German moratorium on nuclear to become permanent
Over the weekend, Germany's governing coalition decided that eight of the country's 17 nuclear plants currently off-line will never be going back online. Proponents of renewables are nonetheless concerned about proposed cuts to feed-in tariffs for onshore wind and photovoltaics.
Rarely has there been such an about-face in politics on such a major issue. Only last fall, Germany's governing coalition of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the libertarian FDP resolved to extend the service lives of nuclear plants beyond 32 years. Under the policy adopted by the Social Democrats and the Greens in 2000, the last German nuclear plant would have been shut down in 2022, but Chancellor Merkel's government extended those commissions for another decade.
It was an unpopular decision at the time, and in the wake of the disaster at Fukushima the German public has made clear its disgust; first, by voting the CDU out of office in the state of Baden-Württemberg, which now has the first Green governor in German history; and second, by giving the Greens more votes than the CDU in the city-state of Bremen – also for the first time in history in any German state.
Over the weekend, Merkel's government sat down to review the proposals made. First, there was the strange case of a study produced for Environmental Minister Röttgen by the UBA, the German equivalent of the US EPA. There were reports throughout the German media that Minister Röttgen was suppressing the report, which found that all of Germany's nuclear plants could be shut down by 2017 without leading to any shortfall in power supply. The UBA told Renewables International this morning that the paper was not contracted by Röttgen’s Environmental Ministry (which is above the UBA); rather, the UBA created the paper without being asked to do so. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the ministry took a few days to read it and put it online. It is to be made available today (in German) on the UBA website.
Whether or not the UBA's study played a major role at the marathon meeting on Sunday, the focus was certainly on the Ethic Commission's own findings, which – unlike the UBA's study – was not completely technical in nature. Chancellor Merkel created the commission solely for the purpose of making recommendations on how to proceed after the moratorium (Renewables International reported). Now, the German government has largely adopted the commission's recommendations.
As a result, Germany will be shutting down its last nuclear plant at the end of 2022 – almost exactly what would have happened anyway under the nuclear phase-out designed by the SPD and the Greens in 2000. Germany currently has 17 nuclear plants, and the moratorium affected eight of them; seven were taken off-line, while the eighth was already off-line. Those eight are now to be shut down for good, leaving Germany with its nine most modern plants.
Germany's Network Agency – and not the power companies themselves – will decide which plants are to be taken offline when, and the FDP insisted that there be flexibility in the policy to allow the agency to prevent blackouts if the shutdown of nuclear plants starts to lead to a shortfall in power supply. Strangely, a similar flexibility was already provided by the SPD/Green phase-out policy from 2000, which allocated 32 years of power production in kilowatt-hours to each plant and allowed power companies to transfer the kilowatt-hours so they could shut one down prematurely in order to have another one run longer.
Chancellor Merkel's government has also explained that her new phase-out plan does not contain a "revision clause," meaning that it cannot be revised. Strangely, the SPD/Green policy of 2000 also contained no such clause, but Chancellor Merkel tossed it out summarily last fall – only to now readopt it nearly whole-hog. The main difference between the old and the new phase-out scheme is that Chancellor Merkel's plan irresponsibly shut down 20 percent of the country's baseload power supply in one week – an unnecessary test of whether Germany can do without nuclear, considering that the events in Fukushima did not change the security of German nuclear plants at all.
As incompetent as the current government has seemed in its handling of nuclear power since the disaster at Fukushima, its handling of renewables is no better. Although proponents of renewables have now gotten what they wanted with nuclear, they are not happy because they already had what they wanted up until last fall, and some of the changes currently on the table for renewables are hair-raising. Although feed-in tariffs for photovoltaics have practically been cut in half over the past two years and face further cuts of around 20 percent by the beginning of 2012, further cuts in feed-in tariffs for PV are being discussed. The situation is so absurd that Photon Magazine, which has supported all of the cuts in solar FITs up to now (to the great dismay of many in the industry), is now saying (PDF in German) that the proposals would "strangle solar power" and that the "baby is being tossed out with the bathwater." And as Hermann Albers, head of the German Wind Energy Association, recently told Renewables International, the German government is supporting the much more expensive offshore wind sector to the detriment of onshore wind, which will only benefit large corporations at the expense of numerous community projects behind distributed power.
Of course, the phase-out of nuclear only makes sense if we actually switch to renewables in the process. Unfortunately, that message has not reached everyone. Last month, SPD head Sigmar Gabriel reiterated the claim that "we will need coal power for the interim" – an approach that would surely make the German phase-out of nuclear a laughingstock internationally. (cm)
