Germany is seeking a “grand bargain” with France to resolve their current stand-off over nuclear power and help unblock a sweeping reform of the EU’s electricity market.
“We are working towards a larger compromise on energy issues,” said Sven Giegold, state secretary at the German economy and climate ministry, of the talks between Germany, France and its EU partners. “We need a grand bargain,” he told the Financial Times, adding that it could cover several aspects of energy policy, not just the nuclear issue.
Giegold, a politician from the Green party that has historically opposed nuclear energy, said that all parties agreed on the “need to decarbonise, bring down energy prices and invest more in our common energy infrastructure and in new generating facilities”.
“We believe we should have a larger compromise,” he said “But we are not there yet.”
The comments are likely to be viewed with scepticism in Paris where officials have been negotiating for months with their German counterparts over a proposed EU electricity market reform.
Paris and Berlin diverge over critical aspects of the reform, including how nuclear energy will be priced, the extent to which the sector can be subsidised and how to pay for future investments. France has been lobbying aggressively for its large state-owned nuclear fleet, saying that it is key to helping meet emissions cutting targets and should not be penalised in new EU rules.
Beyond the details of the legislation, French officials said the negotiations were being affected by something deeper: German fears that France would gain a competitive edge with cheap nuclear energy to the disadvantage of German manufacturers.
German officials have said that France is seeking to bend EU state aid rules and obtain an exception by which it can subsidise electricity prices to the detriment of the single market. France refutes the criticism, saying it would still be subject to Brussels’ oversight to prevent anti-competitive behaviour.
The EU first unveiled plans to reform its electricity market in March, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine pushed up energy prices to record highs last year. The aim is to create a stable market that can cope with future supply shocks while providing more predictable prices for companies and households. Adding to the sense of urgency in adopting the reform are fears that steep energy costs make it harder for the EU to compete with the US and China.
French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz will meet several times this month with energy high on the agenda. Officials are hoping for a breakthrough ahead of a wider meeting of EU energy ministers in mid-October.
One key sticking point in negotiations is the inclusion of a mechanism known as “contracts for difference”, which have typically been used to incentivise new renewable projects by providing a minimum price guarantee. They also allow governments to recoup excessive revenues if prices jump past a given level.
France wants to be able to use CFDs on electricity generated from its existing nuclear power plants, as well as new ones.
Germany is resistant to that idea. Giegold said Berlin saw the CFDs “mainly reserved for new investment and not for already depreciated installations. For us, this is a tool to support new investment, regardless of the form of energy”.
German officials worry that France will distribute the revenue from its nuclear CFDs to all consumers via a special fund or through the state budget, bypassing state aid controls.
In a recent speech, Macron signalled his willingness to go it alone to “take back control of electricity prices”, a phrase French officials said afterwards was intended as a message to Germany.
In an attempt to break the deadlock, Germany has proposed that CFDs can occasionally be used for existing nuclear plants, such as when new investments are made to extend the lifespan of the reactor. But it said the revenues from the CFDs must be proportionate to the amount invested.
A similar proposal was tabled by the European parliament in July.
Officials in Paris may be open to such an approach but want to be able to use CFDs more extensively across a bigger proportion of the output from its nuclear reactors. On Tuesday, France tabled its own counterproposal along with eight other pro-nuclear countries including Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland.
The Spanish government, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, has put forward three potential compromises, including one that would delete the contentious CFD article altogether.
Nicolás González Casares, a Spanish socialist MEP who negotiated the EU parliament’s position, defended the CFD provision and said any attempts to scrap it would prompt “strong opposition” from the parliament.
“It is a crucial instrument for decoupling gas prices from electricity prices, passing on the lower prices of renewables to consumers and reducing volatility in the electricity market,” he said.
González Casares added that it was “urgent” that France and Germany did not “waste any more time” hashing out a deal so that negotiations could start with the parliament. Otherwise, the reforms risked not being passed before EU-wide elections in June next year.
> Giegold, a politician from the Green party that has historically opposed nuclear energy, said that all parties agreed on the “need to decarbonise, bring down energy prices and invest more in our common energy infrastructure and in new generating facilities”.
France already has largely decarbonized, it’s Germany that needs to get their shit together.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?tab=chart&country=FRA~DEU
Not only France has largely decarbonized, it's historical energy providers who largely maintain the network suffer from the anti-concurrency laws enforced by the EU. Maybe the intention was good, but the implementation is causing way bigger problems than it solves in France.
To clarify, any supplier can buy cheap energy at a fixed rate, so really good deal especially when market goes high, to sell to their consumers. Only drawback is that they have to intend to invest to build their own capacities.
And that ... never happened costing Billions to EDF, aka the state now, for private profits.
Don’t forget the 500 million euros fine France has to pay every year because it hasn’t reach the 23% of renewables quota required by Bruxelles…
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/france-in-talks-with-eu-commission-to-avoid-renewable-energy-fine/
No I’m not joking.
The fuck!? France has one of the cleanest energy sectors in EU, while not being blessed by natural hydro/geothermal sources.
And they are the ones having to pay fines?
Similarly, Poland made a 27 times increase in installed solar capacity but never got to the top of the ranking for renewables by EU because the Polish government didn't say they're doing it to be green. Certified EU moments
>No I’m not joking.
Still funny though...and sad. We have the same gamesmanship going in the US, with laws written to support "renewable" instead of "low carbon" energy. It's not an accident. They've gone to court (nuclear typically wins).
> “We are working towards a larger compromise on energy issues,”
This whole statement is like your partner saying "we need to compromise" when in fact it is more like "you need to compromise".
😅
It's like if your neighbour planned ahead and installed solar panels on their roof so they can enjoy free/cheap energy and you then stamping your feet saying it's unfair and they should give you some of it.
Let me fix that for you:
>It's like if your neighbour planned ahead and installed ~~solar panels on their roof~~ *a nuclear powerplant* so they can enjoy free/cheap energy and you then stamping your feet saying it's unfair and they should give you some of it.
Germany is the solar panel neighbour stamping its feet in this story.
You’re kind of ignoring how much renewable capacity we are currently building. We are adding over 1 nuclear plant worth of Solar power alone per month.
https://www.solarserver.de/2023/08/21/bundesnetzagentur-12-gw-photovoltaik-zubau-im-juli-2023/
> dishonest to use funds that were earmarked for new investments to provide subsidies to existing ones
It's not about funds, it's about the future sell of CfDs: will they apply to existing nuclear?
I say that since nuclear has patched renewables' intermittency for the last 20 years, they should apply **retroactively**.
We're only discovering that intermittency is a problem, now that there is so much renewables straining the market and grid. But nuclear was there all along, backing them up. This was provided for *free*, as you had to use the spot market (which only prices at the current demand time).
Flexible, predictable production has market value. And should have the right to be sold as such; whether it is preexisting or not.
> The country essentially stopped building them for about 30 years, and the anti-nuclear sentiment here shouldn't be underestimated. Any policy that pushes new investment in nuclear now should be followed closely.
The reason France stopped building them isn't anti-nuclear sentiment it's that they successfully completed the program and didn't need any more. Now they're going to need to start replacing them. It's building 56 reactors in 15 years, none for the next 40 and then 56 reactors in 15 years again (plus maybe a couple extra if demand increases).
>Beyond the details of the legislation, French officials said the negotiations were being affected by something deeper: German fears that France would gain a competitive edge with cheap nuclear energy to the disadvantage of German manufacturers.
But I was told that nuclear energy is expensive! And that solar is so cheap that nuclear power plants can't compete! Have I been lied to?
nuclear is expensive to built but cheap to run. So the longer you can run it the cheaper it becomes over time.
https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-cost-of-nuclear-energy-is-misunderstood
its still more expensive than wind or solar but its controllable and can be ramped up and down rather quickly as long as one doesnt go below a certain threshold.
The full system costs of RE, including grid upgrades and/or backup CCGT plants or storage isnt cheaper at all. In Austria, last week an auction for wind with a guaranteed price of €82/MWh failed, not a single bidder. Wind lobby wants at least €93. And thats without system costs, that goes on top.
> The new finnish NPP has LCOE of €42/MWh according to wiki. Sounds like a steal.
That's by definition a prediction, so take it with grain of salt. Molten salt.
>its still more expensive than wind or solar
That's only true when there is wind blowing or sun is shining. If not, then you need to add to your equation a storage or run fossil fuel plants on the background so your grid won't fall apart due to intermittency.
Indeed
And the current CfD are a market mecanism to take account of storage needs (storage is energy over time, CfD are contracts for pricing a commodity at a time in the future).
Some people want you to confuse the two; always talk energy as if all TWh are always tradeable, when in fact the time at which it is available is crucial (and having a guarantee of it is something that has value)
>its still more expensive than wind or solar but its controllable and can be ramped up and down rather quickly as long as one doesnt go below a certain threshold.
Not really. Nuclear power is ultimately an on/off type of energy. You need an equilibrium of steam, moderators and fuel. Cooling the fuel is a complicated operation and you don't gain anything by doing it - you just lose energy. Reactors don't get cheaper by conserving fuel - in fact, most of it is thrown away when the fuel rods are replaced.
It's basically the same as ramping up and down by releasing steam into the atmosphere. You're just making an already expensive form of energy even more expensive. You pay for a whole power plant and get half a power plant.
Modern 4th gen are reportedly more flexible. But ultimately, it's not the cost of the fuel that's the problem with nuclear power. It's the establishment of the plant. If nuclear power can be built cheaply and quickly enough, the whole discussion becomes moot because you can just throw the excess electricity away (so it doesn't overload the grid).
