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Data Centres don't necessarily need to have negative environmental impacts .. they can be made to use water and energy sustainability. This is just a matter of regulation.

Extracting, exporting, and burning fossil fuels not so much.

Not really.

The fundamental costs and margin requirements in the system haven't changed.

This is a government-mandated electricity plan (a default market offer) that competitive electricity retailers are now required to offer. Those retailers still have network costs, environmental costs, energy costs, and administration costs to recover, and so prices at other times of day necessarily go up.

Some consumers may be better off on this plan (generally at the expense of other consumers), and some will be worse off.

It's good politics and only so-so policy.

It’s not 100% “instead”, but equally it’s not 0%. A grid with more distributed generation (and storage and load flexibility) can be smaller and cheaper.

The framing in the article is that Germany made a purely technical decarbonization policy choice between renewable energy and nuclear power and chose incorrectly, but this is too reductive.

Germany has a long history of public opposition to nuclear power, going back over 50 years, and this is related to environmental concerns, safety concerns, and the association with nuclear weapons.

Both the USA and the Soviets had nuclear weapons deployed on German soil with the potential to be directed at the German people and this cultural and historical context is important to understand the current policy landscape.

The origin of the popular Green party in Germany is deeply connected to the peace movement and anti-nuclear activism that pre-dates concerns about climate change.

It’s fine to disagree with the policy decisions the German people made, but it’s good to understand the reasons why they made them.

So how would you start phasing out plastic?

Dog whistling.

The phrase "green energy transition" is mentioned only in the headline, and is completely irrelavent to the point being made in article, which is that unregulated mining in poor developing countries is bad.

Somehow? Wild guess, but maybe they will be selling the product of that R&D for more than 10 days.