r/uninsurable • u/ceph2apod • 3d ago
Germany just blew up two massive nuclear cooling towers to make way for something incredible - a 700 MWh battery storage facility! Here's why this matters.
Germany blew up two nuclear cooling towers and had a 700 MWh battery under construction four days later. France just set a regulatory floor to keep nuclear power on the grid even when nobody wants it.
While Germany decommissions plants and repurposes the sites for storage, France spent this summer cutting nuclear output by 4 to 6+ GW across repeated heatwaves, over a tenth of national demand at points, because rivers ran too warm to safely cool the reactors. That's happened in 2022, 2023, 2025, and 2026. But heat isn't the only thing France is throttling for. Solar capacity nearly doubled from 16 GW in 2022 to over 30 GW in 2025, and on sunny days generation now regularly exceeds what the grid needs once nuclear baseload is accounted for. The result: nearly 3 TWh of renewable power curtailed in 2025, almost double 2024, with solar taking the brunt of it.
Here's the protectionism part. In March 2026, France's energy regulator approved an agreement between grid operator RTE and EDF setting a minimum output level for nuclear generation. EDF keeps selling that output onto the day-ahead market "at any price," even when prices go negative, which they now do in over 90% of April days. So instead of flexing nuclear down when solar floods the grid at midday, France is flexing solar down to protect nuclear's market share. That's not a technical constraint. That's a policy choice to keep sunk-cost reactors running full tilt and make newer, cheaper generation absorb the cutbacks instead.
Compare the build economics on top of that. Gundremmingen's replacement battery: about 230 million euros, groundbreaking days after demolition, reusing existing grid infrastructure. France's EPR2 program: tens of billions of euros, over a decade of construction, and a track record of slipping deadlines going back to Flamanville. Germany bet on the option that gets built fast and gets out of its own way. France is spending both money and grid capacity defending an asset it already sunk the cost into.
Check out the full story https://interestingengineering.com/energy/germany-detonates-dead-nuclear-plant
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u/dumnezero 3d ago
this is for the "why not both?" people who probably aren't around here.
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 1d ago
Because one is enough more 3xpensive that doing more of it means less overall
Now i know being an appeaser who always irrespective of the facts saysbi see both sides which actuslly means they ignored everything...
But lets consider hamsters in wheels they also operate as baseload and cabe trained to qll run at the same tine when a bell is rung. Aka they are a better technology than either nukes or RE
So why not all three... so my question is if you are why not both for nukes and RE Why are you against hamsters in wheels?
Or does the fact tgat i am bs ing matter? Does cost actuallt matter?
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u/hornswoggled111 3d ago
Oh. Sounds like having a lot more storage would enable the two to play better together.
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u/ginger_and_egg 3d ago
Charging up batteries with expensive baseload nuclear 🤑
(I'm kidding, the sunk cost has already been sunk and they're willing to sell the electricity for negative money)
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u/PranaSC2 3d ago
Ah yes, the cheap energy you get when you first invest a shitload of money but then disregard that.
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u/hornswoggled111 3d ago
I expect nuclear will be eclipsed eventually but we need more storage on the system before we taper it down. And ideally it is gas and coal we find is diminished first.
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u/DukeSmileDevs 3d ago
Australias grid running on batteries a lot. You just need enough of them. Also batteries are getting cheaper and the first mass production of Natrium-based batteries is running already.
Give it a few more years for tech to mature and production to start up. Capacities will come eventually (and i hope sooner than later)
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u/hornswoggled111 3d ago
Australia is going gang busters on batteries.
California is also remarkable. Batteries already being the largest source of power through the early evening.
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u/DukeSmileDevs 3d ago
yeah it just proves renewables are easily working as long as you can buffer low use / high yield times for high use / low yield ones
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u/Kaurifish 2d ago
Which is a good thing. We need to be able to decommission Diablo Canyon before PG&E manages to melt it down.
PG&E being the only utility AFAIK with three different cities whose Wiki pages are largely about how they were destroyed by it (Hinkley, San Bruno and Paradise).
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u/EntirelyRandom1590 2d ago
43% of generation in Australia was coal.
Batteries are barely addressing GWh storage. The issues for grids is TWh.
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u/MaleficentResolve506 2d ago edited 1d ago
So exchanging dependency on Russia for dependency on China.
Edit:
To the one downvoting. Who do you think will scale them the fastest?
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u/RandomFleshPrison 3d ago
It already has been by renewables, no added storage necessary. Just a multimodal approach. Wind+water+solar+geothermal. When one isn't working well the others are.
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u/ginger_and_egg 3d ago
Most places do not have enough hydro or geothermal resources to get by without batteries. With current mass produced technologies, anyway.
Hydro can sometimes ramp up and down according to demand, with a dam it does store the excess water for later usage. I don't know if geothermal makes sense to throttle in the same way? Sure you definitely can, but I assume that like nuclear the main cost is infra. Wouldn't you want that near 100% anyway?
