9 ms·

The EU also released a plan in the past week to accelerate the deployment of both nuclear and renewable energy. This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts.

by 716dpl 5mo ago

The EU also released a plan in the past week to accelerate the deployment of both nuclear and renewable energy. This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts. https://energy.ec.europa.eu/publications/accelerateeu-energy-union-affordable-and-secure-energy-through-accelerated-action_en https://energy.ec.europa.eu/publications/accelerateeu-energy...

adev_ 5mo ago
> This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts. It is not only the oil shock. Most of the nuclear initiatives at the EU level have been mostly blocked by the German government for the last 15y. The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move. The German position changed significantly after the crisis with Friedrich Merz explicitly called the German nuclear phaseout 'a mistake'. Soon after, Nuclear energy stopped to be a swear word at EU level and EU funding streams seems to have opened up again for Nuclear power. The recent oil crisis is just the last nail in the coffin of the anti-nuclear lobby.
- croes 5mo ago
  And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.
  - adev_ 5mo ago
    > And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage. It is not. And people who repeat this lie have generally very little clue of the reality of an electrical grid and how it is designed and managed in practice. Solar and Wind are cheaper in term of LCOE. LCOE is a secondary metric in a much larger equation. A grid is managed in term of instant power matching the demand, not in term of energy. That changes a lot over a simplistic LCOE view. Take into consideration the cost of power lines, the necessity of backup for the long dunkelflaute, the increase of demand over winter and the problem ROI with the overcapacity of solar... and suddenly the equation is not that simple anymore. In reality, it is not "Just build Wind/Solar + battery Bro": It is much more complex and highly geographically dependent. (1) A country with a lot of Hydro can generally easy run full renewable with a lot of Wind: Hydro acts as both as storage and a regulation. (2) A country without much Hydro has a interests to keep the baseload Nuclear. It is mostly CAPEX based and the most economical low CO2 source around. (3) A sub-tropical / tropical country has all interests to Spawn solar arrays. The air con consumption tend to matches quite well the solar production. At the opposite, Solar is almost an annoyance to the grid in Nordic countries because it produces outside of the peak of consumption and is intermittent. Like often: there is no silver bullet. The only part of your sentence what is true, is that indeed 'New nuclear' is way more expensive that it should be. That is however not inevitable, China demonstrate that quite clearly [1]. [1]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-costs/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-c...
    - dalyons 5mo ago
      I think it is actually the pro nuke case that often has misconceptions of how a modern grid works, repeating terms like “base load” etc Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear. Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
      - adev_ 5mo ago
        > Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap. No. Nuclear energy production in China continue to increase and will probably continue to increase for the next 60y. Its relative percentage in the global mix decreased. And this has nothing to do with Solar, but with the insane amount of Coal power plants that China had to setup quickly to match the increasing electricity demand of the developing country [1] > The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Nuclear plants are mainly CAPEX based. And yes, excessive solar capacity tend to decrease nuclear profitability and increase global electricity cost. But that is mainly a problem of public policy, not a technical one. In country without tremendous of Hydro storage (e.g Switzerland or Norway), the most balanced economical combination tend to be Nuclear for baseload and Wind+Hydro+Storage for peaks. [1]: https://www.iea.org/countries/china/electricity https://www.iea.org/countries/china/electricity
        dalyons 5mo ago
        A lot has changed since the 2023 data in your link. Chinas coal use declined in 2025, and is projected to continue to decline in 2026 and into the future [1]. Not share, absolute. Despite overall generation growing by 5%. And it’s all driven by guess what, renewables growth. 1 https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/ https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-china-and-india-for-first-time-in-52-years-after-clean-energy-records/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi... Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed
  - Moldoteck 5mo ago
