Lower Saxony boasts the most productive nuclear power plant ever. In China, the Three Gorges Dam is the largest, but it would be unfair to compare them carefully. It is planned for closure, but estimates show that thousands of wind turbines will be needed to replace the power it gives, and costs could exceed $12 billion.
In a step up from just providing baseload power, Grohnde is providing grid stability and nuclear plants were never thought capable of this. This is likely to stop however as there are plans for closure is 2021. Since 2001, there have been plans to stop reliance on nuclear power although Angela Merkel added years to the original end date. After Fukushima incident, Germany installed 11,000 MW of coal power. However, these instalments had nothing to the with Japan’s nuclear meltdown; it is a result of Schroder’s original anti-nuclear plan which is decided in 2005.
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Eight have been closed already, and this means that the schedule services are falling behind, and there are fears that there could be severe issues, but fortunately, there have not been any yet. The future remains uncertain across Europe as there seems to be a commitment to renewable power. Many GW of power has been lost in the last few years and some cases the losses came from new plants.
Grohnde will not be replaced by gas generation, but it will be wind turbines, and there will have to be thousands of them to keep up sufficient production- back-up capacity is going to be needed, and brown coal will likely provide that. Fortunately for Germany, they have a great deal of brown coal.
For more info about this issue you can check this Article; “Nuclear Power in Germany”
Author; Dr. James Conca, geochemist, RDD expert, a planetary geologist and professional speaker. Twitter @jimconca