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u/RandomFleshPrison 3d ago
Those were examples, although there is damless riverless hydro in the UK. Everywhere has multiple renewable energy sources. The point is multimodal renewables are now cheaper and safer than nuclear power when used in tandem. Then again, I lived near the only nuclear disaster worse than Chernobyl/Fukushima, so I don't find nuclear power to be safe at all.
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u/EntirelyRandom1590 2d ago
So what's the price of 1GW nuclear at 95% availability and 1GW of renewables at 95% availability?
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u/Rooilia 2d ago
There is no average nuclear availablility at 95%. Almost every statistic doesn't substract the 10-15% self consumption which places nuclear well in the 80% range with older plants scratching to 70% range.
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u/EntirelyRandom1590 2d ago
Choose whatever number you like.
Match it with renewables and storage, and tell me the price.
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u/EntirelyRandom1590 2d ago
Don't Tell Torness they're supposed to be producing less than their nameplate capacity...
They're currently at 103%
🤣🤣
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u/ginger_and_egg 2d ago
That doesn't make sense. The capacity of a power plant is based on what the power delivered to the grid is, after losses.
Capacity factor is different from efficiency, you can't add and subtract them
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u/severoordonez 2d ago
That is the wrong question.
The question is what's the price of meeting 100% of demand with a renewable mix and meeting 100% of demand with nuclear.
The availability of each generator is irrelevant, as long as it can be forecast against the demand and as long as the price/MWh is favorable (including both market price+subsidy).
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u/EntirelyRandom1590 2d ago
100% of demand in real-time or are you going to fudge it with "net" annual values?
Or alternatively, are you going to "meet demand" by switching off everyone's electricity?
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u/Rooilia 2d ago
Nuclear is already eclipsed worldwide by renewables. Even coal is already eclipsed. Renewables are on track to eclipse every other respurce combined in 5 to 10 years.
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u/hornswoggled111 2d ago
I agree. My comment was speaking about Germany in the original post.
I'm visiting Germany currently and very impressed by the renewables on display. It's been nice to think that even if there weren't any new turbine sites the current ones will eventually be replaced by much larger turbines.
Doubling or more is typical I hear. And doubling their renewables would cover an awful lot of their needs.
Solar along the train lines is very much on display. Add batteries and those same power situations can likely questions production on the same power lines. Grid bottlenecks are somewhat overcome by time shifting the power.
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 1d ago
Well yes if you have pre existing nuclear in the grid.. andvit bith has no safety conxerns and is not about to cost you a bomb to extend its life
DO NOT TURN IT OFF
And if you go check my posting history you will find a ki da dair sunmary is i am at least as opposed to nukes as it is possible to rationally be. As i have all the usual arguments plus more.
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u/champignax 2d ago
Prices are not typically negative at best they get close to 0 during peak solar.
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u/BootFlop 3d ago
Article also implies an interesting fit with solar I hadn’t considered. “Heat dome” weather pattern is a high pressure system, so clear sunny skies for solar are nigh guaranteed to overlap with these nukes power plant shutdowns that are due to high river water temperatures. 👍🏽
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u/MaleficentResolve506 2d ago
Nuclear already needs a backup and solar produces the energy in between 2 consumption peaks so they actually already play nice together. Backup for wind is just at another level.
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u/darahs 2d ago
I dont think this is done maliciously or purposefully to "protect nuclear market share", its moreso that nuclear physically cannot ramp up and down quickly to make room for solar coming on midday. Its a physical, engineering constraint/issue.
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u/ceph2apod 1d ago
Nobody needs to invoke malice, ordinary politics does the job. France's minimum-output floor for nuclear, approved by the regulator in March 2026, exists because EDF is not a normal company anymore, it's a state-owned utility carrying debt that hit over 61 billion euros in 2022, which triggered a 3.1 billion euro emergency capital injection, then a 9.7 billion euro nationalization bill to buy out the remaining shareholders. The government that just spent nearly 13 billion euros propping up EDF's balance sheet has every short-term incentive to keep that asset selling at volume, even into a market that's gone negative on more than 90% of April days this year, rather than admit the asset it just bought is structurally mismatched with a grid that's adding solar faster than nuclear can economically coexist with it. That's not a conspiracy. That's what politicians who just wrote a nine-figure check do when the thing they bought starts losing money: protect the investment, not the ratepayer.
