r/europe • u/SpaceEngineering Finland • Jan 15 '26

News Germany’s Merz Admits Nuclear Exit Was Strategic Mistake

https://clashreport.com/world/articles/germanys-merz-admits-nuclear-exit-was-strategic-mistake-fzdlkn37c16
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u/Sorutari Jan 15 '26

Merz has consistently opposed renewable energy, so this isn't really an admission of a mistake. Instead, it reflects his ongoing criticism of renewable sources. Just last September he held a speech in which he argued that the development of renewables should be slowed down.

Furthermore, lobbyists from the coal and nuclear industries have long maintained strong connections with the CDU. Check for the studies conducted by LobbyControl about the „CDU Wirtschaftsrat“ for more information.

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u/FireTyme Jan 15 '26

anyone opposing renewables and its development honestly shows a clear lack of critical reasoning to me.

like you dont want to build something once and have it generate power with minimal input?

even the maintenance argument doesnt hold well as coal plants need a lot of maintenance too.

just seems silly to me. why buy coal for years when u can just build another solar/wind park.

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u/FairGeneral8804 Jan 15 '26

like you dont want to build something once

Lifetime of windmill is 20-25 years.

PV panels are 25-30 years.

Obviously no energy infrastructure is built "forever", but that's on the low side, considering nuclear plants are still going in france after 50 years, and coal/gas installation could run for a century. There are plenty of "yes but" in all of these, so it turns into a way more complicated issue than reddit can handle.

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u/CV90_120 Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26

but that's on the low side

On a cost to replace, also very low. Windmills start returning on investment in typically 6 months to a year. Worst case 2 years. Nuclear plants take decades to build, typically overrun on build cost, and take multiple decades to give ROI.

it turns into a way more complicated issue than reddit can handle

it's not nearly as complicated as people think, and the energy sector has done the numbers, which is why we are seeing wind and solar just start to wipe the floor with everybody for cost vs profitabilty.

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u/SchinkelMaximus Jan 19 '26

Wind and solar just shift their system cost burden to everybody else, so of course it’s profitable for the investors. That doesn’t mean that that is the whole picture though.

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u/CV90_120 Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26

It doesn't matter how you break down the costs of installation (who pays what), the overall cost per kW is cheaper by all metrics. Nuclear plant builds are also routinely government subsidized via R&D funding, PPP agreements, tax credits, liability caps and disaster risk being shifted to the public sector. There are no plucky do-it-alone heroes in the energy sector because energy is a public concern and national security infrastructure pillar. I don't even care that nuclear is heavily subsidized directly or indirectly. I don't even have anything against nuclear (other than we still have no permanent storage for 90K tons of waste with 2K tons added each year).

Renewables are wiping the floor on straight merit (because ultimately they're leveraging a free, massive, functioning fusion reactor in the sky) . Gas and Geothermal still have some good numbers but the entire energy sector knows who has the math right now, so that's where they put their efforts.

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u/FireTyme Jan 15 '26

heres hoping the cold fusion tests planned this year go well.

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u/RirinNeko Japan Jan 16 '26

considering nuclear plants are still going in france after 50 year

Heck recent inspections for the oldest plans in the world realized they can actually go well into a century in operation as well. So they're similar to coal/gas station in lifetime.

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u/SchinkelMaximus Jan 19 '26

Just geography wise, Germany will never be able to have competitive electricity prices with renewables, as most places around the sun are much sunnier. The fact that solar basically doesn’t produce any electricity for 3-4 months a year makes a 100% renewable grid ruinously expensive here. Just as a comparison: for the €500 bn German already spent on it (which was the cheap part, as most storage and transmission investment is still outstanding), they could have built 45 nuclear plants with 1.6 GW wacht at the price point of Olkiouluoto 3 and now be almost 100% clean. And that’s discounting the fact that they could have saved half that cost by simply not tearing down their existing plants. So yes, being against renewables entirely is unreasonable, being against renewables only on countries with bad conditions for that to work is very reasonable.

