The Minister of the Economy has announced the “reserve” until next spring of a part of the German nuclear park which should have been closed this year.
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Between energy imperatives and political considerations, Robert Habeck decided: out of the last three nuclear power plants supposed to close definitively at the end of the year, two will finally be “maintained in reserve” until the spring of 2023, announced on Monday September 5, the Minister of the German economy.
“It is very unlikely that the electrical system will experience crisis situations for a few hours during the winter, but that cannot be completely excluded,” said Habeck to justify this sprained a few months Nuclear exit calendar, fixed by the government of Angela Merkel after the Fukushima disaster in 2011.
Based on the results of the “resistance test” that the government had ordered in July to the four managers of the German electricity network, 50herz, Amprion, Tennet and Transnetbw, the plan of Mr. Habeck plans to “keep in reserve “The two power plants in the south of the country, Isar 2 (Bavaria) and Neckarwestheim (Baden-Wurtemberg). Unlike that of Emsland (Basse-Saxe), which will close as expected at the end of December, these two power stations may be requested if necessary until mid-April 2023. But it is only a stay of three months and a half, insisted the minister, specifying that no additional fuel would be bought.
“An overall extension of the lifespan of nuclear power plants would not be defensible, if only with regard to their security state. We cannot play with nuclear energy,” said Mr. Habeck, explaining that the decision to postpone the closure of two power stations by three months was linked to several “uncertainty factors”: the increasingly likely hypothesis of a total stop of Russian gas deliveries, the closure of the Half of the French nuclear park and the extremely low level of the Rhine, consequence of the drought, which complicates the delivery of coal to the thermal power plants along the river.
a safety valve
In such a context, said the minister, Germany must do everything to avoid bottlenecks. For this, the “reserve” of two power stations is a security valve: in the event of an emergency, they would make it possible to reduce the needs of Germany to electricity from abroad, by passing them from 5 , 1 to 4.6 gigawatts (GW). On the other hand, it is illusory to believe that their maintenance in activity would be a response to the cessation of gas deliveries: according to Mr. Habeck, the savings made on the total consumption of gas in the event of continuation of their exploitation would only be The order of 0.09 %.
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