Renewable energy cost has fallen _a lot_, and Germany doesn't need nuclear power, IF it worked towards this goal: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
Unless people are suddenly ok with blackouts, energy grid have to be robust. For renewables, that means having enough stores energy for times of decreased production.
Option a) the power to pump was generated using fossile fuels. In this case pumped storage is just "greenwashing" energy and doesn't actually produce any.
Option b) the power was generated using renewables. In this case the pumped storage just counts the renewables twice.
This "pumparound" is what makes up the gains in hydroelectric power, not only in Germany, but in most countries: There simply isn't infinite amounts of useable space for hydroelectric power.
If you look at the generated energy, though you will see a constant increase in generated power:
2016: 11,258 MW hydroelectric power, of which 6,806 MW (more than half) are pumped. Generation: 21.5 TWh
2019: 11,022 MW hydroelectric power, of which 6,364 MW (still more than half) are pumped. Generation: 27.88 TWh
A major component of the rise in generation is that pump-around.
From an energy storage PoV they aren't even that effective: Let's say you wanted to supply Munich and surroundings with power for 3 days (~2Mio people). Let's also assume that there are only people living there, so no industry or infrastructure. Let's also assume we have 100% efficiency in our pumped storage system. Let's also assume that everybody lives in two-person housholds (to make the math eaiser). According to destatis, a two person houshold consumed 3221kWh in 2018 (without industry and infrastructure). Dividing by 356 gives us the daily consumption. In Joules, this amounts to 3.25710^13 joules. Dividing by 9.81 m/s^2 and we achieve a value of 3d3.3210^12 kgm. There are now two ways to handle this:
1. high mass
2. high distance
Let's choose something flashy and pump lake constanze (bodensee), the largest freshwater lake in central europe. We would have to pump this up by almost a quarter of a meter to save this amount of energy. And this is with completely optimistic values: double this for electric cars, then add the same amount for electric heating, then again for industry, then add another at least 20% for inefficiency of the hydroelectric generation. And then you have to consider that this is one German city. Or, maybe in a different view: German renewables only need to lose 1/40 th of their efficiency for you to be in this situation (if you want to go 100% renewable).
One also has to consider that, even if it were possible to add more capacity (which the German hydroelectric association doesn't believe is), one has to consider that hydroelectic is by far the most environmentally destructive of all power generation methods. Simply the flooding of a single valley is such an utter environmental disaster, that one has to be very sure that this valley absolutely _has_ to become a hydroelectric installation. Additionally one has the construction of the damn itself, as well as the enormous disturbance of every instance of wildlife both up and downstream for decades to centuries (and that ignores the both human and wildelife destruction brought on by a damn break).
I would gladly take the construction of a nuclear powerplant over a hydroelectric one, considering that the biblis reactor alone has a nameplate capacity of almost half the amount of non-pumped hydroelectric power.
They never include massive battery costs, and are never designed to provide robust baseload power. The grid needs to be up 99.5% of the time. The rule of thumb in engineering is that every 9 costs another 10x - and this applies to energy production most especially.
It's such an absolute cluster-F that I honestly believe the renewables and anti-nuclear movements in the West are promoted by the Russian FSB.
Yet every discussion has claims about how energy storage is somehow a solved problem; usually with some handwaving about pump storage or how batteries have gotten cheaper. There are, interestingly enough, never any real world examples of this.
It's perfectly rational to argue that solar and wind have obvious merits that could be worth subsidizing but that usually isn't the argument. Solar and wind are always cheaper period. Which just isn't true
And here are some estimated Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) figures by energy technology as of 2021, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
I'm all for renewable energy, but this is hypocritic nonsense fuelled by emotional decision making, and not helpful towards that goal.
Please, stay calm. Germany is in a transition process. Nuclear is phasing out, renewable is coming. In the EU Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Norway, and Portugal have no nuclear power plants (Estonia has none, but is planning one; Croatia has none, but operates one together with Slovenia; Poland is planning one for 2040). Germany is just joining this club of "hypocrites" this year.
