Merkel Has a Nuclear Problem the Size of Belgium

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a government declaration at the Bundestag on Germany’s future energy policy in Berlin Thursday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has revealed more than she might have cared to about her nuclear exit strategy.

The German government, after a cabinet decision Monday, has been bragging about its environmental credentials with plans for a massive build-up of offshore wind power.

But Mrs. Merkel, speaking in the German parliament Thursday, disclosed that the government now aims for the construction of up to 20 gigawatts in additional gas and coal fire plant capacity as nuclear stations are phased out by the end of 2022.

That’s double what the government had judged necessary. And it would come on top of 10 gigawatts in fossil capacity already planned or being built.

Mrs. Merkel says that Germany is required to have enough spare capacity to guarantee the power supply of Europe’s biggest economy.

But she doesn’t explain who should build the gas and coal fire plants.

The government wants to come up with a new program to foster the construction of power plants by small utilities. Whether that will do the job is uncertain. Twenty gigawatts is a lot of electricity generating capacity, more than all of Belgium’s power plants can produce.

And big power utilities balk at Germany’s low electricity prices that make investments in new capacity unattractive.

Even less well explained is how Germany wants to reach its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40% until 2020 from 1990 levels, as Mrs. Merkel insists the country will still do.

Just replacing the first seven shuttered reactors with conventional energy would add some 25 million metric tons in CO2 to Germany’s emissions, the International Energy Agency recently said.

While the pro-nuclear energy industry may inflate these figures, there’s no way Germany can meet its climate goals if it bets this heavily on coal and gas, says Michael Mueller, one of the heads of the German Federation for Nature, or DNR.

Instead, far more ambitious and coherent plans need to be drafted to decentralize energy supply, and become more energy efficient though measures such as the massive use of the co-generation of heat and power, he says.

Co-generation uses heat from electricity generation for heating houses.

A far greater amount of energy from power plants can thus be won than if surplus heat is simply released into the atmosphere. The technique is still under-used in Germany.

Given an electorate that after Fukushima is even more hostile to nuclear power than before, Mrs. Merkel seems to have no chance than to abandon nuclear power, or lose the next general election in two years.

But if she is serious about the environment, she probably needs to try a lot harder than to simply replace part of the nuclear capacity by gas and the environmentally more harmful coal.

Catering to an electorate in coal-producing regions in Eastern Germany and the populous Western German state of North-Rhine Westphalia won’t do the job in the long term.

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    • Where is the coal and gas going to come from? Coal is plentyful but mines are limited. Natural gas, even accounting for hydraulic frackturing techniques, is not plentyful enough, and there aren't enough pipelines or LNG terminals, to end nuclear power worldwide. Merkel can have her utopia, but she will still depend on the rest of the world NOT burning natural gas and coal, to ensure supplies at affordable prices.

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