Comment by tietjens
8 hours ago
Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
It’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.
Germany doesn't need to participate in the next. They need to participate in something though. They are too small to do everything alone. Even the US depends on a lot of other countries to make things work.
Could you expand more on your car point? I thought BMW and Benz were doing great at the moment. I dunno much about Audi or VW, but Mini also seems to be doing well (which I thought was British, but one of their models has literally the same engine as my last bimmer, so I guess they were sold at some point?).
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If we’re looking at the car and energy industries, I think China has already won.
Sure, talk to your grid operators about that! :)
It would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help.
Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
I'm not sure how tidal and geothermal fare in Germany
It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands
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It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
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Not with a tech that needs 15 years to be build
If AI server farm operators conclude that nuclear is the way to go, they should be free to do so, yes. If they manage to fulfill all regulatory requirements. (Which means it'll be at least $2 per kWh, yay.)
You limit data center power demand until the AI bubble pops.
Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025
Cool, your country fell way behind every other developed nation in this and you've missed out on a huge industry. In the end, your citizens will still use the products, they'll just probably end up having to pay more for the same functionality.
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There's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.
Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants.
Check out:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
Geothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes.
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A country is not forced to have AI farms running in it. Building giant powerplant for the AI tech (possible) bubble not seems wise.
The plant will take 5 - 10 years to build, who knows what demands AI will have at that point.
SO let some countries that want to spent enormous amounts of their energy on AI do so, adn the rest can connect to those.
> who knows what demands AI will have at that point
This is true for any investment pretty much.
This is shortsighted. China routinely experiences large overcapacity in their electricity grid just to deal with the unknown unknowns of outages and other new demands. Suppose that the AI bubble burst and AI energy use is negligible, the extra capacity could be used for something else: retire your traditional coal fired furnaces for steel making and replacing them with electric arc furnaces; produce more aluminum; build more EV chargers.
I willing to wager that the AI bubble will burst before you could even begin to build power plants for them.
I'm sure the bubble will burst. However we have already found a few uses for AI and those uses will continue after the burst (if they are economical)
The wait until after the AI bubble and buy the cheap surplus of energy.
AI is useful but nit as useful as the AI companied claim it to be and the ROI isn’t as great neither.
Germany has stopped actively trying to sabotage France on nuclear energy at every occasion in the EU. That’s a start.
Give you hope that at some point, they might even move on the brain dead competition policies in the energy market and we might end up with a sensible energy policy.
I’d guess Germany’s opposition to French nuclear power wasn’t just about the technology itself, but tied up with political and economic strategy. There must have been stronger political reasons behind it than simply « not liking nuclear ». I’d be curious to read something deeper on the subject and understand the reasoning behind those strategies since the Fukushima accident.
Nuclear is really unpopular with a significant part of the German electorate especially on the left. So, yes, it’s entirely political.
I guess sabotaging France by preventing it for exploiting the advantage its great strategy in energy should have afforded it is just cherry on the cake.
France is sabotaging France on nuclear.
Flamanville 3 is a complete joke and the EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
The EU is fining France because they don’t have enough clean energy in their mix despite France having the cleanest energy in Europe because nuclear used to not count. They are also forcing the French national energy company to resell their electricity at a loss to competitor moving money which should be used to invest into the pocket of private investors. And let’s not talk about the utter stupidity of the current discussion on the dams.
Then you realise that a significant part of France new debts was due to them shielding their population for the soaring prices of electricity despite France producing cheap energy, said prices being due to Germany brain dead strategy leading to a dependence on Russian gas and the obligation to go through the European market, and you start to see the double whammy.
Well, at least, the energy market is not as bad as the ECB rules.
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Germany doesn't need to sabotage France on nuclear energy; France has done a fine job of sabotaging themselves.
The historical data shows that France didn't have upwards trend in nuclear generation since early 2000s.[1] I wouldn't bet on it to change regardless of political climate.
1: https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/generation/nucle...
Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell.
Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge?
The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
> if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.
So basically, be the only energy source not subsidized? There are plenty of decent reasons to be against nuclear, and there's a discussion to be had on its price, but pointing out subsidies in the energy sector is like casting stones from your glass house.
and a municipality willing to have the German finale nuclear waste storage in their backyard.
the Söder Challenge is Legend:-)
That's a shame.
Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground.
Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany.
After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises about "hydrogen" or "power to gas" will quiet rapidly once it becomes clear that they are financially not feasible.
The data does not back up this narrative: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
The share of electricity production that coal lost is primarily take up by wind and solar, not gas.
The devil is in the details. The easy part is now done, and further significant increases in solar/wind in Germany are not going to happen.
Renewables now dominate generation during the optimal periods, but there's nothing on the horizon for other times.
Your graph also ignores energy used for heating and for industrial processes. Their electrification is now stalled by high energy prices.
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Coal phaseout is already 3+ years ahead of schedule in Germany without any government intervention because coal plants simply can't compete against renewables anymore.
Yeah. It's so great that Germany has to directly pay for gas power plants.
Yeah, but we're Germans. We don't stop when it's reasonable, not when we want to follow an idea.