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> No, the only question is the relative subsidies vs taxes, and the revenue from taxes are significantly less than the subsidies. I've tried to find the extent

> No, the only question is the relative subsidies vs taxes, and the revenue from taxes are significantly less than the subsidies. I've tried to find the extent of subsidies to the nuclear industry in France and I failed. It's not public information as far as I can tell. So, how would you know? > Nuclear ends up needing more storage because wind and solar can be crafted to roughly follow load. I've given you a link that calculated that Germany would need decades worth of worldwide battery production to buffer its renewables. It also doesn't have near enough locations for hydro storage. Meanwhile, the share of France's nuclear is far higher than that of Germany's renewables. If that explanation was true, France would have to have massively more buffering than Germany, which clearly isn't the case. This brings us to your alternative explanation: > The other option is to vastly over build nuclear capacity which sit’s idle 99% of the year. That’s ridiculously expensive per kWh. So in this explanation, not only are France's electricity costs in reality far higher than those of other countries because of nuclear subsidies, but those subsidies are so large that they depress the price of electricity to half of that of Germany, which has all this really "cheap" renewable energy. To show how unlikely this is, take the cost offset for a single cent per kWh for France's energy usage[1]: 450 billion kWh * 0.01 EUR = 4.5 billion EUR That amounts to almost 0.5% of total annual tax revenue[2] for a single cent, or over 5% just to explain the consumer price difference between Germany and France without accounting for all this supposed extra cost that nuclear is causing. Yet, somehow France manages to hide this enormous expense in its accounting? [1] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/energy-consumption.php https://www.worlddata.info/europe/france/energy-consumption.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France#Taxes_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France#Taxes_by_so... > New wind, solar, and hydro are the three cheapest electricity sources. Read up on some of those solar power purchase agreements, it’s hitting under 3c/kWh without subsidies. I'm not contesting that they are cheap on paper, but they're not that cheap if you count in the infrastructure to actually make them support a nation's grid in the general case. Again, if it was all so easy why isn't everybody 100% invested in wind and solar everywhere? Why bother with anything else? You're ignoring a lot of factors, like land use or location requirements. There's a vast difference in wind output depending where it is, and hydroelectricity doesn't work at all without a suitable location. Of course there are cases where wind, solar and especially hydro totally make sense. That doesn't mean it's a solution for all energy needs. We can make do without nuclear, we can make do without fossil fuels, but as it is, we can't make do without both. That's the issue at hand.

Retric 7y ago
https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiewende-need https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiew... Is wildly incorrect. When calculating storing wind and solar power you want to minimize total costs, in most cases this results in over productions resulting in a lot of ‘wasted’ power. Do this and you don’t get 6TWh for Germany. The country only uses 556.5 TWh per year or ~1.5 TWh per day. 0.2 TWh is a high but much more reasonable estimate. Considering they already have .0377 TWh of storage or 19% of that suddenly the numbers don’t look that huge. > massively more buffering than Germany France has massive buffering from the rest of the European electric grid. It’s fine because they use peaking power not actually going 100% Nuclear, using significant peaking power generation. PS: France uses 6,939.52 kWh (2014) per year. A 0.1 euro discount is 70$ per person per year, not exactly crazy money. Germany and much of Europe on the other hand has huge energy taxes which push up their bills. France (2013) spending central government 487.7€ billion, 562.9 Social Security, Local 252 billion, quasi government bodies 81.3€ billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > The country only uses 556.5 TWh per year or ~1.5 TWh per day. 0.2 TWh is a high but much more reasonable estimate. Considering they already have .0377 TWh of storage or 19% of that suddenly the numbers don’t look that huge. The "average" isn't the issue here. If you just look at the graphs you will see that actual production is well below the required ~0.8-1.9 TWh load for several days in a row. That's how the buffering requirements multiply. You can also clearly see how massively larger the discrepancy between production and load is, when compared to the stable output of a nuclear (or fossil fuel) plant. > France has massive buffering from the rest of the European electric grid. It’s fine because they use peaking power not actually going 100% Nuclear, using significant peaking power generation. France doesn't have any buffering for itself that the other countries don't also share. As you can hopefully see by just looking at the graphs, Germany currently needs far more buffering than France: https://www.power-technology.com/features/featureovercapacity-and-the-challenges-of-going-100-renewable-5872868/ https://www.power-technology.com/features/featureovercapacit... > France uses 6,939.52 kWh (2014) per year. A 0.1 euro discount is 70$ per person per year, not exactly crazy money. A 0.1 EUR (=10 cents) discount is ~670 EUR per person per year, or roughly 40 billion EUR per year, just as I calculated earlier. This is more than the entire military budget. If this kind of money was really spent on nuclear subsidies, do you think it could just be kept secret? Wouldn't it be all over the media, wouldn't every renewables lobbyist be touting it, talking about "the big nuclear scam" going on in France? > Germany and much of Europe on the other hand has huge energy taxes which push up their bills. France also has those taxes[1], but the taxes in Germany are even higher to pay for the renewables[2]. [1] https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/France-electricity-bills-rise-to-1-000-per-household-as-costs-rise-in-June https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/France-electrici... [2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-power https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house...

