Readit NewsWhat are you referencing?
Which is another misrepresentation of statistics given that we use less electricity today than 20 years ago.
See this page for "all varieties" of the same graphs. Generally coal is on a downward trajectory, except the blip for the Covid years.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Using lignite only slowed the reduction of coal, nuclear was almost completely replaced by renewables.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
You can see here [1] that on a time frame of 2000 to 2022 Germany is yet to replace reduction of nuclear generation (Kernkraft) with renewables. Construction of renewables in 2023 has only accelerated 50% relative to 2022 [2].
[1] https://www.tech-for-future.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/... [2] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart....
I'm not saying there's no benefit to Nuclear, there definitely is, and it should be part of the mix, but it's not a replacement for a decent investment in Solar.
Only if you omit cost of energy storage infrastructure and grid upgrades necessary for VRE.
> Secondly, it's not a responsive source of electricity - so you can't modulate the output easily.
Repeated often by nuclear critics even though there's evidence out there of German nuclear modulating load within 24 hours.
> Fourthly, as we found last year, during heat waves rivers can run dry causing a shortage of water to cool the plants forcing them to go offline.
French powerplants did not go offline last summer, a few of them that lack sufficient cooling tower infrastructure had to eject hotter than usual water into rivers.
A secondary role for LNG is to power gas peaker plants when renewables fall short. Mainly this can be done with existing gas plants. There's very little need for building more of those. Also, coal plants remain popular for this. Before the war the plan was replacing coal with gas plants. With current gas prices, that plan is out of the window and we're now looking at increased speed of the rollout of wind, solar, and batteries instead.
> that plan is out of the window
There hasn't been officially confirmed, soon there will be a report called "Power plant strategy 2026" that will give a better outlook as to what is gonna happen this decade.
Modern batteries do not burn. Teslas do.
That's not sufficient for pumped storage at scale, but Germany is mostly focusing on hydrogen for now.
"All the problems associated with" what? Modern batteries don't burst into flame. Anyway the overwhelming bulk of storage is not and will not be chemical batteries.
Economic challenges of quickly building grid-scale battery storage , battery production for the entire globe, NIMBY's etc.
> Modern batteries don't burst into flame
they literally do
> the overwhelming bulk of storage is not batteries
Well overwhelming bulk is a high bar and storage is geography dependent. Germany f.e. can't build as much pumped storage as Australia and Australia built a large amount of battery storage vs PSH.
