From Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance, May 24:
Germany plans to bring back coal- and oil-fired power plants should Russia cut off natural gas shipments to Europe’s largest economy.
Economy Minister Robert Habeck will on Tuesday present an emergency decree enabling the government to bring back the facilities in case of gas shortages, according to the proposed legislation seen by Bloomberg.
Germany is resorting to desperate measures to keep the lights on and its massive industrial parks running, turning to dirty fuels even if that means a surge in carbon emissions. The nation has almost six gigawatts of facilities that are currently part of a national reserve, many of which were supposed to be closed down as part of the coal phase-out plan.
“This request for additional coal-fired power generation only occurs when there is a gas shortage, or if there is a threat of a gas shortage and the gas consumption in power generation has to be reduced,” according to the proposed law.
The decision comes even as Habeck’s Greens -- part of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s so-called traffic light coalition -- want to bring forward to 2030. The coal-phase out was initially planned for eight years later.....
....MUCH MORE
I think I see the problem. Chancellor Merkel's advisors were idiots.
They were warned, over and over again, especially fervent were the Polish geostrategists, but nein, they go their own way.
Here's one of the warnings from 2018:
Someone should check in with Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland to see what the plan to follow-up on the 2014 regime change in Ukraine was.
Because, despite the fact their first concern is their own energy security, the Poles do have a point regarding their frenemy Ukraine, things could get a bit chaotic for Kyiv if Nord Stream 2 is completed as planned.
Maybe the Ukraine follow-up plan is mixed in the same stack as the follow-up for the "We came, we saw, he died" Libya plan.
Here are three stories on some aspects of the current state of play in Eastern European energy geopolitics....
Prescient. And that's just the intro.
Poland has been trying to warn the rest of Europe of the risks in getting too dependent on Russian gas, in particular via the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
New Russian Pipeline In Baltic Sea Could 'Collapse' Ukraine
I'm not sure what it is about the Poles but they seem wary of their neighbors
