Not really. Nuclear power requires massive subsidies. In Germany, the "De Height" wind farm was completed in August. Sixty-four 15-MW turbines generate about 4 TWh of electricity annually, which is sold entirely on the open market without any EEG funding.
The market for baseload electricity has disappeared in Germany, as renewables push the residual load to zero or below for almost the entire year:
Yes, but then when the wind doesn't blow, you miss upto 960MW of capacity, you can choose how to fill that; solar, coal, gas, waterpower, diesel, nuclear.
And the question is, are those wind turbines without subsidy?
Here in the Netherlands some big energy users like Aldel already have stopped, those big users are also good in up and down scaling energy usage on demand, and also those products have to come from somewhere else now, so in the end the question is about energy and availability.
A single wind turbine or a single PV module obviously provides only variable amounts of electricity. However, this is not the case for many PV modules and wind turbines spread across the entire continent. Wind and PV complement each other very well in Europe because of regular weather fronts; when there is little wind, there is more sunshine.
In Europe, the average weekly electricity generation in 2025 was 14.0 TWh, and no week fell below 10.2 TWh.
In 2026, the average output was about 15.5 TWh, and so far, no week has fallen below 12.5 TWh.
Of course, batteries are needed for short-term storage, but with the creation of excess capacity in wind and solar power, the troughs below the load curve become narrower and shallower, drastically reducing the need for storage.
Or they could get with the times and build a ton of battery like California. Down to 25% fossil in 2026 due to the massive success of shifting solar into the night with batteries.
the answers exist, euro states just can’t get out of their own way and actually build things
and thats fine by me! if we covered just the average daily cycle with batteries (like cali is closing in on) then you're talking like a 95% non-fossil production for the year. We've effectively won the climate crisis at that point. Or at least, can spend our efforts in other sectors while technology keeps giving us more options for the last 5%
Here is an analysis from Germany: Quarter-hourly spot prices compared to the share of renewable energy generation in total generation. A higher share of renewables puts massive downward pressure on the spot market electricity price.
Since price elasticity for electricity is very high, the market cap decreases by approximately €150,000 for every additional GWh of renewable energy production. A single additional offshore wind turbine with an annual output of 60 GWh reduces the combined revenue of all electricity producers by about €9 million per year that it is in operation.
Blocking wind power and solar projects only serves to secure the profits of monopolists and oligopolists in the electricity market, but causes massive harm to the economy.
No amount of solar panels will generate electricity without sun light. Also the amount sun light can shrink quite a lot in winter months at high latitudes and under cloud cover.
No amount of wind turbines will generate electricity without wind, or to be more precise:
Cut-in speed: 3–4 m/s (12–15 km/h) to begin spinning and producing power.
Cut-out / Stop speed: Above 25 m/s (90 km/h) where brakes are applied to prevent mechanical damage
Germany has to have backups, currently quite expensive, for all this times of missing renewables production.
The apparent volatility of electricity generation from a single wind turbine is negligible, because what counts is the wind and PV output over large areas. Due to regular weather fronts, electricity output from wind and PV in Europe is surprisingly stable; when there is less sunshine, there is more wind.
In 2025, for example, the weekly electricity output from wind and solar PV was 14.0 TWh, with no week falling below 10.5 TWh. If more wind power were installed in Eastern Europe, the curves would flatten out even further.
Yes, single wind turbine is negligible, what counts is the wind and PV output over extremely large areas because weather fronts are correlated over hundreds of km. Of course night/day cycle is correlated over whole Europe with few hours shift.
So in 100% renewables Europe scenario, you have build multiples of renewable production in each region.
You build enough renewables in Western Europe to power the whole Europe, you build enough renewables in Central Europe to power the whole Europe and you build enough renewables in Eastern Europe to power the whole Europe and build electric grid to transfer 2/3s of electricity produced in each region into other regions.
Can it be done? Yes, but it will be very expensive.
Many renewable energy modelers often ignore realities and costs of physical electric grid and model whole continent as copper plate which can transfer infinite amount of electricity from each to point to any other point.
For more realistic scenarios German government is looking into power-to-gas energy storage systems, where you convert renewable electricity to hydrogen, ammonia or ethanol and store it underground. There are also plans to import large part of these gases/liquids from other countries, so no energy independence in the future.