    germany has highest prices in eu without any nuclear. It spent on eeg double the cost of entire french fleet. and that fleet wasnt even very cheap looking at what china does now. Germany also needs gas firming per fraunhofer ise report since bess is not sufficient
  - selfmodruntime 5mo ago
    What is that storage you speak of?
- dmix 5mo ago
  Yep even before the war German industry was ringing alarm bells about how their high energy costs made it very difficult to compete against China. They should be adopting every sort of energy. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environment/iran-energy-costs-germany-factories.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environme... > For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.
  - dalyons 5mo ago
    Building _new_ nuclear is not going to make their energy costs cheaper. It is the most expensive form of generation
    - dmix 5mo ago
      Then why is China building 30 new reactors on top of the 60 they already have, if it's not competitive? https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-it-can-now-build-50-nuclear-reactors-at-once-what-about-the-united-states/ https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-i... The answer is usually more about how China can actually build things, not that nuclear isn't economically feasible.
      - nikanj 5mo ago
        China can build ten reactors for the cost of Germany running the appeals, environmental studies and neighborhood consultations for one
      - dalyons 5mo ago
        And yet, even with their buildout the nuclear share of electricity is projected to decline y/y. Because renewables are cheaper. And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.
- afh1 5mo ago
  German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, probably next to Trump's war in Iran. And for 15y if you said anything about it you were an evil capitalist who doesn't care about the environment. No wonder the country is ever more polarized.
  - fnordian_slip 5mo ago
    >German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, The sad thing is, you might be right. With the rise of far right populists everywhere, it is entirely possible that it will be written in the history books just as you said it. It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party. Facts don't matter when it comes to nuclear energy, otherwise nobody would pretend that it's "the cheapest form of energy" and the like me
    - Moldoteck 5mo ago
      phaseout was adopted by redgreens in 2000 and continued by cdu in 2011. THat's a fact German solar was just not competitive - labor, electricity and coal were more expensive in germany. Solar industry was showing problems even before cfd's reduction (which applied to chinese ones too but they endured since costs were lower)
      - peterfirefly 5mo ago
        > continued by cdu in 2011. because of the electoral threat of the Greens and an uninformed public. The solar thing was a farce: Germany created all sorts of subsidies and big plans in the expectation that German factories would be supply the solar panels -- only to be almost immediately outcompeted by more efficient Chinese production (and likely a lot of state subsidies there as well).
        5mo ago
- txdv 5mo ago
  Can we get one in Lithuania?
- selfmodruntime 5mo ago
  > The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move. Man do I wish that were the case. In any way, we simply don't hold the cards in the EU as much anymore as the rest of the EU has recognized that we're idiots, and they're certainly not keen on joining us in that regard.
- spixy 5mo ago
  Austria is also trying to block nuclear, at least in Czechia and Slovakia.
boringg 5mo ago
Couldn't ask for better unintended outcomes from that Iran war than to fast track deployment of renewable and nuclear energy. Get europe off their anti-nuclear, pro gas stance. France gains a fair bit from this development. Russia loses influence as does the mid-east if the trajectory holds. Winners: heat pump manufacturers, nuclear re-processing, uranium enrichment, eVs, nuclear heavy manufacturers, solar panels (China)...
- spacebanana7 5mo ago
  Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small. The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
  - marcosdumay 5mo ago
    All of that is right... But we needed something to make batteries competitive with gas, because the renewables part is already solved, and we need to move to the next step.
  - lucb1e 5mo ago
    Saying gas has relatively little emissions reminds me of the joke german car manufacturers are making about their latest combustion cars using relatively little fuel ('hocheffizienzverbrenner'). It's marginal gains. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-factor https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-... Gas is 200gCO2e/kWh, plain old diesel is 260. Better than nothing but not going to make a big dent Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)
    - dalyons 5mo ago
      GP is saying gas has relatively little emissions in this scenario because we wont use it much total in a year. Not because its cleaner.

