Germany is nuclear free – or is it? Where does the energy in Germany come from a week after the end of the nuclear power plants.
It has been exactly a week since the last three nuclear power plants in Germany went offline: The reactors in the nuclear power plants Isar 2 (Bavaria), Emsland (Lower Saxony) and Neckarwestheim 2 (Baden-Württemberg) have been idle since last Sunday (read here see more). But does that mean that Germany is really free of nuclear power?
In order to investigate this question, t-online took a look at the daily updated figures from the Federal Network Agency. Answer: probably not.
This is mainly due to the fact that Germany had to import large amounts of electricity from other countries in the first few weeks without nuclear power. According to the Federal Network Agency, from April 16, the first day without nuclear power plants, until today, Sunday, April 23, net electricity imports amounted to 28,168 megawatt hours.
Nuclear power imported from France
The lion’s share came from Denmark: our northern neighbor sold us around 16,500 megawatt hours – which mainly uses green wind power and has never relied on nuclear power plants in its history. But: On a few days, a lot of French electricity also flowed into our grids. For example, on Sunday, April 23, Germany imported almost 2,000 megawatt hours of electricity from France.
Although this cannot be traced back exactly, it is very likely that most of it comes from nuclear power plants. Because: France uses nuclear power plants on a large scale to generate electricity, two thirds of the electricity produced there comes from nuclear reactors.
In the Czech Republic, too, a much smaller part of the electricity continues to be generated from nuclear fuel rods. Germany imported around 3,400 megawatt hours of electricity from the Czech Republic over the entire first week after the end of German nuclear power plants.
This is what the German electricity mix looks like now
The fact that Germany recently had to buy more electricity than it could sell is because consumption in this country was higher than production. As expected, this has changed since the end of nuclear power a week ago.
While nuclear power still accounted for 5.3 percent of German electricity generation on Sunday, April 16, the day the nuclear power plants were shut down, with a total output of 56,150 megawatt hours, this figure fell to zero last Sunday.
As of now, Sunday, April 23, German electricity comes mainly from renewable energies: almost 60 percent comes from wind power, solar systems, biomass power plants, hydroelectric power plants and from the recycling of waste. But: Germany produced 25 percent of its own electricity on April 23 at the same time in brown coal piles.
