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How Germany Traded in Its Nuclear Plants for Solar Panels Without Missing a Beat

After the Fukushima meltdown, Germany vowed to abolish its nuclear reactors.

After the Fukushima meltdown, Germany vowed to abolish its nuclear reactors. Japan too, but yeah—Germany. After the criss, protests and popular sentiment supercharged the nation like enriched uranium; it was the only other place to see such a vociferous movement against nuke power. Before long, Angela Merkel’s government had outlined a plan to phase out nuclear energy and a number of reactors were singled out for immediate closure. Then came the criticism:

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By abandoning nuclear power, said the critics, Germany would return to the globe-warming embrace of fossil fuel power. They’d have to burn more coal, or at least more gas, and the emissions generated would be worse than any risk of keeping the nuke plants humming.

Germany persisted. It shuttered a number of nuke plants, and made concrete plans to draw down the rest. But instead of turning to coal, it made a powerful drive to fill the void with renewable energy. Since 2010, it has hit a number of rather amazing hallmarks—at one point just earlier this year, more than 50% of the nation was running on solar power. One northern German state is gunning for 300% renewables, and to export its clean power to neighbors.

Today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists released a small treasure trove of scholarly materials on Germany’s historic shift away from nuclear and to renewable energy. The highlights are tantalizing—first, look at the map of all the nuke plants that have been axed; the red ones are next.

Politics professor Miranda Schreurs, of Freie Universität Berlin, for example, writes in “The Politics of Phase-out” that there’s a relatively straightforward reason that Germans continue to register popular support for the phaseout: “The shift to renewable energy sources that accompanies the phase-out has brought financial benefits to farmers, investors, and small- and medium-sized businesses.”

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That’s because Germany has adopted a feed-in tariff, which allows any individual or business to profit from operating a small scale renewable power project, by selling the power back to the grid. This has led to the mass adoption, as well as democratization, of renewable energy. People like making money by making their own energy, it turns out, and they like not having to answer to a monolithic, faceless utility.

Unfortunately, due to such policies, the price of electricity has risen somewhat in Germany. Fortunately, Germans don’t really care that much—and researchers find that they’ll fall again soon.

According to the Introduction of “The German Nuclear Exit:”

Marshaling a wide range of observed data and predictive economic models, Felix Matthes, research coordinator at the Institute for Applied Ecology in Berlin, reaches another unexpected conclusion: The nuclear phase-out is likely to have only a small and temporary effect on electricity prices and the overall German economy. And Lutz Mez, co-founder of Freie Universität Berlin’s Environmental Policy Research Center, presents what may be the most startling finding of all. The Energiewende that is being pursued in parallel with the German nuclear exit has reached a climate change milestone, Mez writes: “It has actually decoupled energy from economic growth, with the country’s energy supply and carbon-dioxide emissions dropping from 1990 to 2011, even as its gross domestic product rose by 36 percent.”

With climate change ascendant, that is one of the great holy grails of energy production—keep GDP on the rise while CO2 output falls. Even while phasing out one of its bastions of carbon-free baseload power, Germany, one of the most advanced, industrialized nations in the world, has shown that it can be done by ramping up solar and wind. Your nation can do it too.