The baseload talking point has never made sense but storage doesn't make it make less sense. Baseload here is definitionally power sources that can't economically follow the demand curve. They carry the exact same problem that intermittent power sources like solar do, in that you need dispatchable power sources to augment them so that they can actually meet demand, the only difference is that the cause of this is that generation stays constant while load varies instead of both generation and load varying.
Baseload is not, and has never been, a feature. It's just a drawback that can be handled so long as only some of your power comes from such sources.
Batteries augment base load power sources the exact same way they augment intermittent ones, they take power from them when there is excess and give power back when there isn't making them effectively dispatachable power.
Um, yes it has. When you use solar or wind for baseload, it must be backed up by a spinning reserve. When you calculate the combined CO2 output of both the renewables and the spinning reserve, you learn it is more than just using gas by itself (and often it is more than just using oil or coal). There has never been a renewable power source used for baseload that has reduced CO2 emissions per watt. The math and laws of physics basically prevents it from happening. You want that to change, learn how to purify poly-silica more efficiently. And nobody (and I mean nobody) is even working on that. You don't pay for power, you pay for power you control with a switch. Power you don't control is called an explosion.
Baseload is about supplying demand. It'll not go. And to supply it reliably you need firm power. The 500gw statement contains both overlapping bids and just intentions to "think" about deployment. Still, germany would need at bare minimum 3TWh of storage to ditch fossils firming per last winter and deploy even more renewables to charge it. It remains a question how govt will protect investors from cannibalized generation- offshore is already facing problems
The proof is looking at open generation data past winter. Sadly energy charts gives only gwh/day but you can still do some inference about how much fossils were used/how much imported
There's no such thing as baseload power plant. If solar were able to supply the demand with some bess you'd call it baseload. What matters is firm power.
And yes, Germany plans to expand gas plants. It's sad they didn't opt out for BWRs that can modulate faster, at 1%/sec
Now you want a firming nuclear plant? First it needs to be reliable, we can't have a system collapse when 45% is offline like happened in Sweden in October and May this year.
Then it needs to be dispatchable.
Nuclear power when it runs at 100% 24/7 all year around except a tiny maintenance window costs ~18 cents/kWh.
Are we looking at a 50% capacity factor? And not collapsing when 50% are having outages?
So ~60 cents/kWh?
I love how new built nuclear power becomes completely farcial when put into real world constraints.
Germany has the most expensive and dirtiest grid in the developed world. They get the majority of their baseload power from other countries, often generated by nuclear or gas. Also, that you think they have 500 GW of anything that generates power is pretty funny. The only thing your comment says is that you don't understand anything about how power is generated or how an electrical grid works. People like you are why we still use so much FFs. You can't solve AGW with accounting tricks.
PS Maybe ask Spain how that renewable baseload generated power is doing for them.
Germany sourced 57% of all power from renewables in the first 9mo of 2025 [1]. They seem to be doing just fine, might be time to update your talking points
Quickly becoming greener. Are you saying that Germany should stop their renewable buildout and keep their current emissions until the 2040s while waiting for new built nuclear power to ”save the day”?
That literally makes no sense at all.
Looking at wholesale prices all of continental Europe is quite similar.
Some countries, like Germany, taxes electricity a lot to promote efficiency.
Not sure what alternative you suggest?
The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power. So that’s not an option either.
Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program. 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 H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
It didn't make sense to shut down nuclear before coal/gas for Germany. It should deploy both ren and nuclear, even restarts unless it wants to use gas firming.
Germany's low carbon twh is unchanged since 2015. What changed is it became net importer and demand dropped, hence a lot of coal closed.
Wholesale is irrelevant. Taxes are needed to fund infrastructure. In case of Germany a big chunk is transmission which will be subsidized from 2026 just like eeg already is. Example of why- sudlink, but that's just for redispatching, ren require by default more transmission due to distributed deployment
France is open to subsidize epr2 project. The challenge is, edf must first show a bill by EOY and, EC must approve state funding, unlike ren subsidies. Epr2 is expected to cost about 60-80bn, half being offered by the state as 'nice loans'. 40bn is about what Germany pours into EEG alone in merely 2y.
Germany can reuse own konvoi designs or try to make a deal with khnp and Westinghouse
French debt and electricity/edf are not connected. Most of the debt is from pension system because well, work hours, pension age and vacation days vs neighbors. Edf debt is peanuts in comparison. In fact it's debt to ebitda ratio is in normal range.
> ren require by default more transmission due to distributed deployment
Which has been calcualted by GenCost to add up to ~€10B for Australia. That is less than the subsidies a single reactor needs.
> France is open to subsidize epr2 project. The challenge is, edf must first show a bill by EOY and, EC must approve state funding, unlike ren subsidies. Epr2 is expected to cost about 60-80bn, half being offered by the state as 'nice loans'. 40bn is about what Germany pours into EEG alone in merely 2y.
This is very typical of nuclear bros. You can never look forward. The EEG is a backwards looking metric, a ton of extremely expensive solar was added 10-15 years ago which still get paid.
You can look at the historical cost of the EEG system to see it decreasing.
- 2019: €27B
- 2020: €30B
- 2021: €17B
Those payments support 153 GW of infrastructure. Again you do realize as soon as we compare with new built nuclear power, adjusting for capacity factors, it just becomes lunatic to suggest nuclear power?
The question is where we spend our money today. The subsidy needed for renewable deployment in 2025 is 0. As can be seen by the 16 GW built without subsidies.
> The installed capacity of renewable installations not eligible for payments under the EEG was 16.2 GW
That's just equivalent to a few nuclear reactors. Nothing big!
> Germany can reuse own konvoi designs or try to make a deal with khnp and Westinghouse
Or they can just let the French folly continue and see the state finances crash when loaning becomes even more expensive.
> French debt and electricity/edf are not connected. Most of the debt is from pension system because well, work hours, pension age and vacation days vs neighbors.
It becomes connected when the state subsidizes nuclear power to enormous amounts which could have gone to balance the budget.
> Edf debt is peanuts in comparison. In fact it's debt to ebitda ratio is in normal range.
I love this sleight of hand. Debt to ebitda is fine, when considering that Hinkley Point C gets a completely insane 17 cents/kWh. And that the state will subsidize the EPR2 program.
EDF is fine if the state takes all the costs. So funny.
It will be interesting to see how long the ”baseload” talking point lasts.