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As Germany closes its last nuclear reactors, it is also reactivating old coal power plants to ensure electricity supply security amid Russian threats to turn off the gas tap.
Germany’s attempt to simultaneously phase out nuclear and coal power just got significantly more complicated. Once envisaged as a transition fuel on the way to renewables, fossil gas is being reconsidered in Germany after Russia invaded Ukraine.
“Coal will play a crucial role,” said Olaf Lies, the energy minister of Lower Saxony. “That we choose this phrase once again is certainly not entirely self-evident given the country’s plan to phase out coal by 2030,” he said during a press conference on Tuesday (8 March).
As Russia wages war in Ukraine and threatens to stop pumping gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, Germany is experiencing a rude awakening.
“We know, and we have to admit it, that in the last 20 years, we have manoeuvred ourselves into ever greater dependence on fossil energy imports from Russia,” said Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, speaking alongside Lies.
“This is not a good state of affairs. All the efforts of the federal government, indeed of the country, are aimed at reducing this dependency as quickly as possible,” he added.
In effect, that will imply that Germany is firing its coal power plants back up at the behest of the Greens’ minister for economy and climate, Habeck.
“But if we want to be more independent, we will have to operate with coal,” noted Lies, putting in clear terms that which his colleague Habeck was reluctant to say outright.
Lies spoke on behalf of the conference of Germany’s 17 energy ministers, one for each state conferring with the federal minister Habeck, who held an extraordinary consultation session on Tuesday.
Germany currently has somewhere around 45 GW of coal power capacity in place, some of which has been turned off with some held in reserve to ensure the security of supply.
Following the plans, Habeck announced strategic coal reserves, allowing the coal power plants to run for 30 days of winter without any deliveries, Spiegel reported.
Now, the energy ministers are taking the country’s network agency to ensure that the coal power plants are ready to fire up as needed.
“As Klaus Müller, the president of the Federal Network Agency, once again clearly stated, we will see which power plants actually have to remain in the reserve or which can be released from the reserve at all so that we also realise the security of supply via the coal-fired power plants,” Lies concluded.
