Germany restarts coal power stations
By Paul Homewood
I wonder why they don’t just build lots of windmills instead?
The German government will pass emergency laws to reactivate the coal plants as Europe takes steps to deal with reduced energy supplies from Russia.
The announcement on Sunday came as part of a series of measures, including new incentives for companies to burn less natural gas.
Alarm has grown over the prospect of fuel reserves running out as countries cut ties with Russia following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Last week the Kremlin reduced flows through the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany by 60pc, as part of an escalating pressure campaign by the Russian President.
On Sunday Robert Habeck, Germany’s economic minister, said: “To reduce gas consumption, less gas must be used to generate electricity. Coal-first power plants will have to be used more instead,”
The minister, a member of the Greens party, added that bringing back coal-first power plants was “painful, but it is a sheer necessity”.
Under the plans, Germany will rely more on its coal plants to produce electricity, with a bill to be discussed in the upper house of the country’s parliament in early July. It is expected to quickly enter law afterwards.
Mr Habeck said that the German government is prepared to take further action if needed.
He added: “That’s bitter, but it’s simply necessary in this situation to reduce gas consumption. We must and we will do everything we can to store as much gas as possible in the summer and fall,”
The move comes after Siegfried Russwurm, president of Germany’s BDI lobby group, said in an interview on Saturday that Germany needed to get coal-fired plants out of reserve “immediately”.
Meanwhile, a new auction system will be introduced to encourage industrial companies to save fuel, which can then be transferred to storage.
A German government source told Reuters the support would also include €15bn (£12.8bn) of support for the country’s gas market operator to fill storage facilities more quickly.
Mr Habeck said: “Security of supply is currently guaranteed. But the situation is serious.
“Gas consumption must fall further, and in return more gas must be put into the storage facilities, otherwise things will really get tight in the winter.”
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Some glimmering of reality begin to seep thru.
Zaktly.
T S Eliot: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
But Germans will have to learn to bear a wee bit. Us next?
We need to get rid of the Prime Minister and her husband first.
Meanwhile, in the UK, our decommissioned coal fired power stations have been hastily demolished. They should have been mothballed, as in Germany, for just such a situation as this.
It’s even worse than that Michael, we actually had power stations specifically designed for such eventualities that were demolished. There were Oil fired units actually known as “Cold War” plants which were developed to secure supply but only needed to run occasionally. They could hold large stocks of “Bunker Fuel” and ranked as some of the biggest units in the UK. During the miner’s strike these units ran almost continuously to avoid coal consumption in the same way as now switching to coal to avoid using gas.
I briefly worked at Littlebrook D when the plant ran at over 110% of capacity!
https://web.archive.org/web/20150401144846/https://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/01/us-britain-electricity-oil-kemp-idUSKBN0MR2B520150401
It is clear that the parasitic destroyers learned their lesson and ensured that this time the alternative sources of power were taken out.
Explosive demolition brings down Scotland power station chimney
“The minister, a member of the Greens party, added that bringing back coal-first power plants was “painful, but it is a sheer necessity”.
Funny how these “Greens” were hell bent on closing down 4GW of “CO2 emissions free” of perfectly operable nuclear power on the 31st December 2021 and totally blocked any possibility of restarting them. Rather proves the point that “Greens” are as thick as sh1t and really couldn’t care less about the environment.
When your head is actually on the block your previous dumb as mince utterances gain a renewed and sharpened perspective. Opposition (we have none on our Parliament at present) vs responsibility once elected – & note NOT ‘in power’.
In theory WE the PEOPLE have the power…. hmmmmmm.
Or, for those higher up the food chain, couldn’t care less about Germany, or the West.
I was thinking about that Russian speaking, East German who drove the Nord Stream 2 pipeline development and succeeded in getting Germany to import 40% of her Methane, similar amounts of her oil and coal, and closing down Germany’s nuclear power industry. The country is well on its way to deindustrialization.
Yes, the one who was Chancellor of Germany.
And then we have the Biden Administration: they plead with Venezuela and Iran for more oil, yet won’t open the Keystone pipeline and heavily restricted oil/gas exploration.
And Johnson and Kwasi Kwarteng still won’t allow fraccing to start or thermal coal to be mined, with extra taxes on North Sea Oil and Gas companies to drive them away. What did they learn during their Classics and History degrees that makes them averse to progress in the nation’s Energy production?