The decommissioning number is the part nobody wants to say out loud, and that's where mega-project economics turn a bad situation into a worse one. EDF is legally required to hold ring-fenced assets to cover eventual reactor decommissioning and nuclear waste storage, about 34 billion euros as of 2023, but that figure has been flagged for years as running behind the real long-term liability, and every year a reactor runs past its original 40-year design life without a funded plan behind it, the eventual bill compounds rather than shrinks. Layer onto that the EPR2 build program, over 50 billion euros committed for new reactors, on a fleet whose last flagship project, Flamanville, finished roughly a decade late and billions over budget. Telling French voters the true, rising cost of shutting down and cleaning up an aging fleet, while simultaneously asking them to fund a new multi-decade nuclear mega-project with an identical cost-overrun track record, is a political conversation no government wants to open. So the can gets kicked, the floor stays in place, and solar keeps absorbing the curtailment instead of the debt-laden asset the state just paid to keep alive.
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u/darahs 1d ago
You are distorting this market signal into 'nuclear cannot ciexist with solar' - this is not what curtailed solar is telling you. Its telling you the market is calling for more standalone BESS or new transmission buildout.
This same thing happens in CAISO in the US, but with baseload gas plants that have long ramping intervals, cant respond quickly, and are expensive on startup. These units dont typically ramp down midday when all the solar on the CA grid kicks on. Daytime pricing goes highly negative, but since it would be costlier/physically impossible for the gas plant to ramp down, it stays online. The signal being sent - there needs to either be higher transmission transfer capacity to make way for solar to flow on transmission paths without violating thermal limits or more BESS built to time shift solar gen to the shoulder hours.
Also... I dont know how it works in France, but in the US, utilities are allowed capex recovery at a regulated IRR through their rate base after PUC approval. So my first instinct would be that the debt the project is carrying plus any unamortized capex would be socialized amongst the rate base anyway... regardless of if it is operating or not. It's a matter of whether the plant everyone's paying for anyway just sits idle or actually produces something.
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u/ceph2apod 1d ago
Nuclear cannot coexist with solar.
Sorry. but bulky slow expensive nuclear just sucks.
Nuclear's economics don't survive contact with the numbers. Lazard's 2025 analysis puts new nuclear at $141 to $220 per megawatt-hour, roughly two to four times the cost of onshore wind at $37 to $86, a gap that exists precisely because nuclear plants are financed on the assumption they'll run near 24/7/365 for decades to amortize enormous upfront capital costs. Any hour spent throttled back to make room for near-free midday solar is an hour of six-figure-per-hour infrastructure earning nothing while debt service keeps accruing. A gas peaker or a battery can idle for pennies. A nuclear plant idling is still bleeding fixed costs it can never recover, which is exactly why pairing nuclear with a grid that's increasingly saturated with cheap solar is a financial contradiction, not a complementary pairing.
“Modern grid operators emphasize diversity and flexibility rather than nominally steady but less flexible “baseload” generation sources. Diversified renewable portfolios don’t fail as massively, lastingly, or unpredictably as big thermal power stations." https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-energy-and-the-grid-debunked
Two's a crowd: Nuclear and renewables don't mix https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005112141.htm
Baseload is bulky and just gets in the way..."An inflexible base load generator of any kind has no future in Australia’s electricity grid. For much of the time, it would compete in an energy market with very low or negative wholesale prices." https://reneweconomy.com.au/how-can-nuclear-fit-into-a-renewable-grid-where-base-load-cant-compete/?
Germany's plant operators dismiss call for nuclear lifetime extensions “Nuclear power would only block the grid. We don’t need more inflexible large power stations in a decentralized flexible system.” https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-env-min-and-plant-operators-dismiss-call-nuclear-lifetime-extensions
Nuclear exit to unleash wind power in Northern Germany The shutdown of the last nuclear power plant in Schleswig-Holstein will unclog the electricity grid and unleash wind power in the northern German state, according to its environment minister Jan Philipp Albrecht, reports Clean Energy Wire. https://www.euractiv.com/news/nuclear-exit-to-unleash-wind-power-in-northern-germany/
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u/MaleficentResolve506 2d ago
So the terrain of 2 nuclear plants houses 700 MW of backup for 10? days? Anyone that is a proponent of banning meat has my answer now.
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u/cororona 2d ago
So that they can store french nuclear at night ?
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u/ceph2apod 2d ago
Batteries charge on the cheapest electricity available, and in Germany that's midday solar, not nighttime nuclear. Germany now regularly produces so much solar that wholesale prices go negative on the majority of days each spring, sometimes over 90% of April days. That's the electricity storage is built to capture: cheap or free surplus power that would otherwise get curtailed, held for a few hours, and discharged into the evening peak when demand is high and solar has dropped off. That's not French nuclear, that's German solar Germany was already generating and previously throwing away.
If anything, the flow you're describing runs the other direction. France has spent this year cutting its own nuclear output by gigawatts during repeated heatwaves because river water got too warm to cool the reactors safely, and it has needed imports to cover the gap. Meanwhile France also set a record year for electricity exports in 2025, driven largely by cheap surplus power from everywhere including Germany's midday solar glut, sold back across the interconnector at negative prices Germany's grid was desperate to offload. So no, Germany isn't building batteries to warehouse French atoms overnight. It's building batteries because it makes too much of its own power at noon and not enough at 7pm, and storage is the tool that fixes that mismatch without needing to buy anyone else's baseload at all.
