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I wonder what prices would they have if they did not implement sunsetting of nuclear energy. Has to be the worst energy policy decision ever.
by azan_ 7mo ago
I wonder what prices would they have if they did not implement sunsetting of nuclear energy. Has to be the worst energy policy decision ever.
- sod 7mo agoIn a pieceful world, sure. But then there is this [1]. Don't blame the player, blame the game. [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_drone_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...>
- onli 7mo agoNo. Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production. Sunsetting the old plants had no negative impact at all on electricity prices, to the contrary, insofar as it made space for more green energy.
- exe34 7mo agoHow much solar/wind can you really install in the area covered by a nuclear station?
- lxgr 7mo agoThat's not the problem; Germany has enough space to build solar and wind capacity to satisfy its consumption – on average. The problem is storage.
- happosai 7mo agoMost definitely not true. Maybe enough area to cover current electric usage, but to truly decarbonize society a lot more renewable energy is needed - for transport, heating, iron industry, chemical industries, fetilizers etc. Massive amounts of electricity is needed unless you export your industries to china.
- lxgr 7mo agoWhy not? Germany's total energy consumption is estimated to be around 1-2 TWh/y. This could be generated by photovoltaics covering less than 5% of its land surface. There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.
- happosai 7mo agoWtf are your numbers from, but they are wrong. It's over 2200TWh per year. And it you truly want to be renewable, the numbers go up. Upcycling waste to plastics or using hydrogen to make steel is more energy intensive than using fossil fuels. https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/indicator-final-energy-consumption https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/indicator-final-energy-con...
- lxgr 7mo agoGermany uses “,” as the decimal separator.
- reitzensteinm 7mo agoBut this document does not. Note it says 12.5%, not 12,5%. 1 TWh on the scale of a country is very little - a 1 GW nuclear plant operating continuously would generate over 8 TWh a year. Nevertheless the back of the napkin math of land requirements for solar check out, so it was probably just a typo and OP meant to say PWh.
- azan_ 7mo agoCompare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute. Germany is frequently at the Polish levels of emissions and Poland is famous for huge emissions. Sunsetting would make sense if they could already generate enough green electricity even in bad conditions, which was not and is not the case. It was purely political decision - Germany wanted to be European hub for distributing gas from Russia (that's why tried to convince others than gas is somehow green energy).
- locallost 7mo agoYour question was how would the prices be without the nuclear shutdown, talking about emissions now is goalpost shifting. Speaking of politics and not making sense, Poland is still at these levels because they put road blocks into renewables deployment and spend their resources on nuclear plants. If those plans go well they will be at around 35% coal in 2040, which is more than Germany is now.
- MarvinYork 7mo ago[dead]
- realusername 7mo ago> Compare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute Even without dunkelflaute, the absolute bottom per kwh emissions of Germany in summer still doesn't reach the maximum emissions of France in winter.
- bhelkey 7mo ago> Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production The Guardian reports that Nuclear power produced ~20% of Germany's electricity in 2011. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nuclear-power-germany-renewable-energy https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nuclear-pow...
- Ringz 7mo agoBut 2011 was not the year the nuclear power plants were shut down. However, that is the year your previous commenter was referring to. So what exactly are you trying to say? Incidentally, the electricity that the nuclear power plants had supplied was not replaced by coal power plants, but by renewable energy.
- bhelkey 7mo agoThere was not a single moment in time in which all nuclear power plants were simultaneously shut down. The shut down was gradual [1]. 2011 is relevant because it is when the German government decided to phase out its remaining nuclear power plants. [1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out/nuclear-phase-out_content.html#a456430 https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out....
- fundatus 7mo agoLevelized Cost of Energy for Germany's existing nuclear fleet was roughly 13ct/kwh.[1] The averaged costs (YTD) from the linked article currently stands at 9.71 ct/kwh. So nuclear in the mix would have increased the costs. [1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d883a81adcf2697313c7d/WD-5-090-21-pdf-data.pdf https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88...
- BenoitP 7mo agoLCOE is good for marginal cost (eg: one more solar panel), but fails dramatically at evaluating systemic costs. A nuclear reactor moves the entire market down, including the costs to the consumer when he buys solar energy. Here is a UN document explaining it: https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/GECES-21_2025_INF.2%20-%20Understanding%20the%20Full%20System%20Cost%20of%20the%20Electricity%20System.pdf https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/GECES-21_2025_...
- Ringz 7mo agoThe SCBOE score is a good idea. However, in the case of Germany, it is often overlooked that the power grid dating from the 1970s, which was built as a one-way system from large power plants (nuclear power plants) to consumers, would have needed to be rebuilt regardless. A large share of the grid costs would therefore have been passed on to consumers even without the transition to renewable energy. Additionally, Germany is located in the center of Europe and is thus a major transit country for electricity. Here too, corresponding capacities would have had to be expanded. The expansion of a European power grid also means that the disadvantages of renewable energy variability can be offset. As the SCBOE system also shows, the individual power plant still accounts for the largest share of costs. Many of the additional factors can actually go down in prices as renewables scale up (nuclear has still to prove that this could work there too). In that regard, LCOE remains relevant.
