Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Personal tools
Sections
You are here: Home Members Climate Answers - Stephen Tindale Germany planning several new fossil fuel plants

Germany planning several new fossil fuel plants

30 April 2012, 10:49 CET
— filed under:

The German trade association for the energy and water industry, the BDEW, says that the country’s utilities and other investors intend to build or update 84 power plants over the next decade.

This will cost around €60 billion ($79 billion; see Bloomberg: Utilities Plan $79 Billion of Power Plants in Germany, BDEW Says). 23 will be offshore wind farms, but 29 will be gas and 17 coal. And none will have CCS, which is almost as unpopular in Germany as nuclear power.

The new fossil fuel plants aren’t all due to the nuclear closure. Some fossil fuel plants would have had to be closed and be replaced, due to age or European regulations. However, many of them are to replace the nuclear stations. According to the International Energy Agency, nuclear provided 23% of Germany's electricity in 2009 (see Germany – climate and energy statistics).

Building new coal and gas plants without CCS to replace nuclear stations will be bad for the climate. A coal plant emits eight times as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity as a does a nuclear station.  A gas plant emits around three-and-a-half times (see How low-carbon are different generating technologies?).

Shutting nuclear stations early is also a waste of money. Nuclear power will never be cheap overall, but most of the cost is the capital cost of construction and decommissioning. This has already been spent (or, for decommissioning, is unavoidable) in the German stations.

There’s no going back on the German government’s post-Fukushima decision. Whoever wins next year’s German general election, nuclear power in Germany is dead. However, any other country thinking of following Germany's lead should consider the climate and financial effects of early closure – and leave existing nuclear stations open.

By Stephen Tindale

Document Actions
Climate Answers
climate answers

Climate change is the most serious issue ever to have faced humanity. Rightly, it is now high on the public, political, media and business agendas. However, too much of the discussion is still about what we should not be doing or what we should be against. There is not enough discussion or information on solutions - what we can and should do to minimise dangerous climate change, and what should be done to make us not only safer and more secure, but also richer and happier.


Stephen Tindale photoStephen Tindale (29 March 1963 – 1 July 2017) was a British environmentalist who was Executive Director of Greenpeace UK from 2000 to 2005. He was Director of The Alvin Weinberg Foundation, co-founder of the organisation Climate Answers, Associate Fellow at the Centre for European Reform and co-author of Repowering Communities with Prashant Vaze.