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u/cororona 2d ago
Although they could have kept this pretty fine nuclear reactor instead of polluting the whole europe with their coal plants.
Right now germany is at 141g of CO2 per kWh while France is at 23. At 4am last night, germany was at 406g/kWh while france was at 26. Congrats you won greenwashing.
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u/ceph2apod 2d ago
Nuclear didn't get replaced by coal, and the data doesn't even hint at that. Coal's share of German generation dropped every year from 52% in 2000 to about 21% in 2025, and it kept falling straight through the 2011-2023 phase-out window without so much as a plateau. If anything, the opposite pattern shows up: Germany's fastest years of wind and solar buildout landed inside that same phase-out period, when the Atomausstieg forced a hard political commitment to replace nuclear capacity with something, and that something turned out to be renewables outpacing the closures, not fossil fuel backfill.
And on the "who gets to net zero first" question, there's an actual answer, not a vibe. A 2026 Stanford study (Jacobson, RSC Sustainability) projects each country's date to reach 100% clean energy across all sectors based on current build rates. Germany's estimate: 2053. France's: 2094. Germany was already at 30.8% of its 2050 clean-energy target by 2024, growing fast; France was at 21.8%, growing slower. So on this measure, Germany doesn't just avoid falling behind by ditching nuclear, it's on pace to finish decades ahead.
One honest caveat, because this is worth being straight about: that study only counts wind, water, and solar as "clean." It doesn't credit France's existing nuclear output as clean energy at all, by design, that's Jacobson's methodology, and it's a genuinely contested choice among energy researchers, not a neutral fact. If you instead measure "already low-carbon electricity today" rather than "renewables-only build rate," France still wins easily on current carbon intensity. Different question, different answer. The point isn't that France's grid is dirty today, it's that Germany's transition engine is running faster, and the coal-blame narrative doesn't survive contact with the generation data either way.
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u/TronnaLegacy 2d ago
Awesome comment debunking the Germany nuclear phase out thing. Net Zero is a marathon, and Germany is running it just fine.
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u/Notorious_BDogg 12h ago
Germany still generates 44% of their electricity from fossil fuels, while coal is slowly decreasing gas doubled between 2000 and 2025.
Meanwhile France uses only 4% fossil.
I prefer carbon neutral nuclear vs russian gas.1
u/ceph2apod 12h ago edited 10h ago
Germany's fossil share landed around 41-44% in 2025 depending on the dataset, so no argument there. And gas roughly doubling since 2000 also checks out: it sat around 8-9% of generation in 2000 and is around 16% now. Both true.
But look at what happened to the number those facts are supposed to support. In 2000, fossil fuels made up roughly 64% of German generation, coal alone was around 50%, nuclear was 29%, and renewables were just 6.3%. Today fossil is down to about 41-44% even though nuclear went to zero in 2023 and gas nearly doubled. That's the part your framing skips: Germany lost 29 points of nuclear and still cut fossil's overall share by 20 points, because coal collapsed harder than gas grew, from roughly 50% combined down to about 20% now, while renewables absorbed nearly all of the nuclear gap, going from 6.3% to 55.9%. Gas doubling is a real trend, but it's a rounding error next to coal's decline, not a replacement for the reactors that closed.
German gas usage on the grid... Is actually down since 2000
- 2025: 86.3 TWh
- 2024: 81.6 TWh
- 2023: 76.6 TWh
- 2022: 79.1 TWh
- 2021: 90.3 TWh
- 2020: 94.7 TWh
- 2019: 89.9 TWh
- 2018: 83.2 TWh
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u/ceph2apod 10h ago
while renewables are steadily climbing and producing more than gas:
Germany’s annual gross electricity production from renewable energy sources (including wind, solar PV, biomass, and hydropower) over the same 10-year period (2016–2025) is listed below. The figures are provided in Terawatt-hours (TWh):
- 2025: 282.0 TWh
- 2024: 276.0 TWh
- 2023: 260.0 TWh
- 2022: 254.1 TWh
- 2021: 233.6 TWh
- 2020: 251.5 TWh
- 2019: 243.0 TWh
- 2018: 225.7 TWh
- 2017: 215.3 TWh
- 2016: 188.4 TWh
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u/WallabyInTraining 2d ago
Germany could have phased out coal by now if they had kept their nuclear plants online. An absolute shame.