In the next years, Germany is going to export more electric energy than importing. Yes, there are days when Germany needs to import electricity, but that this includes electricity produced by nuclear power is only due to the fact that other countries are slower in their transition process or have decided against it. You should not blame Germany for being fast, when others are just slow.
Now they had to roll back their decision because it's totally bonkers, and open back some less polluting nuclear plants.
I always find it a bit funny that the green parties are so retarded that they take decisions that cause more pollution. They really live in this idealistic world that is completely separate from the real one. Hippies...
The new gas power plants weren't build and the nuclear reactors weren't shut down.
Shouldn’t one have the replacement first and only then close the existing producers?!
https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-power-a...
> Following Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant meltdown, Germany’s antinuclear lobby kicked into high gear, and tens of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. The German government quickly passed legislation to decommission all of the country’s nuclear reactors
> ...
> found that nuclear power was mostly replaced with power from coal plants, which led to the release of an additional 36 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, or about a 5 percent increase in emissions
So yes, they're fast. So much so that they've outpaced any plans that should have existed to go alongside phasing out nuclear power.
I hope you're right and they're at least going to be in good shape in a few years, but I both doubt that, and it doesn't change the damage they're doing right now.
The decision for abondoning nuclear power did not follow the Fukushima desaster of 11 March 2011, but preceeded it by more than 10 years. The agreement between the German federal government and the energy supply companies to phase out nuclear energy dates back to 14 June 2000. The first nuclear power plant was shut down permanently in Nov. 2003. It was planned to shut the last one down between 2015/2020. In 2010, a new government extended the operating term by several years (depending on the individual power plant), but returned in 2011, after Fukushima, to an earlier phase out, but which was still later (2022) than the initial decision from 2000.
The first decision for abondoning nuclear power was a project of a coalition of the SPD (labour) and the Green party. From late 2005 to late 2021 the Green party was not part of the government. The result was a slowdown in efforts to switch to renewable energies, in particular before 2010. But even after Fukushima the government was very slow to push ahead with the measures necessary for a switch to renewable energies, especially the planning and implementation of new long-distance power lines.
The operators of the nuclear power plants were more or less the same as the operators of the coal-fired power plants: RWE, Vattenfall, E.ON/PreussenElectra, EnBW. (The STEAG is the only major coal-plant operator that was not involved in nuclear energy.) In other words, Germany's nuclear industry is more or less identical with its carbon-based industry. It was their lobbying within the Merkel cabints from 2005 to 2021 that resulted in the deal to replace nuclear with coal, instead of switching to the new technologies of their competitors faster.
The deficits in the current situation were therefore not caused by the political forces that advocated a switch from nuclear and coal to renewable energies, but by those who stood in the way of this change.
Personally, I very much support this restructuring, but I am not dogmatic. In view of the situation in Ukraine, I would have spontaneously thought it appropriate to extend the lifetime of the last three nuclear power plants. However, I have read in the press that this is not practical for at least two reasons: firstly, in order to keep them running longer, they would have to be maintained (technical tests and repairs would be necessary), which would mean that they would have to be taken off the grid soon for several month, and secondly, the procurement of new fuel elements would reportedly take about one and a half years.
Don't fall for emotional reasonings, lobby or geopolitical narratives relayed by useful idiots NGO[0][1], in the coming years it is not renewables vs nuclear, it is renewables with nuclear, both against carbon emitting energies.
[0]https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18330/russia-funding-envi...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Planet_Energy#Fossil_gas...
What bothers me greatly is that Germany still has not come to turns with the fact that they need nuclear power. That is a long and costly investment to make and you need to start right away.
LNG can only get you so far and renewable sources just can't provide the energy needed, as should be clear by now (although it was widely understood for the past 30 years at least).