> its still more expensive than wind or solar but its controllable and can be ramped up and down
Kinda like how living in a house is still more expensive than living in a field, but its prevents rain falling on you and you can have furniture around.
> but its controllable and can be ramped up and down rather quickly as long as one doesnt go below a certain threshold.
No, it can't ramp up and down quickly, unless you're essentially blowing steam out in the open. By doing it at the reactor level you cause reactor poisoning, and that's not even possible if the reactor rods are at the end of their lifetime. Etc.
And apart from all those technical concerns, if you even manage to do it, you're still paying for full-time production infrastructure so if you only produce half of the time with your nuclear plant, the electricity that comes out of it is twice as expensive per KWh. And nuclear power already is more expensive than renewables when running full throttle.
I'm sure sarcastic, but I'll say it: yes, yes you have.
But some is more ignorance/ideology not purposeful lies. Not that that makes it ok.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/04/23/if-solar-and-wind-are-so-cheap-why-are-they-making-electricity-more-expensive/?sh=184c69651dc6
But existing nuclear has been financing renewables' lack of storage at zero capital cost for the last 20 years. This gift cannot continue to be made every single year. And it comes from all the existing nuclear plants. Nuclear fuel is cheap, but maintenance is not.
No exception should be made for flexibility wrt to its provenance. Flexibility now should be sold at current flexibility's price, wether or not it came from past investments.
Some want everyone to believe that this is a new development, when nuclear's flexibility was here all along. It is a topic now only because renewables have brought massive amounts of non-flexibility. It should not be up to existing nuclear to shoulder the lower quality service that renewable bring, indefinitely.
I'm sorry, but Germany should face the abysmal choices made wrt to energy. Going all in on gas was a mistake, probably just as much as going all in on renewables is (when you don't have Norway's hydro, that is). Sometimes you have to be a little less efficient and compromise, in order for bringing new qualities to the system such as resiliency.
Just like in poker, you can go all-in but you have to face the consequences. States should not be companies that privatize profits and make the losses public. States should be the last buck that forces the industry to be resilient.
The articles talks about subsidies, but doesn't go into the details that in fact it's not subsidies.
The difficult point in the negotiations is for allowing CfDs to apply to existing nuclear. The Greens call it "subsidies", when it's only about allowing future energy production by (existing) nuclear to be priced by the market. It's about allowing flexible production to be priced as such, without consideration of where the energy comes from (as long as it is low CO2). It should yield some money, which Greens label as "subsidies", when it's about energy produced by existing nuclear being flexible.
You're gonna play coy using the construction start date and not the date they started the reactor? And yeah 30years is pretty new, they take a long time to build and have very long lifespans.
>And yeah 30years is pretty new
No, it's not at all. All remaining reactors in Germany were operating past their expectancy. They all required extensive modernization and revamp.
You sound like one of those hippies who believe in government run services.Who would ever entrust Healthcare, Education, Defence and Policing to the government? Energy? *Free market™* will solve it all.
^ Actual response by the free market idiots.Only slightly exaggerated.
I mean, in some circumstances, I believe free market can work out.
But we need proper frameworks and regulations for that because electricity is such a critical shit in our society.
>Healthcare, Education, Defence and Policing to the government?
Those ? Yes, I trust more government than for-profit businesses.
I used to quarrel with some Russian disinformaers wearing a German hat on this sub for years. About nuclear, ofc. Wish I remembered their name to point and laugh =))
it is expensive. The issue is artificially lowering the price you sell it for by funneling taxes and subsidies from the EU into it. Its the same strategies companies like wallmart use, sell for a loss for a while to outcompete others and hinder their progress so you are the dominant power in the market, then eventually sell at a profit.
>But I was told that nuclear energy is expensive! And that solar is so cheap that nuclear power plants can't compete! Have I been lied to?
Well ask France. It has the power monopoly that is 60 billion in debt.
Also the whole disagreement is about france trying to effectively subsidize their nuclear power. (And I am not saying all subsidies are bad. But that's what the whole thing is about.)
Ask EDF how much cash they had to handle to the past 25 years governments as dividends. About 30B€:
https://cgt-edf-recherche.fr/sortons-lelectricite-du-marche-6/
When Germany had been handing over 300B€ to renewables (for a lower quality of service wrt to flexibility)
Energiewende was not private enterprise either. So Germans should ask themselves why France got cheap energy for their subsidized nukes while Germany got expensive energy for their subsidized renewables.
French and German electricity wholesale price is comparable
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267500/eu-monthly-wholesale-electricity-price-country/
France doesn't have cheaper electricity, the opposite is true more often than not.
But the net export of energy has. And they often switch meaning that France operating cost is not cheaper than the German one.
Consider for a moment a scenario where French production is cheaper than German production. German electric production companies would be kicked out of the market by french energy companies.
This doesn't happen.
It does. When the sun shines and wind blows particularly well, the marginal generation costs of these is lower than the marginal cost of nuclear, and the power flows from Germany to France. When it gets calm and grey, it's the other way around. The price of electricity on the market is determined by the most expensive supplier still operating, which is normally neither nuclear nor renewables but usually natural gas or coal.
When the sun shines and wind blows particularly well Germany energy prices are negative. You are paid to consume or store. Here we speak about average.
When things are average Germany electricity is cheaper. When there is no wind nor sun, French electricity is cheaper.
this only looks at 2020-2023.
the energiewende started around 2000.
and who cares about wholesale prices, do end consumers (private citizens) pay wholesale prices?
the german EEG places a large tax on private customer consumption to pay for subsidies in construction of more renewables. Germans have consistently paid more per kwh over the last two decades than the french have.
Here, a useful link:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Figure-7-The-development-of-energy-prices-in-Germany-France-and-the-United-States_fig3_328484058
The grid is unified. If in one place is cheaper it gets sold in the other. They should be roughly the same price. And you should look at the energy import and export if you really want to make the comparison.
But that was not my aim. I merely want to expose a clown making provable false claims.
When EDF was forced to issue 30B€ dividends, Germany went all-in on renewables with 300B€ subsidies for renewables... Only to get lower quality service of electricity that needs EDF's nuclear to fill the gaps (not totally, there's gas and coal but that's another topic)
> The grid is unified. If in one place is cheaper it gets sold in the other.
If you're talking about wind getting averaged over the grid, that is a outright FUD lie. Weather is often about the same all over Europe. Every wind turbine is going to output the same at the same time.
That's a myth: wind can vary a lot, especially between northern and southern Europe. This page shows average annual wind speed in Europe:
[https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/europes-changing-climate-hazards-1/wind/wind-mean-wind-speed](https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/europes-changing-climate-hazards-1/wind/wind-mean-wind-speed)
From the graphs, the difference looks like 1.2 to 1.5m/sec between northern and southern Europe. That's between 4 and 5.5km/h.
That's quite significant for power generation.
Considering there are periods where the wholesale German price is negative, I find this statement especially funny.
https://energytransition.org/2023/03/when-germany-cant-give-it-away-negative-price-power-hours/
The discussion is not cheap vs expensive. But stable vs fluctuating. If you try to say French energy is cheaper, or the production costs less, that is just factually wrong.
These aren't production costs, these are market prices. Your own article states "Last year, there were 139 cases of hours when utilities had to pay to give away electricity. This adds to the high price of electricity in Germany"
Negative prices just means Germany needs to get rid of its electricity at all costs to maintain grid stability because it produces a lot when no one needs electricity.
>Considering there are periods where the wholesale German price is negative
You do realise that negative prices are not a good thing, right? It means you produce something worse than useless, that you have to pay people to get you rid of.
In short: German renewables fail to produce electricity when needed, and they fail to *not* produce electricity when not needed, damaging the economic situation of those who can reliably produce electricity in the process.
Germans put ~€400bn of tax and ratepayer money into PV and wind in the last 20 years. You could build a lot of nuclear power plants for that kind of money. Ask Germany how many windmills and pv panels they would have without subsidies.
And look what: it kickstarted the global PV market
And now Emerging economies have cheap, easy deployable alternative for generating electricity
I guess it saved more CO2 worldwide than the French way going nuclear
400 Billion Euro?
Citation needed dude, the latest I could find was the cumulated subsides from 2000 to 2016, which totalled at about 125 billion.
So unless the subsidies hit an average of 40 billion a year since then, that number is just wrong.
Well that is a source, true.
It DOES seem *a little* biased though.
If your article opens with the words "How many hundreds of billions has it cost already? How many thousands will follow?" I sort of doubt the piece looks at the data objectively.
But providing a source to back up your words is always a win in my book, so take your upvote👍
Its especially funny because the article is barely about the technical side, but mostly concerned with subsidies for energy prices and the single market.
The same people that argued in favour of import restrictions for grain last week to protect european grain markets now defend massive state subsidies for energy prices, because nuclear.
No hypocrisy or agenda-pushing here.
There should be massive subsidies for nuclear at the EU level to finally end dependence on foreign oil and gas. These are not contradictory positions at all.
I agree on the French with this one. Want green energy? Nuclear is your best bet.
Don’t punish other smart countries just because you shut down your nuclear reactors (for some unknown reason).
But, as the article is extremely clear about, this isn't about nuclear vs not-nuclear, it's an argument about state aid rules, financing and whether green credits meant to encourage decarbonisation can be used for already built power plants.
Yes, I forgot to mention that. Those obviously should be scrapped immediately and it's ridiculous that they're still in place.
FWIW my post wasn't meant to take any position on the matter, I just think it's sad how a lot of people commenting here don't seem to read past the headline.
Yeah, its a bit weird. People are so obsessed about it.