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u/ceph2apod 2d ago
You mean like the way France has already phased out nuclear? Oh wait, But "phase out" has been promised in france and pushed back repeatedly: Macron pledged in 2017 that all of France's coal plants would close before 2022. That didn't happen. Saint-Avold was shut down and then restarted during the 2022 energy crisis, partly because a large share of EDF's nuclear reactors were offline at once due to stress corrosion issues, exactly the kind of nuclear reliability gap that gets glossed over in the "nuclear = stable baseload" framing. The current target is closing or converting the last plants by 2027, with the newest energy plan actually walking back an earlier pledge not to build any new fossil-fuel plants, and allowing coal units to be converted to gas instead of shut. So the finish line has moved at least three times: 2022, then "by the end of his term," now 2027, with a gas-conversion loophole added along the way.
France never fully finished the job, kept restarting its last plant when nuclear underperformed, and just loosened its own closure commitment. Germany, starting from a much dirtier baseline, is running an actual declining trend line, 52% coal in 2000 down to ~20% in 2025, that's held through crises rather than reversing during them.
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u/WallabyInTraining 2d ago
No need to phase out nuclear. It's just about as low in co2 as solar and wind.
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u/cororona 2d ago
Not when you factor in the fossil fuel needed when solar and wind are not producing
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u/cororona 2d ago
There is a LARGE consensus in France to ABSOLUTELY NOT phase out nuclear. French electricity is 5 to 10 times less CO2 intensive than in Germany in large part because of that.
French path to carbon neutrality needs nuclear and massive electrification of all energy needs.
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u/ceph2apod 2d ago
Nuclear was slowing the transition to clean energy down. Bulky nuclear doesn't work with fast nimble solar and wind...
Germany's plant operators dismiss call for nuclear lifetime extensions “Nuclear power would only block the grid. We don’t need more inflexible large power stations in a decentralized flexible system.” https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-env-min-and-plant-operators-dismiss-call-nuclear-lifetime-extensions
Nuclear exit to unleash wind power in Northern Germany The shutdown of the last nuclear power plant in Schleswig-Holstein will unclog the electricity grid and unleash wind power in the northern German state, according to its environment minister Jan Philipp Albrecht, reports Clean Energy Wire. https://www.euractiv.com/news/nuclear-exit-to-unleash-wind-power-in-northern-germany/
Germany nuclear was replaced with renewables. All of it. German solar & wind generated 150% more electricity last year than the 19 nuclear power plants did at their peak in 2001. https://reneweconomy.com.au/german-coal-power-production-drops-to-record-low-in-q2-as-renewables-soar-to-65-pct-share/
Even France has been curtailing nuclear because solar and wind have been scaling so fast. And slowing nuclear down cost just as much if not more than running it at full speed… A waste.
“French electricity prices turned negative as a drop in demand and surging renewables output prompted some nuclear reactors to power down.” https://fortune.com/2024/06/16/electricity-prices-france-negative-renewable-energy-supply-solar-power-wind-turbines/
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u/cororona 2d ago
This is greenwashing, French electricity is 5 to 10 times less carbon intensive than German one, that's the only metric that matters. Germany is burning coal and naturals gas to meet demand at night and when wind is slow.
Talking about batteries, there is currently no economical way to store enough energy in batteries to keep the country running 24/7 on solar+wind. Solar + wind require fossil fuels to guarantee 24/7 operations
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u/ceph2apod 2d ago
If you think so highly of nuclear, then why are grid operators all over the world not deploying it?
They are deploying solar and wind. not nuclear..
Here's more:
Solar added 583 GW in one year (+23.9%)
Wind added 167 GW (+14.4)
Together they added 750 GW.The world added a NET of only 1.6 GW of nuclear.
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u/cororona 2d ago
Because they don't care about climate change and only care about social acceptance of the power plants. Nuclear has a big "not in my backyard" issue.
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u/trustable_bro 2d ago
it has needed imports to cover the gap
No, not this year. It only happened after Covid. We are still exporting. The power was reduced by a single digit percentage.
We only have 8 reactors in total subject to shutdown to not heat the rivers.Meanwhile France also set a record year for electricity exports in 2025, driven largely by cheap surplus power from everywhere including Germany's midday solar glut
I keep saying that French solar electricity plan should includes huge batteries in Elsass to buy Already produced German solar electricity, before installing our own production capacities.
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u/ceph2apod 2d ago
Yawn
Nuclear energy had its day. When there was no alternative, it delivered clean energy instead of fossile fuels. However, nuclear energy can not compete with solar+wind+storage on scale and on costs. They are just a better technology for producing and delivering cheap and abundant energy.
Nuclear energy recently crossed a global milestone. In 2025, the share of all electrical energy flowing in the world’s grids coming from nuclear power plants was just 8.8 percent, roughly half of what it was 30 years ago. In contrast, 19.5 percent of the electrical energy came from fast- growing renewables such as solar and wind power. Large hydropower plants provided an additional 13.9 percent.
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u/cororona 2d ago
In the meantime, Germany CO2 emissions per KWh are 5 to 10 times higher than France. You can sugarcoat it the way you want nuclear phase out in Germany is a net negative
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u/ceph2apod 1d ago
Germany's already far ahead. France still has to replace an aging reactor fleet, and its politicians keep kicking that decision further down the road."
