The main reason why electricity is expensive in Germany is because it's taxed to oblivion. Even when wholesale prices are negative, electricity costs about three times as much as gas.

Now you might ask why electricity is taxed to oblivion. Some don't like nuclear or coal. Some prefer oil or gas. In the end, there's a majority that wants electricity to be expensive.

No amount of solar panels will generate electricity without sun light. Also the amount sun light can shrink quite a lot in winter months at high latitudes and under cloud cover.

No amount of wind turbines will generate electricity without wind, or to be more precise:

Cut-in speed: 3–4 m/s (12–15 km/h) to begin spinning and producing power.

Cut-out / Stop speed: Above 25 m/s (90 km/h) where brakes are applied to prevent mechanical damage

Germany has to have backups, currently quite expensive, for all this times of missing renewables production.

For households in Europe, there are some incentives to switch to heat pumps for heating... for best efficiency (and longevity), usually a heat pump needs to run at lower power constantly without switching off much.

And since the heat pump will be the biggest total consumer in a household (in winter), there is not a huge opportunity for flexibility.

This sort of thing was called “smartgrid” but it doesn’t seem to have caught on. Maybe we could lean into modern buzzwords.

The electricity distribution system is a big sparse graph. If they are allowed to pass signals back and forth, don’t look too close, and maybe we can call it an AI enhanced grid. Then we can call this sort of ability to schedule appliances based on those signals “closed loop AI enhanced green appliances” or something similarly buzzwordy.

A lot of fossil power stations cant shut down for a few hours, they have to keep themselves on.

French nuclear supply chain atrophied quite lot in the last 30 years. Don't forget that even in France, president Hollande promised in 2014 to the voters to slash nuclear's contribution of power generation by 2025.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/renewables-up-nuclear-down-in-fren...

It was only when Russia started invasion in 2022, that the politicians in France started to change their opinion.

If you want build a nuclear power plant you go to nuclear supplier with uninterrupted experience in building nuclear power plants, like South Korea, China or Russia.

The South Koreans build Barakah nuclear power plant 5600 MWe for $32bn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant

https://www.powermag.com/uaes-first-reactor-gets-go-ahead/

It is not even an "idea". Is the consequence of nuclear power being so difficult to modulate to consumption. You give it for free by night, hoping that at least some people consumes, because the country is sleeping.

Solar energy aligns so much better, peaking its production when the consumption is high, going to zero when the consumption gets low, except for the diner time. In Spain we get really low prices (sometimes near 0) in the middle of the day, you don't have to plan or incentivize night consumption.

These approaches always measure the wrong thing though - the average carbon cost of electricity.

What you need to know is the marginal carbon cost, which will be much less variable as almost all dispatchable generation is fossil.

So yes, you should avoiding adding load when there is a severe supply crunch and the marginal power is generated by gas peaker plants (often gas turbine based), and use power when renewable generation is otherwise being curtailed, but most of the time the grid is firmly in the middle regime with a fairly average marginal cost.

They are in conflict, because you can spend the same Euro only once. You could build a lot of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines for the cost of one nuclear plant

Yes, but then when the wind doesn't blow, you miss upto 960MW of capacity, you can choose how to fill that; solar, coal, gas, waterpower, diesel, nuclear.

And the question is, are those wind turbines without subsidy?

Here in the Netherlands some big energy users like Aldel already have stopped, those big users are also good in up and down scaling energy usage on demand, and also those products have to come from somewhere else now, so in the end the question is about energy and availability.

Some (or a lot of) subsidies can be justified.

Germany is currently operating the world biggest permanent storage for dangerous waste UTD Herfa-Neurode. Contains at least 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans, 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. Nuclear waste is currently excluded, but I think it would not make a difference, especially because after about 400 years most dangerous fission products (Caesium-137, Strontium-90, and Iodine-131) decay away and only Plutonium and minor actinides stays. Mercury, arsenic, dioxins and furans stay forever.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode

https://radioactivity.eu.com/articles/radioactive_waste/acti...

We learned quite lot about underground migration of plutonium over millennia because we studied the remnants of the natural nuclear fission reactor which nature run about approximately 1.7 billion years ago in Oklo, Gabon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

"Plutonium has moved less than ten feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago contained in the sedimentary rocks that kept them from being dissolved or spread by groundwater."

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/voigt2/

I mean yeah. Nuclear waste is much safer than fossil fuel waste - deaths caused, radioactivity, etc

English is not my mother language. Yes, I polished. My prefered one was Carbon-aware electricity pricing but seemed so general.

I had the same question but about price (and its related impact on consumption, which is your question) -- are we assuming total spent / total consumed are held constant?

It wasn't stated in the website and I didn't see anything about it from skimming the github. I didn't read the thesis, though :D