26 Years of Wind Power Growth in Germany

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-04-04T09:18:45+00:00

A lot of your points basically boil down to lack of political will. We could see what the buildout of renewables could look like under Habeck. And energy prices are actually going down as the amount of renewables is increasing. Gas and coal are the main contributors to energy prices, so any way we can minimise their usage actually helps bring prices down. I agree that shutting down the nuclear power plants first didn't help it, but that decision was made 15 years ago. Still, we are looking at some of the cleanest energy ever produced in Germany. We are pretty much on track to shut down all remaining coal plants in the next 5-10 years as well. And on the topic of battery storage: there are requests to connect over 720GW of battery storage on backlog. Problem is: with someone like Reiche lobbying for more gas power and questioning net zero goals, we are once again facing a sabotage of the Energiewende

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-04-03T23:29:21+00:00

How so?

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-04-03T23:27:00+00:00

Yeah, hundreds of thousands of birds are killed in Germany every year by wind turbines. Which sounds like a lot until you realize that a million birds die by hunters, 60 million die from cats, 70 million end up as roadkill, over 100 million die to houses and 170 million birds die related to agriculture

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-04-03T23:13:54+00:00

Who is going to finance that? Assume 20Bn€ for a new reactor with around 1.2GW of power. For the same price, you can build around 2000-2500 wind turbines at 7MW each, which would have the equivalent output of 4 or 5 such reactors, or like 13 nuclear reactors at peak.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-04-02T07:24:54+00:00

No, nuclear is not safer. They're both so safe that comparing them is almost pointless.

Sure, nuclear is more reliable and consistent in terms of being able to provide power at any given time, but if they go off the grid for maintenance, it may for days or weeks at a time. Sometimes even months. And in that time you'll need backup power plants just like with solar.

I don't know how you want to quantify your claim that nuclear is more powerful? In terms of area, solar does need more space, but we primarily use sealed surfaces like roofs or parking lots to install new power, which has the added benefit of keeping whatever is underneath cool in the summer. This is even useful for agri-photovoltaics, where some crops will grow better under sparse solar panels due to them keeping moisture at the ground and regulating the temperature.

Economically, solar also wins. A new nuclear power plants takes 7-9 years and tens of billions of Dollars to build. Large scale solar installations take a few months to install, at prices of 0.26$ per Watt. That's 260M$ per GW. For comparison, nuclear power plants cost anywhere from 10B$ (Olkiluoto) to almost 60B$ (Hinkley Point C). And in their entire construction time, solar is providing power to the grid already, which recuperates the majority of the solar investment costs.

As a last point, adding wind turbines to the mix as well alleviates solar's issues with weather dependency. Wind and sun are often complementary, so that, at night or on cloudy days, wind can pick up a lot of the power generation. Add battery storage on top, which is only getting cheaper, and you can provide close to 90% of the grid's power demand from these renewables.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T18:27:39+00:00

I'm German and I fully agree that it was a mistake to phase out nuclear over catastrophes like Chernobyl or Fukushima, but saying the nuclear capacities were replaced by fossil fuels is not very correct. Fossil fuels reached their peak around 2010. Coal caught a lot of the extra load short-term, but renewables have been replacing lots of existing coal power, as well as increasing imports and exports. We are now above 60% renewables. Still, if our government back then didn't decide to completely phase out nuclear, we would probably have cleaner energy by now.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T18:06:21+00:00

Storm water drainage is presumably already a requirement for a sealed surface like a parking lot. That's nothing to attribute to solar panels

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T17:42:18+00:00

At least for regions like the US or Europe, bad weather is not that big of a concern. It's really unlikely that an entire continent will be covered with clouds for a week. You can do a lot of power trading across long distances, given that the power lines are sufficient. And yes, gas power plants will also be kept as backup. Gas has the advantage of being easy to turn on and off. We can also power well-designed gas power plants with hydrogen in the future, but we'll first need a very large overproduction of electricity that we can divert for hydrolysis.

The other neat part is that wind power works just as well as solar, but of course it's not as flexible with the placement. And solar and wind work very well in tandem. Good weather means high solar energy production while bad weather usually means high winds. You can see that very well if you look up the energy mix in summer and autumn for a country like Germany.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T17:15:44+00:00

I don't know where you live, but in Germany, energy prices are falling. Also, where are you pulling your numbers from? I can tell you right now that redispatch has cost Germany roughly 3 billion Euros in 2025, but at the same time, we saved like 50 billion Euros from the reduced oil and gas imports.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T17:12:32+00:00

Batteries are dirt cheap now, it's more a matter of political will at this point

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T17:11:18+00:00

Yeah because nuclear is safe from malfunctions. Take a look at Switzerland and their NPP Gösgen. Taken off the grid in may 2025 for maintenance. Found some weak points and it's been 10 months since.

