I don't know about Spain, but I can tell you what is happening in Australia. We aren't phasing out anything. "Phasing out" implies decommissioning a money mak

I don't know about Spain, but I can tell you what is happening in Australia. We aren't phasing out anything. "Phasing out" implies decommissioning a money making machine, and I've yet to see that happen anywhere. Yet, Australia looks like it will be one of the leaders in the changeover to renewables. Instead of "phasing out" we are replacing things when they no longer are making money. By chance and good luck most (all?) of our coal fired power stations were built decades ago, and so are becoming very expensive to maintain. Their private owners (who aren't about to take a loss for the public good and who would happily continue to pump out CO2 if it made a buck) are decommissioning them at a brisk pace. Politicians on the left like to claim their policies has something to do the rapid change over. Politicians on the right like to claim they are holding it up or stopping it. The reality seems to be neither are having much effect on the outcome. It's all driven by money. That said, the politicians of both sides sold the then publicly owned generators to private equity a decade or two ago. We were given lots of reasons by the pollies (like promises of cheaper power), most of which turned out to bullshit. But it did make this money driven transition possible. There are two reasons the coal fired stations are now making losses. One is the aforementioned "they are old" and hence getting expensive to maintain. But that doesn't explain why they are shutting down earlier than their planned lifetimes. The reason they are doing that is because renewables are economic poison for coal fired power stations. The planners counted on selling near 100% of the power they generated. But renewables are supplying 75% of the power (long term average of course, 150% in one hour and 0% in the next) in some parts of Australia. Coal plants can't vary their output fast enough to match indeterminacy of renewables, so they often find themselves pushing power into a market that is literally paying negative prices for it. Power prices go through the roof of course when renewables drop to 0%, but coal can't ramp up anywhere near quickly enough to take advantage of it. Instead, the gas peakers step in with their high priced generation. So coal can't win either way. Turns out that's a death sentence for a coal fired plant that's expensive to maintain, in spite of the fact that it's repaid it's capital costs years ago. Nuclear has the same problems competing against renewables, but on steroids. The capital costs take decades to recoup even with the assumption will make money from most of the demand in the plants catchment, and it's so bad at varying it's output to meet demand Japan (which has a lot of nuclear) has more pumped storage per unit generation (to soak up the excess output) than anywhere else on the planet. So it's not a surprise to me that Spain is phasing out nuclear. We would be far better off climate wise if they didn't, but this isn't driven by climate or safety concerns. The decision is driven my money.