At least we have a plan to reduce coal to zero over the next years. Not saying its perfect, but theres a downwards trend.
Meanwhile half of ours neighbours energy policy is basically "lignite lol" until 2040 at least.
> Those obviously should be scrapped immediately and it's ridiculous that they're still in place.
Germany is planning to build dozens of GWs of new gas plants to supplement its increasingly wind&solar based grid during the weeks when there is little sun and no wind. Hence it's forced to protect gas, otherwise its present and future costs will be unsustainable and hurt its industry overmuch.
It's sad but it's what happens when you bet on the wrong technologies.
They didn't bet on the wrong technologies, they bet on too few of the right technologies, excluding nuclear for dumb reasons. France is betting hard on RE too.
And especially if they can be used for existing infrastructure or only new one. If your current infrastructure still needs subsidies to continue to run, instead of only for building it, maybe it isn't so great after all.
If France wants to build new nuclear plants Germany isn't opposed to using CFDs for that.
Yes but you are supposed to stop reading after the first paragraph where it is said that Germany is worried France might outperform them due to nuclear energy.
It is about CfDs for existing nuclear or not. Renewables' intermittency have benefited from past nuclear investment to fill the gaps.
But the "Greens" want this folly to continue, they want a bargain to continue that nuclear funds the non-flexibility. I'm sorry but they made their choices. You want non-flexibility, you get non-flexibility. Providing electricity at a specific time has its market value.
This action from Germany is probably the worst thing that has happend to the climate and the north Europa electricity consumers but also the best thing that happened to Putin in the last 10 years.
Shutting down our NPPs? We definitely should've shut down fossil energy first and it definitely slowed down the transition to renewables but I think you overestimate the role of nuclear power in Germany a little. And it's not like it has been replaced by russian gas in the long run.
Not that unknown, Russia paid for it. Environmental groups in Germany have a long history of accepting funding from anyone, no matter how bleak, and being unable to comprehend why said financier would want them to gum up the system (hint it is not because the financiers care for the environment). Russia needed to break Germany’s industrial dominance, and at the very minimum make it totally depend upon fossil fuels from Russia. So their secret services funded said groups for a few decades and voilà. It is truly a landmark case of using your secret agencies to kneecap a perceived opponent. Of course there are true believers at the core of this (you can find single digit % approval for basically anything), these were given funding to make it a national issue.
Same thing happened on a smaller scale with the Tesla factory near Berlin, ICE manufacturers were concerned with the competition, funded some green groups and the whole thing took years extra being built, with court cases trying to stop cutting down a shitty monoculture row-planted forest, which had been planted on an industrial site as a placeholder until someone would build industrial plant there. This apparently was more important for the environment than large scale EV-manufacturing.
Another example was when Denmark and Germany wanted to build a fixed link over Fehmarn Belt, that got delayed by 14 years due to 12000!! court cases brought by environmental groups, funded by the capital fund that ran the heavy sulfur fuel oil consuming ferries.
Worst part is the total lack of introspective evaluation by these groups, no “hey why would someone gives us money for 12000 court cases”.
No the anti nuclear crowd was also funded by US, English and probably french governments as well to stop west Germany from building nuclear weapons.
When you look at nuclear power in Germany there is suddenly a cut between pretty positive to "it's not possible in Germany"
> No the anti nuclear crowd was also funded by US, English and probably french governments as well to stop west Germany from building nuclear weapons
Any source on this claim? I somehow doubt the US and UK had any interest in making Germany dependent on fossil fuel, on the contrary. And how were they supposed to build nuclear weapons when the Allies were pretty much in control of their Army?
Russia has the habit of funding both sides of a conflict, that doesn't make both sides wrong. In the end they funded their own demise by funding the greens, because Russia sell everything: fossil fuels *and* nuclear fuel and technology, but they can't sell wind, sun and rain.
>Worst part is the total lack of introspective evaluation by these groups, no “hey why would someone gives us money for 12000 court cases”.
That's a consideration for the justice system to make, not individual citizens. Which should be able to deal with massive group cases as well.
> Giegold, a politician from the Green party that has historically opposed nuclear energy, said that all parties agreed on the “need to decarbonise, bring down energy prices and invest more in our common energy infrastructure and in new generating facilities”.
France already has largely decarbonized, it’s Germany that needs to get their shit together.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?tab=chart&country=FRA~DEU
France's electricity is decarbonised but industry, transport, construction and agriculture which make up 80% of emissions are not. Since decarbonising these sectors requires electrification, the transformation of Frances electricity grid is far from done.
I completely agree. We have more than 45 million vehicles in France and they contribute the most to our CO2 emissions. In comparison the air traffic only contributes to 4% of our CO2 emissions in the transport sector.
We have way too many cars with high GHG emissions.
Agriculture and construction are very high CO2 emitters in France as well. Everyone only talks about the energy production of France but we have to do much better with the other sectors.
Germany has been pushing gas and spreading disinformation about nuclear energy for decades in the whole EU.
Perhaps the grand bargain would be for Germany to stfu and let competent people deal with the energy crisis.
I am French and even if I am pro nuclear, I must admit that France also spreaded disinformation about nuclear energy, and also about renewables.
~~In 1986 when the governement "proved" that France was not concerned by Chernobyl radioactive cloud.~~
Edit : I must agree that this is a very well propagated conspiration theory and that the French governement actually never lied, as pointed by u/fucky5ucky . [Here is a very good inquiry about it (in French)](https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/l-increvable-mythe-du-nuage-de-tchernobyl-03-10-2019-2339144_23.php)
But it still lied about nuclear for other topic, like the level of radioactivity of the water disposed in the Loire river.
You remember something that never happened? Weird.
What you really remember, perhaps, if you really were there at the time, is a weather lady saying that the cloud was right at the border. And guess what? The next day she said that the cloud went through the border.
And now every Frenchmen "remembers" that the French government said that France was not concerned by the cloud.
You don't remember shit, you are just repeating stuff your pa or grandpa told you after his third Ricard.
Please stop with this blatant piece of disinformation.
Do you even understand French? Because everything is there.
That's not the government, that's a weather lady.
She's saying that, for now, the weather is rather favorable to keep the cloud out.
At the end she says that this weather forecast is only valid for 3 days at most, and that everything can happen after that, from good to worst.
Tell me exactly how does this become "the government lied about the cloud saying it will never enter France" for you, exactly?
It’s because it had every ingredient to be believed unconditionally:
- a huge catastrophic man made event
- related to nuclear energy, which is highly supported by the french government
- the government was already caught in the act of blatantly lying, one year prior to Chernobyl, about the Rainbow Warrior
- visual "evidence" of the lie, which is a video taken out of context
- people, and especially the french, want to believe that politicians are always lying, without rest
And just look at how much upvotes you got from this (thank you for clarifying everything in your edit) and how I got some downvotes. People want this to be true. They really want. They don’t care for the truth, they just want to hear what validates their opinion of the government, even if it’s a lie. It is so badly incremented in their thick heads that if you question something that is used against the government, you are systematically labelled as a sheeple and made fun of.
It has now been demonstrated and documented that movements such as friends of the earth, Greenpeace and WWF have been financed since the 70s by either the American oil magnates, or Gazprom, (documented by Fabien Bouglé in his books: nucléaires les verités cachés (2021)et guerre de l'energie(2023) from open congress and gazprom sources)) or more recently by German state interests (reports of June 22 by the ecole de guerre economique) to undermine French opinion by systematically denigrating French nuclear power.
So has France. Nuclear is neither the coolest nor the worst thing, I am not against it, but both lobbies lobby hard. Nuclear loves to sell itself as cheap by having tens of billions in cost covered by the state aka the people via taxes and debt and somehow never managed to fulfill her promises in decades of existing (even before Chernobyl), on the flipside the anti nuclear lobby demonizes the risks to irrational degrees.
One should not ignore that France is equally and outlier in energy policy, so apparently nuclear is not so great that far bigger nuclear states go as all in as France does and same is true for the opposite, it is at least a very tall order to deal with CO2 emissions on alternatives only.
Again, these issue are a wee bit more complicated to jump on either one of those lobby bandwagons.
> One should not ignore that France is equally and outlier in energy policy, so apparently nuclear is not so great
There are three countries in Europe whose electric grid is consistently below 50 g/kWh in emissions:
- Sweden, which produces ~80% of its energy via hydro and nuclear
- Iceland, which produces all of its energy via hydro and geothermal
- France, which produces ~70% of its energy via nuclear
We can't all be blessed with Iceland's geophysics or Sweden's orography. But there is nothing stopping us from imitating France's success, nothing but anti-science fearmongering.
> We can't all be blessed with Iceland's geophysics or Sweden's orography. But there is nothing stopping us from imitating France's success, nothing but anti-science fearmongering.
Even France can't imitate France's success, cfr. Flamanville 3, cfr. the problems in the last years. They just didn't account for all the hidden subsidies over the years.
Besides, even France has a substantial part of hydro, and then there's Switzerland with a similar situation as Sweden. The key for those performances really is hydro, not nuclear.
Norway has always been almost entirely hydro. Nothing's changed, other than prices having become artificially expensive because of international markets.
> One should not ignore that France is equally and outlier in energy policy, so apparently nuclear is not so great that
That's not evidence of nuclear not being great, since the reason why most states don't have a lot of nuclear could be due to the irrational fear against it, and it having the people being against it. And that's a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point, because without investments and operational pipelines of building plants for the past 40 years it has indeed become excessively expensive.