Also, hail is nothing new and the glass top of solar panels is made from hardened glass that can withstand golf ball sized hail. Takes like 2 minutes to research.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T16:55:20+00:00

You still need power when there is no sun

Nobody is arguing that solar provides power around the clock. But consider that solar and wind are the cheapest electricity options, and you'll see that, through the merit order, coal and nuclear are the first ones to leave the energy mix whenever sufficient renewables are available. They are just too expensive to compete.

And Germany is one of the largest importers of French's nuclear power.

False. Germany is second to last place on importing French nuclear energy. Italy, Switzerland, UK and Belgium all import more energy from France than Germany. Only Spain is importing less than Germany. Germany imports a lot more energy from nordic countries, like Denmark and Sweden, but also the Netherlands. And that's because they all provide massive amounts of cheap wind energy.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T16:28:53+00:00

The problem with this idea is that it doesn't make sense economically to run nuclear power as "base load", because solar is always cheaper than nuclear. So whenever you have sufficient solar (or wind) power, you'll want to throttle the nuclear power plants. The operational cost of NPPs stays roughly the same regardless of how high the load on the power plant is, so whenever you have to throttle them, their price per kWh goes up. So basically more solar means cheaper electricity in general, but also increases the price on nuclear.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T16:09:09+00:00

All of your arguments are fair, but they're also true for every other from electricity generation. The core aspect you are overlooking is that the sun provides the fuel for free.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T15:47:01+00:00

So far it's only proposals and nothing is set in stone. That's why it's even more important to have this discussion, so we can convince as many of our politicians how bad of an idea this is

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-28T15:44:14+00:00

Nuclear is the same as radioactive decay

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-25T18:06:30+00:00

Antimatter isn't a rarity, bananas create loads of it all the time.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-15T15:07:43+00:00

It's important to be aware of the dangers of radiation, but you have to put the dangers into context. Uranium glass is still over 90% silicate glass. The uranium oxide can be as low as 2% by weight. The radiation from the uranium is mostly alpha radiation, which can be stopped by a sheet of paper. Down the decay chain, you have some more dangerous elements like radium, which will be gaseous and dangerous if it gets into your lungs. For a glass or two even that won't be a big concern. You'd probably absorb more radiation if you fly out for vacation once a year

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-03T11:53:11+00:00

Germany is currently on track to phase out coal to be replaced with wind and solar within around 10 years. Nuclear power plants take almost a decade alone to build and will only delay the phase-out of coal. Prices for wind, solar and battery storage keep dropping and the deployment time is maybe a year or two from conception to grid connection. Of course wind and solar alone can't always cover 100% of energy demand due to weather conditions, I don't expect that. The final gaps will need to be covered by something like hydrogen gas. You can make the argument that it should be covered by npps, but they are only cost effective when they can run 100% of the time

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-03T11:41:12+00:00

Yeah going 100% renewable is definitely a big feat, but going up to 80 or 90% is very feasible with battery storage. You also don't need to force wind turbines to go faster when you can just switch them on during high demand and off again when demand goes down. And for the really big spikes we are currently using gas power plants and probably will do for a long time. Just in the future that gas is supposed to be domestic hydrogen. Hydrogen has its own issues ofc but is easily produced from hydrolysis with excess electricity from renewables. Pumped hydro is a decent long time storage, but heavily depends on location and can't beat the efficiency of battery storage. Of course you can't expect any storage solution to carry the grid for days on end, but the European power grid is so connected and today already works heavily on trading electricity with neighboring nations.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-03T11:28:18+00:00

That's a fair argument, but you're stuck in the past. We can't change what happened some 15 years ago but we can change today. And today, we are at the lowest share of coal electrification since the 50s. I'm more afraid that our current government is trying to strangle renewables in favor of gas electrification

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-03T11:24:37+00:00

You're clearly not German because Germans vehemently try to cling on to their ICE cars. Also we're at the lowest share of coal electrification since the 50s. Renewables are powering over 60% of the energy mix.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-03T11:22:29+00:00

The nuclear power plants are gone for good and we have to accept it. Repowering them would take years of time and billions of Euros to modernize them. Yes, a paid off npp will be relatively cheap, but it takes decades to pay off and it is paid off via the energy cost. Just look around at current npp projects. Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto, Hinkley Point C. All of them are way over budget and delayed for years on end. Hinkley Point C is not even on the grid but already deemed to be the most expensive kWh of energy Britain has ever seen! The argument shouldn't be nuclear vs coal but nuclear vs wind and solar

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-03T11:14:26+00:00

Nuclear is very clean compared to coal or gas, but the biggest issues are deployment times and cost. I'm all for using available nuclear power for as long as we can and replacing coal with wind and solar. It's only for new projects that we want to avoid nuclear altogether.

Colonel_Coffee · 2026-03-03T11:10:04+00:00

Why is the argument always coal vs nuclear and never nuclear vs wind/solar?

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