Thats exactly how you build for resiliency. You probably aren't familiar with running workloads on the cloud. There are multiple levels of redundancy, Availability Zones, multiple regions, etc. At least 4X redundancy if you are running anything important.
The peaker natural gas plants are not running at 100%, they mostly run a few hours for peak production. Any critical infrastructure is built for peak utilization and there will always be some idling.
The good thing with electricity is excess production can be used to charge cars, pump water, produce green hydrogen or green ammonia. People are creative, they will figure out what to use excess production for.
"Reliability: Five-nines availability (99.999%, under 6 minutes downtime annually), typically achieved by combining high grid reliability with backup generation."
I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.
Physicaly, you can do 3X redundancy in electric generation and electric grid, as there are no physical laws against it, but such large infrastructure is expensive and you have to pay the CAPEX even if the infrastructure is almost never utilized. Also transporting electricity over large distances is really expensive, therefor only relative small amount of electricity can be transport in europe and future targets are modest.
"The EU has set an interconnection target of at least 15% by 2030 to encourage EU countries to interconnect their installed electricity production capacity. This means that each country should have electricity infrastructure in place that would allow it to import, from its neighbouring EU countries, an equivalent of at least 15% of the electricity production capacity on its territory."
Someone has to pay for this, either customers or tax payers (through goverment subsidies) and Europe already has high electricity prices (when compared with China and US).
"The energy sector is one of the largest and most important sectors of the world economy. Accounting for 8%–10% of world GDP, it is second only to health care in size and is equally pervasive in scope"
I think you are trying to say something, but I'm not sure what it is. It is not clear what you are advocating for. More nuclear?
Resiliency requires redundancy and that means excess production capacity. It is now mostly peaker gas plants that run only a few hours a day at most. Instead, solar panels are dirt cheap and you can have lots of redundancy pretty cheap. There are many uses for excess energy, it can be used for green hydrogen (industrial heat) and green ammonia (fertilizer) or pump water back if there is hydro. Most importantly, Europe has ~460 million vehicles, all of these can be EVs and have flexible demand. People are creative and they will find many uses with time-of-use pricing.
As a civilization, we're only just getting started on solar. So far, its been horizontal panels to capture when the Sun is brightest. The next phase is vertical solar. It requires zero land and can be deployed anywhere, think of all the fences and walls and tall buildings. It can be deployed in cities, close to consumption, without requiring new transmission infrastructure. Vertical solar will add 4 hours solar production. And Europe is geographically a large area, ~3400 miles wide, which means with grid interconnect, you can add 4 more hours excess production, ship to the other countries and get paid.
Or you can do what Romania does and install Solar with batteries: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-P.... If a poor Eastern European country can figure out how to build renewables, I'm sure its not a hard task for Western Europe?
> I wrote software for monitoring and controling electric grids on country level and later software for controling nuclear power plants, I know a little bit about resiliency.
You have a fixed worldview, the grid is an unchangeable fixed structure, and it can never be changed because you wrote a bit of software in COBOL 50 years back. What happened in your 20s is the best and ideal grid and it should never change. In your age of fossil fuel, production was far away, needed transmission infrastructure to bring power to the cities. Because coal is extremely polluting, hydro is geo-fixed and nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it). None of those assumptions are true anymore.
I'm advocating for more nuclear, for deep decarbonization (removing 99% of CO2 output) and removing of all uses of fossil fuels. And as humanity we failing, because CO2 output is still rising.
I think the best option would be a world wide CO2 tax, because we already see carbon leakage, competitive advantage of economies with more CO2 production, but cheaper energy and cheaper products. (China, US over Europe)
> Resiliency requires redundancy and that means excess production capacity.
Redundancy is good and desirable, but someone has to pay for the infrastructure even when it's not fully utilized or is used to full extend only few times a year (Dunkelflaute). Overbuilding electricity production and overbuilding electric grid is expensive. In the past get to high reliability countries had only about 5 - 10% spare electric production capacity, not a spare coal power plant for each running coal power plant.
"Of course, the probability of Dunkelflaute is higher in winter, with peaks in November and January. Here, on average, there are 50-100 hours of Dunkelflaute per month, and as many as 150 hours in Sweden."
