[Zufriedenheit]

The german energy policy has really been an economic failure on an epic scale. They destroyed 30+ fully functional nuclear power plants because of fear of radiation. In the last 20 year spend >500billion € to remodel the energy grid. Now subsidizing electricity with ~30billion € per year. And the result: Carbon intensity of energy production on the same level as US and 3x the electricity price!

[uecker]

This is lot of nonsense. The cost is mostly due to the funding of renewables at a time when they were still very expensive. This was highly successful in bringing down cost. Despite fakenews in this direction, fossil fuel consumption did not increase in Germany and is on the decline with a corresponding reductions in CO2 emissions. According to the following link Germany 338g / kWh Co emissions, US 384g /kWh. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

[aubanel]

Yet the carbone intensity of energy production in Germany is among the worst in Europe.

And France (nuclear powered, no particular huge investment in a green transition) beats them easily in both price and carbon.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes

[uecker]

Again, this is a misleading argument. The low carbon footprint in France is the result form investments of the past, while Germany relied on coal and lignite for a long time and only started to transition to carbon-neutral renewables much latter. The result was substantial drop of CO2 emissions form the grid which will continue. You can see it over time here: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/co2_emissions/chart.ht...

[gregbot]

No, what you are saying is a bunch of nonsense. If germany had simply kept its nuclear plants running and replaced its remaining coal with new nuclear back in 2000 instead of going with wind and solar it would have as low emissions as france by now. The decisions to go with wind and solar instead if nuclear meant keeping fossil fuels on the grid

[uecker]

"remaining coal",This sounds as if nuclear did produce the majority. But it never produced more than 30% of the electricity in Germany. In 2000 it was 60% fossil fuels and 30% nuclear. Renewables today produce 60% and fossil fuels are below 40% (coal only 20%). Of course, Germany could have decided to build more nuclear. It could have also decided to build renewables faster. Investing into renewables brought prices down by creating an economy in scale, which for nuclear never has worked. The result is that there are now immense investments into renewables worldwide.

[gregbot]

> Investing into renewables brought prices down by creating an economy in scale, which for nuclear never has worked

Never worked? How do you explain all the countries in the world with large low carbon nuclear fleets and reasonable electricity prices? Like France, Japan, Korea, Russia, China, the US, Canada, UK, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine etc? Everywhere large nuclear fleets have been built with a dozen or more reactors the per unit costs have been affordable.

None of that really matters though because when you look at the full system cost of intermittent renewables, they are an order of magnitude more expensive than the marginal cost.

https://discussion.fool.com/t/levelized-full-system-costs-of...