You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. That backup capacity needs to be equal to the entire electricity demand. Renewables need to exceed that by a significant margin. So, either you build gas power plants and keep them idle, or you build nuclear power plants and switch them off when the sun is shining.
The problem is that nuclear had a fixed cost per year, not per unit produced. A reactor sitting idle costs about the same as a reactor running at 100% capacity.
This makes them fundamentally flawed as backup generation. Nuclear is already the most expensive source of electricity when operating at full capacity, having it run only 5% of the time makes it completely unaffordable as it'll cost 20x as much.
When used traditionally, nuclear costs about $175/MWh. Solar and wind costs about $50/MWh. Use nuclear as backup and it'll cost $3500/MWh. Orrr, you've suddenly got a $3450/MWh budget to spend on storage for renewable energy...
> Nuclear is already the most expensive source of electricity
Lmao, meanwhile France had the cheapest clean electricity of the developed world for the past 70 years, while Germany paid 2-5x more depending on the period
It's only expensive for new built reactors in Europe because we've given up on the technology a long time ago, countries which made it a national priority and kept the know how are still enjoying cheap nuclear energy. If Germany didn't spend decades and billions on green lobbyists in Bruxels the story would have been very different
Why do you think China is building 30 new reactors right now and have planned for dozen more? They have all the coal and manufacture the vast majority of solar panels and windmills worldwide but they still go for nuclear.
Almost as if having a diversified energy mix is desirable...
There is another under discussed alternative UHV power transmission, e.g. south to north: Morocco has great conditions for solar.
Or East to West, the sun rises and sets at different times.
We still need more storage and generation, but a better grid would help a lot.
No need to obsess with solar if it doesn't work for you, its just that solar is so good. It uses manufactured devices that you just point to the sky and makes your machine run. For stability of course you need something like nuclear or storage.
Industrialized countries generally need stability when it comes to electricity. People also want to watch TV whenever they like and take a hot shower whenever they feel like it.
Pursuing an industrial strategy predicated on eternal cheap Russian gas (a strategy no doubt encouraged by Russian influence post-GDR) left Germany vulnerable to this situation. It is indeed admirable that they are willing to give it up now for principals, unlike Orban and Hungary.
> This means renewables are economically worthwhile based solely on the fuel savings they provide. Even if they would never fully replace fossil power plants, but only reduce how much fuel those plants consume, they would be worth it. Simply reducing fossil fuel use during sunny or windy periods—or when batteries charged from these periods are available—saves more money than the entire investment in renewables. That's how remarkably cheap solar, wind, and batteries have become—and precisely why they're winning around the world today.
You factored in a new grid and backup nuclear plants/gas power plants requiring >100B investments in Germany or Tesla Megapacks in excess of 100 metric tons?
Take a look at what is needed to make Germany “green” by a reputable and independent institute:
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
I skimmed the study you linked. It has a focus on the social aspects of renewable energy, namely would the population react with acceptance or resistance (or varying degrees thereof ) and is divided into the corresponding scenarios which influence the outcome. That said, the summary clearly states that it is both technically feasible and more cost efficient if suffiency with renewable is realized if you can build on wide social acceptance.
I think this paints your statements in a different light. You omitted the studies focus on social aspects.
Well, 5 years later past publication and with “the highest electricity prices, a high carbon footprint compared to neighboring countries, challenges with network stability and 3 years in a recession with major mass layoffs in the news every week” I can reassure you that the math of cost efficiency was certainly off and the population has serious concerns about the feasibility.
I do trust their math on carbon emissions and capacity calculations wrt to renewable energy and gas power plants though.
So, you take the results on their calculations, divorcing them completely from the preconditions and all variables;not to mentioned outdated data - and we should take this as the base of our future argument?
Fraunhofer’s own math says 2050 electricity demand is ~700–750 TWh (≈80 GW average load), yet they assume 500–750 GW PV + wind — that’s 6–9× average demand and 5–7× today’s installed base (p. 15). On top of that, they still need 100–150 GW gas turbine backup plus major battery storage (p. 17), i.e. almost the whole peak load duplicated in flexible backup. In their model this cuts CO₂ by >95 % vs. 1990 (p. 11), which I accept technically. But given we already see close-call outages in Germany during “Dunkelflauten,” and given that today’s reality is ~40 ct/kWh for households instead of the 7–9 ct/kWh Fraunhofer projects (p. 65 ff.), I find their economic modeling divorced from the trajectory we’re actually on.
> You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.
Which does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.
Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.
Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.
> Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?
Why waste money on horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power? Who looks at Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C and friends and draw the conclusion that they want some more?!?
> Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.
The regime can just make it illegal to do rooftop solar or home batteries. In a functioning country this is easy enough to push through as a safety measure (lithium battery fires are legit scary, at least in videos). In the U.S. you can just start a campaign to get people fired for endangering their neighbors with dangerous woke energy, no legislation needed at all.