It has nothing to do with the Environment.
Did anyone else hear the head of Offcom on LBC this morning saying that we are all right now because lots more cheap wind power is just around the corner?
Strewth David, the head of “Offcom” might have more an idea about energy supply than the head of “Ofgem”!
I like the extra f, giving xxxx-off, which is what those bodies say to consumers.
“Last week the Kremlin reduced flows through the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany by 60pc, as part of an escalating pressure campaign by the Russian President.”
Or, maybe, this was the problem:
Russian Sanctions Leave Nord Stream Turbine Stranded in Canada
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/russian-sanctions-leave-nord-stream-turbine-stranded-in-canada-1.1778655
Putin’s running rings around the West, without even trying.
“Escalating pressure” by de-escalating pressure.
I’ll get me coat 🙃
‘The German government will pass emergency laws to reactivate the coal plants as Europe takes steps to deal with reduced energy supplies from Russia.’
Don’t know what an ’emergency’ law is.
I’m impressed that you can reactivate plants with a law.
They assume owners haven’t sold off capital equipment.
They assume trained, experienced workers haven’t found other jobs.
They assume owners didn’t sell off their stockpiles of coal.
‘Germany is to reopen mothballed coal power plants’
What makes them think owners ‘mothballed’ their plants? A stupid assumption. These are politicians and journalists who have no worldly experience.
‘The announcement on Sunday came as part of a series of measures, including new incentives for companies to burn less natural gas.
‘It prompted the Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, a potential leadership rival to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, to call for a reduction in energy taxes.’
An absurd linkage.
Back to ’emergency’ law. It has ‘temporary’ written all over it. With no time specified. Some kind of special incentive – trainloads of cash? – would have to be granted to get a plant owner to bother trying to reopen, only to reclose.
I agree it looks dumb at first sight – a wave of the lawmaker’s wand and old plants leap back to life.
However it wouldn’t surprise me if there has been some sort of provision for this eventuality such that there are some plants which can be brought back into service relatively quickly.
It will be interesting to see how this develops.
Why did the UK switch from coal-fired to gas-fired power stations?
The official reason given in the early 1990s for building a large fleet of gas-fired power stations in the UK was that there was a huge supply of cheap natural gas supposedly available from the North Sea. The gas-fired power stations got built by the newly privatised electricity generation industry, but I suspect that they were heavily encouraged to do so by the Major government. Michael Heseltine, deputy PM and the person most responsible for ousting Margaret Thatcher, claimed there was a 50 year supply of natural gas (and with it a 50 year era of lower cost electricity) in a House of Commons debate on the “Coal industry” on 19th Oct 1992:
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1992/oct/19/coal-industry#S6CV0212P0_19921019_HOC_238
“The hon. Gentleman asks about our strategy for an energy policy. It is impossible to ignore the existence of United Kingdom-owned North sea gas. That is the source of the remarkable opportunity to obtain lower cost electricity. At present consumption levels, North sea gas supplies will last for another 50 years.”
“My hon. Friend makes an important point about resources and reserves, but the history of the North sea has been a continuing one of extending the calculations for the amount of reserves that are available. The present calculations indicate that on the present levels of consumption we have about 50 years’ worth of reserves, and that is before taking into account any further reserves which may be discovered. On any foreseeable calculation of the likely availability of fuel, there is a continuing availability of North sea gas as far into the future as any practical judgments can predict.”
Note that in the 1992 debate there was actually no mention of ‘carbon’, ‘carbon dioxide’, ‘CO2′ or ’emissions’. The idea that coal-fired power stations had to be phased out to make way for gas-fired power stations because of their higher CO2 emissions seemed to emerge a few years later as being the reason why the gas-fired power stations got built.
Back in 1992, the 50 year supply of cheap North Sea gas claim looked implausible to me. If there really was that much gas, the Thatcher government would have got the CEGB to build at least a few gas-fired power stations in the 1980s.
My own personal view is that the Major government encouraged a large fleet of gas-fired power stations to be built mainly to get rid of the troublesome UK coal mining industry.
