John Brian Shannon
What everyone forgets about Germany is that after the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster, there were protests in Germany by millions of citizens who never liked nuclear power in the first place -- but especially so, since the Fukushima meltdown.So the German government studied the problem and almost immediately took 9 nuclear reactors offline. All except one of Germanys nuclear reactors have been problem-plagued (this is easy to ascertain via simple Google search) and the 9 that were shutdown, were shutdown because they had the worst safety record of all the reactors in Germany. They remain shutdown to this day.
Germany is going to be out of the nuclear power business in 2022, although it will take until 2045 to completely decommission their reactor fleet and remediate the nuclear power station sites.
All that will cost billions of dollars.
And going without 11 GigaWatts (GW) of electricity since 2011, meant that Germany had to act fast to replace that suddenly lost power.
So they instituted Feed-in-Tariffs to speed along the adoption of wind and solar power. Yes, the FiT was costly. (Its ended now)
How else was Germany going to replace 11GW of power?
To build 9 new reactors would have taken 10 years and 1GW nuclear reactors these days are about 10-20 billion euros apiece!
Any German government that tried build new reactors in Germany would have been booted from office (if they were already in power) or simply would never have gotten elected in the first place.
FOR MUCH LESS MONEY than building 9 new reactors, that would have taken 10 years to build -- and would never have been allowed by German taxpayers anyway -- Germany added more than enough wind and solar capacity to cover the loss of the 9 reactors, and in record time!
And German electric bills are high, because 9 nuclear reactors were suddenly taken offline, and that capacity had to be replaced quickly.
Another reason German electric bills are so high:
Thats right, there is a nuclear decommissioning fee added to each German electric bill -- which everyone here in North America who hasnt ever seen a German electric bill! -- thinks is a fee to help pay for German renewable energy. But it isnt. It is to help pay for the nuclear decommissioning costs, which may cost more than 100 billion euros by the time 2045 rolls around.
So, yes, German electricity rates are higher since the 9 nuclear reactors were suddenly taken offline for safety and political reasons.
But those electric bills would have been a whole lot higher had the German government decided to build 9 NEW reactors, to replace the old reactors.
And the FiT DID add to the cost of German electricity rates, but nuclear had no chance (10 years to build and 10-20 billion euros EACH!) and coal was deemed to be too dirty, especially Germanys brown coal (which they have a lot of) and they would have had to import black coal from North America or Australia, which would have cost a lot of money.
Importing enough black coal to feed 11GW of electricity production every day would have required a huge coal tariff, larger than the renewable energy FiT -- and would have required a couple new railway lines to transport it from the coastline to the German coal-fired power plants -- again, even more billions of euros.
Germany had one other choice, and that was to become completely dependent on Russian natural gas. That is a political consideration, even more than an economic consideration. Germans like their sovereignty. They dont want Russia to say (for example), "Get out of Ukraine by next Monday, or well cut off your gas supply." (They would do that in the middle of the winter, of course, to guarantee German compliance)
So to all the people who hate renewable energy, and have tried to make Germany look incompetent for choosing renewable energy, Germany really had no other choice.
By the way, Germany sold billions of dollars worth of solar panels around the world which helped it to log the largest trade surplus in history (and still is) all through the recession, all through the shutdown of 9 nuclear reactors, and all through time of the FiT electricity rates.
How could that be possible if renewable energy was so bad? Hmm?
Some interesting charts for you here:
http://jbsnews.com/2014/08/16/as...
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