Which actually makes sense, if you have a high upfront cost, constant output source iike nuclear, taxing each individual unit makes no sense since the marginal cost is effectively zero up till you need to build a new plant. Whereas if you burn coal or gas, you want to incentivise people to cut back for cost, carbon and pollution reasons.
An even more sensible approach would be to tax the carbon directly and charge more for peak electricity since that contributes more to the infrastructure requirements, which I guess both countries will already be moving towards as is the current trend in most places.
On the other hand: To have higher energy prices provides incentives for less use and must be part of an intermediate strategy to bring down CO2 emissions.
That's more than I pay in the US in total per kWh for electricity, generated, distributed, and taxed.
41.3 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2016 was frankly excessive though it helped PV get much cheaper. Unfortunately, Germany now stuck with these huge agreed upon subsides for another decade.
The Greens in Germany seem to be hell bent on de-industrializing Germany. They hate nuclear power and they hate all fossil fuels, but want to buy fracking LNG from the USA and fire up brown coal plants that were previously shut down to shove it to Putin. The outcome seems to be mass bankruptcies in what seems to be the social fabric of Germany, while getting a lot less energy for the same price.
- the Greens are the party most opposed to brown coal out of all German parties.
- Gas is far less emissions intense than most other forms of fossil fuels, so it is a good transitional source of energy.
- Germanies nuclear plants were built around 40 years ago, with a lifetime in mind of 40 years. The idea of arguing they can run longer because nothing happened in the last 40 years is preposterous, and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how industry works. Not only are the designs lacking essential security features, every single part was produced with 40 year lifetime in mind.
- the three plants that where built in 87 are going to continue to run for now.
You can bring up your "facts" about Germany's nuclear power plants all you want. But the green policies are part of the reason why the investment in nuclear was halted and on top of that the German Taxpayer had to foot a massive payout to nuclear plant operators for the premature exit. [2]
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/erdgas-brau...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-utilities-nuclear...
It's normal to do a general maintenance (with upgrades to recent security standard) at the end of projected lifetime and then run it for another 40 years. It's absolute - economically speaking - bullshit to destroy a mostly-good nuclear power plant. It's not like the reactor core is the only thing there, anyways - even replacing it would be much better than tearing the place down.
The worst thing is - you lose experts, and they don't train new experts. And then there's no one to bring the nuclear power plant up again, or build a new one. Lost technology...
It's like trying to keep an old car on the road, except a few critical components are highly radioactive.
Do you have any sources? Last time I checked, Germany and France weren't that far apart, if you remove taxes out of the costs. The thing is that Germany has a lot of Taxes that have nothing todo with how we generate the electricity. I.e. 90% of the electricity tax (Stromsteuer) goes into the government pension fund.