By about 2005 the UK was having to import a significant proportion of its natural gas requirement and energy prices started increasing significantly. Heseltine’s “50 years of cheap gas from the North Sea” was obviously wrong and the correct course of action should have been to revert back to coal-fired generation. However the Blair government just continued with the ‘progressive’ energy policy that it had inherited from the Major government. The Blair government had begun to significantly increase the UK’s renewable energy capacity as required by targets agreed with the EU, and the gas-fired power stations have the advantage of making intermittent renewable energy a bit more workable.
Germany isn’t forced to buy Russian gas, coal or oil.
Over a decade ago, Vlad-the-Bad pointed out reality:
http://archive.premier.gov.ru/eng/visits/world/13103/events/13118/
Reblogged this on delboydave and commented:
You couldn’t make this stuff up!
They’re going to tie themselves in knots over this, and indeed the greenies already have when they say “that bringing back coal-first power plants was ‘painful, but it is a sheer necessity’”. It will be like Biden, begging the oil co’s to increase production in one breath, then in the next saying he’s still going to destroy their businesses. At least they had the good sense to mothball coal power stations and not blow them up!
I often wondered why Didcot thermal plant was demolished instead of mothballing. Obviously, the greens did not want that opportunity left open.
I think that it was simply the value of the land as an extension of the industrial estate on the old Army stores barracks (the other side of the didcot to oxford line) and the demand for housing land , e g the Ladygrove estate . Also didcot was supplied I believe from the Midland coalfields and without them coal would have to come up the A34 (a death track at the best of times) or on the old Great Western line from Bristol ( not a coaling port ) or Paddington , the Didcot , Newbury, Southampton line having been closed in about 1961.
The politicians are getting crazier as the energy supply becomes too expensive and dysfunctional. The US is in an Alice in Wonderland dystopia. See reference below:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-bashes-oil-companies-for-going-along-with-his-plan-to-end-fossil-fuel_4540127.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-19-2&utm_medium=email&est=GGoqc%2FGtMwY97cS%2Bhnq2onmwa5eYP245mR%2FWFjG4koaCKolBZaF35QM6xwwSc3sueQGB
Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
At least some sanity by restarting coal plants. But still no sign of politicians in any country drastically reducing, ideally scrapping the tax on petrol and diesel-. Over two euros per litre in several countries now (probably much more in France) and and worse, normal diesel (not the expensive one) even more expensive than petrol.
And no sign yet that any politicians have understood yet that it’s their Net Zero or equivalent policies that caused this in the first place. It’s still BAU: “Dear oil & gas co’s, we desperately need more production, but we’re still going to close you down.”.
What brilliant COMMON SENSE! With coal fired power stations you DO get power 24-7-365, regardless of whether it’s night or day, hot or cold and no matter if it’s windy or not! Only in the UK NUT-led loony bin would WE risk the lights going out, due to the ‘gweenies’ crazy concerns about such sillinesses as: Global warmin’ -sea level rise etc, and shut down OUR essential power supplies! Hoping for the best! On top of all that, here in Britain we have CENTURIES of OUR OWN coal available, PLUS VAST quantities of GAS to fracked! -just waiting for some sensible politicos to give the order!
“painful, but it is a sheer necessity”
Every fool knows it’s a choice between “painful” and “THE SCIENCE SAYS WE’RE ALL DOOMED” (sniff).
They chose painful.
I am awaiting the announcement from our rats in government and opposition parties that there is to be a change back to our energy independence, with cheap fuel costs and that there will be a return to coal, gas, oil and nuclear.
In my view this is inevitable and the fun will be seeing how they attempt to rewrite history to tell the gullible public this was the plan all along.
No matter how much wind or solar it just adds to the volatility of the grid. Now they have restarted coal I’m doubting whether they will stop.
Re building more wind turbines,
Wind Europe notes in a media release (14/6/22) that “In the first quarter of 2022 all five European wind turbine manufacturers were operating at a loss” and that a shortage of specialised construction vessels “poses risk for project execution worldwide” for offshore wind farms.
The problem is particularly acute in the Baltic Sea where Poland, Latvia,Estonia, Lithuania and Sweden all have plans to build such wind farms and is compounded by the fact that the turbines are getting bigger and bigger requiring larger vessels.
There is something karmic about Germany freezing in the dark to avoid the nuclear option of burning rocks that are bound to decay no matter what.