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Angst mounts over Germany’s green transition
(www.economist.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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I can’t get over Germany closing its existing nuclear power plants. The costly job of construction was done! But Fukushima panic struck and they never stepped down from that decision. And now they are all shocked pikachu face that they can’t make the climate goals…
You seem a bit uninformed on the German energy sector. First off: The running power plants were quite old and it was never planned to use them this long. Now, the energy sector is on line with the climate goals for this year. There is a small gap in the forecasts to 2035, but hopefully this will be cleared up with the falling price of renewables in the following years. Even now more renewables are built in Germany than were originally planned in the ambitious energy transformation plan, which already included the rising demand due to electric cars and heat pumps.
The sectors were Germany fails their climate goals horribly are the transportation and the building sector. This would have happened with or without nuclear power plants.
So, basically, the rollout of heat pumps and electric cars (I know it's more complicated than that, but those are the main factors that are missing). There is one thing that countries with a higher market penetration of those have: Cheap electricity. And I can tell you one thing: Germany did not have exceptionally high consumer electricity prices in the past decades due to nuclear power plants. It was because we heavily subsidized renewable energies that were still expensive as hell and put the price tag almost exclusively on consumer electricity prices (this was Merkel, of course), also we tax electricity in an effort to improve efficiency.
Technologies that rely on electricity, such as heat pumps and electric cars, would have a much easier time to gain market share if electricity was actually cheap. That is the main problem I have with the debate about this in Germany. All of our legislation still treats electricity as if it was produced exclusively with fossil fuels, which actually hampers all efforts to replace fossil fuels with electric solutions. Forcing people to buy those instead of creating circumstances that makes them want to buy them is not a good idea. It creates exactly the kind of opposition we are seeing now.
To get back to the original point: Having nuclear plants with negligible marginal costs run for longer could definitely have helped those sectors, because it would have lowered the price of electricity. Especially so if the CO2 budget saved by that had been used to stretch the early rollout of renewables that was extremely expensive. 50 cents/kWh and more for solar in the 2000s, still 20-30 cents/kWh in 2011 when solar peaked. Thankfully wind was a lot cheaper, but still way above the marginal costs of nuclear.
Unfortunately we cannot go back to the past, so this whole debate is kind of useless, but the German nuclear exit was definitely a mistake with regards to climate protection, and the rollout of renewables was done in a horribly inefficient and unnecessarily expensive way that still hurts us today (although it is hidden in taxes now thanks to Habeck's decision to move the EEG costs to the federal budget). And it was done this way mostly because of the nuclear exit. Which, apart from less anxiety about nuclear power plants, does not provide a lot of benefits. We still have to deal with our nuclear waste, we still had to pay fully for the construction of the reactors, all the necessary research and deconstructing them.
In essence, we wasted years of a significant amount of low-carbon electricity that was already >90% paid for and replaced it with extremely expensive not yet ready for market (in the 2000s and early 2010s, which we are still paying for now) renewables.
There were several studies done after the shutdown of the nuclear power plants, that showed, that the electricity prices did not increase. We will see what winter brings in that regard. If you have to buy a new heating system for your house now, the chance is high, that a heat pump will be cheaper. Improving the isolation of your house is always cost efficient. The whole uproar about this was synthetic, newly constructed houses install to over 50% heat pumps and only 10% gas. Electric cars would be adapted more, if companies would sell small, cheap EVs as well. France is a good example to compare Germany too, because they have a heavily subsidized electricity price. They do not have a significantly higher proportion of EVs. Finnland has a comparable electricity price, but a much higher proportion of installed heat pumps.
I agree with your second point though, phasing out of fossils before nuclear would have been a better decision. However, that's not what most of the pro nuclear faction under these posts argue. The final shutdown was unavoidable anyway, because we were out of fuel rods.
Eh, it depends a lot on what exactly they analyzed. Throwing away electricity you basically already paid for is gonna cost you, there is no way that can be circumvented. It is not like we have so much wind and solar energy in the mix that nuclear could not have replaced more expensive gas, coal, oil, biomass, whatever.
Household electricity prices in Finland were a lot cheaper than in Germany up until the gas crisis, which is unrelated to my point about nuclear. Here is an example from 2020:
France is a bit weird, I think they actually heat directly with electricity a lot. I guess that's a case where electricity is TOO cheap so people use it in stupid ways. :) Too much of a good thing can turn bad as well, I guess. Would not have happened in Germany even with extending nuclear, though. The thing is, heat pumps in France would not change much about their emissions. Heating (mostly) with nuclear electricity does not emit more than heating with heat pumps.
This does not mean extending nuclear could not have helped (assuming it would have helped to lower prices, which I still assume here). Maybe people would be more eager to replace their gas heaters with heat pumps if electricity prices had not been going up all the time (a lot more than in basically all other EU countries) in the past 20 years, what do you think? New houses are a special case anyway, since you basically already have to design them in a way that makes heat pumps the better option.
