Nuclear Power in Germany - Role For Coal and Renewables

Role For Coal and Renewables

In Germany, where they are shutting down their nuclear power plants, more than 80% of the shut down nuclear power has been replaced with coal power plants, which release 100 times as much radiation as a nuclear power plant of the same wattage.

Since nuclear power generates almost a third of the electricity in Germany, many thought that the country would have to import energy as the nuclear phase-out progressed. At first, Germany was still selling more electricity than it bought, due to its renewable energy industry. Renewable energy supplied a record 20.8% of Germany’s electricity in the first half of 2011, from wind power, solar power, biomass and hydro. Germany installed over 7,400 MW of solar in 2010 and another 7,000 MW will be added in 2011. Solar and wind capacity is expected to grow by 32% from 2012–2013. The surge in renewable energy is credited with driving down the price of electricity in Germany.

This, however already changed in the autumn, with Germany beginning to import energy from its neighbors. In certain cases, the country was actually buying electricity, generated in nuclear powerplants close to the German border.

Germany has combined the phase-out with an initiative for renewable energy and wants to increase the efficiency of fossil power plants in an effort to reduce the reliance on coal. According to the former German Minister for the Environment Jürgen Trittin, in 2020, this would cut carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent compared with 1990 levels. Germany has become one of the leaders in the efforts to fulfill the Kyoto protocol. Critics of the German policy have called it a mistake to abandon nuclear power, claiming the only alternative to nuclear power was coal and abandoning nuclear power was therefore contradictory to the goal of lowering CO₂ emissions.

As a result of its efforts and subsidies, Germany has developed advanced non-conventional renewable energy for electricity generation, particularly in photovoltaic and wind turbine installations. At the same time, Germany continues to rely heavily on coal power, with usage increasing to offset the phase-out of nuclear energy.

The German nuclear industry has insisted that its shutdown would cause major damage to the country's industrial base. In 2012, member firms of the Verband der Industriellen Energie- und Kraftwirtschaft (VIK) reported power failures of several seconds duration, combined with a rise in frequency fluctuations. These were reportedly caused by network overloads due to the shutdown of nuclear power plants, and an increase in wind power generation. VIK also fear that industrial control units will be damaged by outages.

The cost of replacing Germany's nuclear power generation with renewable energy has been officially estimated by the German Ministry of Economics at about €0.01/kW·h (about €55 billion for the next decade), on top of the €13 billion per year already devoted to subsidizing renewables. However, unofficial estimates of the ministry, and of the Rhenish-Westphalian Institute for Economic Research (RWI), German Energy Agency (DENA), Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBV), and the government-owned development bank (KfW), put the cost several times higher, at about €250 billion ($340 B) over the next decade.

In March 2013, the administrative court for the German state of Hesse ruled that a three-month closure imposed by the government on RWE's Biblis A and B reactors as an immediate response to the incident was illegal. The state ministry of the environment acted illegally in March 2011, when an order was issued for the immediate closure of the Biblis units. RWE complied with the decree by shutting Biblis-A immediately, however as the plants were in compliance with the relevant safety requirements, the German government had no legal grounds for shutting them. The court ruled that the closure notice was illegal because RWE had not been given sufficient opportunity to respond to the order.