Absolutely-- but if you have to exempt like 99% of your population from a law then its probably not too popular a concept (compare income tax, which a lot more people are actually fine with paying).

I still think this would have mainly negative effects if the gift tax rate is lower than inheritance tax anyway.

No, I'm not purposefully giving this the worst framing.

My main point is that setting it higher than gift tax rates is effectively pointless, and basically just punishes people for dying unexpectedly (and/or not planning ahead for their own death), and neither is desirable.

Are you actually advocating for an inheritance tax close to 100%?

Because that is completely unworkable IMO, for several reasons:

1) Unless you introduce comparable "wealth transfer"/gift taxes, it becomes completely meaningless for the average case.

2) This would be insanely harmful in cases of unexpected deaths; inheritance is a really bad compensation already when someone close dies, this would make it even worse. And dealing with any kind of shared assets would be a nightmare, too (father dies, mother has to pay tax on half the house?)

Could be workable with large allowances though, but I don't hink you would ever get this pushed through in a democracy because it is too easy to put negative spin on it (even if it was in the majorities economical best interest).

I don't think that inheritance tax is a bad concept, but setting it higher than the gift tax rate is actively harmful and would not achieve anything.

You can order 1kW of panels with 1kWh of batteries as a plug-and-play system off of Amazon for about $1k.

Thats gonna generate >1MWh of electricity per year easily (probably closer to 2MW even), and with spot pricing for electricity at ~$100/MWh (Europe), this pays off within a decade easily.

Provide numbers if you disagree.

I think preserving nuclear industry is a decent justification on its own.

Especially the whole steam turbine/generator tech is a huge synergy for them (because all their coal plants need basically the same), and gutting suppliers by scaling back nuclear ambitions could have highly detrimental side-effects there.

Coal power is still the back-bone of their grid, and provides basically all the dispatchability (for now).

I think the big incoming challenge for renewables will be surpassing the 70%-ish percent mark (of produced electricity), because at that point intermittency is gonna become much more challenging (it's an easy problem as long as you can just down-regulate existing plants-- buffering with batteries is significantly more expensive, and they don't have a lot of gas either, which works pretty well for this).

I'm pretty confident that battery progress is gonna keep pace, and other countries are already way further in the switch to renewables anyway; China will be able to get free lessions there (e.g. Germany).