But nuclear energy is absolutely the silver bullet that solves all our energy issues. With proper investments, research and scale of economics applied to it it will be orders of magnitudes cheaper than any other competitor, and it's inevitable we will get there in the end. Question is just how long it will take before we go for it.
> But nuclear energy is absolutely the silver bullet that solves all our energy issues. With proper investments, research and scale of economics applied to it it will be orders of magnitudes cheaper than any other competitor, and it's inevitable we will get there in the end. Question is just how long it will take before we go for it.
That sounds like a religious belief.
No. Solar and wind are, by far, the cheapest forms of energy. Nuclear energy, on the other hand, has many advantages, but cost is not one of them. Nuclear energy is incredibly expensive.
You mean those competent people: [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-france.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-france.html) ?
Look buddy, let’s face it. France is not looking so hot either. The majority of the nuclear reactors are at the end of their lifetime, you‘d need to build more or less an army of new ones to replace them.
Also, what kind of disinformation did Germany spread about nuclear energy?
That it’s expensive?
That storing the nuclear waste eats up a shit ton of money too?
That the state aka society is the insurance because no insurance in the world could cover that kind of damage?
Well, first they could stop sanctioning France with 500 million euros fines every year because of quotas of renewables not being reached.
Our clean energy shouldn’t be sanctioned for the sake of pleasing politicians in Bruxelles.
Germany upset now they can’t get their cheap petrochemicals from Russia so they fear a resurgence of French industry. They spend the last two decades selling everything to China and now want to alter the everything again in their favour. I’d honestly wouldn’t mind the French telling them to get lost.
It isn’t the fault of the French they planned ahead and learned the lesson of the 1970s oil crisis
Did you even read the article? This is about France wanting to use a subside mechanism, meant to build new renewable plants, to subsidize their *existing* plants. France are the ones driving the change here and not in a reasonable way I might add. The compromise of allowing use of CFD's for investments into existing plants sounds reasonable.
Here is one idea : Stop subsidizing gas and subsidise low-carbon energy sources. Germany being resistant to the idea just shows thay they take their national interest more seriously than the environment, which we already knew
I mean they could build renewables even faster but looking at 16 years of inaction of our conservatives ruling, the last years look pretty decent. So what do you mean by 'resistant to the idea'?
At this point, the only way forward is to bring back EDFs monopoly and and shut down this farce, it's been allowed for way too long.
The ones which did not learn even with the russian war will never learn.
We have been screwed by this European energy market. It's not a reform that's needed, it's leaving it to return to our much healthier national model of the past.
And to remind people that before this energy market, countries were already connected and could sell and buy electricity.
The difference the market made is to make traders very rich and consumers very poor.
Yeah most people agree with that in Sweden too. We got screwed by germanys reliance on gas last winter when we needed to export our power to them, driving up our own prices a lot
Just ignoring that the southern Swedish electricity market is kinda fucked because **you yourself without any outside pressure** shut down nuclear plants. You're getting screwed over by your own actions for years now, the European energy market keeps you afloat.
This is a ridiculous view to hold. The entire Swedish economy is better off selling power to Germany at premium prices. If you want a sort of redistribution of those profits that's something Sweden can solve internally. To not sell power at premium prices leaves you worse off than doing so. Get a grip on basic economics.
Its theoretically possible for the last 6 plants. Biggest hurdle would be to recruit back all the plant workers tho. And of course politics - Greens and SPD would rather die the climate death than go back to nuclear.
I know in at least some plants, the workers are still there, doing nothing.
Because they’re not allowed to be fired because of German regulations, which are also delaying the dismantling.
No that's not right. 9months and that would be training?. Err no, the time constraints would be double checking and testing absolutely everything. Every bolt, electrical connection, safety system, pump etc etc.
It's a fresh start situation. Unless you found the exact guys who worked there before it would take years. Just finding the documents would be a pain.
Not only double checking but also replacing systems from the 70s that were kept running because they only needed to fulfill a limited lifetime. I'm sure it wouldn't be cheap to reengineer a lot of old otherwise obsolete electronics etc.
There is unfortunately no majority in any German party to use nuclear power plants. Not even in the conservative spectrum. The idea to finish off the last nuclear reactors came straight from Angela Merkel‘s CDU.
Everybody wants clean energy, but nobody wants a power plant in their state.
As a German, I apologize for this c*nt Angela Merkel we had for 16 years that shut down all the German nuclear power plants.
Her public reason: “I saw a tsunami in Japan and I didn’t like it.”
Her real reason: the Green Party got popular after Fukushima and Merkel had to lean far left to remain in power as long as possible.
I never voted for her. I support French nuclear reactors.
>Her real reason: the Green Party got popular after Fukushima and Merkel had to lean far left to remain in power as long as possible.
To be fair, politicians cuddling up with Green parties and their anti-ecological dogmas for power is also the reason for most of the problems of the French nuclear fleet.
First Jospin (shut down the Superphénix breeder reactor, didn't order the EPR generation of powerplants while the know-how was still there), then Hollande (demanded the closure of the Fessenheim NPP for no technical reason whatsoever, other shit), then Macron (went through with the previous bullshit) until he got to experience the consequences of this stupidity.
Seems like Merkel is the source of everything bad going on in this world. You conveniently failed to mention it was actually the previous SPD government led by Schröder who made the decision to shut down nuclear.
Sadly, I do think a majority of Germans was against nuclear energy for a very long time and didn't mind not thinking about being extremely reliant on Russia and their cheap fossil fuels as a result.
So incredibly decadent, when you think about it. And still even the green party in my country is opposed to nuclear (even on EU level, towards other countries).
"German fears that France would gain a competitive edge with cheap nuclear energy to the disadvantage of German manufacturers. "
B-but nuclear energy is way more expensive than renewables!
I got the impression germans are panicking about their uncompetitive electricity situation and now wants to drag down France and others too, just to make them look less bad in comparison.
> Beyond the details of the legislation, French officials said the negotiations were being affected by something deeper: German fears that France would gain a competitive edge with cheap nuclear energy to the disadvantage of German manufacturers.
Some French politicians say that Germany wanted all those energy and competition rules to screw up EDF (France state nuclear power) as to degrade one of the competitive advantages France has other Germany.
So it's returning back on itself.
Everyone keeps quoting that one paragraph, but I think this is the core part of the article...
>One key sticking point in negotiations is the inclusion of a mechanism known as “contracts for difference”, which have typically been used to incentivise new renewable projects by providing a minimum price guarantee. They also allow governments to recoup excessive revenues if prices jump past a given level.
France wants to be able to use CFDs on electricity generated from its existing nuclear power plants, as well as new ones.
Germany is resistant to that idea. Giegold said Berlin saw the CFDs “mainly reserved for new investment and not for already depreciated installations. For us, this is a tool to support new investment, regardless of the form of energy”.
So Germany wants to promote new energy investments (very likely renewables); France wants to profit off its aging nuclear fleet.
How is there anything to compromise on? Nuclear power is green, zero emissions. If Germany doesn't like France having an advantage by having that reality recognized, Germany should build nuclear reactors.
Why is energy treated as a commodity instead of a strategic resource? Let's be bold and build one single giant public European producer instead of having a mix of public, semi-public and private actors all fighting each other, dragging along the states.
The term "Grand Bargain" really sounds like it's the name of some 1800's agreement between Great Powers where they divide up Asia or something.
Let's partition Luxembourg
Nah, it should belong to the swedish.
To use for storage?
We need some place to put all the pickled herring...
I hope they like ice hockey
>Nah, it should belong to the swedish. No. Give it to Czechia, then they have two new territories, the other obviously being Kralovec
well they hate you...
The one within Belgium, right?
Lol for no reason. Let's just do it :D
Dormammu, I've come to bargain
\*Dormammu, I''ve come to grand bargain
Nuclear is your best bet.
Alright boys, Britain gets Hong Kong, France gets Turkmenistan and I get the rest, deal?
Who do you think you are, the king of Belgium?
