The German government has agreed to pay nuclear operators 2.4 billion euros in compensation for an early nuclear shutdown. Germany had decided to decommission nuclear power plants by 2022. It is still unclear, how the taxpayers’ money will be divided between the electricity producers, such as RWE, EnBW, E.ON and Vattenfall.

A deregulated market that rewards power generation without requiring reliable capacity ready to supply power as needed naturally tilted the field in favour of intermittent solar and wind power. The knife-edge fragility of power grids in Western Europe and the UK which have imposed policies that forced rapid growth in renewable energy capacity is no surprise.

Sweden is in the green elite. Yet a cold snap provoked a political storm this winter when, in order to keep the lights on, the authorities started up a 52-year-old oil-fired power plant. A furious debate centered on the wisdom of decommissioning nuclear plants, exposing a divide over plans to rely more on wind power for everything from transport to factories.

We have targets for closing coal-fired power stations and for achieving net zero; we spend rather less time thinking about how to keep the lights on during times of stress. We invest in more intermittent forms of energy while the provision of energy storage lags well behind, resulting in several close shaves recently as the wind dropped and the sun went down.

The French electrical grid could support an electricity mix made up almost 100% of renewables in 2050. However, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the operator of the French electricity transmission network (RTE) in a recent report warn about the massive effort required to develop the technologies to achieve this.

The world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturers have committed to eliminating their net emissions of greenhouse gases, but reducing the carbon footprint of their production process may mean customers have to bear some of the cost. Towers are particularly problematic, because of the large amount of steel they contain.

British government and the wind industry claim that costs are falling. The analysis finds that offshore construction costs rose until the early 2010s and show no sign of a sharp decline. Costs have increased by about 15% for every doubling in total wind capacity in NW Europe, mostly because of using sites that are more distant from shore and in deeper water.

The German federal government assumes that electricity consumption will remain largely constant over the next ten years. However, their own consultants see it differently. They warn against a miscalculation and demand that the German energy transition is partially relocated abroad. Germany will turn from a net exporter to a net importer of electricity.

RTE, the operator of the national grid called on the French to reduce their consumption. The consumption was forecast at 88 GW, low compared to the 102 GW peak of 2018. Some of the nuclear power stations are under maintenance, two reactors and a coal-fired power station at Fessenheim had been closed and wind was very weak on Friday.

National Grid is struggling to keep the system balanced as demand rises with colder weather and wind generation is forecast to be low. Britain gets about 8% of its power supply from huge cables connected to Europe. The low electricity supply situation could be compounded by a planned strike by Electricite de France SA workers.

Britain more than halved the carbon intensity of its electricity over a decade to 2017. Racing to “net zero” risks losing political support if expensive. Tackling climate change will require massive amounts of clean electricity to electrify transport and heating. UK electricity demand will double by 2050, predicts Aurora Energy Research.

Biden’s bet on small-scale nuclear. As part of his decarbonisation drive, the president-elect wants to spur development of small modular reactors (SMRs), so that they can help balance the grid alongside surging renewable output. Small-scale nuclear’s biggest rival natural gas can already be ordered off the shelf and constructed quickly and cheaply.