Well, if you refuse to look at the details, everything looks like a pipe dream.

In reality, Germany still exports electricity to "nuclear powered" France.

The plan to stop coal plants does not count on higher energy imports, particularly not in the form of electricity.

> In reality, Germany still exports electricity to "nuclear powered" France.

France imports very cheap electricity from Germany when wind/solar works very well and exports very expensive electricity when wind/solar works badly. It's a pretty much balanced trade between the two in terms of electricity but it's far from balanced in monetary terms, Germany pays the non-stability of their grid at a high price.

> France imports very cheap electricity from Germany when wind/solar works very well

or when nuclear doesn't deliver enough electricity. Like in cold winters (high demand) or hot summers (low production).

There's no such problems in France right now. There's much lower consumption in the summer, it's the time planned for maintenance, producing more would be useless and I don't recall any issue with the winter load.

> it's the time planned for maintenance

also unplanned maintenance, overheating rivers, drying rivers, ...

Google is your friend:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nucle...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/30/heatwave-may-for...

https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-power-supply/germany-...

https://energytransition.org/2017/01/france-cant-meet-its-ow...

> also unplanned maintenance, overheating rivers, drying rivers, ...

Those are a very small number of reactors and not affecting in anyway the grid, it's totally planned, you do get clickbait article every year though. By the way, they are only being stopped by regulation as well, not any technical problem.

Additionally, renewables had more severe issues at the moment from the heatwaves, above 25 degrees, solar panel outputs drops a lot and generally there's not much wind either during this kind of weather to compensate.

https://twitter.com/TristanKamin/status/1153624647243620355, Here is the electricity production in France for this summer, there's definitely one source of electricity working better than the others during heatwave...

I don't know why people keep bringing this up, it's an non-issue and it's never been one.

> Those are a very small number of reactors and not affecting in anyway the grid, it's totally planned, you do get clickbait article every year though. By the way, they are only being stopped by regulation as well, not any technical problem.

What do you think regulation is for?

> Additionally, renewables had more severe issues at the moment from the heatwaves, above 25 degrees, solar panel outputs drops a lot and generally there's not much wind either during this kind of weather to compensate.

We were breaking a lot of records with renewable energy here in Germany lately...

> What do you think regulation is for?

Those regulations are there to save fishes, they're not related to nuclear plants, coal plants also have the same issue. That's to save wildlife. If you don't care about fishes, the plant technically works.

Since there's a need for maintenance anyway and less demand, that's not worth killing the fishes with warmer water.

A nuclear power plant does not work 'technically', if it harms the environment.

I mean we're going in circles here, it's not needed to start those plants in summer anyway so...

Sure, you can always import German electricity.

The reason those plants are not needed (as I said multiple times they are not) is because you have 50% share of electricity heating. And you obviously don't need any heating in summer...

France imported energy from Germany long before renewables became a thing.

Also: The French state heavily subsidizes nuclear energy.

Every electricity source is heavily subsidized anyway, I don't think there's any exception.

I think that there is an exception if a nation wants to have a nuclear industry complement and partially amortize the production of nuclear weapon.

The subsidies in France led to the absurd situation that electric heating is much more prevalent than anywhere else, even though renewable electricity is supposedly more heavily subsidized.

That's not an absurd situation, that's making France way ahead of other European countries for the carbon footprint of heating, it would be nice if other countries could catch up.

And renewables were not even a thing at that time anyways.

Currently the situation in France is that the nuclear energy is made artificially more expensive to fund renewables with the goal of increasing the renewable share but even with that market distortion, renewables are still failing to compete.

In reality, heating with natural gas is more carbon efficient currently, than using most commonly available electricity mixes. Cheaper, in any case, than heating with nuclear electricity anywhere but in France. Of course you can make a case where nuclear power is cheaper, if you disregard any of the risks, political problems, and clean-up costs associated with it. Particularly in France, all those costs are covered (or mostly ignored) by the government. The private energy companies certainly can't pay it.

France still has to import electricity from coal power, so the carbon footprint isn't that great in any case. And you can't claim that slightly raising electricity costs offset the dozens of billions that went into the French nuclear sector in any way.

> Particularly in France, all those costs are covered (or mostly ignored) by the government.

That's an argument constantly repeated by the anti-nuclear activists, it's of course totally false, there's extensive (100+ pages) reports every few years on all the external and primary costs.

> France still has to import electricity from coal power, so the carbon footprint isn't that great in any case. And you can't claim that slightly raising electricity costs offset the dozens of billions that went into the French nuclear sector in any way.

That's not true in any way but if you are concerned about that, you can check https://www.electricitymap.org for other EU countries (this takes into account import as well). Most of them (except Scandinavia) are doing 6x to 10x worse than France at the moment and have a very long way to catch up.

Can you substantiate that claim?

So how you will balance the grid? You can export excess energy to whenever you want, but what happens when renewables are inactive? Russian gas?..

That's a typical objection of people who haven't studied the details.

The engineers who are behind such proposals and plans actually now that sun and wind energy isn't constantly available. That's way there is a mix of energy sources and technologies, including, yes, Russian gas. But also American Liquified Natural Gas. Oil. Electricity storage systems. And maybe even new nuclear reactors in the future, once a few nagging problems have been figured out.

There are great engineers for sure in Germany. Not everybody left for Valley or Switzerland. But having 2nd most expensive electricity in Europe is a crystal clear result of bad engineering.

Or, you know, we could build wind turbines and solar panels and reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuels.

Germany already does that quite a lot (>30% of their production in average come from renewable), but there is a distribution issue. The north generates a lot of electricity using a combination of windmills and solar panel, but the south doesn’t for some reasons (I guess the environment isn’t adapted? Not sure why). And there are a lot of problems (not necessarily technical) to bring the electricity from the north to the south. As far as I understood, the government need to get the authorization from each land owner on the way to be able to install new cables and infrastructure, and that takes crazy amount of time. Nobody want to have this going through their property.

Germany just lost 20000 jobs in wind power last year because they essentially stopped all construction.

Wow, that’s a massive blow. Do you have a source for this?

Only in German, http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/19/116/1911619.pdf

Germany imports most of its natural resources, because we don’t have them anyway. That‘s why we rely so much on exporting products.