Just because you call yourself green doesn't mean you know what you're doing.
And let's not forget how several former high ranking German and Austrian politicians are on the boards of various Russian oil and gas companies, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence and not in any way related to the countries' energy policies. /s
The ranking German politician is former chancellor Schröder and indeed, this is very much critisized throughout Germany.
Stop trying to shift the blame off the greens.
Merkel (or rathr her minister Altmaier) shortened the life time of nuclear and more importantly curbed the buildup of renewables. Of course the exit of nuclear can only work with enough renewables being built up and that they not only failed but held back. Add to that the complete one sided dependence of Russian gas - they even sold the German gas storage to Gazprom. Guess why the German storage happened to be empty just at the beginning of the invasion of the Ukraine.
Where are you getting this 1gwh number? I am seeing 5gwh in 2021. I also am not seeing 10gwh any year. Perhaps I am not looking at the correct numbers?
If solar had its peak in 2012 that means it had its peak under Merkel's time as Chancellor? Which policy do you think Merkel was involved with that caused the drop? I assume you will say the change in feed in tariff? If so then why did the peak occur after years of the tariff continually dropping?
If it is the tariff, then why didn't we see a similar continual decline in the US when the tax credit ended at the end of 2016? There was a few year decline, but solar adoption is now higher than ever.
Would 5 years been enough that nuclear could have been shut down without causing any issues? Nuclear appears to be a large supplier of power in Germany. It doesn't seem likely that 5 years could have allowed solar to displace nuclear. Germany would still be having issues.
Do you have proof that roll out of solar would have continued at the same rate without the change in tariff (or whatever you are blaming Merkel for)?
You can see that solar collapsed from 8.2GW/a[1] in 2012 to 1.2GW/a in 2015. Wind collapsed from 4.9GW/a in 2017 to 0.9GW/a in 2019.
I cannot exactly "proove" which decision was exact killer, but of course any decision takes some time to have the full impact, as larger installations usually are planned years ahead, so any change in politics will take years to take full effect. But the collapse of both wind and solar are difficult to miss - and we rather should have a steady growth in both rates or at least maintain the peak rates on a constant level. At minimum one can blame politics not to have acted to keep up with installations. But there were a lot of decisions taken which were clearly impacting the roll out of renewables. And that with a known deadline for the nuclear power plants.
Some decisions taken I can remember:
- the feed in tariff was lowered. Even if that is a constant process, when it crosses the threshhold of no longer being profitable, there will be a steep drop in new installations
- solar started to recover in recent years, probably because due to the cells becoming cheaper so it began to be more profitable again
- as far as I know there was an upper limit for any subsidy, so another reason for a stop of new installations
- for wind power the whole system was changed, leading to a deep decline. Subsidies were auctioned off, but unfortunately not including a time limit for actually installing new capacity. So many projects "won" auctions and were never realized.
The 5 years alone wouldn't probably not suffice to replace the nuclear power plants, but you have to count in as well all the missed capacity after 2012. If we had just continued at 8GW/a and above, solar capacity would almost be double of what it is today. Pretty much the same with wind.
[1] Sorry, might have mistaken the total number on top of the solar bar with the number on the bar. But over 8GW/a is still pretty much it.
(And ironically on the French nuclear power plants failing due to wear and heat, so that Germany had to produce an additional 20TWh of electricity to keep the grid alive)
Frances issue aren't with nuclear, but with funding.
Rare events can be backed up with hydrogen-burning turbines. A simple cycle turbine power plant has 5% of the capital cost of a nuclear power plant of the same output, so this doesn't cost much compared to the all-nuclear solution.
If we are going to have hydrogen turbines how much should we have? Enough to cover a quarter of a city?
We can look at a model to see how much long term storage is optimal (under various cost assumptions) to deliver a constant output, using historical weather data.
For the US, the minimum cost model using 2011 weather data and 2030 cost assumptions uses 6 hours of battery storage and 106 hours of hydrogen storage. For someplace at high latitude, more hydrogen gets used, since it becomes economical to save energy from summer to winter. In Finland, for example, the optimal solution has 2 hours of batteries and 275 hours of hydrogen. On the other side, the solution for Saudi Arabia uses 10 hours of batteries and 48 hours of hydrogen.