Germany intends to phase out coal-fired power generation by 2038 in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It never ceases to amaze me environmental parties in Germany pushed for killing their nuclear plants, forcing Germany to keep the fucking coal plants online. Meanwhile France is next door expanding their nuclear power, has a grid with little carbon emissions, and is even able to offer it at cheaper prices than Germany.
Edit: Links!
France struggles with nuclear power in the summer, Germany with gas in the winter, and wind and solar energy are unreliable and not available 100% of the time. There’s no perfect solution—every energy source has major drawbacks. Name an energy source, and I’ll tell you why it sucks.
Fusion energy. Edit: yeah it exists, alright. Just not quite ready yet,look at how close we are: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260101160855.htm Also, the comment says “name an energy source”, and not “one that can be implemented on a large scale” and “today”.
yeah the tiny drawback here is that it doesnt exist yet.
This would be my response
I’ll take cheaper, cleaner power any day. France has shown the way.
It’s bullshit, though.
What now? Cheap and clean would mean renewables. Nuclear is (at least regarding climate) clean but the most expensive energy there is.
No, it’s the other way around.
France does not struggle in summer. They don’t need much energy production then. They however struggle in winter, and need imports for the few coldest weeks… mostly from Germany that is.
Nuclear power is incredible bad as base load. The amount of capacities they need for energy-demanding winter times are total overkill most of the year. And as costs of nuclear are basically all construction (and later rebuilding) plants but operation is cheap as fuck, they don’t save money when they throttle them down in summer. And so France is a big exporter… all over the year but not actually in winter.
It’s funny that in both countries a complete lie is nowday common knowledge. Regarding France we hear fairy tales of how they struggle in summer (they don’t) but are oh so self-sufficient (they aren’t), while in Germany it’s 24/7 right-wing propaganda of how they have stuipidly shut down they reactors to be dependent on French ones (they aren’t… contrary to France Germany is in fact fully self-sufficient but with a lot of it based on coal which they turn down at times when France needs to get rid of overproduction cheaply).