When more solar/wind is installed on grid the necessary builds of backup peaker gas plants, expansion of electric grids to balance out the weather caused variations in production is no calculated in the LCOE of the solar/wind power plant. LCOE for solar PV plus battery storage is better indicator, but even then doesn't include the backup peaker gas plants and expansion of electric grids. (China builds backup coal power plants for solar).
> solar panels are dirt cheap
Solar panels are dirt cheap, because they are made in China. Polysilicon production is very energy intensive and China has a lot cheap electricity. Lot of production in Inner Mongolia, lot of sunshine and lot of coal.
> excess energy, it can be used for green hydrogen
How to do it economically is a open research problem, because Alkaline water electrolysis has problems with fluctuating solar power supply (battery storage and solar overbuilding may be necessary) and Proton exchange membrane electrolysis is expensive (uses expensive metal because of corrosion).
> You have a fixed worldview, the grid is an unchangeable fixed structure, and it can never be changed because you wrote a bit of software in COBOL 50 years back. What happened in your 20s is the best and ideal grid and it should never change. In your age of fossil fuel, production was far away, needed transmission infrastructure to bring power to the cities. Because coal is extremely polluting, hydro is geo-fixed and nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it). None of those assumptions are true anymore.
I didn't see any COBOL code, oldest code was Pascal, but was been replaced because Sun stopped official support of Pascal compiler on Solaris.
Coal burning is terrible, lot of particulate matter (depending on the filtering system of the coal plant), sulfur, toxic heavy metals (lead, arsenic, cadmium), radioactive elements (uranium, thorium and decay products) (under normal situation coal power plant outputs more radioactive material then nuclear power plant into air). Gas is much cleaner, but still some methane leakage and lot of CO2.
> nuclear needs to be far (nobody will allow it)
We scared the people to death in 1970s, 1980s, 1990s with nuclear fear mongering. Movies: China syndrome, Dr. Strangelove, and other. Nuclear power production has been made equal with nuclear weapons. Activists presented each nuclear powerplant as ticking nuclear bomb.
Chernobyl was a big Soviet failure, but probably smaller then the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster.
I think the point is, if you can decide when to consume electricity then you will do it when it's the cheapest, so let's put the cheapest when the low carbon sources are available. So the website is taking into account that renewables are not always available, that's exactly its point.
And the backup source for Germany is the nuclear electricity from France. The grid is at the European scale.
This is interesting, but now explain why Germany has both the highest electricity prices in Europe as well as a relatively high CO2 footprint from electricity? Germany is buying not only nuclear but also coal energy from neighbouring countries.
Will this be fixed at some point or is the German model not actually as good as you imply?
The main reason why electricity is expensive in Germany is because it's taxed to oblivion. Even when wholesale prices are negative, electricity costs about three times as much as gas.
Now you might ask why electricity is taxed to oblivion. Some don't like nuclear or coal. Some prefer oil or gas. In the end, there's a majority that wants electricity to be expensive.
I was under the impression that the taxes are going into infrastructure and grants for renewable energies, meaning those energy prices are maybe way higher than advertised. Funny thing is we are constantly being told how cheap reneweables are to produce but apparently there are other costs involved.
Well, that impression is wrong. The german word for "Taxes" is "Steuer". And they go to one of the 3 levels of our government: Federal level, the 16 states, municipalities / communes.
And yes, we pay VAT (19%) and electricty tax (0.0205 € / kWh).
But we also pay other things, like Konzessionsabgabe, KWKG-Umlage, AbN and Offshore-Netzumlage. They have various reasons:
AbN is used to make electricity artificially cheaper for ecenomically important companies that have a high usage of electricity. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
KWKG (Kraft-Wärme-Kopplungs-Gesetz) is payed to keep the oil and gas power plants in operation. We now have so much renewable energy, they it wouldn't be economically feasible to operate them -- they have quite low duty cycles these days. They are however important for the quality of the whole network. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
Konzessionsabgabe could perhaps counted as tax. The lines of the electric grid go over public property. Or they use the area below the pedestrian sidewalks. And so they have to pay for it. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax, more a rent.
