What? Germany is a net exporter of electricity[1] - this was in 2022 and the trend is that net exports will increase this year. France (65% nuclear) imports more electricity from Germany than it exports to Germany.

I don't understand why this lie about Germany is repeated so regularly on here and yet is so easy to google/check.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-...

You can be a net exporter of electricity and still have expensive power.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267541/germany-monthly-...

I can't view that graph.

German wholesale prices are pretty much bang in the middle of European average which is what you'd expect given the high level of integration between each country's domestic market and the large amount of capacity for import/export and the liberalised nature of the markets (liberalised by EU decree in 2008).

There was a huge spike last Summer but it was caused not by a domestic shift in German supply and demand but by the fact that over 50% of French nuclear capacity went offline in August/September which meant France needed to import huge amounts of electricity from its neighbours (primarily Germany) which pushed up wholesale prices across much of Europe.

You can be a big exporter - and Germany is the biggest electricity exporter in the world[1] (like the US is of natural gas for example) but this doesn't prevent domestic prices from responding to external prices.

[1] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/electricity_export...

Excess power is excess power.

Here's a better visualization: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

Germany has essentially replaced nuclear 1:1 with renewables (mostly wind).

Unfortunately, even though they've been building renewables in a seriously impressive way, they could have also had nuclear at the same time.

The root issue was completely ceasing construction of a fixed-lifetime generating resource in 1983+ that accounted for ~25% of a country's energy mix, with the majority built in the 1970s.

But I'm going to take some convincing to decide that +375 TWh of stable, baseload electrical power wouldn't have helped the German (and European) economy.

Same people are writing the energy policy here. Germany just was further along.

Climate change mitigation doesn't work if the fossil fuels just make it cheaper for other countries to use them. Russia and the Middle East aren't walking away from trillions of dollars in oil reserves and the BRICS aren't going to stop developing to keep the world from getting a couple degrees hotter in a hundred years.

If they really wanted to do something about climate change they'd be pushing next gen nuclear energy to the forefront, make clean electricity super cheap, and drive electrification by outcompeting fossils.

The energy policy we have now in the West was designed by scammers and morons.

T. Energy Policy PhD

Where is "here"?

Russia and the Middle East can try to sell their oil reserves, but eventually demand is going to crash as a consequence of vehicle and power grid replacement with renewables.

Oil will remain in certain energy dense and/or conservative applications for awhile (e.g. aircraft), but the two above sectors are a big chunk of demand (~50%, roughly).

Compared to renewables' zero cost of fuel, it's hard to balance refining and shipping oil around the world at any price, especially after the current system downsizes.

At this point the price for new solar power or onshore wind is cheaper than gas or coal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...

Only in places that can afford to replace them. Liquid fuels are well understood and supported in the developing world because ICEs are relatively cheap and liquid fuels have amazing energy density.

A village with a tank of diesel can be amazingly self sufficient in the developing world while their grid central power are not reliable.

I understand the urgency of climate change, but doing something obviously unproductive like pretending the developing world is going to eagerly spend money they don't have to preserve the climate 75 years from now, isn't going to help anything.