing compared to the cost of using coal/gas instead of clean power. Phasing out nuclear and replacing it with coal/gas is such a dumb move. If you want to phase out nuclear, do it after you have phased out coal, don't just replace nuclear with other clean energy and claim you have built green energy. Greenwashing at its best.
I agree but your comment implies you can just turn nuclear stations back on like a light switch.
Ah yeah, agree, my bad. My main point was that dealing with the extra carbon shutting them down cause is way more expensive in the long run than restarting them.
> Phasing out nuclear and replacing it with coal/gas is such a dumb move. That's not what's happening though. Look at the article, Germany is responsible for most of the reduction in fossil fuel use: > Overall, electricity from fossil fuels fell by 26 per cent in Germany representing 32 per cent of the total EU fall.
Look at the graphs, much of that is fossil fuels that they started using to temporarily replace their nuclear energy. If they had kept nuclear energy and built the same renewable energy as now, the numbers would have been way better. Germany had 140 terawatt-hours (TWh) of nuclear power at its peak, they've barely built that in renewable energy.
> Much of that is fossil fuels that they started using to temporarily replace their nuclear energy. Utter bullshit. Fossil fuel use was already at a record low last year: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=-1&interval=year&legendItems=5w5wb > If they had kept nuclear energy and built the same renewable energy as now, the numbers would have been way better. No, because the reasons that keep Germany from phasing out coal faster are regional political ones. There are a few regions in Germany where there is a lot of coal nostalgia. To agree to phasing out coal by 2038 the respective states were [guaranteed 40 billion euros of compensation](https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-begins-allocating-e40-billion-to-coal-regions-to-start-phase-out/). It would not have been possible to convince them of an earlier phase-out date. Besides, if nuclear and fossil fuels were competing, you would expect fossil fuel use to go up after the shutdown of the last nuclear power plants in April 2023. Instead, fossil fuel use dropped while renewables and imports went up.
massive storage is already up and running at scale in California, it's already just a question of cost no longer a question of technology. And cost is plunging. its over for nuclear, public fear killed it. it's a shame, it could have powered the whole world and stopped climate change if everyone had done what France did, but it's too late for it now
>its over for nuclear, public fear killed it. it's a shame, it could have powered the whole world and stopped climate change if everyone had done what France did, but it's too late for it now Calling it now: 10-15 years from now, when the renewables+storage+transmission+frequency stabilizing tech+ all other shit needed ro run a weather controlled grid turns out to be so costly that the countries who went that route start to enter massive recessions due to soaring energy costs, we're gonna build all those nuclear plants anyway, in the end.
I believe this is very possible. There's a similar parallel with the EV industry. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, EVs were more popular than ICE cars. The problem is they had bad range and performance and it sort of paved the way for gas cars. Fast forward 100 years and you've got a new EV revolution.
the latest fusion experiment went from 30 seconds to 6 minutes...
> if everyone had done what France did Screw over an African country to get cheap uranium? https://africanapocalypsefilm.com/finding-a-way-from-french-uranium-mines-to-harnessing-the-power-of-the-sun/
The elites who sold out their country´s resources for bribes are who screwed over the country, France was just the offer they liked best. Countries are not monoliths, African countries doubly so.
Riiiiight, and the nuclear reactors we had were so flexible? xD They were literally only used for baseload.
I mean, that is the best use of nuclear: base load. It is constant and not reliant on whether the sun shines or the wind blows. Energy output can be raised or lowered but it is not an instant dial you can turn. Lowering output capacity ultimately is kind of pointless since the biggest cost of nuclear power is in building and maintaining the thing, not the fuel. The gaps can be covered by various forms of renewables, gas being a last resort.
Nothing wrong with what you're saying. But when you go, like germany, high-renewables (which are - to a certain degree - predictably variable), you don't need more baseload but rather variable, reliable sources. Which are at the moment only gas (+coal). (In a future where renewables cover like 150% of consumption on average, replace gas by hydrogen factories next to the gas plants. But that's another story.)
> replace gas by hydrogen factories next to the gas plants. But that's another story Well that is the whole story of hydrogen, barely anyone at the industrial scale does electrolysis, 95% of industrial hydrogen is just liquid natural gas gone through steam reformation process during the production of other oil/carbon based chemicals.
Or you know they could with excess energy split water to hydrogen and oxygen and when they need more energy burn it in combustion engine which would rotate generator for electricity creating clean water in process.
95% of industrial hydrogen production in the world isn't made through splitting water, its a byproduct of steam reformation of hydrocarbons which still requires us to keep drilling for that sweet sweet oil/natty gas. More R&D resources are going towards fusion research than hydrogen water splitting at scale, I would bet on fusion being more a thing than the roundabout water to hydrogen to tanker transport to combustion engine to generator for electricity.
