According to Reuters, I was off by a factor of two, if the number they quoted counts all the plants they decided to shut down. ~4000 GW shut down. That’s a decent wild-ass guess, IMHO.
Yeah, I don't think Reuters is correct here. Everything I'm seeing is that a nuclear plant produces around 1 gigawatt, so we'd be talking about thousands of nuclear plants.
Also probably helpful to think about it on a per person basis. Another comment corrected me that Germany has 80 million people, so let's use that. 8000 gigawatts (8 terawatts) divided by 80 million looks like 8,000,000,000,000 watts / 80,000,000 persons gives you 100,000 watts per person which does not seem realistic. With my air conditioner running at full blast, that's probably just a couple kilowatts, and that covers 3 people. Lights use a few watts. A beefy computer is around 100 watts.
It's possible that Reuters got gigawatts and gigawatt hours confused.
Ah, that's a very fair napkin calculation, the 4000GW number is obviously wrong.
But I don't think it ruins the core of my argument; it wasn't hinging on Germany having reduced their annual power production by 99%. If Germany in fact shut down 15GW of nuclear production (15 plants), that's still on the order of 200 watts for every person in Germany, or one new 1000W resistive heater running 24/7 for every fifth household.
That's the kind of "on the margins" capacity that would indeed make a Russian gas embargo dramatically less painful.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/could-germany-keep-i...