kravietz 🦇 on Nostr: Funny thing about #Germany #nuclear phase-out is that in 2012 its supporters claimed ...

Funny thing about #Germany #nuclear phase-out is that in 2012 its supporters claimed that “baseload generation is incompatible with renewables”. The first chart comes from [^1], a 2012 article using “common-sense” to explain why they have to get rid of nuclear because Germany will no longer need baseload generation. The chart shows the “archaic” way of generating electricity with the static lines for nuclear and lignite (brown coal) generation, and variable part provided by hard coal and natural gas.

It must have radically changed since, did it? Let’s see - the second chart comes from last week (March 2026) and shows… exactly the same thick ( ~8 GW) static baseload generation using brown coal and biomass (green stripe at the bottom) 😄

So let’s see what changed - the third chart shows a week from 2014, when nuclear power was still operating in Germany but share of renewables had significantly increased. Nuclear is the red stripe ~11 GW wide, brown coal is 16 GW.

The only thing that changed is that nuclear has disappeared, but baseload based on brown coal, the dirtiest possible fuel, has remained in place. So much about the fancy 2012 “common sense” arguments about baseload being “archaic”.

Germany could have replaced all brown coal baseload with nuclear power generation at 5.6 gCO2eq/kWh, but it preferred brown coal baseload generation at 1000 gCO2eq/kWh claiming to be the EU champion in climate protection 😄

Also, the lesson from the 2012 article is that any such “common sense” predictions using future tense can be complete and utter bullshit even if they sound convincing at that specific moment of history.

[^1]: https://grist.org/renewable-energy/why-germany-is-phasing-out-nuclear-power/