Offshore-Netzumlage is because we have sooooo much electric wind power in the north and baltic sea, but most bigger industry is in the south. It is used to pay for the new electric trasses. So this doesn't go to government, it's no tax.
Also, electric power in Germany is both cheap and expensive. The internal price is often cheap. But the price to end-customers is often expensive. One part of that is that many end-customers don't switch their electricity power. In history, we had local power distributors, often in the hand of the city or the county. But since perhaps 20 years one can now just select anyone, whoever has the lowest price. However, the majority of the germans stay (due to lazyness?) with their local providers. Which are usually on the more costly side.
Also we should not forget that Germany has one of the best electric grids in Germany. We can take the SAIDI and compare electric grids of regions or countries. And in Europe, Germany has the lowest SAIDI of all large industrial countries. Some have a lower SAIDI, but they are tiny-states.
So, what is SAIDI? The System Average Interuption Duration Index --- or how long per year and customer the power is out. And here we're better than e.g. Austria, France, Belgium, Sweden ... but also MUCH better than the USA, which seem to have exceptional shaggy electric grids.
So price is one thing... but that you can depend on the electric power in Germany, but maybe not abroad, is another thing.
Source for SAIDI: Germany and english language Wikipedia, Bundesnetzagentur
Good to point out the difference between taxes and other tariffs, but I have a hard time understanding why you have to call what I said "wrong"? What you went to explain in detail is exactly what I alluded to, that also matches the previous posters "electricity [...] taxed into oblivion".
Another point: 3.3% of federal tax income, or 1.7% of all taxes paid by citizens, goes directly into "Klima- und Transformationsfonds" i.e. gets pumped into energy transformation. And the state even pumps more money into that, by means of "Sondervermögen" (taking additional debts). Measured as a percentage of federal state tax income, seems like Germany is pumping more than 7% total into energy transformation. Quite a lot I think, and even if this is not directly a tariff on electricity, it's easy to imagine how this can result in general price inflation.
All of Germany's neighbours, from which it buys electricity, are decarbonising so yes obviously it inevitably gets "fixed at some point".
Germany's wholesale prices are similar to many other European countries, the worst is easily Ireland because of their geography, small, northern, coastal, they often need to import power, and that import has to come from Britain, which is between them and the continent, so their prices will almost always be higher than Britain's already not-great prices - we're obviously not going to sell the Irish £89 per MWh electricity and then charge our own users £119 per MWh for the same product.
What I am saying is that those spot prices may not represent all of the reneweables' marginal costs. Question is, will the end consumer prices ever go down, and by how much?
> Question is, will the end consumer prices ever go down, and by how much?
No, electricity is not likely to become a deflationary product. It hasn't been in my lifetime and I don't see that changing. Products which do that are weird and they don't tend to do it for very long.
There was a period (last century, more than fifty years ago) when Oil was deflationary in the US, as the very easily extracted Saudi Oil came online and US import bans ended - you'd pay the same dollar price to fill a car with gasoline in one year as the next and of course wages continued to grow so that oil is getting cheaper in real terms. But that's a long time ago, a time when gasoline was 30 cents per gallon.
Solar PV is just straight up cheaper than any fossil power. Solar Farms the UK agreed to subsidise in 2022 came online early last year and even in those more normal times (before Trump started a war in the Middle East) the "subsidy" amounts they were paying us totalled a few million quid a year because the fossil power was so expensive. Once Trump got into it, we were being paid like £3-4M per month in "subsidy" because of course the fossil fuel costs more now but sunlight is still free.
But that does not translate into lower prices for consumers, at most it means their prices might not rise as quickly.
The prices of so many things have gone down with times due to increased efficiencies. Why not electricity? If solar PV is cheaper than fossils, I would, naive as I am, expect prices to go down.
(I acknowledge fossils have been going up for various reasons, and have become more scarce, and energy demands are rising)
There's a situation like with Amdahl's law here, which I'm guessing you're familiar with since this is HN but if not then I'm sure you can read about it. Consumer prices - the thing you're experiencing - have multiple inputs, and wholesale price is the only one that's subject to this change by generation technology so that dilutes the consequence of any such change for consumers.
