[thatsit]

Imho it’s a good thing to not block other countries approach to clean power from a german perspective.

However, there is just no way new nuclear power makes any sense for German grid. Just last week we had negative prices for _every_ day during peak demand (yes, peak demand is usually around noon, it’s just not visible because there is so much solar self-consumption) https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...

What‘s really needed is more batteries. At lot more batteries soon.

[AustinDev]

>What‘s really needed is more batteries. At lot more batteries soon.

Germany would have one of the biggest batteries on the continent if they controlled Lake Geneva @ ~341bn liters of water.

Pumped hydro storage is infinitely superior to Li-ion battery storage where it is available. Batteries are good for instantaneous response but lack the stability of water turning a large mass.

Solar creates a difficult environment for base load generators such as hydro, nuclear and nat gas. When it's sunny they nuke the price down to zero or negative but produce nothing when it is not sunny. As evidenced by Spain's recent blackouts you need a healthy mix of generation because renewables are seasonal in nature and not very stable compared to a large mass spinning at the correct frequency.

[codingbot3000]

fyi, the root cause of the Spain blackout (not blackout) is not yet known.

I won't deny that solar and wind make things harder, but linking the recent blackout to renewables without the facts is only done by fossil/nuclear propaganda orgs and their useful idiots.

The Spanish network had much wilder days before and did not break down. First insights point to possible design flaws in the network.

"healthy mix of generation" is quite funny to read, thinking about nuclear and coal which are not too healthy for the people living close to the plants :-D

[izacus]

I wonder if the Spanish also looked at numbers during the day of a very sunny spring week when they designed their power network to fail.

[ashoeafoot]

Germany is old, and paying its pensions from however the taxed economy is currently running. And its addicted economically to russian gas. The piggybank is spent, the "make belief can come true by the power of surplus money" philosophy ran out of steam as idealistic projects have to be payed for by holding back on the pensioner feeding trough. The generation that bend it all to their will finally ran out.

[dapf]

Do you have the pixie dust needed to make enough of them at a reasonable price?

[matthewdgreen]

The Pixie dust is called China. BNEF is tracking 7.9 TWh of annual battery manufacturing capacity for the end of 2025 [1]. Chinese manufacturers' all-in costs for BESS are now down to $66/kWh and still dropping [2]. We (or at least China) have crossed the "knee" of the exponential for battery production, and loads of people don't seem to realize this.

[1] https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt...

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2024/12/24/what-are-the-implicatio...

[Schiendelman]

It's less pixie dust than nuclear capacity - the cheapest additional nuclear capacity costs more than the most expensive grid scale batteries.

[barbazoo]

The term is technology agnostic, just fyi. There are many ways to store energy.

[rasz]

> negative prices for _every_ day during peak

What was the price at midnight? Afaik there were days last year when Germany peaked at 1000 EUR/MWh at night.

[exabrial]

> Just last week we had negative prices for _every_ day during peak demand

Burning coal for negative prices is not a good thing.

[ZeroGravitas]

Inflexible generation getting fined for inflexibility leads to innovations like running two shifts of coal generation. The UK pioneered it in their now totally shut down coal plants and Australia is now implementing it.

[realitycheck99]

how is uranium not already a "battery"

[AustinDev]

You can't put the alpha particles back into the chunk of Uranium. Well, not easily or efficiently.

[barbazoo]

Isn’t Uranium more like a fuel?