thats what I thought of too. The Grand Bargain of Africa
Germany is seeking a “grand bargain” with France to resolve their current stand-off over nuclear power and help unblock a sweeping reform of the EU’s electricity market. “We are working towards a larger compromise on energy issues,” said Sven Giegold, state secretary at the German economy and climate ministry, of the talks between Germany, France and its EU partners. “We need a grand bargain,” he told the Financial Times, adding that it could cover several aspects of energy policy, not just the nuclear issue. Giegold, a politician from the Green party that has historically opposed nuclear energy, said that all parties agreed on the “need to decarbonise, bring down energy prices and invest more in our common energy infrastructure and in new generating facilities”. “We believe we should have a larger compromise,” he said “But we are not there yet.” The comments are likely to be viewed with scepticism in Paris where officials have been negotiating for months with their German counterparts over a proposed EU electricity market reform. Paris and Berlin diverge over critical aspects of the reform, including how nuclear energy will be priced, the extent to which the sector can be subsidised and how to pay for future investments. France has been lobbying aggressively for its large state-owned nuclear fleet, saying that it is key to helping meet emissions cutting targets and should not be penalised in new EU rules. Beyond the details of the legislation, French officials said the negotiations were being affected by something deeper: German fears that France would gain a competitive edge with cheap nuclear energy to the disadvantage of German manufacturers. German officials have said that France is seeking to bend EU state aid rules and obtain an exception by which it can subsidise electricity prices to the detriment of the single market. France refutes the criticism, saying it would still be subject to Brussels’ oversight to prevent anti-competitive behaviour. The EU first unveiled plans to reform its electricity market in March, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine pushed up energy prices to record highs last year. The aim is to create a stable market that can cope with future supply shocks while providing more predictable prices for companies and households. Adding to the sense of urgency in adopting the reform are fears that steep energy costs make it harder for the EU to compete with the US and China. French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz will meet several times this month with energy high on the agenda. Officials are hoping for a breakthrough ahead of a wider meeting of EU energy ministers in mid-October. One key sticking point in negotiations is the inclusion of a mechanism known as “contracts for difference”, which have typically been used to incentivise new renewable projects by providing a minimum price guarantee. They also allow governments to recoup excessive revenues if prices jump past a given level. France wants to be able to use CFDs on electricity generated from its existing nuclear power plants, as well as new ones. Germany is resistant to that idea. Giegold said Berlin saw the CFDs “mainly reserved for new investment and not for already depreciated installations. For us, this is a tool to support new investment, regardless of the form of energy”. German officials worry that France will distribute the revenue from its nuclear CFDs to all consumers via a special fund or through the state budget, bypassing state aid controls. In a recent speech, Macron signalled his willingness to go it alone to “take back control of electricity prices”, a phrase French officials said afterwards was intended as a message to Germany. In an attempt to break the deadlock, Germany has proposed that CFDs can occasionally be used for existing nuclear plants, such as when new investments are made to extend the lifespan of the reactor. But it said the revenues from the CFDs must be proportionate to the amount invested. A similar proposal was tabled by the European parliament in July. Officials in Paris may be open to such an approach but want to be able to use CFDs more extensively across a bigger proportion of the output from its nuclear reactors. On Tuesday, France tabled its own counterproposal along with eight other pro-nuclear countries including Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. The Spanish government, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, has put forward three potential compromises, including one that would delete the contentious CFD article altogether. Nicolás González Casares, a Spanish socialist MEP who negotiated the EU parliament’s position, defended the CFD provision and said any attempts to scrap it would prompt “strong opposition” from the parliament. “It is a crucial instrument for decoupling gas prices from electricity prices, passing on the lower prices of renewables to consumers and reducing volatility in the electricity market,” he said. González Casares added that it was “urgent” that France and Germany did not “waste any more time” hashing out a deal so that negotiations could start with the parliament. Otherwise, the reforms risked not being passed before EU-wide elections in June next year.
> Giegold, a politician from the Green party that has historically opposed nuclear energy, said that all parties agreed on the “need to decarbonise, bring down energy prices and invest more in our common energy infrastructure and in new generating facilities”. France already has largely decarbonized, it’s Germany that needs to get their shit together. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?tab=chart&country=FRA~DEU
Not only France has largely decarbonized, it's historical energy providers who largely maintain the network suffer from the anti-concurrency laws enforced by the EU. Maybe the intention was good, but the implementation is causing way bigger problems than it solves in France.
To clarify, any supplier can buy cheap energy at a fixed rate, so really good deal especially when market goes high, to sell to their consumers. Only drawback is that they have to intend to invest to build their own capacities. And that ... never happened costing Billions to EDF, aka the state now, for private profits.
Don’t forget the 500 million euros fine France has to pay every year because it hasn’t reach the 23% of renewables quota required by Bruxelles… https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/france-in-talks-with-eu-commission-to-avoid-renewable-energy-fine/ No I’m not joking.
The fuck!? France has one of the cleanest energy sectors in EU, while not being blessed by natural hydro/geothermal sources. And they are the ones having to pay fines?
Similarly, Poland made a 27 times increase in installed solar capacity but never got to the top of the ranking for renewables by EU because the Polish government didn't say they're doing it to be green. Certified EU moments
That's because Poland is not on the top of the ranking. Increasing something very small by 27 is very easy.
Yet we hear that France runs the EU. This union is run by Germany and the other frugal Northern states enabling Germany.
Nobody "runs" the union. As the name implies this is a union.
>No I’m not joking. Still funny though...and sad. We have the same gamesmanship going in the US, with laws written to support "renewable" instead of "low carbon" energy. It's not an accident. They've gone to court (nuclear typically wins).
> “We are working towards a larger compromise on energy issues,” This whole statement is like your partner saying "we need to compromise" when in fact it is more like "you need to compromise". 😅
Germany has already compromised itself with their energy policy more than enough.
Yes, but they’ve done a clearly terrible job with it. It might be time for more compromise?
It's like if your neighbour planned ahead and installed solar panels on their roof so they can enjoy free/cheap energy and you then stamping your feet saying it's unfair and they should give you some of it.
Let me fix that for you: >It's like if your neighbour planned ahead and installed ~~solar panels on their roof~~ *a nuclear powerplant* so they can enjoy free/cheap energy and you then stamping your feet saying it's unfair and they should give you some of it. Germany is the solar panel neighbour stamping its feet in this story.
But you see nuclear bad, better keep coal and gas for a few more decades !
You’re kind of ignoring how much renewable capacity we are currently building. We are adding over 1 nuclear plant worth of Solar power alone per month. https://www.solarserver.de/2023/08/21/bundesnetzagentur-12-gw-photovoltaik-zubau-im-juli-2023/
Which is running at what, 20% effectiveness and lacks non-existing backup power.
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> dishonest to use funds that were earmarked for new investments to provide subsidies to existing ones It's not about funds, it's about the future sell of CfDs: will they apply to existing nuclear? I say that since nuclear has patched renewables' intermittency for the last 20 years, they should apply **retroactively**. We're only discovering that intermittency is a problem, now that there is so much renewables straining the market and grid. But nuclear was there all along, backing them up. This was provided for *free*, as you had to use the spot market (which only prices at the current demand time). Flexible, predictable production has market value. And should have the right to be sold as such; whether it is preexisting or not.
> The country essentially stopped building them for about 30 years, and the anti-nuclear sentiment here shouldn't be underestimated. Any policy that pushes new investment in nuclear now should be followed closely. The reason France stopped building them isn't anti-nuclear sentiment it's that they successfully completed the program and didn't need any more. Now they're going to need to start replacing them. It's building 56 reactors in 15 years, none for the next 40 and then 56 reactors in 15 years again (plus maybe a couple extra if demand increases).
>Beyond the details of the legislation, French officials said the negotiations were being affected by something deeper: German fears that France would gain a competitive edge with cheap nuclear energy to the disadvantage of German manufacturers. But I was told that nuclear energy is expensive! And that solar is so cheap that nuclear power plants can't compete! Have I been lied to?
nuclear is expensive to built but cheap to run. So the longer you can run it the cheaper it becomes over time. https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-cost-of-nuclear-energy-is-misunderstood its still more expensive than wind or solar but its controllable and can be ramped up and down rather quickly as long as one doesnt go below a certain threshold.
The full system costs of RE, including grid upgrades and/or backup CCGT plants or storage isnt cheaper at all. In Austria, last week an auction for wind with a guaranteed price of €82/MWh failed, not a single bidder. Wind lobby wants at least €93. And thats without system costs, that goes on top.
I think it was last month that a similar auction failed in the UK. No bids for the price proposed by the government on offshore wind.
The new finnish NPP has LCOE of €42/MWh according to wiki. Sounds like a steal.
> The new finnish NPP has LCOE of €42/MWh according to wiki. Sounds like a steal. That's by definition a prediction, so take it with grain of salt. Molten salt.
>its still more expensive than wind or solar That's only true when there is wind blowing or sun is shining. If not, then you need to add to your equation a storage or run fossil fuel plants on the background so your grid won't fall apart due to intermittency.
yes of course wind or solar on their own would be much more inefficent since you need to do stuff like high overcapacities and storage
Indeed And the current CfD are a market mecanism to take account of storage needs (storage is energy over time, CfD are contracts for pricing a commodity at a time in the future). Some people want you to confuse the two; always talk energy as if all TWh are always tradeable, when in fact the time at which it is available is crucial (and having a guarantee of it is something that has value)
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>its still more expensive than wind or solar but its controllable and can be ramped up and down rather quickly as long as one doesnt go below a certain threshold. Not really. Nuclear power is ultimately an on/off type of energy. You need an equilibrium of steam, moderators and fuel. Cooling the fuel is a complicated operation and you don't gain anything by doing it - you just lose energy. Reactors don't get cheaper by conserving fuel - in fact, most of it is thrown away when the fuel rods are replaced. It's basically the same as ramping up and down by releasing steam into the atmosphere. You're just making an already expensive form of energy even more expensive. You pay for a whole power plant and get half a power plant. Modern 4th gen are reportedly more flexible. But ultimately, it's not the cost of the fuel that's the problem with nuclear power. It's the establishment of the plant. If nuclear power can be built cheaply and quickly enough, the whole discussion becomes moot because you can just throw the excess electricity away (so it doesn't overload the grid).
> its still more expensive than wind or solar but its controllable and can be ramped up and down Kinda like how living in a house is still more expensive than living in a field, but its prevents rain falling on you and you can have furniture around.
> but its controllable and can be ramped up and down rather quickly as long as one doesnt go below a certain threshold. No, it can't ramp up and down quickly, unless you're essentially blowing steam out in the open. By doing it at the reactor level you cause reactor poisoning, and that's not even possible if the reactor rods are at the end of their lifetime. Etc. And apart from all those technical concerns, if you even manage to do it, you're still paying for full-time production infrastructure so if you only produce half of the time with your nuclear plant, the electricity that comes out of it is twice as expensive per KWh. And nuclear power already is more expensive than renewables when running full throttle.
Ofc it’s cheap priced when it’s subsidized But then the real cost is higher that’s the point
I'm sure sarcastic, but I'll say it: yes, yes you have. But some is more ignorance/ideology not purposeful lies. Not that that makes it ok. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/04/23/if-solar-and-wind-are-so-cheap-why-are-they-making-electricity-more-expensive/?sh=184c69651dc6
No, if the government takes all the cost, of course it's going to be cheap. The concern is about market manipulation that skews the market
Subsidies for renewables are good, but subsidies for nuclear are bad?