Germany does do fairly well in electric cars and heat pumps have a massive other issue as well and that is a much cheaper gas price. Until a few years ago electricity production with fossil fuels had to use the emission trading system, but gas did not have any sort of cost attached to that at all. Even today we are talking 81€/t emission cost for electricity and 30€/ for gas. So a massive advantage. More recently we say the German government cut VAT for gas to 7%, whereas electricity remained at 19%. Keep in mind in 2022 89% of Germanys electricity did not come from natural gas, so moving households away from gas heating, should have been an easy win in a gas crisis.
As for the EEG it is paid for from ETS-1 EU wide emissions trading scheme money and not from tax money. So honestly a pretty good solution. It should also fall relativly quickly by 2032, when the 20 year subsidy period runs out.
Yes, all of that is also true, but it does not negate the points I made. Yes, gas was (and ironically still is) too cheap compared to electricity, but that does not change that at least using all of our nuclear power plants until their 40 year end of life (and it can be argued that they could have been used beyond that, but that is open to debate, of course) would also have helped to lower electricity prices and therefore benefit adoption. Ideally, both should have been done. More expensive gas AND cheaper electricity.
The operators would not pay the money to maintain the plants after 40 years. Nuclear is mostly baseload. I know that is can be throtteled, but that does not decrease the cost of the plant at all and is only necessary for grid stability. So the most comparable electricity form is lignite. There is still a lot of it in the mix, but we are talking about some massive declines compared to last year already. This and the last quarter were or are among the worst ever for lignite. If this continues, lignite is basicly dead in five years. It could be dead today if nuclear would be allowed to operate however.
The big issue in this is Rosatom. Right now they enrich a lot of uranium especially for the US. If that stops for some reason, the Western price for nuclear fuel would skyrocket.
There is no need to throttle nuclear, it is already low carbon and does not need to be replaced by renewable energy quickly, unlike ALL fossil fuel energy sources. That is the main problem I have with German Greens and climate activists, they act like nuclear and renewables cannot work together in a grid for no reason. In a scenario where there actually is too much electricity in the grid, throttling coal, gas, oil, hell, even biomass would be preferable before throttling nuclear. If that cannot happen, you can still try to export the excess electricity, which usually should not pose a problem, because both existing nuclear and subsidized renewables have a margin cost of basically zero. And if that does not work, finding ways to use excess renewable electricity (power to heat, power to gas, batteries, whatever else you can think of) is STILL preferable to throttling nuclear.
TBH I do not have enough insight into the uranium market to comment much on that, but even if true: The same situation already happened to renewables and their inherent (no, we do not have storage or H2 plants yet) gas backup plants. The need to diversify your energy sources unfortunately seems to be a lesson that the EU needs to learn the hard way. And fuel costs are such a small part of nuclear costs that even skyrocketing uranium prices would not change a lot.
You're basically seeing my point here.
In any case, thank you for your constructive comments! We might not totally agree, but I enjoy debating and you made some good points. Since not much can be changed about the German nuclear exit anymore (maybe we can still save 6 plants, but highly unlikely), this is all the effort I will expend on this topic. I just hope German climate activists (and our government ffs) will stop to block nuclear on the EU level, because I really am of the opinion that it can contribute to climate change mitigation. In ADDITION to renewables, not instead of. We need all the low carbon energy sources we can get, we have to replace the energy system of the whole fucking globe!
The issue is we actually are sometime shutting down renewables plants, due to electricity overproduction. That is usually on weekends with great production capacity, so rarer on not much production is lost, but with nuclear we would be at that border on weekdays as well. So in five years, you propably end up shutting down something on a regular bases.
As for renewables on EU level that is France really needing a lot of low carbon electricity today, due to its aging fleet.
Do you really think France is in a worse position than Germany? Their electricity sector is almost carbon free, their CO2 emissions/capita are a lot lower than Germany's and they did not build a lot of renewables so far. So, even in the worst case of having to replace all nuclear plants, they have to replace almost carbon-free electricity, using the most suitable locations for renewables in their country, since those are all still available, using current pretty low prices for renewables.
Meanwhile Germany did not even get rid of coal yet, about 50% of its electricity is still provided by fossil fuels (and a significant share of fucking coal, still), put inefficient old renewable technology in the best available spots for outlandish prices in the 2000s/2010s and now has to wait until the end of the lifespan of those old installations to put modern, cheap, efficient renewables there. If even possible, repowering old wind installations is faced with a backlash often enough.
You can look at this any way you want, the way the German Energiewende was implemented was terrible. You could argue that it helped to kickstart solar and wind, which it definitely did, but I do not think it was necessary to the extent it happened. Prices for wind and solar were already on a downward trend even way before 2000.
I don't even put the blame fully on the Greens, who loved the goal of 100% renewables as quickly as possible and getting rid of nuclear so much they never stopped to ask about the price tag. Coal-loving SPD and conservative CDU messing up from 2005 to 2021 played a huge role as well. Really the only good thing the CDU ever did about climate policies in that timeframe was trying to extend nuclear, if you ask me. Unfortunately they botched even that.
