Sigh, again,, someone who was informed about this before, speading misinformation:

There are different electricity prices. In Europa electricity is traded at markets. The prices their are usually not higher in Germany than - say - France. For example, see the EPEX SPOT dayhead market: https://www.epexspot.com/en/ma...

At the moment: Germany €133.70 France: €133.51

Household prices are different. Those are indeed much higher in Germany than elsewhere. Those are affected by taxes, fees, etc. which are about 40% of the price. Only 10% (included in the 40%) is the surcharge for renewables, though. And this is mostly to pay off old installations which come from a time were renewables were still much more expensive. It was also a political decision to put the renewable levy on top of the household price to encourage consumption.

In France, prices are kept artificially low, which is one reason (also: maintenance issues with the nuclear fleet, and projects going over budget) EDF went almost bankrupt and was later fully nationalized:
https://www.reuters.com/busine...

I do not think the plants had serious issues in Germany. While some were end of life, for others it would have been no problem to let them run longer.

In France there were issues about cracks in the reactor vessels, which was the reason many were offline in 2022 for repairs and checks.

True, Germany should have prioritized shutting down coal over nuclear. On the other hand, Germany invested substantially into renewables at a time when they were still very expensive, helping to create an economy of scale which brought down prices substantially (comparable to Moore's law in IT). Renewables are now cheap and our best bet in fighting climate change.

Ad the same it is also is clear that nuclear will not have a big overall in combating climate change because it is too expensive (with no substantial price reduction despite substantial investments), and that investing in nuclear now would delay effective action for at least decade and take away important resources from renewables.

I think cost is not the problem. Cost was dropping dramatically over the years. It may have gone up recently, but this happened for everything else too. Fossil plants you already have do not have major capital cost. And for those thinking we have an alternative: capital cost will hit nuclear much more (which did not see cost reductions the past). People who do simulation studies usually find that going all renewables comes along with cost savings. For example:

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/rese...

While this is true, I think it is wrong to see this as a fundamental problem. At the moment Germany still has all the fossil plants and simply put them on stand by, So if there is no wind or sun it can scale up all the fossil plants. This then consumes fossil fuels but only for some limited time. Overall you still reduce use of fossil fuels a lot by using the renewables for the other times where it is available and filling the gaps with fossil fuel. Numbers show that until now this works very well (~ 50% production from renewables). Now in the long run one needs to solve this somehow to completely remove fossil fuels. The price changes are helpful: The give incentives for demand shaping and building storage (and storage prices are also dropping). For a long dunkelflaute the problem will likely be solved by having large hydrogen gas reserves (or other synthetic gas). This is then really expensive gas and costy due to conversion losses, but if this happens only once in a while it is also overall not a fundamental problem if you can have cheap renewables all the other times.

One should point out that only a small percentage of gas is used for electricity production in Germany. That Germany depends on gas has not much to do with the electricity market (although gas plants play an import role for balancing, overall production is not that high and also did not increase over time)

For 2023 is could change. At the moment Germany is a net importer. Of course, in winter there is more wind, so this could change, but I am not sure. On the other hand, this is no problem and in contrast what many people believe here, Germany did not import from France (or rather this is pretty balanced with slightly more export to France than back) or Poland (in general neglectable trade). Instead, Germany imported a lot from Denmark (80% renewable production) and reduced coal production at the same time. The reason was probably that Denmark produced very cheap wind power. So also a clear win for renewables.

Electricity production in Germany in 2010 from lignite 146 TWh, coal 117 TWh, nuclear 141 TWh, gas 89 TWh and renewables 105 TWh.
Electricity production in Germany in 2022 from lignite 116 TWh, coal 64 TWh, nuclear 35 TWh, gas 80 TWh and renewables 254 TWh.

Source: https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/...

And yet, Germany was able to replace Russian gas very quickly. At the same the Rosatom is still not on any embargo list as far as I know.

"Until the left parties in Germany needed to take in the greens in a coalition government Germany’s nuclear industry did even better"
It is certainly true that the green party fought against nuclear in Germany, but it was the Merkel government that then finally decided to shut down the nuclear industry after Fukushima, immediately shutting down six plants.

"Germany is now running on brown coal from Poland." Does it? In 2022 Germany's electricity production was 50% renewables and 22% brown coal, 11% hard coal, 9% gas, 7% nuclear. Brown coal is the the only domestic fossil source in Germany, which is why it is so difficult for politics to get rid of it because of jobs and energy independence. In 2021 there was more mining of brown coal than was used in Germany: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de... (see Importquote which is negative). So no, it is not imported from Poland.

"... by people who don’t know or care about the facts." Considering you quote "Steve Bannon" I think you are grotesquely misinformed and never bothered to check a single fact against some reliable source.
 

That was true in the past, but the point of the subsidies was to bring cost down and this was tremendously successful.

Contrast this with nuclear, which - despite getting subsidies - did not get cheaper over time.

No, this is misleading The household price is capped in France , e.g. see here:
https://www.reuters.com/busine...

and also generally does not really reflect the cost of production. In Germany it is kept high by adding the renewable surcharge and other taxes and fees. Also note that true cost of the nuclear in France is not really known because essentially the government has built all the plants. The court of audit looked into it much later and published some data from what it was estimated that it also wasn't cheap.

The real indication that nuclear is too expensive that even under favorable conditions no private investors invests in it. This is also why lobby efforts focus on presenting as necessity and portrait renewables as insufficient so that one could make the case the governments need to step in and the tax payer has to foot the bill.

It would be dump if it were like this. But power trade statistics for Germany show net profits. It also exports more to France than it imports and at similar prices.

But you are not only trusting them not to be evil, you also trusting them to have perfect security on their systems all the time. The last part is difficult to achieve in general, so such trust is generally not well placed.

This is why it is important to distribute in source and have reproducible builds.

Some people say supply-chain security is more critical than memory safety, and apparently the Rust folks learn this the hard way.

There is nothing wrong when prices go up when there is less production. This will provide incentives into investing into storage and shifting demand to other times.

To the extend nuclear is useful in this context, this would also provide incentives for building nuclear. But I doubt many will do this as nuclear is still far too high capital cost and is financially too risky.