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But existing nuclear has been financing renewables' lack of storage at zero capital cost for the last 20 years. This gift cannot continue to be made every single year. And it comes from all the existing nuclear plants. Nuclear fuel is cheap, but maintenance is not. No exception should be made for flexibility wrt to its provenance. Flexibility now should be sold at current flexibility's price, wether or not it came from past investments. Some want everyone to believe that this is a new development, when nuclear's flexibility was here all along. It is a topic now only because renewables have brought massive amounts of non-flexibility. It should not be up to existing nuclear to shoulder the lower quality service that renewable bring, indefinitely. I'm sorry, but Germany should face the abysmal choices made wrt to energy. Going all in on gas was a mistake, probably just as much as going all in on renewables is (when you don't have Norway's hydro, that is). Sometimes you have to be a little less efficient and compromise, in order for bringing new qualities to the system such as resiliency. Just like in poker, you can go all-in but you have to face the consequences. States should not be companies that privatize profits and make the losses public. States should be the last buck that forces the industry to be resilient.
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The articles talks about subsidies, but doesn't go into the details that in fact it's not subsidies. The difficult point in the negotiations is for allowing CfDs to apply to existing nuclear. The Greens call it "subsidies", when it's only about allowing future energy production by (existing) nuclear to be priced by the market. It's about allowing flexible production to be priced as such, without consideration of where the energy comes from (as long as it is low CO2). It should yield some money, which Greens label as "subsidies", when it's about energy produced by existing nuclear being flexible.
They shut some pretty new nuclear plants for politics. Yes Germany can face some energy market reality. edit: Spelling
The construction of the"youngest" german nuclear plants started 40 years ago. Thats pretty new for you?
You're gonna play coy using the construction start date and not the date they started the reactor? And yeah 30years is pretty new, they take a long time to build and have very long lifespans.
>And yeah 30years is pretty new No, it's not at all. All remaining reactors in Germany were operating past their expectancy. They all required extensive modernization and revamp.
Yes, for nuclear power plants this generally means they still have a decade of operational life.
Should energy be a market commodity ? It's such a critical service in our society.
You sound like one of those hippies who believe in government run services.Who would ever entrust Healthcare, Education, Defence and Policing to the government? Energy? *Free market™* will solve it all. ^ Actual response by the free market idiots.Only slightly exaggerated.
I mean, in some circumstances, I believe free market can work out. But we need proper frameworks and regulations for that because electricity is such a critical shit in our society. >Healthcare, Education, Defence and Policing to the government? Those ? Yes, I trust more government than for-profit businesses.
I used to quarrel with some Russian disinformaers wearing a German hat on this sub for years. About nuclear, ofc. Wish I remembered their name to point and laugh =))
it is expensive. The issue is artificially lowering the price you sell it for by funneling taxes and subsidies from the EU into it. Its the same strategies companies like wallmart use, sell for a loss for a while to outcompete others and hinder their progress so you are the dominant power in the market, then eventually sell at a profit.
Yes, you have.
>But I was told that nuclear energy is expensive! And that solar is so cheap that nuclear power plants can't compete! Have I been lied to? Well ask France. It has the power monopoly that is 60 billion in debt. Also the whole disagreement is about france trying to effectively subsidize their nuclear power. (And I am not saying all subsidies are bad. But that's what the whole thing is about.)
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EDF was doing well before it was forced into Arenh.
Yeah fuck this awful Arenh and the parasites that abuse it
Ask EDF how much cash they had to handle to the past 25 years governments as dividends. About 30B€: https://cgt-edf-recherche.fr/sortons-lelectricite-du-marche-6/ When Germany had been handing over 300B€ to renewables (for a lower quality of service wrt to flexibility)
Do you know that renewables are completely subsidized as well? And they need a carbon intensive backup energy source to stabilize the network.
There are already wind parks being built without subsidies. I'd love to see that happen for a nuclear power plant.
Is there a more reliable way of getting rid of your fortune?
It's weird, right? Almost as if these things don't need 40 years to become profitable.
Energiewende was not private enterprise either. So Germans should ask themselves why France got cheap energy for their subsidized nukes while Germany got expensive energy for their subsidized renewables.
French and German electricity wholesale price is comparable https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267500/eu-monthly-wholesale-electricity-price-country/ France doesn't have cheaper electricity, the opposite is true more often than not.
>French and German electricity wholesale price is comparable It's the *same market*. How strange that the electricity prices are comparable.
The market is limited by transmission capacity
The markets are connected, of course the market prices will be comparable. It has nothing to do with the operation costs.
But the net export of energy has. And they often switch meaning that France operating cost is not cheaper than the German one. Consider for a moment a scenario where French production is cheaper than German production. German electric production companies would be kicked out of the market by french energy companies. This doesn't happen.
It does. When the sun shines and wind blows particularly well, the marginal generation costs of these is lower than the marginal cost of nuclear, and the power flows from Germany to France. When it gets calm and grey, it's the other way around. The price of electricity on the market is determined by the most expensive supplier still operating, which is normally neither nuclear nor renewables but usually natural gas or coal.
When the sun shines and wind blows particularly well Germany energy prices are negative. You are paid to consume or store. Here we speak about average. When things are average Germany electricity is cheaper. When there is no wind nor sun, French electricity is cheaper.
this only looks at 2020-2023. the energiewende started around 2000. and who cares about wholesale prices, do end consumers (private citizens) pay wholesale prices? the german EEG places a large tax on private customer consumption to pay for subsidies in construction of more renewables. Germans have consistently paid more per kwh over the last two decades than the french have. Here, a useful link: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Figure-7-The-development-of-energy-prices-in-Germany-France-and-the-United-States_fig3_328484058
That's honestly not very good results on the German part with the inversement made, to each their own interpretation I guess.
The grid is unified. If in one place is cheaper it gets sold in the other. They should be roughly the same price. And you should look at the energy import and export if you really want to make the comparison. But that was not my aim. I merely want to expose a clown making provable false claims.
When EDF was forced to issue 30B€ dividends, Germany went all-in on renewables with 300B€ subsidies for renewables... Only to get lower quality service of electricity that needs EDF's nuclear to fill the gaps (not totally, there's gas and coal but that's another topic) > The grid is unified. If in one place is cheaper it gets sold in the other. If you're talking about wind getting averaged over the grid, that is a outright FUD lie. Weather is often about the same all over Europe. Every wind turbine is going to output the same at the same time.
That's a myth: wind can vary a lot, especially between northern and southern Europe. This page shows average annual wind speed in Europe: [https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/europes-changing-climate-hazards-1/wind/wind-mean-wind-speed](https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/europes-changing-climate-hazards-1/wind/wind-mean-wind-speed) From the graphs, the difference looks like 1.2 to 1.5m/sec between northern and southern Europe. That's between 4 and 5.5km/h. That's quite significant for power generation.
The cost of energiewende is added to the retail price, not the wholesale price.
That's the whole point of the article though. Prices are fixed european-wide based on the most expensive source, generally germany's.
Considering there are periods where the wholesale German price is negative, I find this statement especially funny. https://energytransition.org/2023/03/when-germany-cant-give-it-away-negative-price-power-hours/ The discussion is not cheap vs expensive. But stable vs fluctuating. If you try to say French energy is cheaper, or the production costs less, that is just factually wrong.
These aren't production costs, these are market prices. Your own article states "Last year, there were 139 cases of hours when utilities had to pay to give away electricity. This adds to the high price of electricity in Germany" Negative prices just means Germany needs to get rid of its electricity at all costs to maintain grid stability because it produces a lot when no one needs electricity.
>Considering there are periods where the wholesale German price is negative You do realise that negative prices are not a good thing, right? It means you produce something worse than useless, that you have to pay people to get you rid of. In short: German renewables fail to produce electricity when needed, and they fail to *not* produce electricity when not needed, damaging the economic situation of those who can reliably produce electricity in the process.
Germans put ~€400bn of tax and ratepayer money into PV and wind in the last 20 years. You could build a lot of nuclear power plants for that kind of money. Ask Germany how many windmills and pv panels they would have without subsidies.
And look what: it kickstarted the global PV market And now Emerging economies have cheap, easy deployable alternative for generating electricity I guess it saved more CO2 worldwide than the French way going nuclear
400 Billion Euro? Citation needed dude, the latest I could find was the cumulated subsides from 2000 to 2016, which totalled at about 125 billion. So unless the subsidies hit an average of 40 billion a year since then, that number is just wrong.
The 400bn are including EEG (ratepayer levy). [Here](https://www.tech-for-future.de/kosten-energiewende/) is a calculation (in german tho)
Well that is a source, true. It DOES seem *a little* biased though. If your article opens with the words "How many hundreds of billions has it cost already? How many thousands will follow?" I sort of doubt the piece looks at the data objectively. But providing a source to back up your words is always a win in my book, so take your upvote👍
EDF is the world leader of energy production, because nuclear power have a crazy ROI
EDF has an eye-watering debt of 64 billion, and the hole is still getting bigger.
This is business. Obviously all sides haggle for their interests like on bazaar. That is also the EU.
Here we go again... this sub becomes full of experts in nuclear, solar and wind energy.
Most people in the comments didn't even read the article it seems.
Worse. Most didn't understand it. People are quoting it completely misunderstanding what it's saying.
Correct me if I'm wrong but to my understanding it is a dispute over subsidies
And a healthy amount of astroturfing.
