This Saturday night at 10 pm, the last three nuclear power plants–Emsland in northwest Germany and Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim 2 in the south in Germany–will be switched off, a decision taking about 6% of the country’s energy mix off the grid.
Fossil fuels are filling the void. With Russian gas imports cut off, output from coal-fired plants rose 8% last year, accounting for over 31% of power supplies. Germany is also ramping up imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), including cargoes from the US. The country plans to boost its LNG import capacity more than fivefold by 2030, to nearly 71 million tons annually.
Chancellor Scholz has warned that Germany will need to install four to five new wind turbines each day over the next few years to meet its power supply needs. That would be about triple last year’s pace of 1.5 per day. Renewable energy sources currently account for 46% of power supplies.
While environmentalists have pressed to keep Scholz’s government on course with the nuclear phaseout, most Germans oppose the move. A poll released on Friday by the first national TV program ARD showed that 59% of Germans believe the government’s decision to abandon atomic power was wrong, while only 34% agree with the policy. Two-thirds of respondents who want to keep the reactors running said they’re concerned that energy prices will rise when nuclear power supplies are lost.
“The nuclear phase-out by April 15, that’s this Saturday, is a done deal,” the chancellor’s spokesperson said earlier this week. Environment Minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) defended the shutdown decision, claiming that the safety risks of nuclear power “can’t be controlled, even in a high-tech country like Germany.”
Protests against the shutdown have come too late: Only earlier this week, Bavarian Minister President Markus Soeder visited the Isar 2 plant site to voice disagreement with the end of nuclear power, and Finance Minister Christian Lindner issued a weak-kneed statement saying that the shutdown should be postponed for another year, “but there is no majority for it in the government.” This will not be received well by voters of Lindner’s Free Democrats which have expected the party to fight for nuclear power instead of complaining there was no majority for it in the three-party government coalition. The failure of the FDP will be felt in massive vote losses in the three state-level elections in Bremen (May), Hesse and Bavaria (October), and whether the party can stay in the national government then, is uncertain.
