Can renewables replace German nukes?

Germany will close the remaining 8GW of its nuclear fleet by 2022. But how quickly can new renewables replace lost nuclear output? The blue line in the chart shows 2019 nuclear output (71 TWh). Let’s be optimistic and assume Germany meets its recently announced 2030 RES policy targets, via a linear increase in capacity.  The green bars show the resulting incremental increase in wind & solar output.  Even with aggressive RES build, it takes until 2026 to replace lost nuclear output.  Yet Germany is also closing an additional 8GW of coal & lignite capacity by 2022. We analyse the looming German capacity crunch in Monday’s blog article.