Germany is now generating 1/3 of its electricity with coal (BusinessInsider) and is locking-in natural gas usage with 20-year contracts.
From EurActiv, September 8:
The EU’s roiling energy crisis is poised to erupt as Europe heads into winter, prompting calls to ensure every watt of available electricity is fed into the European grid. Germany, meanwhile, stays committed to shutting off its last nuclear reactors, causing mounting frustration among its neighbours.
As Germany prepares to shut down its last remaining nuclear reactors, EU officials are calling upon the bloc’s leadership to ensure that every single joule of energy is mobilised ahead of the coming winter’s looming energy crisis.
In 2011, Germany committed to a two-step nuclear exit, shutting down three reactors in 2021 and another three in 2022. The increasingly loud calls to keep them running in the face of the ongoing energy crisis have largely been ignored by Berlin, despite some decrying the policy as a break with solidarity.
“It’s the responsibility of any countries to do whatever we can regarding the availability of energy production,” the EU’s internal market Commissioner Thierry Breton said on Thursday (8 September) after a meeting with the German government in Berlin.
Breton’s declarations came on the same week as Germany took the final decision to shut down its three remaining nuclear reactors.
And while he declined to “comment on the energy mix of countries,” Breton praised Belgium for delaying its own nuclear exit.
“I want to make sure that we can provide everything to pass the winter,” he said. “I think it’s important that every country, which has a capacity to do it for this very period, that they do whatever they can. And that’s also a matter of solidarity.”
In July, Breton told German paper Handelsblatt that it would be “extremely important to keep the three German nuclear power plants that are still in operation running longer.”...
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At least they had the coal plants to fire up. If memory serves, Britain was demolishing theirs.
On the other hand, Germany's "We have to shut down the nukes because there was a tsunami in Japan" aktion looks insane to outsiders.
