Germany intends to phase out coal-fired power generation by 2038 in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It never ceases to amaze me environmental parties in Germany pushed for killing their nuclear plants, forcing Germany to keep the fucking coal plants online. Meanwhile France is next door expanding their nuclear power, has a grid with little carbon emissions, and is even able to offer it at cheaper prices than Germany.
Edit: Links!
It never ceases to amaze me environmental parties in Germany pushed for killing their nuclear plants, forcing Germany to keep the fucking coal plants online
No, they did not. They wanted to phase out coal and nuclear via renewables (including a lot of money for power-to-gas development, just like they spend a lot to develop renewables in the first place) and instead conservatives ran with the nuclear phase out and renewable upbuild. But they let the people pay for the renewable with extra taxes while at the same time subsidising coal and sabotaging all grid expansions to keep renewables in check (also no storage or power-to-gas plans of course, in fact they prevented storage through insane double taxation where a battery operator would be fully takes as a consumer while loading and then again as a producer when unloading). And when renewables took off anyway they still intensified the sabotage and managed to kill the German solar industry and most of the wind industry (~200000 jobs gone to protect about 5000 coal miners… no just joking - they were protecting their rich buddies investments in coal of course and gave a fuck about workers).
The exakt same people that killed nuclear and sabotaged renewables to keep coal relevant are now telling you how renewables are such a failure (and far too expensive) and we should really build some new nuclear. All so they can keep burning more fossil fuels.
And people are still failing for this idiotic fairy tale.
(PS: unrelated fun fact… the framing is also bullshit. The conservative morons back in office did not have enough time yet to crush renewables again. The slight drop in renewables is from 2025 being the worst year in regard to weather in decades. Wíth the same weather of 2024 they would sit far above 70 renewables now.
But of course the propaganda will continue… and when they just lie long enough people may in a few years just accept (and expect) renewable fails again when the retard policies start to strike again…)
The coal plants are mostly lignite, which can be locally mined (at great environmental cost). From an energy security perspective this makes sense over being reliant on foreign natural-gas or uranium processing capabilities.
Well, the greens might have started it, but our dear conservative friends shat their pants in 2011. They wholeheartedly agreed with and delivered the nuclear phaseout.
Blaming “environmental parties” alone is unreasonable and not what the facts are, brother.
Yes, the greens obviously would have tried to push the phaseout earlier, had they continued to rule. But afaik everyone got scared after Fukushima. Including the conservatives.
And afaik it still makes sense. If it weren’t for a bunch of clowns making a big fuss (several wars) for literally no reason, we wouldn’t suddenly need emergency nuclear power. We could be transitioning to green energy in peace. But for some reason (it’s egomaniacs, pedophiles and late stage capitalism in general) we can’t have that.
It’s always the same talking points by nuclear heads, but that still doesn’t make them correct.
France struggles with nuclear power in the summer, Germany with gas in the winter, and wind and solar energy are unreliable and not available 100% of the time. There’s no perfect solution—every energy source has major drawbacks. Name an energy source, and I’ll tell you why it sucks.
No, it’s the other way around.
France does not struggle in summer. They don’t need much energy production then. They however struggle in winter, and need imports for the few coldest weeks… mostly from Germany that is.
Nuclear power is incredible bad as base load. The amount of capacities they need for energy-demanding winter times are total overkill most of the year. And as costs of nuclear are basically all construction (and later rebuilding) plants but operation is cheap as fuck, they don’t save money when they throttle them down in summer. And so France is a big exporter… all over the year but not actually in winter.
It’s funny that in both countries a complete lie is nowday common knowledge. Regarding France we hear fairy tales of how they struggle in summer (they don’t) but are oh so self-sufficient (they aren’t), while in Germany it’s 24/7 right-wing propaganda of how they have stuipidly shut down they reactors to be dependent on French ones (they aren’t… contrary to France Germany is in fact fully self-sufficient but with a lot of it based on coal which they turn down at times when France needs to get rid of overproduction cheaply).
I’ll take cheaper, cleaner power any day. France has shown the way.
What now? Cheap and clean would mean renewables. Nuclear is (at least regarding climate) clean but the most expensive energy there is.
It’s bullshit, though.
Fusion energy
We were talking about existing energy sources. Some magical fusion energy being invented or made practical in the next thirty years doesn’t fit that bill. And let’s be honest: Even if some magical breakthrough would make fusion practicable today, it still would be too late to help us in the global warming crisis.It takes time to build big fusion reactors. It takes even more time to build a lot of reactors. It took France nearly twenty years to build a new nuclear reactor and other countries aren’t that faster. To build a huge fleet of fusion reactors (an unproven technology) will not help us reach our carbon goals in the next years. If we don’t reach them in the next years, we’re toast. We can, however, build proven renewable technology and then we don’t need fusion.
yeah the tiny drawback here is that it doesnt exist yet.
This would be my response
The german green party formed from the anti-nuclear movement in the 70s, hence their stupid priorities in the 80s. But what’s done is done, no need to churn through the same discussion for the millionth time
