Dark clouds gathering over #Germany industry sector, which is now admitted even by RWE CEO Markus Krebber:
Companies and investors have scouted other countries offering attractive subsidies and cheaper energy prices. “You’re going to see a bit of recovery, but I think we’re going to see a significant structural demand destruction in the energy-intensive industries,” Krebber warned.
German electricity sector strategically depends on coal and gas for its dispatchable generation. Krebber now admits that shutdown of #nuclear power plants was a huge mistake:
Echoing criticism in Germany over the country’s energy policy, Krebber said then-chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2011 to shut down its nuclear fleet without replacing the fuel with another energy source aside from Russian pipeline imports was a “mistake”.
Then he dismisses the current narrative dominated by “we’ll just replace it by X” where “X” changes every few years in a vicious cycle: renewables industry comes up with new snake oil, investors hype it as “the future solution”, prototypes are built and fail, and we’re back to square one. Investors cash profits and the grid is still screwed. Krebber says what every single grid engineer was saying for the last two decades of anti-nuclear hysteria worldwide:
“When you know exactly what you want to shut down, you need to immediately start thinking about how do I get the new technology in the ground?” he pointed out.
What we should of course keep in mind is that as recently as in 2021 the same Krebber categorically rejected any idea of extending operations of nuclear power plants:
"Echoing criticism in Germany over the country’s energy policy, Krebber said then-chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2011 to shut down its nuclear fleet without replacing the fuel with another energy source aside from Russian pipeline imports was a “mistake”."
And:
"...lucrative subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act for decarbonisation technologies are attracting European companies." (Like solar panel manufacturers...)
This might be of interest too. German energy market didn't really feel the end of nuclear power. But neither is the "Atomausstieg" the reason why German energy production is "greener" than before.
It has a lot to do with CO2 certificates (buying from elsewhere is cheaper than producing energy via burning Coal...).
So, yeah, it would have been better if Germany would have kept nuclear and phased out lignite faster.
Recently, there was a big article by one German environmental organisation who claimed that German coal emissions are massively underreported, especially the lignite emissions. Mostly due to high methane content which leaks to atmosphere during mining. Then there’s large use of biomass on industrial scale, which is also nothing but an accounting trick to reduce the CO2 emissions on paper, not in reality.
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