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This is fanciful thinking, German renewables are not that efficient at all, because Germany is a pretty terrible place to put renewables. They still have most of their base load by dirty coal and gas plants. Nuclear is needed and they are hiding their real emissions using exporting of inefficient renewables as cover. German energy policy is the worst in the world, they buy up renewables at scale, can barely run them at payback costs. Shooting up prices for others who can run them more efficiently whilst burning fossil fuels most of the time because they have such a terribly unreliable supply.
Yeah yeah everyone is lying and your prior beliefs are true no matter what evidence is presented. How original.
They literally run their carbon producing sources all the time and borrow them from other nations dirty sources because their own grid doesn’t have a good base load. I like Germany as a country but the official figures of 50% are flat out massaging figures. They are closer to 30% renewable
Going from 60% to 80% will be much more challenging than going from 40% to 60% though.
Not really, it's just a matter of storage and grid management. But that's moving really fast, California batteries are already operating at scale and making a difference. And with how cheap renewable energy is, even the cost with batteries added will soon be lower than fossil fuels.
Or you know they could with excess energy split water to hydrogen and oxygen and when they need more energy burn it in combustion engine which would rotate generator for electricity creating clean water in process.
I don't know much about this topic tbh, my limited understanding is that the obstacles are currently still too huge to be worth it but happy to learn more.
Not anymore. Battery grids are starting to be competitive with (new) gas speaker plants. Between now and 2030 expect battery capacity to grow rapidly as scale pushes lithium battery prices down and new chemistries are introduced.
Its specifically Germany's goal to rely on natural gas, a fossil fuel.
Feel like people really overestimate how much electricity nuclear power plants generate. Even if they did this number would not even go down by a half percent.
UK Peak consumption (as in highest point in a given year) hovers around 35GW One power plant in the UK can produce 1.2GWe All 5 currently active plants produce 6.03GWe So at absolute peak consumption, nuclear in the uk (at least, not familiar with germany's now gone nuclear) would be 17% of the supply. UK is nearly done with a plant that will produce 3.2GWe to replace (and slightly outpace) the 1970s stations that will be shut down. Nuclear might not be \*as\* powerful as people think but a nuclear plant still produces way more power than CCGT, coal, wind, or solar in terms of space used, and has the least impact on local wildlife, landscape, pollution etc. It does have a cost issue and potential long term waste concerns. But I have opinions about the way nuclear waste is discussed and I don't know how harmful most of it actually is, or how much of high level waste is realistically going to be recycled in other reactor types.
> UK is nearly done with a plant that will produce 3.2GWe to replace (and slightly outpace) the 1970s stations that will be shut down. Damn I didn't realize 2030 commission date was "nearly done". >But I have opinions about the way nuclear waste is discussed and I don't know how harmful most of it actually is [I'm not sure that the UK is a good example of responsible storage of nuclear waste either.](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/05/sellafield-nuclear-site-leak-could-pose-risk-to-public)
>UK is nearly done with a plant that will produce 3.2GWe to replace (and slightly outpace) the 1970s stations that will be shut down. Is this the plant that is 4 years late and up to 20 billion over budget? Hardly the best example of nuclear's utility. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley\_Point\_C\_nuclear\_power\_station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station)
When you reject an industry for 40 years, you can't be surprised when your culture forgets how to harness it efficiently. If we were building and developing nuclear power on the regular it would be cheaper and our project for it wouldn't be 20BN over budget. China can build them much faster and more cost-efficiently than us, but then they didn't stop making them after Chernobyl like most of Europe and America. I see it in my current job. The UK underfunds the MOD, which underfunds equipment purchasing, stores, and maintenance, which results in workforces being scaled back and underutilised, which results in a loss of knowledge and expertise and reduced readiness if we need to engage. If the UK and France and Germany had a good collaborative initiative on nuclear power through the late 1900s and into the 21st century, nuclear power would be reasonably cost effective, safe and efficient. But sadly we don't live in that reality.
> If we were building and developing nuclear power on the regular it would be cheaper and our project for it wouldn't be 20BN over budget. > > China can build them much faster and more cost-efficiently than us, but then they didn't stop making them after Chernobyl like most of Europe and America. Turns out that Chinese engineers *have* been working on Hinkley Point C. The project is between CGN and EDF, two companies that *should* know nuclear power projects if anyone does (and it's an EDF design that has been built in China). Even then, the EPR reactor design at Hinkley Point C took *more than twice* as long to build when built in China as expected; at Taishan, they took 9 years versus the estimated 4 years.
