this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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You seem a bit uninformed on the German energy sector. First off: The running power plants were quite old and it was never planned to use them this long. Now, the energy sector is on line with the climate goals for this year. There is a small gap in the forecasts to 2035, but hopefully this will be cleared up with the falling price of renewables in the following years. Even now more renewables are built in Germany than were originally planned in the ambitious energy transformation plan, which already included the rising demand due to electric cars and heat pumps.
The sectors were Germany fails their climate goals horribly are the transportation and the building sector. This would have happened with or without nuclear power plants.
So, basically, the rollout of heat pumps and electric cars (I know it's more complicated than that, but those are the main factors that are missing). There is one thing that countries with a higher market penetration of those have: Cheap electricity. And I can tell you one thing: Germany did not have exceptionally high consumer electricity prices in the past decades due to nuclear power plants. It was because we heavily subsidized renewable energies that were still expensive as hell and put the price tag almost exclusively on consumer electricity prices (this was Merkel, of course), also we tax electricity in an effort to improve efficiency.
Technologies that rely on electricity, such as heat pumps and electric cars, would have a much easier time to gain market share if electricity was actually cheap. That is the main problem I have with the debate about this in Germany. All of our legislation still treats electricity as if it was produced exclusively with fossil fuels, which actually hampers all efforts to replace fossil fuels with electric solutions. Forcing people to buy those instead of creating circumstances that makes them want to buy them is not a good idea. It creates exactly the kind of opposition we are seeing now.
To get back to the original point: Having nuclear plants with negligible marginal costs run for longer could definitely have helped those sectors, because it would have lowered the price of electricity. Especially so if the CO2 budget saved by that had been used to stretch the early rollout of renewables that was extremely expensive. 50 cents/kWh and more for solar in the 2000s, still 20-30 cents/kWh in 2011 when solar peaked. Thankfully wind was a lot cheaper, but still way above the marginal costs of nuclear.
Unfortunately we cannot go back to the past, so this whole debate is kind of useless, but the German nuclear exit was definitely a mistake with regards to climate protection, and the rollout of renewables was done in a horribly inefficient and unnecessarily expensive way that still hurts us today (although it is hidden in taxes now thanks to Habeck's decision to move the EEG costs to the federal budget). And it was done this way mostly because of the nuclear exit. Which, apart from less anxiety about nuclear power plants, does not provide a lot of benefits. We still have to deal with our nuclear waste, we still had to pay fully for the construction of the reactors, all the necessary research and deconstructing them.
In essence, we wasted years of a significant amount of low-carbon electricity that was already >90% paid for and replaced it with extremely expensive not yet ready for market (in the 2000s and early 2010s, which we are still paying for now) renewables.
There were several studies done after the shutdown of the nuclear power plants, that showed, that the electricity prices did not increase. We will see what winter brings in that regard. If you have to buy a new heating system for your house now, the chance is high, that a heat pump will be cheaper. Improving the isolation of your house is always cost efficient. The whole uproar about this was synthetic, newly constructed houses install to over 50% heat pumps and only 10% gas. Electric cars would be adapted more, if companies would sell small, cheap EVs as well. France is a good example to compare Germany too, because they have a heavily subsidized electricity price. They do not have a significantly higher proportion of EVs. Finnland has a comparable electricity price, but a much higher proportion of installed heat pumps.
I agree with your second point though, phasing out of fossils before nuclear would have been a better decision. However, that's not what most of the pro nuclear faction under these posts argue. The final shutdown was unavoidable anyway, because we were out of fuel rods.
Eh, it depends a lot on what exactly they analyzed. Throwing away electricity you basically already paid for is gonna cost you, there is no way that can be circumvented. It is not like we have so much wind and solar energy in the mix that nuclear could not have replaced more expensive gas, coal, oil, biomass, whatever.
Household electricity prices in Finland were a lot cheaper than in Germany up until the gas crisis, which is unrelated to my point about nuclear. Here is an example from 2020:
France is a bit weird, I think they actually heat directly with electricity a lot. I guess that's a case where electricity is TOO cheap so people use it in stupid ways. :) Too much of a good thing can turn bad as well, I guess. Would not have happened in Germany even with extending nuclear, though. The thing is, heat pumps in France would not change much about their emissions. Heating (mostly) with nuclear electricity does not emit more than heating with heat pumps.
This does not mean extending nuclear could not have helped (assuming it would have helped to lower prices, which I still assume here). Maybe people would be more eager to replace their gas heaters with heat pumps if electricity prices had not been going up all the time (a lot more than in basically all other EU countries) in the past 20 years, what do you think? New houses are a special case anyway, since you basically already have to design them in a way that makes heat pumps the better option.