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Re:Nord Stream: Tie-ins and hyperbaric welding by formerly_proven on Wednesday September 28, 2022 @04:17AM (#33005494)
Habeck (Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action) went on live TV a week or two ago and called German nuclear power plants a "high risk technology" that "needs to be shut down as planned". There has never been a nuclear accident in a German NPP and they've consistently achieved a 90 % capacity factor.

Now, NPPs are of course pretty expensive, and purely from a $/kWh perspective it's pretty difficult for the large-scale-engineering kind of power plant (this extends to any kind of thermal plant) to compete with the cheaper renewables. But $/kWh is not everything - NPPs are plannable and commandable capacity (unless you're the French), renewables aren't, so their kilowatt-hours are not actually directly comparable.

Naturally natural gas especially in Germany is not primarily used for electricity generation, but largely for process heat, residential heating and as a chemical. A lot of that could be replaced by using electricity, but that'd be quite expensive, too. However, even though natgas isn't used primarily for electricity, due to merit order / economic dispatch the gas price has a hugely outsized impact on electricity prices. This, among with very high taxes and dues on electricity, is what causes world-record prices in Germany.

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