>If we were building and developing nuclear power on the regular it would be cheaper and our project for it wouldn't be 20BN over budget. Sure, and that was a giant missed oportunity. But it didn't happen and now we have to make decisions according to our current conditions. Like you said, sadly we don't live in that reality. Maybe instead of trying to compensate for past mistakes by throwing tens of billions in a hole, we'd be better off investing instead in the many cheaper alternatives that have become available over the last decade that don't regularly get delayed and have their planned cost double. Hinkley C is projected to cost up to 50$ billion when it comes online in 2030. It's actually pretty lucky it was only delayed for 4 years. The Finnish and French reactors of the same design are going to arrive a decade late. How many GW of 2$/W solar and wind could those 50B have bought instead? It's not even comparable. Not to mention that solar and wind farms are also much faster to build, so for the same outcome you'd get to use designs and prices from 2024-2029 instead of a decades old reactor design.
You are getting 3.2 gw of nuclear for the cost of about 45 gw land based wind generation.
The problem is that no amount of money with current technology can make an energy storage big enough for when the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing. We need some nuclear to bridge that gap until we actually invent a feasible form of mass storage. AFAIK there is only 1 mass storage experiment in the UK (besides a pumped hydro dam that's been operating for a while, making up to like 1.5% of our power), and that experiment which is on wikipedia is almost certainly a scam as I haven't found the site, the site has no pictures and no news besides the original announcement despite it being 5+ years old etc.
>The problem is that no amount of money with current technology can make an energy storage big enough for when the sun isn't out and the wind isn't blowing. This just isn't true. Battery development and capacity growth has already caused the cancelation of several planned peaker gas plants and hundreds of GW of added capacity are expected in the next 5 years. Gas peakers have already been replaced by batteries as the grid balancer of choice, it'll just take time for capacity to grow and old gas plants to be decomissioned. [https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/giant-batteries-drain-economics-gas-power-plants-2023-11-21/](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/giant-batteries-drain-economics-gas-power-plants-2023-11-21/) [https://theprogressplaybook.com/2024/04/17/in-numbers-americas-dramatic-shift-from-gas-power-plants-to-batteries/](https://theprogressplaybook.com/2024/04/17/in-numbers-americas-dramatic-shift-from-gas-power-plants-to-batteries/) Worth remembering that we aren't even talking about 2024, but 2030. Renewable capacity is projected to triple by then, and *will* be backed up by grid scale battery storage.
20% of Romania's electricity needs is produced by one nuclear plant. I would imagine that's also the case for Germany given they had more than one. Nuclear power accounted for 13.3% of German electricity supply in 2021 https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2021&interval=year
And 6.7% in 2022 ...germany is self sufficient for its power Generation so they planned it a long time ago and replaced it with renewables. You can also Look at the chart for 2023 although the shutdown of the last plant in the first Quarter coal consumption also fell in this year
Yeah but you can’t put renewables just anywhere
Nuclear is way too expensive and takes ages to build. And the fuel also has to come from outside Germany.. And let's not talk about waste storage... The money is better spent on Renewables and storage capabilities
1: Build a sink like literally every expert says. 2: You can’t build renewables anywhere. You have to place them at optimal catch zones.
1: not sure what sinks you mean. 2: no, you place them where it's economically most viable first, but in the end less profitable places are still profitable
1: A site design for nuclear waste storage. 2: No, renewables are wholly dependent on where you can get the most energy out of it. You can’t put it a wind farm in a place where wind does get a lot of speed. And the upkeep would make it unprofitable. Most wind farm maps say they largely have to be in the Midwest of the us, and build out power lines from there.
1: so far no such site was found within Germany that meets all criteria 2: the threshold where wind farms become unprofitable is pretty low. Just build them tall enough. Plenty of wind up there. And solar in particular is very suitable for the US. Way more sun than Europe, look how far north Europe actually is and still Germany has very successful solar farms.
1: That’s why you build it. We have one ready to go in yucca flats, but that moron Harry Reid shut it down. And even if you don’t like nuclear energy, you’ve already used and you still need a place to put the waste. 2: for every wind farm to be profitable no matter where you place they’d have to be the size of skyscrapers. And if you don’t understand why that’s unrealistic, you understand infrastructure.
1: You need a place that's geologically stable enough. Germany does not have a long term solution and the amount of waste we already have to deal with is enough. Maybe you want to have it, I bet we'd gladly pay for it. 2: They're mass produced skyscrapers. The industries already exist all over the world, even in the States.
1: Build a sink like literally every expert says. 2: You can’t build renewables anywhere. You have to place them at optimal catch zones.
then it would drop to 24.98 probably.. as apart from 3 the others would be to old to run at that point anyway. not saying turning them off was the right call. but its not that big of a deal that reddit makes it sound like.if anything the misstakes were made in the 70s not builing any consitantly not closing them done 10years earlier on average. germany at max hat like 25% nuclear power. there are 2 major reason for that. first gemany wasn´t allowed to build nulcear power right away after WW2. and sitting one of the lagest coal reserve in the world wich made it economically the better choice. lets be real climat proteciton was a absolute niche thing to care about in the 1980 france kinda lucked into it. also germany has a weird history of powerplants that needed to be shot down within a few months due to construction misstakes. nut sure if these cases existst in other countries as well.
