German here. In hindsight it was very stupid to go out of nuclear in a panic attack just to burn coal and buy nuclear from France instead. A big fail.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but for years, Germany sold more power to france than it bought from there. https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=...

Also, during harsh winters and warm summers, france is happy to buy electrical energy from us, because of the unreliability in their system under those circumstances.

(Also German here ....)

> for years, Germany sold more power to france than it bought from there.

True, and from 2020 onwards (conveniently not in your data set but available from the Bundesnetzagentur), that is no longer true as German nuke plants get decommissioned ever faster and power production in Germany shrinks.

> france is happy to buy electrical energy from us, because of the unreliability in their system under those circumstances

France is happy to buy German power in the summer because it is cheap as chips - 0.02c per kWh wholesale because of solar panels that only produce well in the middle of summer when nobody needs much power.

I would prefer if you could provide sources. One typical trap I see people fall into is mistaking physical flow for trading. With Germany being in the center of Europe, it always has a large amount of energy exchanged with France, thats a physical necessity, basically due to "transiting" through the german grid to other countries.

But even in 2020, Imports and Exports with France leveled out with Germany exporting a bit more.

Based on: https://www.smard.de/page/home/marktdaten/78?marketDataAttri...

If you have a better source, let me know.

The low prices are not set by solar, as you probably know, subsidized renewables are always sold for 0, they can't change their pricing. But fossil plants (especially lignite and nuclear) drop their prices as they are not able to completely turn off or reduce below a certain amount of power.

The irony is that the German Greens are one of the reasons Germany burns so much coal, instead of using nuclear like France :(

German speaking: Although, to be fair, most Germans are scared by nuclear power plants independent of their affiliation with the Green party. That is one of the reasons Chancelor Merkel (a conservative) reverted her stance on nuclear years ago.

The thing is, they're scared in large part because of the propaganda by greenpeace et al

The country was under both the Chernobyl fallout cloud and, until 1990ish, the threat of nuclear weapons with no retaliation capability. It is important to understand that Greenpeace's anti-nuclear stance came from being against nuclear weapons, in both testing and omnipresent threat, and then later against the dumping of nuclear waste at sea.