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>Here in Germany we add half of this years world's photovoltaic solar panel production. Much of that is installed by small consumers, houses, farms, factories.

• lispm 16y ago
  >Your solar capacity only exists because of extreme government intervention. It's far more expensive than what you call "expensive" centralized electricity. The government intervention happened because voters brought the politicians into power to do just that: invest massively into renewable energy. >The most recent feed-in tariffs are 31.9 - 43.0 Euro cents per kWh (2009 installations), fixed for 20 years. Payments are constantly adjusted. There is ongoing discussion in Germany by how much to shrink them. > For comparison, wholesale spot prices for utilities in Germany averaged 3.9 Euro cents/kWh for baseload in 2009 (through 3Q), and 5.0 Euro cents/kWh for peaking power. Residential retail rates (as of 2007 -- slightly dated) are about 14 Euro cents/kWh before taxes. Coal. Germany produces a lot of electricity using coal. That's still cheap on the world market. Expect prices to climb in the next years. >>A new nuclear power plant has not been built in he last twenty years and is not planned. >Your government banned them. No, the government has not banned them. It's not so simple. There are several reasons for that: * nuclear reactors are extremely expensive to build. The simple designs of the past are no more. Years ago a block and a reactor was fine. Water was taken from the river and heating the river. Then protection from accidents were demanded. Like somebody flies a small plane into the reactor building. Recently it has been seen that terrorists can fly large airplanes, when needed. * next generation nuclear industry did not deliver. For example the Thorium reactor in Germany was a massive failure. I can remember how high it was praised. Then it failed to work safely. * the breeder technology did not get accepted by the public. The nearer people live to nuclear installations, the lesser the support for those is. That has been seen in Wackersdorf were Germany went into a war between police and its people. Politicians had to accept that the Germans did not want to enter the Plutonium business. * Generally public acceptance faded away. I live here in Hamburg. Relatively near is a reactor that has been shut down, because one of the main electricity transformers caught fire. After a long period of repairs the reactor went online again. The exact same happened again: this time the other transformer caught fire. Then once officials start looking at a reactor in detail, they find all kinds of problems. But that a reactor has an severe emergency shutdown TWICE because of the same failure type, shows how bad the safety situation is. It was also not one government. We had lots of governments during the last 20 years. Not one has encouraged the industry to build new reactors. Currently the ruling conservatives have labeled nuclear technology to be a 'bridge technology'. Thus it has no future. >>The new reactors that are under construction in Finland and France are both much more expensive than planned and are coming years late. >Yes, they've had enormous cost overruns and are years late. And German solar power is an order of magnitude worse. No, solar power is getting online all the time. Price is shrinking all the time. > We're talking about Olkiluoto #3 (Finland) and Flamanville #3 (France), the two new reactors being built in Europe. Both EPRs of 1,600 MW(electric) capacity (net). Olkiluoto had an inital cost estimate of €3 billion, and is overrun by 50% and counting (so €4.5 billion so far). Flamanville' overrun (to date) is smaller, from €3.3 B to €4.0 billion (20%). (These are the most recent numbers I can find; correct me if you find better ones.) Just in the press: France had to admit that it is coming later and gets more expensive. You would never get real costs out of them, since it is all run in soviet-style. The government controls a huge monopolist (EDF), a huge construction company (AREVA), and makes sure that there is no transparency and hides all cost calculations. Still France had to import huge amounts of electricity from Germany last winter, when 20% of their nuclear reactors were not online and their power lines were to weak. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-29/edf-said-to-raise-flamanville-costs-delay-reactor.html http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-29/edf-said-to-rais... Flamanville: cost going up to 5 Billion. Olkiluoto: cost going up to 5.7 Billion. >Crucially, nuclear reactors actually achieve their nameplate capacity -- they run at full load almost all the time. Really? I have TWO reactors here around Hamburg which are doing nothing since quite some time now. Another one has been shut down terminally. >To date, all of German solar panels (i) add up to just one of these EPRs at best, (ii) have earmarked at the minimum €70 billion in subsidies between them, over their next 20 years. German nuclear industry ALREADY has received much higher subsidies. We are not talking about a future. But currently. Who do you think has paid for Gorleben, Asse, Konrad, Wackerdorf, etc., gives the nuclear industry all kinds of incentives? It is estimated that each year we pay more for subsidies for nuclear energy than it is put into research for renewable energy. Just the next problem: the ITER fusion experiment. Massive cost and time overruns, even thought this thing will never produce any electricity. Germany pays how much for that experiment in France? The whole experiment now is estimated to cost up to 15 Billion Euro. Commercial use is decades away. Actually since decades it is always decades away.