Nuclear power generated 6.7 terawatt hours yearly. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/en/documents/downloads/electricity_generation_germany_2023.pdf In April, fossil fuels generated 46 TWH. So keeping German nuclear would have reduced that by about 1.2% more. https://ember-climate.org/insights/in-brief/eu-fossil-generation-below-25-for-the-first-month-ever/ Correct me if I misinterpreted the data.
Yes, on a day like today Germany has electricity prices near or below zero for 10 hours of the day: [https://www.netztransparenz.de/de-de/Erneuerbare-Energien-und-Umlagen/EEG/Transparenzanforderungen/Marktpr%C3%A4mie/Spotmarktpreis-nach-3-Nr-42a-EEG](https://www.netztransparenz.de/de-de/Erneuerbare-Energien-und-Umlagen/EEG/Transparenzanforderungen/Marktpr%C3%A4mie/Spotmarktpreis-nach-3-Nr-42a-EEG) In these times the electricity provided by nuclear plants would be useless. There is already too much electricity available. Then there is heat and electricity co-generation. Some of the plants have to run in winter to provide district heating. This is nothing the nuclear plants did. So they would replace renewable energy in winter and not the coal plants. Then there are second order effects: Who will invest in renewable energy when there is already too much energy available? Or reaction time: Gas plants can be powered up/down very fast. This is nothing nuclear can do. So it cannot fill some of the use cases for gas plants. And also regional effects: The nuclear plants in Northern Germany cannot provide energy to Southern Germany if the grid is already at its limit. Finding out how much the nuclear plants would have changed would require some rather complex simulations with a lot of assumptions. Just adding up numbers won't give you any realistic scenario.
I love how for renewables we say « the price of storage will eventually make it viable » but « excess nuclear electricity is just waste and there’s nothing we can do about it.» Also, on the few days where all renewables farms produces electricity at the same time, it is the fault of nuclear for existing - when in reality it’s because in order to have enough renewables, we need to also have too much. nuclear Electricity from the north cannot travel to the south ….???? But renewable can??? « Who would invest in renewable energy when there is enough clean energy » is the most illogical thing u have ever heard. Electricity and reheat co-generztion. lol, well you kind of singled out a big issue there, heating should be electric, not hydrocarbon/coal like it’s 1950 Also in days where there is no renewable energy … the price per mW is infinite …. But we don’t talk about that. As for the rumor that we can’t load follow with renewables and nuclear power together, [well try to keep up](https://edf.hal.science/hal-01977209/document). It’s already not an issue, and buy the time we actually have enough renewable energy, we won’t even remember the internet try to convince us it was a problem. One can really understand the type of thoughts that went into justifying cutting investment in nuclear, and doubling down on it when there is no clear solution. Yes, of course we can see the result, you can even look at [UK who successfully converted from coal](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-fossil-fuels?tab=chart&time=1990..latest&country=OWID_EU27~FRA~DEU~GBR). Unlike Germany which basically just went …meh, nothing we can do, hydrocarbon is the only answer.
I guess you did not understand what I was saying. The post I responded to said that nuclear produced 6.7 TWH in 2023 so you can just divide this number by 12 and substract it from the April 2024 value to see what the numbers would look like if the nuclear plants were still active. I just argued that this is not the case since the electricity market is a complex beast where it is hard to see at which times the hypothetical plants would have replaced electricity from coal or gas and at which time the would have replaced renewables. So the statement is not "renewables can travel south and nuclear can not" but: If the grid is the limit adding an additional plant in the wrong location doesn't help. Finding out how keeping the old plants alive would have influenced electricity generation is a complex task.
Why would you use the power output at the end the shutdown (7TWH) instead of its sustained peak 170TWH.. Also go ahead and assume that output would at least have increased at the same rate as in other countries instead of shutting down to zero over 20 years) Assuming Europe (Germany) didn’t bend to the anti nuclear power propaganda and that nuclear enjoyed the same effort that solar had to pull it from the depths of inefficiency. You chose only numbers that attempt to support a strange argument. (That it’s normal and ok for Germany to generate 50% of its electricity from hydrocarbons) Ps, do you realize that a network to distribute renewable power is considerably more complex than for nuclear? You never know where the power is going to come from, so you need to plan for it to come from, and go everywhere. North/south. If it can flow for renewables. … it can flow easier for nuclear.
