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.
cartrodus
joined 1 year ago
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.
Bin letztens hierüber gestolpert, fand ich auch eine gut aufbereitete Übersicht: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/erde-klima/kann-deutschland-seine-klimaziele-erreichen-wir-muessen-uns-ranhalten-18862480.html
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!