- leonidasrup 6mo agoEven in the peak of nuclear electricity production in the year 2001, coal was dominant source electricity in German grid. (Data for 2001, Nuclear 171 TWh, Coal 293 TWh). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?country=~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s... Power grid is not and newer was a one-way system, all the AC power lines, transformers don't care for the direction of the current. It's only the amount of current passing through each power lines, transformers that's important. The side effect of many electric customers installing PV panels and reducing their demand from grid is that the fuel costs of on-demand power plants decrease, but the fixed costs of on-demand power plants (installation, maintenance) stay the same. These fixed costs have to be recouped in the smaller amount of electricity sold by on-demand power plants, therefor per MWh prices from on-demand power plants will increase for electric grid customer. For most electric customers it's not possible to disconnect from electric grid and rely just on PV panels and batteries. Germany is not major transit country for electricity. According to data from 2019 electricity interconnection level for Germany was only 10% . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... Germany is projected to have import capacity equal to less than 15% of their domestic electricity generation by 2030. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/money-on-the-line-scaling-electricity-interconnection-for-europes-energy-future/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/money-on-the-line-s... Building of large capacity and long power lines is expensive, therefor many big industrial electric consumers were build near power plants or power plants were build near major industrial customers.
- kccqzy 7mo agoAlthough nuclear energy produces no carbon emissions, it is simply not price competitive with solar and wind in the western world. A culture of safety above all else made nuclear not price competitive. And it would be political suicide for regulators to relax safety given how accidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island are etched into the public mind.
- brazzy 7mo agoAnd that is very much a good thing.
- Dylan16807 7mo agoNo it's not. Our nuclear standards are so high that they have caused more radiation to be released because of demand shifting to coal.
- lostlogin 7mo agoThat was then. Now we have other options, and they are good.
- Dylan16807 7mo agoWe're still using lots of coal power, and it's going to take a long time to get near 90% renewable power. So I'd still like to see a lot of nuclear buildout (with a standardized design for many plants, and streamlined permitting for that design).
- Ringz 7mo agoBuilding nuclear power plants still takes the longest. Especially if you want to produce the same amount of energy that will be needed in the coming years. Currently, nuclear power plants supply about 9% of the electrical energy used worldwide — and it has taken us from 1950 until today to get there. Why should it suddenly be faster and more elegant now? We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel. Yes, I know China and to some extent South Korea build nuclear power plants faster. But even there, some plants have taken up to eleven years to build, and others that were built quickly only achieve a capacity factor of 60%. At least in China’s case, many of the conditions cannot be directly transferred to Western countries. Space, social and political circumstances, and other factors are simply not the same everywhere as in China. Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.
- wewxjfq 7mo agoMerit order pricing and the fact that you need fossil peakers will make the price effect completely negligible to consumers. You are comparing the MWh price of slightly more efficient fossil power plants to slightly less efficient fossil power plants.
- shafyy 7mo agoIt's widely accepted that sunsetting nuclear energy had a positive impact on the deployment of renewables, and consequently on the longer term energy prices. It was one of the better energy policy (and environmental, and security) decisions Germany has made in the recent past.
- dogemaster2026 7mo ago[flagged]
- shafyy 7mo agoWhy?
- sieabahlpark 7mo ago[dead]
- croes 7mo agoYou know that nuclear energy was heavily subsidized? And they still don’t have a long term storage but therefore rotting barrels with nuclear waste in the interim storage facility Asse which have to be retrieved. Cost estimate around 14 billion Euros.
- vmchale 7mo ago"long term storage" for CO2 is to spew it into the air where it remains forever... free for Germany, not so much Australia, California, Florida, etc.
- croes 7mo agoCO2 doesn't stay forever in the atmosphere and what's does that have to do with nuclear energy? Building massive power plants also sets CO2 free, same with mining uranium. Nuclear energy still has a waste problem, is expensive, creates massive single points of failure and given the current situation with the latest advances in drone warfare is a huge security risk while construction and operation.
- sieabahlpark 7mo ago[dead]
- LinXitoW 7mo agoDo you mean the nuclear power that the free market companies very explicitly said wasn't worth doing? That one? Why are we pleading the government to use a horrendously expensive technology that even the free market hates?
- yanis_t 7mo agoI suppose you can just compare it to France https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/3mo/daily?signal=electricity-price https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/3mo/daily?signal=electri...
- cycomanic 7mo agoHigher
- nmehner 7mo agoNuclear in 2006 was 160TWh. Coal in 2025 was 93TWh. So a big portion of nuclear would have been replaced by renewables by now anyways (natural gas has a different role in the grid and cannot be replaced bu nuclear). https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&stacking=stacked_grouped&year=-1&interval=year https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE... Also a lot of coal plants have been / are used in district heating in addition to electricity. Replacing them is much harder and takes longer than nuclear which is electricity only. Shutting those down was never a short term option. Calling it the worst decision ever is really funny, when it really is just a question of the order of the transition to renewables. And much of that order was dictated by technical needs.
- Ringz 7mo agoMaybe 1-4% lower.