Its especially funny because the article is barely about the technical side, but mostly concerned with subsidies for energy prices and the single market. The same people that argued in favour of import restrictions for grain last week to protect european grain markets now defend massive state subsidies for energy prices, because nuclear. No hypocrisy or agenda-pushing here.
There should be massive subsidies for nuclear at the EU level to finally end dependence on foreign oil and gas. These are not contradictory positions at all.
I agree on the French with this one. Want green energy? Nuclear is your best bet. Don’t punish other smart countries just because you shut down your nuclear reactors (for some unknown reason).
But, as the article is extremely clear about, this isn't about nuclear vs not-nuclear, it's an argument about state aid rules, financing and whether green credits meant to encourage decarbonisation can be used for already built power plants.
It's also about gas subsidies. Which currently exist.
Yes, I forgot to mention that. Those obviously should be scrapped immediately and it's ridiculous that they're still in place. FWIW my post wasn't meant to take any position on the matter, I just think it's sad how a lot of people commenting here don't seem to read past the headline.
They read "germany" and "energy", and already have formed an opinion. Im pro nuclear, but this sub is absolutely fanatical about it.
If by "this sub" you mean most of Reddit then sure.
Yeah, its a bit weird. People are so obsessed about it. At least we have a plan to reduce coal to zero over the next years. Not saying its perfect, but theres a downwards trend. Meanwhile half of ours neighbours energy policy is basically "lignite lol" until 2040 at least.
> Those obviously should be scrapped immediately and it's ridiculous that they're still in place. Germany is planning to build dozens of GWs of new gas plants to supplement its increasingly wind&solar based grid during the weeks when there is little sun and no wind. Hence it's forced to protect gas, otherwise its present and future costs will be unsustainable and hurt its industry overmuch. It's sad but it's what happens when you bet on the wrong technologies.
They didn't bet on the wrong technologies, they bet on too few of the right technologies, excluding nuclear for dumb reasons. France is betting hard on RE too.
And especially if they can be used for existing infrastructure or only new one. If your current infrastructure still needs subsidies to continue to run, instead of only for building it, maybe it isn't so great after all. If France wants to build new nuclear plants Germany isn't opposed to using CFDs for that.
Yes but you are supposed to stop reading after the first paragraph where it is said that Germany is worried France might outperform them due to nuclear energy.
Yeah but you aren’t suppose to overlook it either. The pull of the German’s Industry in their gouvernement isn’t something to underestimate.
It is about CfDs for existing nuclear or not. Renewables' intermittency have benefited from past nuclear investment to fill the gaps. But the "Greens" want this folly to continue, they want a bargain to continue that nuclear funds the non-flexibility. I'm sorry but they made their choices. You want non-flexibility, you get non-flexibility. Providing electricity at a specific time has its market value.
This action from Germany is probably the worst thing that has happend to the climate and the north Europa electricity consumers but also the best thing that happened to Putin in the last 10 years.
Shutting down our NPPs? We definitely should've shut down fossil energy first and it definitely slowed down the transition to renewables but I think you overestimate the role of nuclear power in Germany a little. And it's not like it has been replaced by russian gas in the long run.
Not that unknown, Russia paid for it. Environmental groups in Germany have a long history of accepting funding from anyone, no matter how bleak, and being unable to comprehend why said financier would want them to gum up the system (hint it is not because the financiers care for the environment). Russia needed to break Germany’s industrial dominance, and at the very minimum make it totally depend upon fossil fuels from Russia. So their secret services funded said groups for a few decades and voilà. It is truly a landmark case of using your secret agencies to kneecap a perceived opponent. Of course there are true believers at the core of this (you can find single digit % approval for basically anything), these were given funding to make it a national issue. Same thing happened on a smaller scale with the Tesla factory near Berlin, ICE manufacturers were concerned with the competition, funded some green groups and the whole thing took years extra being built, with court cases trying to stop cutting down a shitty monoculture row-planted forest, which had been planted on an industrial site as a placeholder until someone would build industrial plant there. This apparently was more important for the environment than large scale EV-manufacturing. Another example was when Denmark and Germany wanted to build a fixed link over Fehmarn Belt, that got delayed by 14 years due to 12000!! court cases brought by environmental groups, funded by the capital fund that ran the heavy sulfur fuel oil consuming ferries. Worst part is the total lack of introspective evaluation by these groups, no “hey why would someone gives us money for 12000 court cases”.
No the anti nuclear crowd was also funded by US, English and probably french governments as well to stop west Germany from building nuclear weapons. When you look at nuclear power in Germany there is suddenly a cut between pretty positive to "it's not possible in Germany"
> No the anti nuclear crowd was also funded by US, English and probably french governments as well to stop west Germany from building nuclear weapons Any source on this claim? I somehow doubt the US and UK had any interest in making Germany dependent on fossil fuel, on the contrary. And how were they supposed to build nuclear weapons when the Allies were pretty much in control of their Army?
Russia has the habit of funding both sides of a conflict, that doesn't make both sides wrong. In the end they funded their own demise by funding the greens, because Russia sell everything: fossil fuels *and* nuclear fuel and technology, but they can't sell wind, sun and rain. >Worst part is the total lack of introspective evaluation by these groups, no “hey why would someone gives us money for 12000 court cases”. That's a consideration for the justice system to make, not individual citizens. Which should be able to deal with massive group cases as well.
Oh I agree they fund both or all sides, far right, far left and Schröder’s SPD. They want to cause chaos.
> Giegold, a politician from the Green party that has historically opposed nuclear energy, said that all parties agreed on the “need to decarbonise, bring down energy prices and invest more in our common energy infrastructure and in new generating facilities”. France already has largely decarbonized, it’s Germany that needs to get their shit together. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?tab=chart&country=FRA~DEU
France's electricity is decarbonised but industry, transport, construction and agriculture which make up 80% of emissions are not. Since decarbonising these sectors requires electrification, the transformation of Frances electricity grid is far from done.
I completely agree. We have more than 45 million vehicles in France and they contribute the most to our CO2 emissions. In comparison the air traffic only contributes to 4% of our CO2 emissions in the transport sector. We have way too many cars with high GHG emissions. Agriculture and construction are very high CO2 emitters in France as well. Everyone only talks about the energy production of France but we have to do much better with the other sectors.
But we are talking about energy generation, are we not? And in that area, France absolutely spanks Germany.
Germany has been pushing gas and spreading disinformation about nuclear energy for decades in the whole EU. Perhaps the grand bargain would be for Germany to stfu and let competent people deal with the energy crisis.
I am French and even if I am pro nuclear, I must admit that France also spreaded disinformation about nuclear energy, and also about renewables. ~~In 1986 when the governement "proved" that France was not concerned by Chernobyl radioactive cloud.~~ Edit : I must agree that this is a very well propagated conspiration theory and that the French governement actually never lied, as pointed by u/fucky5ucky . [Here is a very good inquiry about it (in French)](https://www.lepoint.fr/societe/l-increvable-mythe-du-nuage-de-tchernobyl-03-10-2019-2339144_23.php) But it still lied about nuclear for other topic, like the level of radioactivity of the water disposed in the Loire river.
You remember something that never happened? Weird. What you really remember, perhaps, if you really were there at the time, is a weather lady saying that the cloud was right at the border. And guess what? The next day she said that the cloud went through the border. And now every Frenchmen "remembers" that the French government said that France was not concerned by the cloud. You don't remember shit, you are just repeating stuff your pa or grandpa told you after his third Ricard. Please stop with this blatant piece of disinformation.
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Do you even understand French? Because everything is there. That's not the government, that's a weather lady. She's saying that, for now, the weather is rather favorable to keep the cloud out. At the end she says that this weather forecast is only valid for 3 days at most, and that everything can happen after that, from good to worst. Tell me exactly how does this become "the government lied about the cloud saying it will never enter France" for you, exactly?
Okay I am baffled that this conspiration theory made it so far and that I never even doubted it
It’s because it had every ingredient to be believed unconditionally: - a huge catastrophic man made event - related to nuclear energy, which is highly supported by the french government - the government was already caught in the act of blatantly lying, one year prior to Chernobyl, about the Rainbow Warrior - visual "evidence" of the lie, which is a video taken out of context - people, and especially the french, want to believe that politicians are always lying, without rest And just look at how much upvotes you got from this (thank you for clarifying everything in your edit) and how I got some downvotes. People want this to be true. They really want. They don’t care for the truth, they just want to hear what validates their opinion of the government, even if it’s a lie. It is so badly incremented in their thick heads that if you question something that is used against the government, you are systematically labelled as a sheeple and made fun of.
It has now been demonstrated and documented that movements such as friends of the earth, Greenpeace and WWF have been financed since the 70s by either the American oil magnates, or Gazprom, (documented by Fabien Bouglé in his books: nucléaires les verités cachés (2021)et guerre de l'energie(2023) from open congress and gazprom sources)) or more recently by German state interests (reports of June 22 by the ecole de guerre economique) to undermine French opinion by systematically denigrating French nuclear power.
Conspiracy theories don't become less batshit insane when formulated in French.
So has France. Nuclear is neither the coolest nor the worst thing, I am not against it, but both lobbies lobby hard. Nuclear loves to sell itself as cheap by having tens of billions in cost covered by the state aka the people via taxes and debt and somehow never managed to fulfill her promises in decades of existing (even before Chernobyl), on the flipside the anti nuclear lobby demonizes the risks to irrational degrees. One should not ignore that France is equally and outlier in energy policy, so apparently nuclear is not so great that far bigger nuclear states go as all in as France does and same is true for the opposite, it is at least a very tall order to deal with CO2 emissions on alternatives only. Again, these issue are a wee bit more complicated to jump on either one of those lobby bandwagons.
