[Reedx]

Yet in practice let's take a look at France (nuclear) vs Germany (leading solar/wind):

"French electricity costs are just 59% of German electricity prices. As such, according to the prevailing economic wisdom, French electricity should be far more carbon intensive than German's. And yet the opposite is the case. France produces one-tenth the carbon pollution from electricity.

Why? Because France generates 72% of its electricity from nuclear, and just 6% from solar and wind."

France is cheaper and produces 2x more electricity from clean sources compared to Germany, where costs keep going up.

[ZeroGravitas]

And yet both France and Germany plan to move to mostly renewable. Which the French government thinks will save them money. Something that probably wouldn't have been possible without Germany's far sighted leadership on this issue.

I wonder how you could attribute the carbon saved by all the people choosing solar and wind as the current cheapest options to the people who put their money where their mouth was when that was just a projection.

[thrower123]

Right. Far sighted leadership of shutting down perfectly good, clean, nuclear power plants, and trying to replace them with intermittent renewables. That need to be backed up by more reliable alternatives, like strip mining old-growth forests for dirty brown coal to burn in steam generators, or importing electricity from France's nuke plants.

Just brilliant.

[ZeroGravitas]

You're thinking too small.

Climate change and deforestation are global problems, and Germany has helped fund a global solution.

Solar and wind are growing rapidly, they're currently passing the total yearly generation of nuclear but with 30% yearly growth will soon be adding the equivalent of the total nuclear fleet every year.

It is actually brilliant.

If Germany has sacrificed some of their own woodlands to make that happen then that's just more impressive.

[thrower123]

Avoiding nuclear power is just stupid, and shutting down functioning plants is cutting off your nose to spite your face. If you actually care about net effects on the environment, anyway.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

I don't know, but I suspect the French government isn't shutting down perfectly good, economical nuclear plants just to spite themselves.

I imagine that the nuclear plants are expensive to maintain since they're getting old. So rather than maintain them, they're probably going to just shut them down. And since new ones are so insanely expensive to build (again, don't know why), it's probably more feasible short term to invest in renewables.

But that's just my suspicion. I know nothing of French politics and very little about energy generation, but a little about finance, politics, and human psychology.

I'd love to know what it costs to maintain the nuclear plants they're shutting down, how much they're spending on renewables, and I'd love to look at it finacially. It's possible it doesn't make sense, and they just want the "green jobs". It's possible none of it makes sense! But I suspect there's some sense in this somewhere.

[thrower123]

As far as I know, the French are not shutting down nuclear plants.

The Germans did shut down operating plants, for political reasons, with the excuse that the capacity would be made up in solar and wind. When that fantasy failed to materialize, they had to fall back on burning more dirty coal.

Lose-lose.

[yorwba]

Most of the difference in prices is due to Germany having very high taxes: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

And those are still (non-household) consumer prices. That means they don't just reflect the cost of generation, but also what consumers are able and willing to pay. Unfortunately I didn't find any information on generation costs.

[imtringued]

The problem is that the cost of elecricity in germany is going down but industry is excempt from the EEG fee which is used to pay for the renewable energy plants. The end result is that households end up paying the electricity bills of industrial companies and so the retail price rises as the renewable share goes up.

[Beldin]

Germany (leading solar/wind):

Huh? Germany leading? Their fabled Energiewende was about moving away from nuclear. It had the unfortunate effect of moving to more coal plants to ensure base load is met.

One problem with wind power in Germany is that they don't have sufficient capacity for north-south power transmission. They've got wind in the north, they need it in the south... problem solved, you'd think. Alas! They need far, far more capacity over very long distances (1000km).

Anyway, I would not have called Germany leading in solar xor wind, but i didn't look into this. Perhaps the rest of the world is even worse? Seems unlikely though.

[imtringued]

Germany never added coal, the amount of power being generated by coal remained unchanged from 2010 to 2014. Of course one should asking oneself what the point of renewable energy is if it isn't being used to reduce dependence on fossil fuel but that is a different topic. The problem with the Energiewende is that the lazy government isn't deploying renewables fast enough. The renewable technologies that are available are more than sufficient until Germany hits 80% renewables.