Retric 7y ago

https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiewende-need https://www.oulu.fi/blogs/how-much-storage-does-the-energiew... Is wildly incorrect. When calculating storing wind and solar power you want to minimize total costs, in most cases this results in over productions resulting in a lot of ‘wasted’ power. Do this and you don’t get 6TWh for Germany. The country only uses 556.5 TWh per year or ~1.5 TWh per day. 0.2 TWh is a high but much more reasonable estimate. Considering they already have .0377 TWh of storage or 19% of that suddenly the numbers don’t look that huge. > massively more buffering than Germany France has massive buffering from the rest of the European electric grid. It’s fine because they use peaking power not actually going 100% Nuclear, using significant peaking power generation. PS: France uses 6,939.52 kWh (2014) per year. A 0.1 euro discount is 70$ per person per year, not exactly crazy money. Germany and much of Europe on the other hand has huge energy taxes which push up their bills. France (2013) spending central government 487.7€ billion, 562.9 Social Security, Local 252 billion, quasi government bodies 81.3€ billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France

gridlockd 7y ago
> The country only uses 556.5 TWh per year or ~1.5 TWh per day. 0.2 TWh is a high but much more reasonable estimate. Considering they already have .0377 TWh of storage or 19% of that suddenly the numbers don’t look that huge. The "average" isn't the issue here. If you just look at the graphs you will see that actual production is well below the required ~0.8-1.9 TWh load for several days in a row. That's how the buffering requirements multiply. You can also clearly see how massively larger the discrepancy between production and load is, when compared to the stable output of a nuclear (or fossil fuel) plant. > France has massive buffering from the rest of the European electric grid. It’s fine because they use peaking power not actually going 100% Nuclear, using significant peaking power generation. France doesn't have any buffering for itself that the other countries don't also share. As you can hopefully see by just looking at the graphs, Germany currently needs far more buffering than France: https://www.power-technology.com/features/featureovercapacity-and-the-challenges-of-going-100-renewable-5872868/ https://www.power-technology.com/features/featureovercapacit... > France uses 6,939.52 kWh (2014) per year. A 0.1 euro discount is 70$ per person per year, not exactly crazy money. A 0.1 EUR (=10 cents) discount is ~670 EUR per person per year, or roughly 40 billion EUR per year, just as I calculated earlier. This is more than the entire military budget. If this kind of money was really spent on nuclear subsidies, do you think it could just be kept secret? Wouldn't it be all over the media, wouldn't every renewables lobbyist be touting it, talking about "the big nuclear scam" going on in France? > Germany and much of Europe on the other hand has huge energy taxes which push up their bills. France also has those taxes[1], but the taxes in Germany are even higher to pay for the renewables[2]. [1] https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/France-electricity-bills-rise-to-1-000-per-household-as-costs-rise-in-June https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/France-electrici... [2] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-power https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house...