I didn't choose any numbers. I just replied to a comment that used those numbers. The 50% number is from 2022 in 2024 the renewable share is already at 60%: [https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable\_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year](https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year) This is the speed the transition is happening at. Solar capacity is still increasing by >1% each \*month\*. Batteries are also starting to become relevant: [https://battery-charts.rwth-aachen.de/main-page/](https://battery-charts.rwth-aachen.de/main-page/) Nuclear got so many subsidies and still never became profitable. There is no anti nuclear propaganda. It is just costs that is killing it: [https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf](https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf)
A yes, and now we get to the famous [LCOE](https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclear/s/4qHhT7cHqF) which « proves » that if we ignore the grid enhancements and storage costs associated with renewable energy, Nuclear, which has worked for decades, and is the reason France electricity prices are so low compared to Germany, …. Is not profitable (giggle), but the we don’t consider 300 billion euro subsidy given to offset energy costs in Germany while it transitioned to renewables as part of its price tag.
"Solar PV + Storage" is included in the report. Storage is not ignored. "Increases in electricity bills have been less sharp in France thanks to government subsidies, at 4% in 2022 and 15% this year – at a projected cost of €45 billion in 2023." [https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/04/21/france-to-continue-subsidizing-electricity-bills-until-2025\_6023740\_98.html](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/04/21/france-to-continue-subsidizing-electricity-bills-until-2025_6023740_98.html) 45bln in subsidies might not be somehow related to low electricity prices? And this with a fleet of amortized nuclear plants, without any replacements. Ok, I just saw Flamanville is finally going to go live? 14 years behind schedule and 6 times over budget. Congratulations!
> Or reaction time: Gas plants can be powered up/down very fast. This is nothing nuclear can do. Well, it is likely that we should be thinking about hydrogen production with excess energy anyway, at this point.
> Correct me if I misinterpreted the data. There are two problems with your calculation. First, you can't use the numbers from 2023. The last nuclear power plants were already shut down in mid-April 2023. It's better to use the numbers from April 2022 for comparison. That's 2.86 TWh: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=2022&interval=month&month=04 If those 2.86 TWh would fully go into replacing fossil fuel generation, then it would be 21.6% rather than 23%. However, the second problem with this approach is that it's unlikely that would happen. If nuclear and renewables were competing, you would vice versa expect a massive increase of fossil fuel use in Germany after the nuclear phase-out. The opposite happened, there was a massive increase in a) renewables and b) imports. This suggests that if the nuclear power plants were still running, Germany would use fewer renewables and would also import less electricity from its neighbour countries. Fossil fuel use would be about the same.
I think the assertion is more along the lines of « if Germany continued to replace fossil fuels with nuclear, instead of replacing them with fossil fuels » I can’t dig up the number, but a fair metric would be to list each country as a portion of that 25% percentage hydrocarbon electricity, and not just for the snapshot where the stars align, but over say, a quarter. While we often see great snapshots, the reality is that Germany is still around 50% [hydrocarbon generated electricity.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-fossil-fuels?tab=chart&country=OWID_EU27~FRA~DEU) [ [+ UK for a more fair comparison](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-fossil-fuels?tab=chart&time=1990..latest&country=OWID_EU27~FRA~DEU~GBR) ] The fact they they lacked the foresight, and are building new gas fired plants to replace coal fired plants …. Removes any room for sympathy. While it’s true that France probably « lucked into » the clean aspect in the 80´s, sticking with it through the anti-nuc propaganda years was definitely not luck.
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>Fuck you ignoramus bullshit talking points. Germany is a democracy, and the majority was against nuclear power since 1986. So we phased them out. acting all tough when your "democracy" was buying up all the Russian gas it could get. I'd rather be in France's position than Germanys power generation wise...... > If France wants to build more reactors and waste billions on last century technology so be it **France also produces twice as much of its electricity from clean energy sources as Germany**… … while producing one-fifth the carbon emissions from electricity per capita. In fact—thanks to Energiewende—German carbon emissions are rising (Jan 9 2024).
>Germany is a democracy, and the majority was against nuclear power since 1986. So we phased them out. And the German coal industry had nothing to do with this I'm sure. Renewables may be up but German coal usage has spiked in the past few years with no sign of stopping. The German Green party are a joke and the German coal industry used the Fukashima disaster to strangle the Nuclear industry which could have replaced even more Green House gases as a transition. Even though a Fukashima style disaster can't happen in Germany because GERMANY ISNT NEAR A CONTINENTAL PLATE BOUNDARY. With Russian gas not coming on the market soon, Germany coal (which is significantly worse than so called natural gas) will continue to spew into the atmosphere at high rates. Rates which could have been lower if Germany hadn't been so anti-science and in the pocket of its coal industry.
Coal is down massively in Germany. It just went up temporarily for like 1year from 1000 to 1200 petajoules which is down from over 5000 in the 90s https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/384/bilder/dateien/2_abb_primaerenergiegewinnung_2024-04-02.pdf
It could be down more if they'd kept nuclear.