by 716dpl 5mo ago

adev_ 5mo ago

> This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts. It is not only the oil shock. Most of the nuclear initiatives at the EU level have been mostly blocked by the German government for the last 15y. The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move. The German position changed significantly after the crisis with Friedrich Merz explicitly called the German nuclear phaseout 'a mistake'. Soon after, Nuclear energy stopped to be a swear word at EU level and EU funding streams seems to have opened up again for Nuclear power. The recent oil crisis is just the last nail in the coffin of the anti-nuclear lobby.

croes 5mo ago
And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.
- adev_ 5mo ago
  > And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage. It is not. And people who repeat this lie have generally very little clue of the reality of an electrical grid and how it is designed and managed in practice. Solar and Wind are cheaper in term of LCOE. LCOE is a secondary metric in a much larger equation. A grid is managed in term of instant power matching the demand, not in term of energy. That changes a lot over a simplistic LCOE view. Take into consideration the cost of power lines, the necessity of backup for the long dunkelflaute, the increase of demand over winter and the problem ROI with the overcapacity of solar... and suddenly the equation is not that simple anymore. In reality, it is not "Just build Wind/Solar + battery Bro": It is much more complex and highly geographically dependent. (1) A country with a lot of Hydro can generally easy run full renewable with a lot of Wind: Hydro acts as both as storage and a regulation. (2) A country without much Hydro has a interests to keep the baseload Nuclear. It is mostly CAPEX based and the most economical low CO2 source around. (3) A sub-tropical / tropical country has all interests to Spawn solar arrays. The air con consumption tend to matches quite well the solar production. At the opposite, Solar is almost an annoyance to the grid in Nordic countries because it produces outside of the peak of consumption and is intermittent. Like often: there is no silver bullet. The only part of your sentence what is true, is that indeed 'New nuclear' is way more expensive that it should be. That is however not inevitable, China demonstrate that quite clearly [1]. [1]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-costs/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-c...
  - dalyons 5mo ago
    I think it is actually the pro nuke case that often has misconceptions of how a modern grid works, repeating terms like “base load” etc Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear. Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
    - adev_ 5mo ago
      > Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap. No. Nuclear energy production in China continue to increase and will probably continue to increase for the next 60y. Its relative percentage in the global mix decreased. And this has nothing to do with Solar, but with the insane amount of Coal power plants that China had to setup quickly to match the increasing electricity demand of the developing country [1] > The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Nuclear plants are mainly CAPEX based. And yes, excessive solar capacity tend to decrease nuclear profitability and increase global electricity cost. But that is mainly a problem of public policy, not a technical one. In country without tremendous of Hydro storage (e.g Switzerland or Norway), the most balanced economical combination tend to be Nuclear for baseload and Wind+Hydro+Storage for peaks. [1]: https://www.iea.org/countries/china/electricity https://www.iea.org/countries/china/electricity
      - dalyons 5mo ago
        A lot has changed since the 2023 data in your link. Chinas coal use declined in 2025, and is projected to continue to decline in 2026 and into the future [1]. Not share, absolute. Despite overall generation growing by 5%. And it’s all driven by guess what, renewables growth. 1 https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/ https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-china-and-india-for-first-time-in-52-years-after-clean-energy-records/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi... Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed
- Moldoteck 5mo ago
  germany has highest prices in eu without any nuclear. It spent on eeg double the cost of entire french fleet. and that fleet wasnt even very cheap looking at what china does now. Germany also needs gas firming per fraunhofer ise report since bess is not sufficient
- selfmodruntime 5mo ago
  What is that storage you speak of?
dmix 5mo ago
Yep even before the war German industry was ringing alarm bells about how their high energy costs made it very difficult to compete against China. They should be adopting every sort of energy. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environment/iran-energy-costs-germany-factories.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environme... > For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.
- dalyons 5mo ago
  Building _new_ nuclear is not going to make their energy costs cheaper. It is the most expensive form of generation
  - dmix 5mo ago
    Then why is China building 30 new reactors on top of the 60 they already have, if it's not competitive? https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-it-can-now-build-50-nuclear-reactors-at-once-what-about-the-united-states/ https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-i... The answer is usually more about how China can actually build things, not that nuclear isn't economically feasible.
    - nikanj 5mo ago
      China can build ten reactors for the cost of Germany running the appeals, environmental studies and neighborhood consultations for one
    - dalyons 5mo ago
      And yet, even with their buildout the nuclear share of electricity is projected to decline y/y. Because renewables are cheaper. And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.
afh1 5mo ago
German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, probably next to Trump's war in Iran. And for 15y if you said anything about it you were an evil capitalist who doesn't care about the environment. No wonder the country is ever more polarized.
- fnordian_slip 5mo ago
  >German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, The sad thing is, you might be right. With the rise of far right populists everywhere, it is entirely possible that it will be written in the history books just as you said it. It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party. Facts don't matter when it comes to nuclear energy, otherwise nobody would pretend that it's "the cheapest form of energy" and the like me
  - Moldoteck 5mo ago
    phaseout was adopted by redgreens in 2000 and continued by cdu in 2011. THat's a fact German solar was just not competitive - labor, electricity and coal were more expensive in germany. Solar industry was showing problems even before cfd's reduction (which applied to chinese ones too but they endured since costs were lower)
    - peterfirefly 5mo ago
      > continued by cdu in 2011. because of the electoral threat of the Greens and an uninformed public. The solar thing was a farce: Germany created all sorts of subsidies and big plans in the expectation that German factories would be supply the solar panels -- only to be almost immediately outcompeted by more efficient Chinese production (and likely a lot of state subsidies there as well).
      - 5mo ago
txdv 5mo ago
Can we get one in Lithuania?
selfmodruntime 5mo ago
> The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move. Man do I wish that were the case. In any way, we simply don't hold the cards in the EU as much anymore as the rest of the EU has recognized that we're idiots, and they're certainly not keen on joining us in that regard.
spixy 5mo ago
Austria is also trying to block nuclear, at least in Czechia and Slovakia.

boringg 5mo ago

Couldn't ask for better unintended outcomes from that Iran war than to fast track deployment of renewable and nuclear energy. Get europe off their anti-nuclear, pro gas stance. France gains a fair bit from this development. Russia loses influence as does the mid-east if the trajectory holds. Winners: heat pump manufacturers, nuclear re-processing, uranium enrichment, eVs, nuclear heavy manufacturers, solar panels (China)...

spacebanana7 5mo ago
Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small. The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
- marcosdumay 5mo ago
  All of that is right... But we needed something to make batteries competitive with gas, because the renewables part is already solved, and we need to move to the next step.
- lucb1e 5mo ago
  Saying gas has relatively little emissions reminds me of the joke german car manufacturers are making about their latest combustion cars using relatively little fuel ('hocheffizienzverbrenner'). It's marginal gains. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-factor https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-... Gas is 200gCO2e/kWh, plain old diesel is 260. Better than nothing but not going to make a big dent Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)
  - dalyons 5mo ago
    GP is saying gas has relatively little emissions in this scenario because we wont use it much total in a year. Not because its cleaner.