If you're paying 25 cents per kWh and and the wholesale price was $100 per MWh then 10 of those 25 cents were for wholesale electricity, but you're paying 15 cents per kWh for "other things". Maybe a huge improvement to generation technology reduces that wholesale price to $90 per MWh, amazing, but alas general inflation increases your suppliers other costs to 16 cents per kWh and so you pay... 25 cents still.
If that wholesale price somehow halved and it was all passed on (good luck with that) your 25 cents per kWh goes to 20 cents, only a 20% drop.
The learning curve for solar is shallowing, and while it's steeper for offshore wind and especially floating offshore wind, those are both way more expensive than solar, so you'd need much more price decrease for them to be cheaper than say, coal.
Nuclear power has been killed off by economic forces; there’s no turning back.
Solar and wind power generate cheap electricity in abundance, and midday electricity prices in Europe regularly dip into negative territory (as low as minus €500 (sic!) on May 1!).
Modern grids do not require high-risk investments in ultra-inert baseload power that ultimately fails to find a market; instead, they require low-risk investments in highly flexible power sources, such as batteries or pumped-storage facilities and transmission upgrades, that can capture surplus electricity at low cost (sometimes negativ) and sell it hours later at favorable prices.
The 2036 electricity futures price for Germany is €70/MWh. The break-even point for France’s EDF for old nuclear power plants that had long since been written off financially was at roughly the same level in 2020. Due to rising labor costs, their break-even point is now significantly higher. There were solid economic reasons why EDF was recently nationalized 100%. New nuclear power plant construction in France is a foreseeable economic disaster. Private investors would have fled long ago.
Electricity prices in Sweden have tripled as a direct result of the political decision to shut down German nuclear power(interconnected grid)
Even the German government has admitted it was a mistake.[1]
Solar generates an abundance of electricity in the summer, but the winter production ranges from tiny to nothing.
The anti nuclear crowd loves looking at buildout graphs and saying we can replace all energy production with solar in x years, assuming energy usage remains the same.
> By then, Germany should "bring the world's first fusion reactor online." Its electricity would be so cheap "that no other generation methods will be needed,” Merz was quoted as saying.
If power is so cheap mid-day, why don't european buildings have sufficient air conditioning not to kill the elderly during heat waves? The laws restricting AC all have power conservation as their rationale.
Do old people not have air conditioning because the law prohibits it? I thought it was more that air conditioners are expensive, old people in Europe are often somewhat poor and on fixed incomes, and a lot of historically temperate places in Europe have no tradition of AC.
Certainly a lot of the young wealthy people I know in Europe have AC, even outside of the really hot places.
The death toll per heat wave can easily hit 5 figures in just france. A hybrid portable-minisplit that will cool a 100m^2 apartment is under a thousand euros, and draw just under a Mwh per year. A portable to cool one small bedroom is much less power-efficient, but can often be found between 200 and 300.
That's not cheap, per se, but funerals aren't much less expensive in Europe than in America.
Many EU countries allow some limited cooling in public buildings, but I still sweat in most grocery stores, malls, libraries, museums, etc. during hot weather--they just don't take air conditioning to a comfortable temperature as worth the power bill, the way America does.
Mini-splits are more complicated than window ACs, they allow the indoor and outdoor components to be separated.
Most European homes don't have the kind of window that you could stick an AC in, the windows hinge rather than sliding up and down. You can get one of those floor units with a hose for probably ~€300 though.
It's cultural latency. Europe is the faster warming continent and the buildings were perfectly fit for purpose 30 years ago. Old people lived their entire lives without AC and plainly dislike it.
It is 50% of daily power consumption. They are planning on overbuild the network by 100% so it can be carbon neutral and cost effective even if the sun stops shining, the wind stops blowing and the rain stops raining for a year. Currently between 50% to 100% of generation capacity is idle in China as government policy to encourage growth.
This is the resilience something civilisation depends upon should have. Not the duct tape and chewing gum that the Us and EU networks are made of.