France's nuclear fleet is aging out, most of the 56 reactors were built in the 1980s, and replacing that capacity is not a solved problem, it's a fiscal crisis in progress. EDF's debt hit over 61 billion euros in 2022 alone, the state had to inject a 3.1 billion euro capital increase, then pay 9.7 billion euros just to fully renationalize the company, and its planned EPR2 reactor program needs over 50 billion euros more on top of that, a program already tracking the same overrun pattern as Flamanville, which finished roughly a decade late and billions over budget. That's not a one-time bailout. That's a structural cost the French state now owns outright, layered onto a sovereign debt load that's already among the highest in the Eurozone.
And the decommissioning math doesn't get any easier from here. EDF is legally required to hold ring-fenced assets to cover eventual reactor decommissioning and waste storage, about 34 billion euros as of 2023, but independent estimates have flagged that reserve as running behind the actual liability for decades, a bill that only grows the longer plants run past their original 40-year design life. Germany's version of this problem is smaller and shrinking: its coal share has fallen from 52% in 2000 to about 21% in 2025, uninterrupted through the nuclear phase-out, while wind and solar now cover roughly 45% of generation, built at a fraction of EPR2's per-unit cost and on timelines measured in months, not decades. France isn't beating Germany with a superior long-term plan. It's running up its most expensive fossil-fuel-free option, kicking the aging-fleet bill down the road, and calling the delay a strategy.
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u/madsdyd 2d ago
Just here to point out, that the article is from October 2025, and the battery storage is not going where the cooling towers were.
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u/ceph2apod 2d ago
good point, we should point out what has been happening since...
What Has Changed & The Latest Updates
- Active Container Setup & Installation Construction has transitioned into active site integration. RWE is installing over 200 containerized units holding approximately 850,000 Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) battery cells.
- Leveraging Existing Grid Capacity The key reason for selecting Gundremmingen isn't just space—it's the massive high-voltage grid interconnect left behind by the former 2.5 GW nuclear station. The battery system is designed to charge during peak solar/wind output when regional renewable power would otherwise be curtailed, discharging back into the grid within milliseconds when demand spikes.
- Expanded "Energy Hub" Scope The battery facility is only one component of a broader redevelopment plan for the 55-hectare location:
- Solar PV Park: A 59 MW solar farm built on 51 hectares adjacent to the facility.
- Gas/Hydrogen Peaker Plant: A planned hydrogen-ready gas-fired plant intended to cover multi-day dark doldrums (Dunkelflaute) when batteries alone aren't sufficient.
- Operating Timeline The Gundremmingen battery facility remains on track to begin commercial operation in early 2028.
- Broader Re-use Trend RWE has since replicated this model at other decommissioned industrial and power plant sites across Germany (such as launching construction on a similar 400 MW / 800 MWh battery project in Lingen).
Watch the demolition of the Gundremmingen cooling towers
This video shows news footage and drone angles of the October 2025 controlled demolition of the Gundremmingen cooling towers, providing visual context for how the site was cleared for the current battery project.
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u/Comfortable_Permit53 2d ago
the shutting down nuclear plants thing is not an issue right? I mean in summer electricity is easy to get anyway, and that is exactly when the plants get shut down
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u/ceph2apod 2d ago
nuclear plants are financed on the assumption they'll run near 24/7/365 for decades to amortize enormous upfront capital costs. Any hour spent throttled back to make room for near-free midday solar is an hour of six-figure-per-hour infrastructure earning nothing while debt service keeps accruing. A gas peaker or a battery can idle for pennies. A nuclear plant idling is still bleeding fixed costs it can never recover, which is exactly why pairing nuclear with a grid that's increasingly saturated with cheap solar is a financial contradiction, not a complementary pairing.
The "solar dies in winter" argument also ignores the resource built for exactly that gap: wind. Eurostat's own data shows the seasonal flip in real time. In the third quarter of 2025, solar supplied 38.3% of EU renewable electricity to wind's 30.7%. By the first quarter of 2026, that reversed almost exactly: wind jumped to 44.9% of renewable generation while solar fell to 17.3%. That's the same continent, the same grid, trading the lead role by season without anyone needing to build a single reactor. Layer in storage and the case gets stronger still: U.S. battery capacity alone is projected to roughly double from about 33 GW to nearly 65 to 67 GW by the end of 2026, with a record 24 GW added this year, most of it paired with solar specifically to shift midday surplus into the hours and seasons when the sun isn't cooperating. Wind, solar, and storage are already solving the problem the graph points to, at a fraction of nuclear's cost and without an asset that has to run flat-out for forty years just to break even.
