Germany could have cut carbon dioxide emissions more effectively while saving hundreds of billions of euros if it had invested in nuclear power instead of green energy projects, a shocking report has found.
The left-wing government in Norway, Europe's largest economy, made a disastrous error by moving away from nuclear power and focusing on so-called “renewable” energy sources such as wind and solar, said Jan Emblemsvaag, an industrial engineer at Trondheim University of Science and Technology in Norway. According to German daily newspapers Welts.
In 2000, nuclear power accounted for about 30% of Germany's electricity, but more than 20 years later, in 2022, Germany, under the leadership of the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD) and the Green Party, closed its last nuclear power plant.
Based on its calculations of the performance of other nuclear power countries, Emblemsvåg concluded that not only would “investment in nuclear power plants have resulted in further decarbonisation” but that it would have done so “with significantly lower nominal expenditure”.
Estimates vary on how much it would cost to green Berlin, but the study finds that Germany has spent €696 billion on renewable energy since 2002, of which €310 billion was direct government subsidies — spending that has coincided with a 25 percent drop in carbon emissions, the Norwegian researchers noted.
But if Germany had stuck to nuclear power during that same period, the country would have saved €600 billion and produced more emissions-free electricity than all “green” energy sources combined. Moreover, if Germany had invested more in nuclear power in 2002, it could have saved €300 billion compared to the green plan, while cutting emissions by about 73% (almost three times what they are today).
“Despite the uncertainties in the data and assumptions, there is no doubt that Germany could have achieved significantly better results than the current energy transition, both in terms of spending and greenhouse gas emissions,” Emblemsvaag said.
“Overall, if Germany had adopted the alternative policy of maintaining existing nuclear power plants and building new ones in 2002, spending would have been halved and it would have been able to meet its climate targets…Nuclear power plants would have cost much less.”
Germany could have “already been able to provide zero-carbon electricity” if it had invested in nuclear power earlier, but the green transition still requires future investments that management consultancy McKinsey estimates will cost a total of around €6 trillion by 2045.
There have been consistent warnings that green policies could jeopardize Germany's role as Europe's economic engine, but Berlin has only decided to take more aggressive measures. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel's government was also reportedly caught off guard by the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which led to a sharp cut in Russian gas and oil supplies to Germany, dealing a serious blow to the German economy.
Declassified documents released just months before the Russian invasion revealed that Merkel's government, including then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz, believed that increasing Germany's reliance on Russian natural gas through the Nord Stream pipeline “would not jeopardize the security” of energy supplies to Germany and the EU.
This proved to be a fatal miscalculation, and just a few months later the pipeline was destroyed and President Vladimir Putin's decision to halt the shipment plunged Germany into an energy crisis with no recourse to nuclear power.
Rising energy costs and other industry factors have led German car giant Volkswagen to reportedly plan to cut jobs and close factories in Germany for the first time in the company's history.