> According to the China Nuclear Energy Association, despite higher output, nuclear’s share of China’s total electricity production slightly slipped from 4.9 percent in 2023 to 4.7 percent in 2024, (Energy Institute data indicate a 3.7-percent increase in net production and a drop from 4.7 percent to 4.5 percent of the nuclear share).40 The remarkable share decline occurred because China’s electricity consumption grew by 6.8 percent or 627 TWh—significantly larger than Germany’s total annual demand—to a total of over 9,850 TWh, and the country added a combined 357 GW of solar and wind capacity (278 GW and 79 GW, respectively) in the same year compared to just 3.5 GW of new nuclear.41
> China has dominated global nuclear power development over the past quarter-century, though its ambitious latest Five-Year Plan targets have proven challenging to meet.
The 10th Five-Year Plan (2001–2005) put forward a policy of “moderate development of nuclear power,” targeting around 8.6 GW gross operating capacity by 2005,61 with 7.1 GW gross achieved in reality. (All Five-Year Plan capacity numbers quoted hereunder are gross gigawatts).
During this period, China connected six new units to the grid—including two French 900-MW reactors at Ling Ao and two Canadian 668-MW CANDU 6 reactors at Qinshan—and completed the development of the CPR-1000, China’s indigenized version of the French M310 900-MW design that would become the workhorse of its early nuclear fleet.
The 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) called on China to pursue “an active development of nuclear power” with a target of 10 GW gross operating by 2010.62 With 10.9 GW gross operating at the end of 2010, that target was slightly over-achieved.
This period saw the construction starts for Westinghouse’s two AP-1000s at Sanmen in 2009 and AREVA’s EPRs at Taishan in 2009–2010, China’s first Gen III projects. Construction commenced on 29 units, most of which were CPR-1000 reactors.
Fukushima’s March 2011 disaster fundamentally reshaped China’s nuclear trajectory during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011–2015). The government imposed a moratorium on new approvals to conduct comprehensive safety reviews. Existing plants and Gen II reactors under construction had to undergo major upgrades including enhanced flood barriers, backup power system overhauls, and seismic reinforcements.63
When approvals resumed, China adopted a strict “Gen III-only” policy requiring passive safety features and core-catchers. Operational capacity reached just 28.7 GW by 2015 versus a target of 40 GW.64 Nevertheless, the period closed with construction beginning on Fuqing-5 and -6 as well as Fangchenggang-3, China’s first Hualong One reactors, representing its indigenous Gen III technology.
The 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) aimed for 58 GW operational capacity plus 30 GW under construction while establishing the Hualong One as an exportable technology and advancing systems like the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTR-PM) and fast reactors.65
However, domestic capacity reached only 51 GW by 2020 and 17.5 GW under construction constrained by the ongoing inland reactor ban— a controversy unheard of in other nuclear countries limiting nuclear power plant development to the seashore—and extended construction timelines for Generation III units.
In August 2019, the U.S. added CGN to its Entity List,66 citing national security concerns regarding alleged attempts to acquire U.S. technology for military purposes.67 This restricted CGN’s access to certain technologies and affected its international partnerships, including involvement in nuclear projects in the United Kingdom. Later, CNNC was also added to the Entity List.68 The sanctions reinforced China’s focus on self-reliance, accelerating the transition from foreign technologies to the domestically developed Hualong One design.
With an operating capacity of around 61 GW as of mid-2025, the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025)69 target of 70 GW operational capacity is out of reach. According to plans, 4.5 GW are scheduled to come online in 2025, but no new reactor started up in the first half of the year. COVID-19 pandemic disruptions to global supply chains, combined with delays caused by mandatory safety upgrades, have created persistent bottlenecks. First-of-a-kind Hualong One projects saw numerous delays (see Figure 23).
Meanwhile, plans for innovative projects like offshore floating nuclear power platforms appear to have stalled, with 2023 reports suggesting the program may have been suspended over safety and feasibility concerns.70
Remember all those projections of solar adoption that, year after year, consistently underestimated future growth?
It turns out the same has been happening with nuclear, only in reverse: the agencies doing the projections have consistently, year after year, overestimated nuclear growth.
Gas turbines are a modern scientific/technological miracle.
The materials science of turbine blades is awesome. Most materials can't be used above about 1/2 their absolute melting temperature as they become subject to creep. But turbine blades are made with nickel and aluminum (and a carefully optimized mix of alloying elements) that just happen to form phases that become less subject to creep as they are heated (until much closer to the melting point).