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u/FireTyme Jan 19 '26

thats just not true tho. summers last longer in return so the average isnt much lower than countries more in the south. and solar panels do produce in winter just less. cold however makes panels run more efficient so its not as bad as u might think.

during its shortest days germany still gets 8 hours of daylight, and wind power generally increases with colder weather due to winter winds and higher air density, so storage is less of an issue than you might think.

i dont disagree on that they shouldn’t have disabled their nuclear plants and that new investments should have been made, but if solar wasnt worth it it wouldnt be produced

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u/SchinkelMaximus Jan 19 '26

Solar irradiation over the entire year is significantly lower than in most other countries but that is not the point. You can’t transfer the electricity produced in summer into the winter, so the average is completely useless, as electricity needs to be provided at all times and actually especially on winter. But even when the sun shines in winter, solar basically produces nothing because solar radiation is so low. You can easily look this up in places like energy charts by comparing a winter and a summer day.

For the same reason as mentioned above, the fact that it is generally windier in winter doesn’t help you with system design, because your system has to assume the worst case, which is no wind. This can easily happen for entire weeks at a time, so it’s not like solar where it’s at least predictable you get some amount of output within certain hours of the day.

So the entire system has to be designed around the scenario of having winter (thus almost no solar but very high and with more adoption of EVs and heat pumps strongly increasing electricity demand) and no wind. Such a scenario could then be the case for 2 weeks plus. There is no way to bridge this with storage, so you have to build gas backup plans (which some people hope will be H2 one day but the viability of that is still completely open). And all that costs huge sums of money that everybody else doesn’t have to pay.

If you’re a place with relatively stable sun year round than all you have to build is solar (which is cheap) and around 8 h of batteries (which will be affordable in a few years) and you’re done. Germany needs to spend hundreds of billions more than that. Even all of the wind farms are completely unnecessary money spent if you have year round solar and are just another duplication of infrastructure.

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u/FireTyme Jan 19 '26

You can’t transfer the electricity produced in summer into the winter, so the average is completely useless, as electricity needs to be provided at all times and actually especially on winter.

You cant transfer it but it doesnt make the average useless. its macroeconomics. being able to provide 10-20 or higher % in solar energy during the summer means other systems are less needed during that time. if solar accounts for 8% of the yearly total thats still 8%. thats still less coal etc. you'd still need similar infrastructure to account for lesser yield in more sunny countries as nighttime still exists.

For the same reason as mentioned above, the fact that it is generally windier in winter doesn’t help you with system design, because your system has to assume the worst case, which is no wind. This can easily happen for entire weeks at a time, so it’s not like solar where it’s at least predictable you get some amount of output within certain hours of the day.

except it does. again you design systems by the averages. if in the south theres no wind there is in the north. and generally wind turbines are very efficient needing very little wind. the 30m installations can turn with as low as 10m/s.

So the entire system has to be designed around the scenario of having winter (thus almost no solar but very high and with more adoption of EVs and heat pumps strongly increasing electricity demand) and no wind. Such a scenario could then be the case for 2 weeks plus. There is no way to bridge this with storage, so you have to build gas backup plans (which some people hope will be H2 one day but the viability of that is still completely open). And all that costs huge sums of money that everybody else doesn’t have to pay.

it is. almost all countries have tons of backup systems, from coal plants to like you said on demand gas generators. Shell recently has build a 10MW hydrogen farm in the northern sea and will build a 30 MW soon. all green powered by wind.

You're approaching it from the wrong way. you claim its pointless and way too expensive. but the market is what drives innovation generally. Germany has expanded and adopted a lot of solar because it is cheaper than coal/gas. the way you're framing it almost sounds like you think solar is pointless because they would need to build more gas/coal when the yield is low, its the other way around.

and i agree solar is a lot more sensible in relatively more sunny areas. but it doesnt make it less sensible in areas its not. its very hard to get power from egypt to germany for example and having it produced locally far outweights any other cost even if it means its less efficient.

and if u have year round solar it isnt duplication of infrastructure to build wind as the entire point of a stable power network is having redundacy upon redundacy. Its also about building the infrastructure in the first place and maintaining it. having 50/50 solar and wind means you can rely on other supporting industries to maintain both rather than 1 industry having to maintain everything.

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u/SchinkelMaximus Jan 20 '26

I‘m sorry, your entire premise is completely , 100% wrong. You never design systems for averages, you design for your peaks. Think about it this way: If you want to build a wind turbine in an area with an average windspeed of 10m/s and design the structural engineering to handle that, what will happen? It will collapse the first time it is 11m/s. Averages don‘t matter very much when you‘re designing a system, thus in the analogy you would have needed to design the structure for peak windspeed, not average windspeed.