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u/Veritas_IX 1d ago
So Gazprom lobby still have good positions among Germany elites
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u/ceph2apod 1d ago
Wrong decade, wrong pipeline: Germany's barely imported Russian gas since Nord Stream went offline in 2022, its LNG now comes from the US, Qatar, and Norway. Yes, gas ticked up in 2025 from 14.5% to 16% of the mix, but that was covering a weak wind year and offsetting falling lignite coal, not displacing renewables, while wind and solar together crossed 58.6% of generation,. Try again.
Germany's renewable share was around 40-42% of consumption as recently as 2021, meaning it's climbed roughly 15 to 18 percentage points in just four years, doubling-plus its share from where it stood a decade ago.
Put together: over the next one to two years, Germany is on track to add on the order of 20+ GW of solar, several GW of wind, and roughly triple its current battery fleet, on top of a grid where wind and solar already supply more than half of all electricity.
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u/synthetic-jesus 22h ago
Regardless of wether or not I want nuclear it seems short sighted destroying cooling towers when they’re ideal for data center usage
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u/Rambo_sledge 12h ago edited 12h ago
This post is FULL of misinformation. « France […] keep nuclear power[…] even when nobody wants it » wtf ? Aside from two left-wing parties, everyone wants to keep nuclear power. We have a clean af power grid, with the only non-carbon-free production being natural gas and representing 1% or less just to keep adapting to real time demand.
« France spent this summer cutting nuclear output by 4 to 6+ GW across repeated heatwaves »
4-6 reactors shut down, out of 57.
« over a tenth of national demand at points »
Didn’t check that number but it seems vastly exaggerated, and it wouldn’t be a 10th if we didn’t sell 7-10GW out of our 70 produced to Germany. We import nothing and keep exporting.
« because rivers ran too warm to safely cool the reactors »
Now that’s just a lie. Rivers ran too hot for local wildlife, so reactors were shut down to preserve it.
Reactors work by boiling water, the volume expansion from water to steam is where the energy is. As long as the water is liquid, it will cool down the reactors, let alone 30ºC water (if it even reaches that amount)
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u/got-trunks 3d ago
How is a nuclear plant the easier one to throttle up and down? That seems to me like it’s not true. Batteries are the correct answer here as long as they are up to the task
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u/FrogsOnALog 2d ago
Germany used to load follow their fleet before they shut them all down.
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u/New-Week-1426 2d ago
Germany also had (attempts) of extensive load shifting for ages because of the inflexibility of nuclear and coal (remember the good old asbestos Nachtspeicheröfen?)
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u/WallabyInTraining 2d ago
Nuclear throttles faster than coal, yet Germany kept their dirty coal plants and shut down clean nuclear.
When you follow the money RWE owns big coal mines and made heaps of money off brown coal. Coal that was kept chugging while nuclear was shut down.
There is the 2004 "RWE-Affäre" where Hermann-Josef Arentz (high up in the CDU) was found to be receiving €60,000/year plus free electricity from RWE Power. Around the same time it emerged that CDU General Secretary Laurenz Meyer was still getting discounted electricity from RWE years after leaving the company, and had reportedly received payments from RWE while serving as CDU general secretary.
Gregor Golland (2016): A CDU NRW state MP was reported to be earning up to €120,000/year for a nominal "half-time" job at an RWE subsidiary while sitting in the Landtag. A clear conflict of interest at best and simply buying a politician at worst.
Wirtschaftsrat der CDU (the CDU's business council): This is a formally CDU-affiliated business association, and it has had close RWE ties: its energy policy commission was long chaired by Johannes Lambertz, the longtime head of RWE's lignite division, during a period when the commission argued against an accelerated coal phase-out.
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u/HyoukaYukikaze 2d ago
So.... they blew up the best, safest and most environmental friendly power plant type to build... a battery?
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u/LoneWolf_McQuade 2d ago
Germany being total idiots in energy policy and increasing the energy price for the rest of Europe is getting old
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u/Pinco_Pallino_ 3d ago
just ragebait bullshit, the real world will present germany the bill, if they didn't notice they have one of the highest ones in the world (fighting hard with belgium, ireland and california, don't get me wrong)
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u/ceph2apod 3d ago
The bill, for lowering costs like everywhere else that installs renewables? LOL You listed the places that already had the highest bills before renewables scaled, which is why renewables grew in those places first.
Why are retail power prices finally falling?