France has to 48 npps hitting 40 years this decade or well they already have and has a single plant under construction with massive cost overruns and delays. At times half their npps were not producing power due to maintanence issues. So they had to ask other countries to turn on recently turned off coal power plants, to make up for their nuclear power plant issues. That might return this winter, as French electricity demand peaks in winter. I hope it does not happen, but France was very close to some massive blackouts last winter.
Also 40% fossil fuels and not 50% for Germany.
I am aware. There are no plans to shut all of them down anytime soon, though.
2022 was at 48.5% even with nuclear still running. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&source=total&interval=year&year=2022
2023 is at 46.2% so far, and I doubt it will get better during autumn and winter. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&source=total&interval=year&year=2023
Edit: Well, Lemmy is botching the links, so here are the graphs directly, I guess:
2022:
2023:
The ones that continued running after 2011 weren't that old and also quite safe. Keeping them running until we phased out coal wouldn't have been much of an issue and it would definitely have helped. Of course it wouldn't been a deciding factor, but given that the yearly death toll from German coal plants may very match the total of the Chernobyl disaster it clearly was the wrong priority.
Edit: The issues with building and transportation are linked to the cost of electricity. So nuclear might have helped there a bit as well. But for the most part the issue with pricing is about making the grid viable for renewables and running natural gas plants as to stabilize the grid. That would have been necessary either way.
When we go back 30 years and phase out of coal before nuclear, I completely agree. But that's not the thing, that is discussed since last year.
Yep, right now it's a moot point. It just think it's helpful to acknowledge that it was a mistake in discussions like this. That prevents derailing the conversation.
Nuclear could actually help to alleviate the integration costs of renewables, though. For starters, you need less gas backup if your baseload (or at least some part of it) is covered by nuclear, and also less adaptations to the existing grid, because hey, it was designed, among others, for nuclear power plants.
It would be especially helpful in winter, because to get to a high share of renewables in winter (assuming we also use a high share of heat pumps) we will need long term storage from other seasons (or import hydrogen/ammonia), and I really doubt those options will become cheaper than nuclear, existing or even new, anytime soon. Green hydrogen is very expensive, and likely always will be in Central Europe, because transporting that stuff here from better suited locations is also expensive. So the less we need, the better.
Funnily enough, nuclear power plants could also provide district heating in addition to electricity, which I reckon would be massively helpful for the heating sector and getting through winter (and make the plants even more economical). The German Konvoi reactor (the design of the newest three plants we just shut down) is even designed to do that, but it was never put to use here (except in Greifswald, but that was an evil Soviet design Germany shut down in 1990).
If the plan were to rely on nuclear forever, sure. But that would necessitate new plants. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think it would have been a good idea to keep the plants from the 80s running until the 2050s. But the 2050s is when we could expect new plants to start operating if we started planning right now. If we wanted to build faster we'd to start doing what the CPC does with NIMBYs.
In other words: If we had decided to replace the nuclear plants in 2000 then we could continue to use nuclear. But right now nuclear is simply no time for that. Coal is supposed to be gone in less than fifteen years and all fossil's are supposed to be gone from the grid in about 20. With renewables and storage that is ambitious but doable. With new nuclear plants it's utterly unrealistic.
Yeah, Germany is mostly a lost cause for this topic, but some other countries in the EU still have considerable nuclear capacity (and also plans for new plants) and the German government is actively trying to derail that wherever it can, so I still think it's important to discuss this. Climate change mitigation does not stop in Germany and we are in the Europe community...
The Decission was made long before Fukushima on the 14. 06. 2000. Th plan was to push for renewables and gas (because Schröder and Putin are friends probably). Then the conservatives under Merkel slowed down the transition and extended the runningtime for reactors for 10 to 14 years. Then Fukushima hit and a state elacion was up where the antinuclear greens now polled high. So Merkel axed nuclear energy (as it was planed from the beginning) in hope to get some votes.
Continuning nuclear was never really an optin for the last 20 years. Germany should have build new nuclear powerplants in the last 20 years but now all closed reactors should be closed due to their age anyway and new ones would be to expencive and would take 10 years so the wouldn't help with the transition.
You could go even further back, the decision to not build any new reactors was made in 1986 by the conservatives. Not building new reactors means phasing them out in the long term.
While not written into law back then, 1986 was the actual year where the end of nuclear energy was decided in Germany.
It's so irritating so see people argue in favour of nuclear energy with arguments that are based on events from 2011 (Fukushima) or from last two years. Thinking it was a recent decision related to some recent events. The recent events even caused the opposite - the nuclear reactors ran longer. Due to French reactor issues and the war in Ukraine, Germany agreed to not shut them off last year.
Bold of you to drop the n-word like that. Brace yourself for the wrath of feddit.de.
how dare the Germans know more about German politics they witnessed for 20 years than some foreigners, who never read more than a few opinion pieces?
My comment might have had quite some negative reactions, but the discussions were good. And I got the wrath of feddit, as expected!