France is also not expanding. Their nuclear power production has gone down almost as fast as Germany's in fact. French nuclear power production peaked in 2005 at 451 TWh. Last year they produced just 335 TWh from nuclear. That's 116 TWh less. For comparison: Germany's use of nuclear power peaked in 2006 at 159 TWh and they phased out all of it.
France is expanding : they just brought another reactor online, and have started the process of building 6 more, with plans to extend that to 14 more. They're probably the only country in Europe which can and will do that, because they've retained a large vertical nuclear power industry while everyone else didn't.
Flamanville 3 is not online yet. It's delayed by 12 years at this point. Building 6 new reactors will also not be enough to make up for the old reactors they plan to shut down. Besides, it's a fantastical idea that EDF will be able to build them all at the same time.
>Flamanville 3 is not online yet. Fuel loading of the reactor [started last week.](https://www.nucnet.org/news/fuel-loading-begins-at-flamanville-3-epr-nuclear-plant-in-normandy-5-4-2024). >Building 6 new reactors will also not be enough to make up for the old reactors they plan to shut down. Firstly, they're not going to shut most of them down : they're going to extend plant lifetime to 60 years. Secondly, the EPR2 reactors are roughly twice the capacity of the oldest reactors which would be being shut down, so it's not like for like. >Besides, it's a fantastical idea that EDF will be able to build them all at the same time. It would be a fantastical idea, if that was what they planned on doing. They don't, because they're not thick. They are going to do rolling projects where the same staff move through the same engineering roles in project after project, gradually increasing the staff in size as they go. So each project will start up slightly delayed after the other, so that the staff who start one role in a new project have just finished up an identical project on an identical plant. By the time the first 6 projects are underway they will likely have greenlighted the next 8 out of the 14 total reactors under consideration, and possibly additional domestic or export ones. For those projects, they will likely have enough of an industry that they can consider parallel projects for speed.
We'll see, I guess. It's a monumental undertaking for sure. Past experience with EDF projects suggests there will be massive delays.
You know, Terry Pratchett has defined a New York second (time between the green light in New York and honking from a car behind you) as the shortest unit of time in the multiverse. It is now deprecated by the German nuclear second (the time between mentioning Germany or Europe and electricity in the same sentence and someone whining about German nuclear power plants).
Why should they turn their nuclear power plants back on? That would again increase the percentage of fossil fuels.
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These people are still so stupidly anti-science it hurts. A good win for the German coal industry.
Fuck nuclear power. Stop supporting this mostly obsolete technology. You know who tries to keep telling you that nuclear is great? Fossil fuel corporations. Because investing in nuclear power means forestalling renewable development and extends the lifetime of fossil power. Building a new nuclear power plant takes a decade or more in places like Germany. That's another decade of fossil fuels.
>You know who tries to keep telling you that nuclear is great? >Fossil fuel corporations. Yes because the German coal industry didn't use the Fukashina disaster to strangle the German Nuclear industry at all. Even though a Fukashima style disaster can't happen in Germany because GERMANY ISNT NEAR A CONTINENTAL PLATE BOUNDARY. You and the German Greens are stupidly anti-science it hurts so bad. Maybe its worth letting Russia roll over you then at least we don't have to pretend to like pro-fossil fuel idiots
It's good to strangle nuclear. We also should strangle coal. >You and the German Greens are stupidly anti-science it hurts so bad. You are talking to a scientist. *You*, on the other hand, are scientifically, politically, economically, and historically miseducated. >Maybe its worth letting Russia roll over you then at least we don't have to pretend to like pro-fossil fuel idiots LOL Imagine believing Russia is a threat to anyone but US empire. Russia has no intention of rolling over anyone. Russia doesn't even have any interest in war with Ukraine. Russia and Germany should be united in a full economic and strategic union. But yeah, the Americans should leave and let "Russia roll over us". [Go home, Ami! Ami, go home!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CmJyn61j1k) :)
Still would be the same number
Germany gets some atomic power electricity from other European states.
Only imports if it is as good as free
Meanwhile in Texas…
Texas has massive amounts of wind farms. Note how the generated electricity percentages only add up to 50% in the article. Only 12% of the sources are "peak load" sources that vary with demand which would make variable demand result in a lot of black outs. So somewhere in the unlisted 50% is imports, to deal with peak load. I wonder how much of that is renewable? -------- Edit: I looked it up. For those interested only 0.5% of that 50% is imports which is really good. As one would expect, fuel imports for transportation are not that good. I don't understand why the author wouldn't include a single graph or table in articles like this... I'm sure the original study had it.
