[ane]

Battery cell production alone is massively expensive. The expenses in setting up a production line is counted in the billions.

So the only way to start fresh here is to raise billions in capital. Unless you're Volkswagen or something, when you could invest billions in an enterprise like this one.

[jansan]

Volkswagen has their own plans with its subsidary PowerCo, and since EV adoption is slower than expected, they may (partly) drop Northvolt in favor of PowerCo. Interestingly they canceled their plan for a second battery plant in Germany due to high energy costs.

Regarding Germany: I still do not understand how you want to electrify everything, reduce CO2 emissions, and then shut down fully working nuclear power plants in the middle of an energy supply crisis. This is completely beyond me. I know there are people defending this decision, but I can only attribute this to malice or idiocy.

[TeMPOraL]

> I know there are people defending this decision, but I can only attribute this to malice or idiocy.

Import energy from abroad, you get to claim that you're all so Clean and Ecological[0], while all you've done is shift the dirty coal plants to some other countries that don't care and will happily take all the blame in the global statistics, as long as you keep paying them.

See also: manufacturing, another case where western nations outsource the dirty and energy-intensive parts, import finished products, and get lauded for "reducing" their footprints.

Accounting trickery, is all.

--

[0] - A claim that's belied by opposition to nuclear energy alone.

[blitzar]

> shut down fully working nuclear power plants in the middle of an energy supply crisis

Yes it is a stupid decision, but your timeline is out a little - 2011 is when they decided to shut down the power plants, the energy crisis was 2022. The amount of work that doesnt get done when you are 2/3/4 years from end of life makes reversing the decision on the day of shutdown not as easy on the ground as it is from an armchair.

[oezi]

> I still do not understand...

Renewables? + some batteries + gas peaker as winter backup

The nuclear plants weren't fully working anymore but taken into planned shutdown 10 years after the decision was made to shut them down. That people think Nuclear is a power technology where you can just nilly-willy decide to continue running is the real idiocy.

Energy prices are now lower than before the run-up to the Russian war of aggression.

[Timwi]

I attribute it to idiocy, but not on the part of Germany today. Sibling comments have already pointed out that a shutdown of nuclear was already decided in 2011 and that you can't just reverse that decision on a whim. I want to add that the shutdown is a culmination of over 60 years of lobbying, first by the Green Party when they were still single-issue radicals in parliament, then by environmental groups like Greenpeace. I like to believe that their intentions have always been good and noble, but to prioritize nuclear over the real polluter (fossil fuels) has always struck me as idiotic. It didn't help that the media constantly painted the search for a final resting place for nuclear waste as an insurmountable crisis, and of course Fukushima basically did the rest.