Solarpunk Travel

Nuclear energy is baseload, just as lignite is. What you see today is 12GW of lignite baseload, which would have been easy to replace with 12GW nuclear, which was available when she came into power. However she did everything she could to help out coal. In 2011 solar was growing very quickly, so she accelerated the nuclear exit massivly and put strict end dates to the use of the npps. This means using nuclear as dispatchable generation was not attractive any longer, as would have been the case earlier with a fixed amount of electricity allowing for more variable operation. Then a year later in 2012 she destroyed solar as well, by cutting subsidies. That worked pretty well, until 2017, when wind was built so quickly that it threatend coal again, so the paperwork was increased to slow wind down.

That is really it, if nuclear exit would have been executed a bit smarte, solar subsidies not cut and wind paperwork not increased it would have worked. But one thing is really important: Merkel came to power in 2005. Back then renewables were more or less a joke in the German grid.

The good part is solar built up is really fast these days and hurting lignite by regularily producing as much electricity as consumed. Combined with more wind, especially the fast construction of more offshore, this should kill coal in the next five years.