Yes, if you want 100% renewable. However, 100% is not the goal right now. Studies have shown that 97% solar coverage can be cheaper than nuclear in sunny areas, for example. Obviously Europe isn't necessarily the sunniest so that number would have to be lower.
What are you going to do at night, or in Germany when it’s cloudy and rainy for a month straight?
I can show you my electricity consumption from my heat pump in the winter compared to the electricity my PV system produced. Hint: it doesn’t work. And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day. Take a look at the Fraunhofer study.
> And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day
You can't generate excess electricity because you don't have enough land or rooftop (I mean maybe you do, I'm talking about the typical homeowner). Utilities can overbuild panels because they're extremely cheap.
LFP batteries have a self-discharge rate of 2-5% per month. Once they're cheap enough, over-building batteries to move summer sunshine into the winter months also becomes an option*. At $100/kwh, you could power Sweden 6 months a year for about $60bn (EDIT: $6tn, sorry) in batteries (yes labor and everything else will probably double that cost). And that doesn't even account for recent advances in sodium batteries, which reportedly bring that price down to $20/kwh
* (Any battery experts know why this might be wrong? I'm using basic arithmetic, not physics. That tells me a battery charged to 100% in July or August will still have > 70% charge left in December)
Germany would require a ballpark of 100 MILLION tons of Teslas Megapack grade batteries to run on battery for 2 weeks - which is even shorter than what we had to endure due to “Dunkelflauten”.
Why would Germany need to run solely on battery for 2 weeks? Do you expect 2 weeks with 0 sun and wind all over continental Europe?
In any case, at $100/kwh, it would cost $250bn (EDIT: $25tn sorry) in batteries and maybe the same in installation costs to power Germany for 6 months a year. At the lower $20/kwh price tag it would be more like $5tn, compared to Germany's ~$4.5tn GDP. Over 10 years it could be done.
I mean not the whole Europe and this is obviously geography-dependent, but those "dark periods" are fairly common for Germany, as in there are weeks-long periods where Germany itself produces basically no electricity from wind or solar. In the most extreme case some years back, that "dark period" lasted almost two months.
This isn't to say they can't import it from elsewhere, they just can't make any of their own. Adding more capacity wouldn't do anything, it would take an incredible amount of batteries to handle the more extreme end of those "dark periods".
But that's my point. It would cost 1 year's worth of German GDP in batteries to power Germany on batteries for 6 months. No one would ever need that much battery backup. And while it's a huge number, it's not an unfathomably huge number.
That's the absolute most that handling the absolute worst case could cost today. It can only get cheaper from here. And there's no need for government debt.
Batteries are definitely an option for day -> night shifting. If not today, then soon, and without requiring and technological advances.
Seasonal or month-long periods of low-generation are another matter, and as-yet an unsolved problem. It may be that synthesizing fuels ends up being a sensible option here.
Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need (read up on Fraunhofer on the thinking: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... ) . But that infrastructure will sit there idle most of the time. That’s not driving down electricity prices. And you’ll still end up with higher carbon emissions than France.
> Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need
Paying for the plant but not having to pay for it to run most of the time is probably cheaper than having it running most of the time.
Maybe there's opportunities for net metering for customers with backup generators. At the right price per kWH, I would run my generator and feed into the grid... personally, my fuel cost is likely too high for that to make sense very often, but I think there's likely some hidden capacity there with the right incentives.
Germany will require 100-150 GW capacity which cost about 1000 EUR/kW and would require an investment of 100+B EUR.
Electricity prices already skyrocketed in Germany and no end in sight.
Listen: I invested in PV, in low energy houses, in heat pumps - but the PV/wind strategy doesn’t work the way people would like them to in their ideology and Germany has proven that.
I think I'm more or less agreeing with you. You've got to build the gas plants (or something), for the dark and windless days of winter, right? That's going to be expensive, but PV/wind won't solve it, so you have to build it.
Now that you've built those plants, would you rather pay to operate them year round, or only when needed?
PV/wind won't help you reduce capex for winter, but it should reduce opex on gas. And that's something.
Spending capex on interconnections may reduce the total dispatchable capacity needed; if it's done carefully. Having more time zones in one grid helps because peaks correspond with time of day; having more latitude helps because day lengths and cloud cover varies. Having more of both helps because still air tends to be geographically bounded. But long distance transmission is expensive.
I’d rather build nuclear plants and not keep them entirely idle but forego the investment into additional PV and wind. Don’t get me wrong: when the sun shines and the wind blows we cover 100% of our need essentially. That’s great. But we can stop now.