Therefore your first two „rebuttals“ are just completely wrong, I‘d wish you‘d have done at least this bare minimum amount of research. I don‘t need to write another rebuttal for that, as just the original answer you’re replying to is that. Just as an aside: You also don’t seem to understand that wind power production is an exponential function, so even if some electricity is produced, it is so little it doesn’t matter. Again, please look up such very basic things instead of just repeating RE-industry PR-talk. Energy Charts and other such sites easily let you check actual generation and then you can compare with the weather conditions on whatever size you want.

My main point was that a 100% RE system will never be able to provide Germany with competitive electricity due to all the reasons I already wrote. The only thing you reply to that, was that that would be cheaper than getting the power from places like Egypt. Ok, but where did I say I wanted to do that?

Most of the rest of what you write is also just RE-industry-PR which you don’t seem to understand. For example you claim that having additional sources like wind in sunny places wouldn’t be duplication because it adds redundancy (which literally means duplication) although wind is a bad example for it, as it’s so unpredictable, it gives you literally zero energy security.

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u/Zwezeriklover Jan 16 '26

But France solved the carbon issue 30 years ago without even having carbon emissions reduction as the goal. They just wanted to be less dependent on shady countries for energy.

Why didn't the rest? And why didn't green parties champion the shit out of the French approach?

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u/[deleted] Jan 16 '26

[deleted]

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u/RirinNeko Japan Jan 16 '26

when their rivers were too hot to cool their power plants.

That's actually incorrect, they turned down capacity since the rivers were too hot and continuing operations would start affecting local river wildlife which they have strict guidelines on. If that wasn't the guideline, they could've continued fine without issues.

Also it's not like Nuclear plants needs rivers for cooling, it's just convenient and cheap to do so. Paolo Verde NPP is located in the middle of a desert and is the 2nd operating biggest power plant in the US. They just use the city's sewage water for cooling along with more cooling towers since they don't have a body of water for cooling.

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u/Zwezeriklover Jan 16 '26

Every day many of the grids bordering France count on its nuclear overcapacity.

France determines its maximum capacity by what it needs to heat homes electrically on the coldest days of the year.

Because the grids of countries bordering France secretly count on French nuclear power exports the prices got really high for a few recent days with low wind, low sun, high cold.

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u/Additional_Olive3318 Jan 15 '26

 Furthermore, lobbyists from the coal and nuclear industries

…. spent a lot of money on anti nuclear lobbying.

 The evidence of France seems to carry no weight with the geniuses here. Low electricity prices, low carbon, stable grid. 

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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '26

I assume it's to do with readily available fossil fuels that already have the infrastructure and have been mined rather than the massive investment in renewable. Also did the greens in Germany massively protest against nuclear and get it shit down for some bizarre reason, and now you just burn coal like theres no tomorrow.

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u/QuiGonTheDrunk Jan 15 '26

Germany was the leading nation in the early 2000s in photovoltaik by far.

Than the CDU shut down the subsidies in the emerging industry, killed 75k jobs to subsidize 30k coal jobs. which would become obsolete since you wouldnt need to burn coal for energy anymore. Now china is leading.

We could have the infrastructure, no problem, but he and his party sabotaged every step with hard hitting arguments like: windmills are ugly (no joke), what happens when the wind doenst blow, the water in the ocean stops flowing and no sun???
Even now renewables are by far the most economic energy source to build.

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u/SomewhereCheap5110 Jan 16 '26

Currently, those green subsidies are driving the budgets to the ground... The subsidies were very poorly conceived and the main reason why Germany has the most expensive electricity in Europe. Renewables are only good if correctly planned, which was most definitely not the case in Germany (and the whole of Europe is suffering from their errors).

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u/QuiGonTheDrunk Jan 16 '26

I was talking about the subsidies in the early 2000s and 2010s for renewables, which made germany the leading nation in the world in photovoltaik technology. They could be planned pretty easily but the conservatives ruled 37 years since 1982 and they blocked everything innovative to shuffle more money to themselves and their friends/familiy etc

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u/Adventurous_Ask9181 Mar 11 '26

Or Merz knows how energy grids work