Germany has neither a nuclear military-industrial complex like the French do nor the opportunity to waste copious amounts of energy the way Norwegians do, so I fail to see how references to those countries are in any way relevant for Germans' situation. No amount of energy policy will compensate for their different circumstances to the extent of turning Germany into a second France or a second Norway.
Even if you think that's insurmountable problem there's an easy solution: Pay the French to build and operate them, they already do that for other foreign customers.
But look at France's portion of nuclear at the start of the 70s, then the 90s. There's no reason except political will that Germany couldn't do the same.
Perhaps. But saying with 20/20 hindsight of the 2020s that people of the 1970s should have made momentously different decisions for the future of whole national industries for decades to come doesn't feel any less arrogant to me. And that's even assuming that the international situation decades ago was the same as one of today, which it wasn't either.
I'm talking about what should be done today, not crying over the milk spilt in the 70s. I only mentioned the 70s to show how rapidly nuclear could be built to replace other energy sources.
If you look at any longer term projections on the German or EU energy mix in the next 10-30 years, natural gas will still be critical to the energy mix in 2050 if current plans continue. E.g. [1] shows a nice summary of that.
Thus arguments like "efficient building codes" are a red herring. You'll still need to heat your efficiently insulated buildings.
The current plans for doing that are fundamentally still those spearheaded by Germany and others before 2014. If the EU has a serious commitment to longer term sanctions on Russia those plans need to change.
I don't think they will. I think we'll still be buying Russian gas then, and that Germany et al will find some way to sell out Ukraine in the next couple of years. But one can always hope for better.
If you're suggesting a reaction today, then I need to point out that globally, over the past decade, new renewable generation was being installed roughly 15x faster than new nuclear generation. So even that is yet another difference from the situation from the 1970s that makes the experience of 1970s inapplicable: we have choices today that we didn't have back then.
> natural gas will still be critical to the energy mix in 2050 if current plans continue. E.g. [1] shows a nice summary of that.
Being critical and being a large component are two different things -- and it's not that difficult to source smaller amounts of natural gas than what Germany uses today. As far as predictions for distant future are concerned...well, we know how e.g. IEA was able to botch those. So I really wouldn't take any predictions about 2050 for granted.
> Thus arguments like "efficient building codes" are a red herring. You'll still need to heat your efficiently insulated buildings.
Decreasing the energy required by a factor of five or so is not "a red herring". That's a massive change. Likewise, there's apparently a chance that by 2030, this will have been amended to require zero-energy buildings in the future.