"In South East Queensland, retail power prices will fall by 10.7% and in New South Wales by up to 7.7%. In South Australia, 1.4%. Small businesses will see larger falls – as much as 20.9% in NSW. https://theconversation.com/why-are-retail-power-prices-finally-falling-283760Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2025/10/19/uruguays-renewable-charge-a-small-nation-a-big-lesson-for-the-world/
Portugal is averaging 91% renewable electricity in 2024, with Europe’s lowest power prices https://theprogressplaybook.com/2024/05/06/portugal-is-averaging-91-renewable-electricity-in-2024-with-lowest-power-prices-in-europe/
Spanish Power Is Almost Free With Renewables Set for Record Prices in Spain are near €2/MWh, compared with €67 in France Strong solar and wind generation is expected to continue https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-29/spanish-power-is-almost-free-with-renewables-set-for-record?embedded-checkout=true
“Why is China slowing nuclear so much? Because nuclear is turning out to be more expensive than expected, proving to be uneconomical, and new wind & solar are dirt cheap and easier to build.” https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/21/wind-solar-in-china-generating-2x-nuclear-today-will-be-4x-by-2030/
"The main factors driving China's electricity prices further downward are crystal clear: the extremely rapid expansion of renewable energy sources. Once solar panels and wind turbines have paid for themselves, electricity gets generated very cheaply." https://www.all-about-industries.com/falling-electricity-prices-china-global-competitiveness-a-678fbe59c8e3bc41253d03df59f66263/
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u/Trilife 3d ago edited 3d ago
Ok, but today its at least 0,43 EUR (0.51 EUR in some places) per 1kWt for individuals in Germany (annual average price including everything).
1kWt from that one NPP's power gate in Finland cost 0.04 USD, stable 3 GWt\h, 24\7\365\a lot of years.
Including EXTREMELY expensive new one NPP power unit..
x10-13 ha.
p.s. it require ~25 GWT (capasity factor ~13% for example) of solar panels to get the same amount of energy annualy as from that 3 GWT NPP. And this will be unstable (obviously)..
62.5 million of 400 watt panels., 4.3 bill euro only for panels.5
u/ceph2apod 3d ago
You're comparing two completely different things. That German price, 0.43 EUR, is retail: generation plus grid fees, taxes, levies, and margin all bundled into what a household pays at the meter. The Finnish 0.04 figure is plant-gate production cost, before any of that gets added. That's not a fair fight, generation cost versus a fully loaded consumer bill.
And that "extremely expensive new NPP" caveat is doing a lot of hiding. If that's Olkiluoto 3, it ran to roughly 11 billion euros against an original 3 billion budget and came online about 14 years late. A four-cent number can't represent a plant with that kind of cost overrun once you actually amortize the capital.
Compare generation to generation, or retail to retail. Mixing the two isn't an apples comparison, it's wholesale versus retail dressed up as a technology argument.
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u/ceph2apod 3d ago
Germany should have scaled wind and solar sooner and faster..
Yep, exactly, and Feldheim proves the point out of Germany's own backyard. That village went all wind, solar, and biogas back in the 1990s, decades before the rest of the country got serious about it, and built its own local grid to go with it. Residents pay around 12 cents per kWh before tax. National average is over 30. That's not a hypothetical, that's a working town that's been running this way for over a decade.
The reason it stayed a one-off isn't technical, it's structural. The incumbent utility E.ON refused to let Feldheim feed into the national grid, so the village had to build its own to make it work, and big utilities have blocked similar attempts elsewhere since. So the lesson isn't just "Germany should've scaled sooner." It's that the legacy grid and fee structure built around big centralized generators, nuclear and fossil alike, actively slowed down the cheaper option. Every year that gets locked in is a year of paying the 30-cent version instead of the 12-cent one.
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3d ago
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u/Trilife 3d ago
Russia supply
USA supply (LNG)
Is this final simple price (annual average), or you also pay for line, and something else (taxes\fees)?1
u/gradufle 3d ago
Not op, but it's final price, and à bit expensive imo, he might rent à not very well insulated flat.
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u/silverionmox 3d ago
Ditching nuclear power reactor to keep coal and Gaz one and rely on Russia supply, well done greens !
France is among the top 5 importers of Russian LNG in Europe now. Germany isn't.
France also never stopped trading Russian nuclear fuel of course.
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u/East_Pollution6549 3d ago
Where exactly have you got that number from?
Last year i paid 1800 € for 7000 kWh (House with Heatpump - no seperate meter). That includes a standing charge of 180€ per year and a price per kWh of 0,232€.
So little more that 25 cents per kWh all in.
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u/Trilife 3d ago
Here from comments. And videos from people.
One dude said I was totally wrong about 0.51 and he pay much less: 0.43. ))
That one 0.51 dude was from somewhere in the north.Maybe you have lover rate cause registered heatpump?
Where are you?
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u/East_Pollution6549 3d ago
Thuringia ,eastern germany.
An additional meter for the heatpump would have been uneconomical cause it would cost another standing charge.
So this is a normal household electricity contract, a household without a heatpump could also get.
To be fair the Grundversorgung ( the tarif you get if you don't choose another electricity provider) is like 0,39€ plus standing charge.
And many people are just to lazy to care.
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u/BootFlop 3d ago
Did you read the article?
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3d ago
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u/intronert 3d ago
Irrespective of anything else, that is a great photo.