Laying out key priorities for the EU’s upcoming Clean Industrial Deal, German Economy State Secretary Sven Giegold said on Monday (30 September) he wants the Commission to prioritise renewable energy, taking a tough line on nuclear power and France’s renewable targets.
Alongside a quicker roll-out of renewable energy facilitated by “further exemptions from [environmental impact] assessments,” Giegold outlined several other German priorities for the EU’s upcoming strategy.
Based on the 2030 renewable energy targets, the EU should also set up a 2040 framework, complemented by new, more ambitious targets for energy efficiency, he said.
“It should include new heating standards, a heat pump action plan and a renovation initiative,” he explained, noting a heat pump action plan was last shelved in 2023.
Hydrogen, made from renewables, should be governed by a “a pragmatic framework,” the German politician stressed, reiterating calls from his boss, Economy Minister Robert Habeck (Greens), to delay strict production rules into the late 2030s.
No, Germany didn’t replace nuclear with coal. They replaced it with renewables.
That’s… One way of looking at it. Another way to look at it is: “the closing of nuclear power plants has allowed gas and oil plants to stay in operation”.
Coal power production is now much lower than before they shut off their nuclear power plants
But it could have been even lower.
Actually, the plan was to phase out coal and nuclear while building up wind and solar and using gas as a bridge. That was 2004. Then a coalition of conservatives and social democrats took over from the coalition of social democrats and greens in 2005 and coal was back on the menu and the exit from.nuclear was postponed, over time devastating the renewable industries almost completely. 2011 with Fukushima happened, nuclear was to be exited sooner again, but nobody cared about renewables anymore under a coalition of conservatives and libertarians. Meanwhile, Merkel said something about “Wandel durch Handel” (change by trade) and made the german power supply dependent on Russia and Putin by buying too much gas there, which backfired completely in 2022 (because nobody in Europe cared in 2014) and the now again green minister of economics had to deal with it, but the nuclear exit was done by now, without having build up renewables in the meantime as planned almost 20 years before.
So no, shutting down nuclear was not the reason gas plants kept working as long as they did, conservatives (and socdems and libertarians as their junior partners) shutting down renewables are the reason.
Coal power production is now much lower than before they shut off their nuclear power plants
But it could have been even lower.
Yes, but not because of exiting nuclear.
Edit: also, gas power plants and nuclear power plants have different tasks.
Second edit: nuclear isn’t exactly clean either.
No it couldn’t because nuclear power plants are much too inflexible in their power output to fit into a grid designed for renewables. Wind power often had to be shut down when its output was too high for the grid cause you couldn’t shut down the nuclear power plants.
This is a myth, most of the nuclear reactors can be throttled down, it is not instant but they can go as low as 20% in around 30 min.
The thing is it is much easier to stop a wind turbine than to throttle a nuclear reactor, and unlike fossil fuel power turbines most of the cost of the nuclear reactor is fixed cost, whether the reactor is running or not it still costs the same.
Afaik, German reactors were designed to be throttled to 60% capacity, within around a week. And doing that too often wasn’t safe either. And there was no economic incentive to do so because a reactor throttled is not a reactor earning—you have to do a bunch of extra work to throttle the reactor and you’re only conserving negligible amounts of fuel.
I am not deep enough in the topic to know whether that’s a limitation due to all the German reactors being particularly outdated. But “30 min” and “20%” sounds more like an emergency protocol to me rather than any kind of standard procedure.
No, because specific power levels need to be available at specific moments. The flat production curve of nuclear does not pair well with varying production from solar/wind. Gas sucks for climate-change reasons but at least you can regulate it up/down in a matter of half hours to react to variability of your other production. While we still had nuclear, wind parks needed to shut down more often.
In the longer run, batteries will shift solar peaks over the day and H2 will likely be used to replace methane.
You make it sound like the completely predictable power output of nuclear is a problem and unpredictable variation in output of the wind/solar is great.
Nuclear takes days to adjust safely. In a non emergency case you don’t regulate it up or down, it has a static load available.
There is emergency shutdown, but the rapid slowing of the fission takes a big burden on the rods and the reactor itself, its for emergency purposes only.
You make it sound like the completely predictable power output of nuclear is a problem
That is a challenge, because it means you need a flat consumption curve as well – which in reality you don’t see often. I.e. you either need to waste or cheaply export energy, especially at night and over the weekend to make sure your grid doesn’t crash.
and unpredictable variation in output of the wind/solar is great.
The point is that augmenting solar/wind with (plain) nuclear doesn’t work well.
But the variability of solar/wind are a challenge as well, especially given the at times negative energy prices. Fossil, biomass, battery, pumped hydro, and H2-based power production have a huge advantage there.
There are ways to modulate production even with “flat” production. A clever way is to use water as energy accumulator: you pump water into a dam during the night, that you later let flow through turbines during the day.
If artificial reservoirs were feasible, they would be better used to flatten the production from renewables.
In practice it is only feasible in areas that have existing natural geographic features.
Germany already have hydroelectricity accounting for 3% of their production, however 3% is nowhere near enough to neither flatten renewable or to modulate flat nuclear production to fit the daily volatile consumption.
Pumpspeicherkraftwerke. We have 31 of them in germany. Which is pretty much the maximum possible because you can’t build them just everywhere. And quick search says these things are economically unsustainable because of the extremely high construction costs but very low revenues. It is wasted money.
Sure, if you’d wanted to put a lot of money into 30±year-old nuclear reactors, the power companies could have added storage. However, this is not the only issue of nuclear either and the societal consensus at one point was to phase the reactors out.
(Fwiw, the TerraPower reactors are supposed to store heat — except of course none have been built so far.)
