Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218790 - September 2025
US Data center projects blocked or delayed amid local opposition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
Citizens will indeed use them anyway, but there's already free models that are OK and which only need 8x current normal device RAM. Bubble bursts tomorrow? Currently-SOTA models on budget phones by the end of the decade.
Check out:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands
Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.
The share of electricity production that coal lost is primarily take up by wind and solar, not gas.
I guess sabotaging France by preventing it for exploiting the advantage its great strategy in energy should have afforded it is just cherry on the cake.
The plant will take 5 - 10 years to build, who knows what demands AI will have at that point.
SO let some countries that want to spent enormous amounts of their energy on AI do so, adn the rest can connect to those.
Renewables now dominate generation during the optimal periods, but there's nothing on the horizon for other times.
Your graph also ignores energy used for heating and for industrial processes. Their electrification is now stalled by high energy prices.
Flamanville 3 is a complete joke and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
1: https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/generation/nucle...
Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge?
The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
Nearly useless for Germany. Some intraday storage will be helpful, but it will not strongly affect the wintertime fossil fuel consumption and the overall CO2 emissions.
> That’s moving to goal posts. The discussion is about electricity.
No. It's not moving goalposts. Switching from gas to electric heat pumps for heating is absolutely relevant here. It's now inhibited by the high _electricity_ prices ( https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-transition-cle... ). Ditto for the ICE to EV transition.
The German government is now directly planning to pay around $20B in direct subsidies ( https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-pushes-17-billi... ) to build _gas_ power plants to alleviate some of that. I expect the final bill will be around $50B just for the new natural gas generation.
Germany is also quietly reassuring investors that it's safe to build natural gas by extending the subsidies: https://www.energyconnects.com/news/renewables/2025/january/...
As usual, actions speak louder than words.
If you're willing, we can place long-term bets on that. I'd be delighted to lose, but I don't expect it.
That is unlike any definition of baseload generation I have ever heard.
Then you realise that a significant part of France new debts was due to them shielding their population for the soaring prices of electricity despite France producing cheap energy, said prices being due to Germany brain dead strategy leading to a dependence on Russian gas and the obligation to go through the European market, and you start to see the double whammy.
Well, at least, the energy market is not as bad as the ECB rules.
So basically, be the only energy source not subsidized? There are plenty of decent reasons to be against nuclear, and there's a discussion to be had on its price, but pointing out subsidies in the energy sector is like casting stones from your glass house.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
I also note that you didn’t have anything to say about the EPR2 program and the absolutely insanely bonkers large subsidies needed to get it off the ground.
It is not. We’re discussing what coal is being replaced with for electricity generation. But let’s talk about it.
> high electricity prices
Let’s ask the obvious question: are high prices caused by wind/solar? No, they’re caused by the extremely volatile prices of fossil fuels: “high fossil fuel prices were the main reason for upward pressure on global electricity prices, accounting for 90% of the rise in the average costs of electricity generation worldwide (natural gas alone for more than 50%).” [0]
So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.
> heat pump sales
From your own link: the lengthy and public political debate about the legal framework and subsidies for heating buildings has caused people to lose confidence”
None of that has to do with electricity.
[0]: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-global-energy-crisis-pu...
Let's. DW has a nice overview article: https://www.dw.com/en/how-germany-seeks-to-cut-electricity-c...
A third of the total cost is grid charges, and another third is taxes. Both go towards subsidizing the renewables.
BTW, the US average for all consumers is 14 cents: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
> So building out more gas plants won’t eliviate prices when the gas is responsible for them in the first place.
So Germany is _deepening_ its dependency on natural gas prices by building more plants because it's... more volatile?
Just imagine if there was some other reliable form of energy that doesn't require fossil fuels.
> None of that has to do with electricity.
It has everything to do with electricity. The government understands that the grid can't handle additional load from heating, so the subsidies are not pursued vigorously.
Again, let me repeat, actions speak louder than words. Like this one: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-coalition-agrees... Or just from today: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/eu-countries-dela...
That event was actually the final nail in the coffin for the all renewable policies of France, seeing that when the nuclear plants had a problem, the renewables failed even harder than the nuclear plants made it hard to make a case for all renewable policies
AI is also just super young, has apparently zero mote, requires insane amounts of hardware that basically becomes useless after a couple of years, and has promised, over and over, the AI revolution is just around the corner multiple times without ever delivering.
Why isn't that instead a call for more storage, in general?
Nobody could say "you had to build more renewables" at the time because they produced even less than the nuclear plants.
> Why isn't that instead a call for more storage, in general?
There's nothing which is appropriate for a winter load yet.
As a result of this incident, France pushed for more nuclear investments and dropped the mandatory renewables share.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Which has not materialized. This is where the thread started:
> The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
> Currently the French can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
> Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
> A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
Sure now it will take some time to be effective but that's what happen when you give the keys to politicians and not engineers.
In many places in the world, peak load does not occur during daylight hours, especially during winter
And yes, further north the days are longer but the solar capture efficiency is also much lower
[1] https://paulkedrosky.com/honey-ai-capex-ate-the-economy/
[2] https://open.substack.com/pub/thealgorithmicbridge/p/im-an-a...