[ZeroGravitas]

Germany uses less coal now than at the peak of their nuclear output.

They both trend down at a similar rate over the last two decades, coal slightly faster.

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

You could make the argument that they could have phased coal out even faster if they'd kept nuclear and did the massive renewables rollout at the same time but generally people advocating strongly for nuclear while attacking environmental groups or left wing political groups are wildly divergent from reality and so don't bother.

[rapsey]

You are right I was mistaken. However Germany is still a basket case. If you want to move to a low carbon economy, you can not do it with renewables only and must be able to maintain equal power generation levels. Germany is producing less power than before and thus shooting their economy in the foot. Nuclear is the only practical solution.

[ZeroGravitas]

Other replies think you're taking about baseload fallacy.

I think you are talking about the reduction in total electricity generation.

This (and similar stats) get tied to the "environmentalists are killing industry/civilization" arguments.

Except, since the nuclear phase out started in 2000 the electricity generation has only dropped about 70TWh. And about 50 TWh of that was exported. And it's not clear if those numbers include the 12TWh of German behind-the-meter solar, which would leave electricity use flat at a time when LED lighting was reducing demand, similar to many Western nations.

They became a net electricity importer (once again the sign of total civilizational collapse to some) and then returned to being a net exporter this year.

But even when importing they had gas and coal capacity they could have used, they just got cleaner energy cheap from other countries to meet their demand.

So why is cheaper energy than gas or coal a problem?

A real problem they have is that their current elected leader hates wind power. If you want to be angry at Germans protesting cheap, clean energy I'd start there.

[belorn]

The strategy of using renewable energy when the weather is optimal and fossil fuels when it is not is one that Germany promoted to the point of getting EU to define natural gas as "green". To a degree it does work to make a country that heavily used fossil fuels to reduce consumption, which Germany itself has shown.

If it is cheaper is less clear case. Having all those peaker plants at standby is expensive and require a lot of subsidizes, and there need to be transmission both from the peaker plants and wind farms, which is also paid mostly through subsidies. German subsidies to both fossil fueled power plants and renewable energy producers has only increased by time. The owners of peaker plants can also recover most of losses from periods of optimal weather, not only by subsidies, but also by increasing prices during non-optimal weather as there is very little competition during periods of high demand and low supply.

Not everyone agree with this strategy. EU has no plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the energy grid, despite having a clear plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the transport sector. With the war in Ukraine and war in Iran, the strategy of peaker plants are also looking to be poor in terms of economic and national security.

EU need to issue a full phase out of all fossil fuels in the energy grid by banning any construction of new power plants that burn fossil fuels by 2030 and a final decommission date by 2040. The solution to non-optimal weather has to be done through some other way. The discussion of renewables vs nuclear will then be mostly irrelevant.

[ZeroGravitas]

The world needs to phase out carbon emissions generally and unreliable suppliers of goods.

We should start with phasing out the mostly costly and harmful emissions first.

Artificial lines drawn between electriciy and other areas are unhelpful.

Once you get below about 500 g per kWh of CO2, which the EU is generally well under, then electrification should be used to offset gas and oil usage in other sectors.

It is fine if you use 1 unit of gas for electricity if you save 9 units elsewhere (roughly accurate figures for home heating with heat pumps in the EU)

And people getting obsessive about nuclear without acknowledging the use of gas peakers and interconnects to balance those grids is just annoying.

Support nuclear by pointing out we can shift cars, trucks, busses, heating and industry to use electricity. A car run on electricity even from the most expensive plants in Europe is cheaper than running on imported fuel.

[dns_snek]

> must be able to maintain equal power generation levels

This is a myth, you just need to overbuild the renewables like solar, add some storage, and then have _some_ capacity from other sources to handle the dips.

[rapsey]

And then watch your industry collapse due to high energy prices like germany.

[fulafel]

> must be able to maintain equal power generation levels

This is the baseload fallacy. It's not the case now and even less in the future as electricity use coevolves (eg more electricity users move to real time pricing, more storage, strengthened crossborder grid links, etc etc).

[modo_mario]

And in the meantime you've been putting out insane amounts of co2 for decades.

[fulafel]

If we so choose. If we want to move faster than we can mange to balance things, we can also reduce energy use. It's all just political decisions.

[modo_mario]

I presume crashing your economy isn't too popular of a political decision.

And the balancing thing seems to get fucked up since there's still no proper north south connection in the country and the "easy" grid scale storage options aren't even remotely close to sufficient.

In my country (Belgium) too the prefered option pushed by the greens ended up being....gas plants with 30 year profit guarantees and even then they didn't find much if any takers.