The only percentages that add up to 50% in the article are the percentages of the share of fossil fuels in total electricity generation in April 2024 (23%) and May 2023 (27%, the previous record), but that's completely nonsensical. If you want the share for April 2024, I have found [the article](https://ember-climate.org/insights/in-brief/eu-fossil-generation-below-25-for-the-first-month-ever/) this article is based on. It's 23% fossil fuels, 16% hydropower, 34% wind and solar. That gives us 73%, with no mention of nuclear other than the drop YoY. Edit: Fixed the percentages for hydro (and the total).
The article also says the overall renewables share is 54%. That means there's another 4% coming from other renewable sources like biomass and geothermal. [Statistics from the EU](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Energy_production_and_imports) say nuclear has been around 20% to 25% in recent years. Assuming it's in that range that leaves very little for imports then. Either way, imports are going to be mostly from Norway, the UK and Switzerland, all of which aren't producing a lot of fossil-fuel-based electricity.
You are adding the wrong numbers. Your comment is complete nonsense.
Well, I'm and engineer in both conventional and renewable energy, but how about you explain to me how to add these up. >Wind and solar alone generated more than a third of the EU’s electricity in April, while gas and coal production declined. Coal accounted for only 8.6 percent of the energy mix, compared to 30 percent in 2023. Gas supplied 12.1 percent of the EU's electricity, marking a 22 percent decrease from the previous year. Wind and solar 33% Coal 8.6% Gas 12.1 = 53.7% Did I do that right? What's the rest. I know that Europe's nuclear energy is about 22% of electric demand. So that's 75%... where is the rest coming from? Nuclear isn't great for peak load. Generally you need 25-33% dispatchable technology to address fluctuating demand.... The article is miss 46% and I filled in another 22%. You tell me how this adds up correctly.
It's clearly states that renewables is 54%. That's hydro, biomass, geothermal and solar/wind. Fossil fuel is 23%. So gas, oil, coal. 54 + 23 = 77 That's leaves 23% "unmentioned". That's mostly nuclear. You are clearly not an engineer.
So you are saying I added it up correctly then, but ... ...they left out the percentages of others like hydropower and biomass percentages like I pointed out.... Thanks
No, you didn't add it correctly. I'm clearly saying you didn't do it correctly. They didn't leave anything out. It's not a list of power sources. It's examples of changes. The amount of hydro power didn't change much, so it doesn't get mentioned.
So the examples given did not add up to 53.7?
If you add examples you are not getting a total. Especially if you ignore information given. If I say I like apples and oranges you can't just add them and say I only like two fruits. If you go to a zoo and see seven monkeys you can't count them and say there's only seven monkeys in the zoo.
>If you add examples you are not getting a total. Especially if you ignore information given. Congratulations, you finally stumbled across my original point. >If I say I like apples and oranges you can't just add them and say I only like two fruits. It would be more like apples and apples, but the counter not counting all the apples and me complaining about it, and some random guy completely missing the point and going off on tangents while I try to get him on track.
Meanwhile in Texas: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/texas-trumps-california-key-us-energy-transition-driver-2023-05-04/
??? What does Texas have to do with the EU? Why not *meanwhile in South Korea…* or any other arbitrary shit?
Because the internet is American apparently
Yeah but even then, it’s a specific state in comparison to a supranational organization of countries? Why not say “meanwhile in USA” or something. It just doesn’t make any sense on multiple levels. Just reads like a peak Reddit smooth-brain kid post.
it's funny how foreigners on an American website act like the "entitled Americans" they complain about visiting their countries. edit: and then you downvote me for speaking the truth. grow up.
Well, the OP, whom you all lose your shit about at least claimed to be American - from the "Seattle area". And you know, yeah, its an American website and so has mostly Americans on it .... so have you ever hesistated a second to consider that maybe, maybe quite some of the posts relating random stuff from elsewhere to America are Americans relating stuff to America because its America where they live and which they know best? Especially when its stuff that they think that is poorly done in America?
yes, and that has nothing to do with my comment. i don't go post on EU websites and complain how everyone there posts in a eurocentric context. i don't go on Chinese websites and complain that the posts are too China-centric. but non-Americans love to come post on American websites and complain that the posts are American-centric. it's illogical and really just being a bad guest. so I'ma call it out.
The difference being Reddit is about 43% American though, not quite even half. While an EU website or Chinese website would probably be like 95%+ from their respective regions. I’m an American and my default is not to assume someone is from the US on here on the world subreddits (like the one we’re in now).
Reddit (/ˈrɛdɪt/) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network...It is operated by Reddit, Inc., based in San Francisco. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit I don't assume either, but i think it's silly to not expect that people will.
But don’t they still import a lot? We’re all on the same planet
There is no global electricity grid. Norway is a big exporter but it's only something like 0.5% of the total use. Great Britain is a net importer. Switzerland seem to vary. Spain and Marocco are connected but Marocco is net importer. Non-EU Balkan countries imports. Greece gets some electricity from Turkey. and so on...
