[revertmean]

What, France? The poster child for the nuclear fans had to re-open coal plants?

Well, I hadn't heard that. That's interesting.

It makes sense to me because they were all clearly dependent on Russian gas, which is what caused the price spike in electricity across Europe. It still doesn't make sense to me that you think it's something to do with renewables.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Comparing France to Germany in this respect is totally misleading. France reignited some coal power plants but the impact of this is negligible compared to the consequences of Germany's atrocious anti-nuclear stance.

France generated less than 1% of electricity with coal in 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1263322/electrical-produ...

While in Germany it was over 30%: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

There is a qualitative difference between an occassional need for some coal in particularly adverse situations, and relying on it for almost a third of your electricity needs.

[looping__lui]

… they probably had to ramp up to help out their German neighbors when their electricity grid was close to collapose because of a non-sustainable idealogically driven strategy authored by the Green part being completely oblivious of today’s reality.

[haizhung]

No, they had to reopen them because their nuclear plants stopped working. Too hot, not enough water in the rivers due to climate change to cool down the nuclear plants - so they shut them off, and France was buying renewable energy from Germany. So you got your facts exactly the wrong way.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-...

Turns out, nuclear is not the end all, be all solution. Who knew?

I don’t know why HN has such a rage boner for Germany’s energy transition, it doesn’t seem that triggered by any other country.

[looping__lui]

Maybe because it’s not a transition but an ideology driven f** up? I live near the coal plants they are firing up again. I’m all pro PV (have one), I heat my house on geothermal, I spent a ton on energy efficiency for my house. But this entire “renewable transition”, “getting out of nuclear” and coming up with other random ideas in a industry focused economy is just bogus in execution.

[cauch]

The German government did indeed messed up their transition. As has the French one (their nuclear park is in a dead end, while they are nowhere with new nuclear or new renewable). The French situation is in fact way dyer, but because they are "borrowing to the future" (for example, their electricity cost is low, but they are not building up the budget that will be needed for older power plants dismantlement, so they are heading for a very big crisis), people don't notice.

Not that the Germany is better than France. My point is that it s true that people who have a rage boner about Germany are not fair: if they really care about f* up, why they don't care about France?

I don't buy this idea that the German transition was an ideology driven f* up. The project was designed and supported by a lot of experts. They published their results, with their computations and all, and no real flaw was discovered. Sure, there were some pro-nuclear partisans who, like the anti-nuclear ones, would never accept that such studies were scientifically sound just because it did not say what they ideologically wanted to hear.

At the time, the project was scientifically sound. It did not work out because 1) the government did half of the things the project said it should do, 2) as every long-term project, it had some uncertainties, and it turned out some elements did not "aligned". An alternative project of keeping with nuclear generation was also scientifically sound, but it is not scientifically correct to pretend that this one was "better", or "more rational", or even "less ideological". People who come here and say "it was an ideological f* up" are just people who see it did not worked out and are not smart enough to not think "obviously, if it would have be me, I would have done it way better, the only reason it failed is because they suck and are irrational while I'm wayyyy smarter than everyone and soooo rational".

[looping__lui]

Ok, you read the studies and are better informed than me. Just lay out how exactly this system would work, if: 1) Nuclear is phased out 2) Coal is phased out 3) We could at any time phase out gas as well because we semi-listened to the US that warned us we gave Putin the switch to our electricity grid

If I look at https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE and see patterns like 50 GW at 3 am and 60 GW at 1 pm I wonder: how can you ensure providing the base output 24/7 entirely with renewables? I have seen facilities within industrial complexes that literally required more electricity than a whole city 24/7. The demand of electricity that needs to be provided 24/7 is enormous.

There is in addition a huge challenge to manage loads in a grid (that was never designed for it) for regional variance and unpredictability in energy production (e.g., sunshine in the north and wind in the north but no need there) and the consumption (e.g., industry in the south).

In classical “German ideology” fashion laws are passed, one-way door decisions are made, “experts testify” that everything works and 10 years later the thing blows up.

And it’s not just me who “brilliantly came up with this assessment” - but I borrowed it from publicly shared opinions of industry leaders: https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/industrie/nikolas...

So, why does it work out and I have it all wrong? What were the evil forces that sabotaged this very well thought through idea? Because I went all PV and geothermal heat pump and energy efficient housing. What have you done?

[cauch]

If you want to "understand exactly how it works", then you need to build a realistic digital twin of the whole grid, and run tons of scenarios. Trying to conclude from such "high level" map is as ridiculous as trying to explain car mobility in a city by just looking at one unique number for each country. When you do that, you realize several things:

- the electricity grid _before the move to go out of the nuclear_ was not sustainable: reducing emission implied electrifying, which implies local flexibility that the grid at the time was simply not able to provide. The "old" nuclear plants had to disappear in the mid-/long-term, and because of that, there were several possibilities. Idiots are assuming that if Germany would not have got out of nuclear, the situation would be perfect today, which is just plain stupid (the situation would be closer to the French one: everything looking fine on the surface, but heading right for the wall).

- the "no wind night" challenge is technically as "easy" as the technical challenge of developing a grid with nuclear plant. It's difficult to understand for the laymen, but the "old" nuclear plants were technically not to the level for a grid without gas and coal, and need to be replaced by new ones which will need to solve a lot of problems that are similar to the "no wind night" challenge. In simulation, it turns out that large distance grid connectivity (which is better for the resilience anyway) and some storage (which was at the time (and still today) way more room to progress than some nuclear technology) are fixing the "no wind night" challenge quite effectively. It may seem surprising, but in science, the conclusions of computations are way more reliable than the gut-feeling of laymen.

I understand it is frustrating to see that your naive understanding is contradicted by conclusions from proper studies, and it is very easy to just conclude "I'm smarter, I know it will not work, the only explanation is that it was ideology".

(not sure I get your point when you bring Nikolas Stihl: isn't this guy as much as an expert on grid simulation than you? Being an industry leader does not magically give them a pass on doing exactly the same mistake as you, which is: drawing naive conclusions from naive understandings and concluding that if experts have a different ones, the only explanation is that they are "ideological")

> What were the evil forces that sabotaged this very well thought through idea?

There are tons of ways to fail. Seeing something not working perfectly and concluding that the project itself was therefore stupid is just incorrect. And we should also keep in mind that the risk of failures was, at the time, according to science, as big if they would have gone in the "nuclear direction". Sometimes you may take the most rational decisions and it still does not work out.

> What have you done?

I really hope this is not one of those stupid argumentation panic "oh yeah? oh yeah? well, you seem to know better than me and have pointed out the stupid things I say, but how many push-ups are you able to do?" (but don't worry, I've done _a lot_).