Because we produce too much on some days and put our grid at risk and we produce too little to often on others and put our grid at risk
Yes, they mention hydrogen caverns and thermal storage on pp. 5–6 — but those are more theoretical potentials than real, scalable solutions today. That’s why even in Fraunhofer’s own scenarios we still see 500–750 GW of wind + PV (6–9× average load) and 100–150 GW gas backup on top. In practice, it’s the massive renewable overcapacity that smooths supply, with storage playing only a limited supporting role.
How are they not scalable? And realize that even in the fantasy of an all-nuclear world, electrolyzers are still required: they are needed to make the hydrogen that's the feedstock for synthesis of ammonia, without which world agricultural yield would be much lower.
Given that this all-nuclear world has electrolyzers, what then prevents these from being driven by renewables (perhaps buffered short term by batteries), and the hydrogen then stored (as has been done for decades in underground storage caverns, just like natural gas is stored)? And once that is done, what prevents some of that hydrogen from then being profitably used to drive turbines when electricity prices are high? Gas turbines burning hydrogen are nearly identical to ones burning natural gas (just minor differences in the combustors) and have been available industrially for decades.
Using reasonable projections for cost (some of which have already been superseded by lower figures), we can estimate the cost of providing synthetic baseload from wind/solar/storage in Europe, using historical weather data. It comes in cheaper than nuclear.
You need either nuclear or gas (like 100% capacity, idle most of the time) in addition to massive investments into the grid to make it work (at least in Germany).
I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up as a backup and what the cost of that is. It’s not me making that up but the Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...
There is no storage in existence that would allow us to run an industrialized country from battery backup. We are talking ballpark 20 TWh of storage which would require 100 MILLION ton Tesla Megapack gear.
This is straight up misinformation. Nuclear power is not a peaker.
Gas is, batteries are. Nuclear power provides baseload and must be paired with a peaker too - almost always gas (France uses epic amounts of gas when its nuke plants are down for maintenance).
The reason why we have gas as a peaker instead of batteries? Gas is cheaper, and batteries dont get lavished with subsidies like nuclear power does.
>I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up
We look at real models based upon real data, for example:
I’m not saying “no gas”. I’ saying: no more PV or wind because we already stress our grid with too much electricity on some days and we have periods of days or week where we need to essentially generate 100% without any PV or wind.
You linked the same study for 5 times in this thread - you still misrepresent it's focus. The study concerns itself with the influence of social acceptance and how that reflects on the cost and efficiency of 'going green'.
I accept Fraunhofer’s technical modeling: they explicitly size ~500–750 GW of PV+wind by 2050 (≈6–9× average load) and still keep ~100–150 GW of flexible gas turbines plus sizable batteries for reliability (pp. 5–7). They target ≥95% cuts in energy-related CO₂ vs. 1990, but that still leaves a non-zero footprint—nowhere near France’s nuclear-heavy intensity (p. 11). Where I part ways is economics: today’s ~40 ct/kWh retail reality makes their rosy cost outlook look detached from how this overbuild-plus-backup approach plays out on the ground. I can appreciate Fraunhofer’s technical simulations—they’re excellent at that—but I’m street-smart enough to separate modeling optimism from economic reality, and that’s a distinction worth keeping in mind.
Maybe some street smart and “nuanced” thinking is something to consider? :-)
Not all gas plants are made equally. There's a huge difference operation-wise between "able to scale at any moment from 0% to 100% within 15 minutes" and "can start going online within 30 days".
Most current plants are either designed to run basically all the time, or only run a couple of hours multiple times a day.
A renewable grid needs generation which is fully shut down for months, but can scale up to 100% within days when weather forecasts predict it'll be needed. The current plants might work as a stop-gap measure, but long-term we'll need to build something designed specifically for this application.
That report is from 2020. Costs have fallen greatly since then, particularly for battery storage. And even so, that report doesn't say fossil fuels are needed (although the "net zero" solution still is allowed to burn some, I'm guessing because CO2 absorbed into the oceans isn't being counted?) It even says explicitly that hydrogen would be used for long term storage! See pages 5 and 6.
With hydrogen available renewables can straightforwardly get to 100%. Germany has plenty of geology for hydrogen storage. As I mentioned elsewhere, long term thermal storage is also a possibility, with recent developments there suggesting very competitive capex.
If not, grow that industry. Just like one would have to do with nuclear if one were to adopt that technology. You do realize that existing burner reactors cannot power the world for more than a few decades, right? The available cheap uranium runs out. Breeder reactors are not commercially available, or available at a cost competitive even with existing commercial burner reactors.
(The French have given up on their breeder development program, cancelling Astrid, the proposed next project, until at least 2050.)
Renewables and storage seem much more quickly scalable than nuclear, as demonstrated by the yearly percentage rate of increase in their deployment.
France generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because France's nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
There is an interesting in-depth analysis by Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... (see page 25, for example).
Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?
PS: I built a low-energy house, heat it with a heat pump, and have PV on my roof.