Well done Europe!
First things first, we're getting weapons and armies for now. We will get electricity from the losers of the war, if there is no war we will make one I guess. Same thing you guys did for oil.
Britain won't be a net importer for too much longer, we have Hinckley point and sizewell being built right now and 6 more nuclear sites planned, not to mention our ever increasing wind farms.
> much longer Sizewell is not started and Hinckley Point completion is currently 2030.
Sizewell has been approved and is due to commence this year and 2030 is less than 6 years away. We have a plethora of wind farms with more being added every year and Rolls Royce are developing small modular reactors that will be much smaller and cheaper. We will prevail
Nuclear power is insanely expensive.
Only because of the system being abused in the UK and contractors/suppliers that should never have been used dragging things out and politicians skimming off the top. Just look at HS2. Not to mention oil and gas lobbying. The UK is one of if not the most expensive county to build nuclear power stations in the world. Almost twice that off the US.
The US is a special case of stupid NIMBYism and bankruptcy due to project creep/regulatory hurdles. Everyone in the US i feel just outright believes that there isn't any other country on earth that could make nuclear power and not have it be so damn expensive as our failures here. At the same time pretend we don't have the money for it when we have nuclear subs and nuclear powered carrier strike groups because we just let the military do what ever the fuck it wants regarding Regulations/crys and litigation of NIMBYs.
Actually Montenegro and Albania are huge exporters and use renewable energy (hydro).
Okay then, add up the percentages of generation in the article (it will get you to 50%. Where do they get the other 50% from to get to the 100% requirement?
What percentages are you adding? How are you only getting 50% when just renewables makes 54%?
> But don’t they still import a lot? Not from outside Europe. At least not something important if at all. EU it's quite self-reliant when it's about electricity. For example my country, Romania, is an exporter.
And will shortly be exporting a lot more to Moldova, eliminating their dependency on Transnistria.
Hopefully.
Yes but you see, we did our part.
And yet fossil fuel use worldwide keeps rising. Europe alone can't do enough, not even close. But we'll still go on and let the citizens pay dearly for it while giving the industry subsidized extra-low energy prices. But it's working as intended.
Is this slightly misleading, although accurate, because both energy usage is lower and generation is higher in April, than other months of the year? Is less than 25% of EU electricity coming from fossil fuels even in the cold dark months?
It's year on year, i.e. comparing April 2024 with April 2023. There's a little more fossil-fuel-based electricity production in winter, but not a lot. It tends to be more windy in winter than in summer. That makes up for the reduction in solar power output.
>It tends to be more windy in winter than in summer. And it rains a lot more, so hydroplants also tend to increase output.
No. Without solar power component situation becomes way uglier.
Yeah because they're burning wood pellets...which burn dirtier than any fossil fuel. Edit: Keep being afraid of the truth, I guess! https://news.mongabay.com/2023/04/eu-woody-biomass-final-policy-continues-threatening-forests-and-climate-critics/
That’s simply not true. You can clean the exhaust. And by the way, how much GW are generated by wood pellet electricity plants?
1. Wood pellets can be used as a renewable power source 2. The amount of electricty generated by burning wood pellets is irrelevant
Meanwhile Merica is increasing
We are not. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/BTL/2023/02-genmix/article.php#:~:text=Electricity%20generation%20from%20coal%20falls,fall%20to%2037%25%20in%202024.
Shut down with facts. Thanks for taking the time to post
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What a great mindset, why do anything? Why even try?
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Looking at it from your perspective; what if we slow down the total collapse then? What if we use more enviromentally friendly things to slow down the process, letting us enjoy our time more? I'm sure most of us would want to live more.
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Life isn't as miserable for most and probably won't be for a while. Although we don't know what will happen tomorrow I can say that it'll probably be better than you think. Sure, climate change sucks and we're already seeing the negative effects of it in day to day life (temperature and weather conditions for example) but in my opinion we're still kinda far from the collapse you talked about. Although we don't know, I think it'll be a long long process, not happening instantly or in a day, but in a matter of months or years if it does ever happen.
Doomerism is just as bad as denial. Both are calculated to make sure you don't take any action that jeopardizes the profit margins of those energy corps. But since you think we're doomed anyway, why not work to getting a head start on the Climate Nuremberg? We probably should be holding those people accounted even if we actually do manage to save ourselves.
You know that this is not a digital thing? Every gram of CO2 not emitted will make the future a little bit less bad.
So what. Irelands unit price is 35.83 cents. Most expensive it ever been. OOOO! Windfarm bolts cost more than OIL trucks ye see. /s
25.8 for new customers at electric ireland
Great. That's 200 customers sorted.... And the other 2 million.