| To give an order of magnitude: Germany is producing 11 times more CO2 to produce the same amount of energy than France. But nothing is sure about what is going to happen in France. While Macron has announced some investments to develop small modular reactors, the path to get to carbon neutrality is still being discussed. RTE, the electricity transmission system operator released a massive report last week with 6 possible pathways to get to Carbon Neutrality (1). 3 of them explore doubling down on nuclear while 3 others consist in divesting from nuclear and relying even more on renewables. All scenarios are considered "realistic" despite each having some uncertainties. The projected costs of all scenarios is in the same order of magnitude (~10B euros). While the scenarios with nuclear seem slightly cheaper given median assumptions, it is a rounding error compared to the uncertainties regarding the cost of capital, the evolution of solar and wind prices, and the capability to deliver new nuclear plants). Maintaining the existing 60GW of nuclear power would certainly make things easier, but the report makes it clear that it is more of a political decision than a technical constraint. The report is clear about one thing though, renewables are not optional. There is no scenario where France gets to carbon neutrality in 2050 without massively scaling its production of renewable energy starting now. 1: https://assets.rte-france.com/prod/public/2021-10/Futurs-Ene... (see page 17 for the 6 scenarios) |
That sounds rather unbelievable. As per Statista, France produced 8.7 exajoules of energy in 2020; Germany produced 12.1 exajoules. Meanwhile France emitted 277 Mt of CO2 in 2020; Germany emitted 644 Mt in 2020. Unless I'm calculating something wrong, Germany's 53.2 Mt/EJ is worse than France's 31.8 Mt/EJ, but not by a factor of 11. More like by a factor of 1.7.