And if we got that going for us, neither coal nor nuclear are needed anymore. Probably.
(Although I'm all in for new nuclear technologies I think our aging reactors are nothing to be proud of. Maybe we could create new jobs in fusion reactor research and development, too. I'd like that.)
> (Although I'm all in for new nuclear technologies I think our aging reactors are nothing to be proud of. Maybe we could create new jobs in fusion reactor research and development, too. I'd like that.)
I think nuclear will be too expensive by the time new plants would be built - 10+ years judging by the projects in the UK and Finland. Germany would be at least as slow as them, especially with the strong anti-nuclear sentiment locally, which would probably lead to ongoing protests and lawsuits.
They dominate the market, have Germany split up amongst them and are crying and threatening with job losses at the slightest sign of change.
Interesting fact (taken from the linked Wiki article): Those big four had less than 10% market share in renewables in 2013. Not sure about now, but numbers might not look much better.
They are the ones that operate coal and nuclear power plants and are not interested in any change whatsoever.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_gro%C3%9Fen_Vier_(Energiev...
The renewable fraction in both cases is just over 30%, but the UK has managed to phase out coal in favour of lower-carbon gas. UK prices average around €0.14 per kWh. Maybe the difference is made up by wind, but there Germany has a huge domestic champion: Siemens.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/fighting-windmill...
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-protesters-oppose-suedlink-win...
There is less resistance to offshore wind projects and to small scale distributed solar. Both of these generating resources are more expensive than onshore wind farms.
Even in the matter of distributed solar, note that the peak installation rate was back in 2012:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Generat...
Germany not only installed a lot of a particularly expensive kind of renewable capacity (distributed solar). It did most of that installation some time ago when it was even more expensive to install. And it did so in a very sunlight-constrained climate, so each kilowatt of capacity generates much less energy than in Italy, Spain, or the US. Since industry threatened to just relocate if higher electricity costs were passed on, residential and commercial electricity customers have borne the financial brunt of the renewable buildout while heavy industry was spared.
The UK did better by phasing out coal in favor of gas faster than Germany and not installing significant solar capacity until the hardware had become much cheaper. The UK's renewable additions were almost exclusively wind until 2011. The UK started deploying significant solar several years later than Germany:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_King...
Between deliberately choosing to pioneer solar PV installations in a low-sun country, phasing out nuclear power, and acting to placate the powerful domestic coal lobby, Germany has really spent a lot of money to accomplish a very modest degree of decarbonization.
Building renewable energy sources doesn't pay off at the moment, so nobody is interested in doing so. If that gets fixed, the amount of renewable energy sources will rise.
I'm looking at the same problem with my parents' house at the moment. Just putting some panels on the roof won't help with anything. You need a concept for the whole house and making that is just lots of work. If people could just spend X Euro and be sure to have the money back in 5 years because they can sell the electricity or whatever, lots of people would be in, I'm sure.
I know some villages are trying to found a cooperative, crowdfund some money and build their own wind turbine somewhere outside in the hills near the village, before some big company does it. They are looking to collect and lend 6 million Euro for a 3.5 MW, 130 meter wind turbine [1].
[1] https://www.vestas.com/en/products/4-mw-platform/v136-_3_45_...
In former times there were generous subsidies for installing solar panels: You got, I think, a fixed amount per kWh that you installed on your roof and you also got a better price for the electricity that you put back into the grid. In Germany it's called "Einspeisevergütung" if I remember correctly.
This program was limited though, and now you have to pay for the panels all yourself (or you get only a little bonus from the state) and the prices for "selling" into the grid have fallen drastically because there's just too much electricity on sunny days and its sold for negative values on the international electricity markets.
Installing new solar panels on your roof is now only interesting when you can use the electricity for yourself. That means charging EVs, filling battery-powered storage (also expensive and not subsidized, I think) or using the electricity around and in your house.
If you've got an older installation you might benefit from the old tariffs and get a little bit more money, but building new systems is rather uninteresting for private households.
With rising prices for electricity there will be new "motivation" for installing new solar systems on your house. But as already said, only for using the electricity for yourself.
Also a law was changed recently, so that renters can now install their own "balcony solar systems" (one panel for example) and feed that electricity right back into their grid through the wall outlet. This is only allowed with small systems though, so that you may produce enough energy for your household base load, but not make your meter turn backwards.
In the bigger picture all of this shows how Germany has, so far, failed to do a real switch to renewable energies or really take a step into that direction.
We got lots of solar systems and lots of wind turbines, but we are not able to store the produced electricity for later use. So lots of wind turbines are turned out of the wind, because there's an overproduction of electricity on windy days. And prices for solar generated electricity have dropped, as already mentioned.
Meanwhile the four large energy companies in Germany are doing what they want and are holding the government as hostage.
Chopping down woods without any need, because some coal-fired power stations needs to be run because we could otherwise lose 20.000 jobs all over Germany.
Nobody thinks about how many jobs we could create with a heavy switch and investment in renewable energies and storage solutions for energy.
After all, taking a step backwards it's kind of a sad situation.