The reason (as I understand it) for this is that the intermetallic phase of NiAl prevents migration of single linear dislocations; pairs of linear dislocations are needed to migrate together. But at elevated temperature these pairs dissociate from each other and migration is inhibited.
Nuclear power has been amazing for my native country Sweden and I do not believe for a nanosecond that there were “economic forces” that shut down many of our operational nuclear plants.
It was political lunacy, in Sweden and Germany and many other countries.
I take a center position on this: every year new nuclear looks worse economically, but that's not a good reason to shut down already operating plants.
The safety issues .. I think the combination of low probability (unknown) and potentially huge cost (Chernobyl affected almost the entirety of Europe!) make it exceptionally prone to toxic discourse. You just can't assign reliable numbers to it. There's a risk of ending up with a Space Shuttle situation, where because a disaster would be so bad everyone in the chain downplays the risk until an O-ring explodes.
Maybe we can try SMRs once they're actually in production, but somewhere else can try them first on their own expense.
The problem is just that already operating plants don't become safer or more state of the art as time goes by. I'd be as comfortable with a 70-year-old nuclear power plant as I would be flying in a 70-year-old airplane...
It certainly was political - with tax policies, you can make nuclear uneconomic which is exactly what happened in Sweden. For decades, the production and capacity taxes were a material part of the operating cost for operators. Only some 10 years ago the political positions started to change and become more nuclear-friendly.
Yeah our green parties brag about how they have made nuclear unfeasible via political means, and then turn around to say it's market forces. It's so stupid I want to cry.
Miljöpartiet in particular is anti-science and has among the worst environment policies of all major Swedish parties. For example they're working hard to ban spreading sludge from wastewater treatment plants on fields. Apparently phosphors are single-use.
There's more to it than first degree economics. If you include broader externalities, including loss through pollution and energy dependency, it makes more sense. Of course it's harder to measure hence harder to advocate, but in my opinion it's one those cases where intuition hits close to the truth.
Of course being French I'm highly biased, but I'm glad we went the way we did, trading CapEx for stability.
Not sure if India is going to triple its electricity demand by 2032. Seems rather doubtful, but if you have evidence for that tripling of electricity demand
But even if what you claim about falling share were true (it's not), a sinking share is not a contradiction to increasing absolute capacity, which was the claim.
> Nuclear power has been killed off by economic forces
That turns out not to be the case. Everywhere nuclear was killed off it was killed off purely by political forces.
> there’s no turning back
That also turns out not to be the case:
1. Sweden enacted a nuclear phase-out, turned back
2. Japan shut off all its nuclear plants, turned back
3. Belgium enacted a nuclear phase out, turned back
4. Taiwan enacted a nuclear phase out, is turning back
5. Italy enacted a nuclear phase out, is turning back
In fact, the number of countries that have turned back from a nuclear phase-out to re-embracing nuclear power is larger than the number of countries that are sticking to nuclear phase-outs. Never mind the countries that never embraced that particular madness ("World's Dumbest Energy Policy") in the first place or that are just now turning to nuclear power.
Countries representing 70% of the world's GDP have agreed to triple nuclear generating capacity, and that doesn't include India, which has its own plans to triple much sooner.
> [electricity prices in] negative territory
That's not a good thing. It means the electricity is worth less than nothing, essentially garbage, not that it doesn't cost anything to produce. In fact, it costs a lot of money to first produce this useless electricity and then more money to dispose of it. A lose-lose.
One of the reasons Germany, for example, has among the highest electricity prices in the world. And this correlation of high intermittent renewable penetration and high electricity prices holds worldwide.
> The break-even point for France’s EDF for old nuclear power plants that had long since been written off financially was at roughly the same level [€700 in 2020.
Also not true. Even the ARENH price was €40/MWh in 2020. And that still left margin. German plants were delivering electric at around €20-€30 / MWh.
> There were solid economic reasons why EDF was recently nationalized 100%
EDF was not recently nationalized. It was always a state company, with 100% state ownership for most of its existence. For a brief time, around 15% were held by private entities. These were bought out to simplify control for the upcoming nuclear investment program. At the same time, investments in intermittent renewables have been scaled back.
