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Comment by martinald

It's hard for renewables to replace coal or nuclear though, because coal and nuclear provide baseload power, whereas wind and solar are very intermittent and require basically 100% gas backup (as there will be circumstances with very low wind and solar, which tends to happen in europe on very cold, still, winter nights when demand is the highest).

There is absolutely no reason the (ex-west) German nuclear power plants could not have been life extended. They were extremely reliable and about 10GWe of modern PWRs were finished in the late 80s. They could have easily be extended to at least 2030 had there been the political will at not a huge amount of cost. The RoI with current/previous high energy prices would have probably been 100 fold.

parent martinald 3 years ago

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