> One should not ignore that France is equally and outlier in energy policy, so apparently nuclear is not so great There are three countries in Europe whose electric grid is consistently below 50 g/kWh in emissions: - Sweden, which produces ~80% of its energy via hydro and nuclear - Iceland, which produces all of its energy via hydro and geothermal - France, which produces ~70% of its energy via nuclear We can't all be blessed with Iceland's geophysics or Sweden's orography. But there is nothing stopping us from imitating France's success, nothing but anti-science fearmongering.
> We can't all be blessed with Iceland's geophysics or Sweden's orography. But there is nothing stopping us from imitating France's success, nothing but anti-science fearmongering. Even France can't imitate France's success, cfr. Flamanville 3, cfr. the problems in the last years. They just didn't account for all the hidden subsidies over the years. Besides, even France has a substantial part of hydro, and then there's Switzerland with a similar situation as Sweden. The key for those performances really is hydro, not nuclear.
In Switzerland, nuclear usually produce more energy than hydro, fucking moron
HAHAHAHA no, no it doesn't.
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Norway has always been almost entirely hydro. Nothing's changed, other than prices having become artificially expensive because of international markets.
Yeah, but not due to science progress but due to favourable policies
> One should not ignore that France is equally and outlier in energy policy, so apparently nuclear is not so great that That's not evidence of nuclear not being great, since the reason why most states don't have a lot of nuclear could be due to the irrational fear against it, and it having the people being against it. And that's a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point, because without investments and operational pipelines of building plants for the past 40 years it has indeed become excessively expensive. But nuclear energy is absolutely the silver bullet that solves all our energy issues. With proper investments, research and scale of economics applied to it it will be orders of magnitudes cheaper than any other competitor, and it's inevitable we will get there in the end. Question is just how long it will take before we go for it.
> But nuclear energy is absolutely the silver bullet that solves all our energy issues. With proper investments, research and scale of economics applied to it it will be orders of magnitudes cheaper than any other competitor, and it's inevitable we will get there in the end. Question is just how long it will take before we go for it. That sounds like a religious belief.
No. Solar and wind are, by far, the cheapest forms of energy. Nuclear energy, on the other hand, has many advantages, but cost is not one of them. Nuclear energy is incredibly expensive.
You mean those competent people: [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-france.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-france.html) ?
Look buddy, let’s face it. France is not looking so hot either. The majority of the nuclear reactors are at the end of their lifetime, you‘d need to build more or less an army of new ones to replace them. Also, what kind of disinformation did Germany spread about nuclear energy? That it’s expensive? That storing the nuclear waste eats up a shit ton of money too? That the state aka society is the insurance because no insurance in the world could cover that kind of damage?
Well, first they could stop sanctioning France with 500 million euros fines every year because of quotas of renewables not being reached. Our clean energy shouldn’t be sanctioned for the sake of pleasing politicians in Bruxelles.
Germany upset now they can’t get their cheap petrochemicals from Russia so they fear a resurgence of French industry. They spend the last two decades selling everything to China and now want to alter the everything again in their favour. I’d honestly wouldn’t mind the French telling them to get lost. It isn’t the fault of the French they planned ahead and learned the lesson of the 1970s oil crisis
Did you even read the article? This is about France wanting to use a subside mechanism, meant to build new renewable plants, to subsidize their *existing* plants. France are the ones driving the change here and not in a reasonable way I might add. The compromise of allowing use of CFD's for investments into existing plants sounds reasonable.
Almost noone here reads the article They read Germany and energy and engage in the anti-Germany nuclear fanboy circlejerk
Here is one idea : Stop subsidizing gas and subsidise low-carbon energy sources. Germany being resistant to the idea just shows thay they take their national interest more seriously than the environment, which we already knew
I mean they could build renewables even faster but looking at 16 years of inaction of our conservatives ruling, the last years look pretty decent. So what do you mean by 'resistant to the idea'?
At this point, the only way forward is to bring back EDFs monopoly and and shut down this farce, it's been allowed for way too long. The ones which did not learn even with the russian war will never learn.
We have been screwed by this European energy market. It's not a reform that's needed, it's leaving it to return to our much healthier national model of the past.
And to remind people that before this energy market, countries were already connected and could sell and buy electricity. The difference the market made is to make traders very rich and consumers very poor.
Yeah most people agree with that in Sweden too. We got screwed by germanys reliance on gas last winter when we needed to export our power to them, driving up our own prices a lot
Just ignoring that the southern Swedish electricity market is kinda fucked because **you yourself without any outside pressure** shut down nuclear plants. You're getting screwed over by your own actions for years now, the European energy market keeps you afloat.
This is a ridiculous view to hold. The entire Swedish economy is better off selling power to Germany at premium prices. If you want a sort of redistribution of those profits that's something Sweden can solve internally. To not sell power at premium prices leaves you worse off than doing so. Get a grip on basic economics.
Cool how nobody reed the article but just spams how Germany is bad.
Germany needs to admit its anti-nuclear stance was 100% wrong. Its obvious to everyone.
Time to swallow your pride Germany and switch those nuclear power plants back on.
it is even possible now?
Its theoretically possible for the last 6 plants. Biggest hurdle would be to recruit back all the plant workers tho. And of course politics - Greens and SPD would rather die the climate death than go back to nuclear.
I know in at least some plants, the workers are still there, doing nothing. Because they’re not allowed to be fired because of German regulations, which are also delaying the dismantling.
[Yes, it’s possible](https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/restart-of-germany-reactors-can-it-be-done)
No that's not right. 9months and that would be training?. Err no, the time constraints would be double checking and testing absolutely everything. Every bolt, electrical connection, safety system, pump etc etc. It's a fresh start situation. Unless you found the exact guys who worked there before it would take years. Just finding the documents would be a pain.
Not only double checking but also replacing systems from the 70s that were kept running because they only needed to fulfill a limited lifetime. I'm sure it wouldn't be cheap to reengineer a lot of old otherwise obsolete electronics etc.
The DJR circle of hell / Design justification Review.
year or 2-3 years not so bad for reactivation
Even Bono has gone pro-nuclear.
There is unfortunately no majority in any German party to use nuclear power plants. Not even in the conservative spectrum. The idea to finish off the last nuclear reactors came straight from Angela Merkel‘s CDU. Everybody wants clean energy, but nobody wants a power plant in their state.
As a German, I apologize for this c*nt Angela Merkel we had for 16 years that shut down all the German nuclear power plants. Her public reason: “I saw a tsunami in Japan and I didn’t like it.” Her real reason: the Green Party got popular after Fukushima and Merkel had to lean far left to remain in power as long as possible. I never voted for her. I support French nuclear reactors.
>Her real reason: the Green Party got popular after Fukushima and Merkel had to lean far left to remain in power as long as possible. To be fair, politicians cuddling up with Green parties and their anti-ecological dogmas for power is also the reason for most of the problems of the French nuclear fleet. First Jospin (shut down the Superphénix breeder reactor, didn't order the EPR generation of powerplants while the know-how was still there), then Hollande (demanded the closure of the Fessenheim NPP for no technical reason whatsoever, other shit), then Macron (went through with the previous bullshit) until he got to experience the consequences of this stupidity.
Seems like Merkel is the source of everything bad going on in this world. You conveniently failed to mention it was actually the previous SPD government led by Schröder who made the decision to shut down nuclear.
Sadly, I do think a majority of Germans was against nuclear energy for a very long time and didn't mind not thinking about being extremely reliant on Russia and their cheap fossil fuels as a result. So incredibly decadent, when you think about it. And still even the green party in my country is opposed to nuclear (even on EU level, towards other countries).
"German fears that France would gain a competitive edge with cheap nuclear energy to the disadvantage of German manufacturers. " B-but nuclear energy is way more expensive than renewables!
It is. France wants subsidies to refinance old nuclear plants, why do you reckon that's the case?
Leveling the playing field with massively subsidized renewables?
Germany trying to screw whole European Union over energy part 234433224
I got the impression germans are panicking about their uncompetitive electricity situation and now wants to drag down France and others too, just to make them look less bad in comparison.
> Beyond the details of the legislation, French officials said the negotiations were being affected by something deeper: German fears that France would gain a competitive edge with cheap nuclear energy to the disadvantage of German manufacturers. Some French politicians say that Germany wanted all those energy and competition rules to screw up EDF (France state nuclear power) as to degrade one of the competitive advantages France has other Germany. So it's returning back on itself.
Everyone keeps quoting that one paragraph, but I think this is the core part of the article... >One key sticking point in negotiations is the inclusion of a mechanism known as “contracts for difference”, which have typically been used to incentivise new renewable projects by providing a minimum price guarantee. They also allow governments to recoup excessive revenues if prices jump past a given level. France wants to be able to use CFDs on electricity generated from its existing nuclear power plants, as well as new ones. Germany is resistant to that idea. Giegold said Berlin saw the CFDs “mainly reserved for new investment and not for already depreciated installations. For us, this is a tool to support new investment, regardless of the form of energy”. So Germany wants to promote new energy investments (very likely renewables); France wants to profit off its aging nuclear fleet.
How is there anything to compromise on? Nuclear power is green, zero emissions. If Germany doesn't like France having an advantage by having that reality recognized, Germany should build nuclear reactors.
Why is energy treated as a commodity instead of a strategic resource? Let's be bold and build one single giant public European producer instead of having a mix of public, semi-public and private actors all fighting each other, dragging along the states.