I'm not sure why subsidies are per se bad. But also almost all infrastructure is subsidized regardless: roads, trains (cargo as well), ports, nuclear, coal, etc...
I think solar and wind are a good idea, and subsidies can be a useful tool, I think making a statement about how cheap solar and wind are without mentioning that they're subsidized is not entirely accurate or honest.
because they're really important? both for the planet but also for strategic energy independance (no gas from russia, no oil from hormuz or america, light from the sun and wind from the air is all thats needed)
MS Access can use DBF files almost as if they were standard Access tables. This was particularly useful when working with ESRI Shapefiles, as it allowed the DBF files to be edited in Access and the changes to be viewed directly in ArcGIS. When editing maps, Access was often more convenient than the ESRI Editor.
Powerprice in Germany today minus 500€/MWh. Nuclear power is economic madness in an environment where we see negative electricity prices practically every day.
Wind and solar power are remarkably stable in Europe. Last year, the average weekly electricity output was 14.0TWh; not a single week fell below 10.5 TWh.
Weather fronts move across the continent on a very regular basis; when the wind dies down, the sun shines more.
Mind that nuclear power relies on favorable weather as well. It's not uncommon in Europe that nuclear power plants have to shut down, because the rivers they use for cooling become too hot.
Not really. Storage is most used for short term stabilization and alleviating congestion in certain transmission nodes. In most markets its used to provide capacity under contract with utilities to meet resource adequacy requirements which don’t consider long term regional complete loss of renewables. Longer term storage that can provide power to, say, a whole region during a multi-day storm is basically an uneconomic fantasy that rational developers have no real incentive to build, because it would be a huge overbuild most of the time, and accordingly undercompensated for said overbuild. Developers are building batteries that are just the right size for a capacity contract & providing ancillary services (voltage support, frequency regulation, etc) plus price arbitrage, which are deployed for only minutes to a few hours. There are some 8 hour duration batteries out there, but they are not common.
Multiday renewable droughts ( solar and wind ) are a significant challenge.
( A further problem would be if a renewables drought occurred at a (multiday) peak demand period )
Appropriate (often new) wide area, power transmission networks can help to reduce this risk.
Renewables also need to be over provisioned to reduce the risks, which could be blackouts or some kind of power rationing (via "smart meters" )
If Germany power prices are so low, why are Germans power bills so high ? Maybe you are cherry picking spot/marginal price and not netting the subsides ?
Germany has highest avg household prices in EU per eurostat. How convenient of you to focus on this day. Btw, this minus 500eur translates in about 18bn/y in subsidies for EEG. DE already spent on it alone double the price of entire french fleet
Nuclear energy is pure economic madness in a context where wind and solar power are generating a surplus of electricity. Today, May 1, electricity prices in Europe are in some cases at the technical minimum of minus €500/MWh.
Thermal power generation, which is difficult to control, is completely unnecessary in an environment where we have negative electricity prices practically every day from March to October. In Europe, we need rapidly controllable energy sources—obviously more storage capacity.
Due to the many hours during which electricity prices are close to zero, the economically viable full-load hours of a nuclear power plant are reduced to barely 3,000 hours per year, effectively tripling the real levelized cost of electricity (LOCE). In addition to the high costs of nuclear power plants, there is also the enormous expense incurred by the government for military and police security at the facilities.
Since the government prioritizes nuclear power, this leads to heavily manipulated electricity prices, with homeowners with solar panels being among the biggest losers, as they are required to feed electricity into the grid but are effectively paid the full negative prices (usually via weighted average pricing methods)
"electricity prices in Europe are in some cases at the technical minimum of minus €500/MWh." - it means all citizens will pay for it through cfd's. In germany its about 18bn/y
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)
Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations. Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to know but is imposable to know.
My original comment was just a counterpoint to the doom in parent: not all is lost, and in fact, quite a lot is not.
The situation of “things we care about are far away and require intermediaries to connect with” and “our ability to trust intermediaries is gone” are both human creations, and totally addressable.
The market for baseload electricity has disappeared in Germany, as renewables push the residual load to zero or below for almost the entire year:
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?c=DE&l...
The base load is an imaginary line passing through the troughs of the residual load curve.