Struggling to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and meet its ambitious climate goals, Germany has launched a task force to formulate a plan to shutter its massive fleet of coal power plants after repeatedly postponing their shutdown. But critics say economic and electric grid reliability concerns will likely continue to delay the "coal exit" of Europe's largest polluter, regardless of the preliminary shutdown deadline that the commission is expected to deliver by the end of 2018.
On June 6, a few days before Germany reaffirmed its commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement at the G7 summit in Canada, Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government kicked off the long-awaited coal commission, officially known as the "Special Commission on Growth, Structural Economic Change and Employment."
Climate activists protest after a court allowed the bulldozing of an ancient forest to expand an open-pit lignite mine. |
The 31-member task force will decide how and when the country will cease generating power from largely imported anthracite, or "hard coal," and from dirtier, domestically mined lignite, known as "brown coal."
Environmental groups such as 350.org criticized the government for focusing on the economy and jobs, instead of on advancing Germany's transition to 65% renewable generation by 2030.
"The commission's mandate doesn't reflect the level of ambition required by the Paris Agreement and for Germany to meet its ... climate targets," said 350.org. "The dirtiest coal mines must be shut down immediately, or by 2020 at the very latest."
No more nukes
Europe's most industrialized and populous nation must close its coal plants, which generate almost 40% of Germany's electricity, in order to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 from 1990 levels and become completely carbon-neutral by 2050. Merkel's 2011 decision to shut down Germany's emissions-free nuclear power plants by 2023, following the nuclear accident at Fukushima, Japan, has made the planned coal exit even more daunting.
The industry-heavy membership of the coal commission has "too many pro-coal supporters," said Lorenz Beutin, a Die Linke (or "The Left") party legislator. The last coal power plant must close by 2035, he added, urging the federal government to allocate €500 million ($589 million) annually in structural funds to avoid unemployment of 20,000 miners and plant workers in the impacted regions.
Germany's grid regulatory agency told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently that Germany could get rid of half of its 47 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity by 2030 without any risk to supply, but only with an expansion of the power grid. Utilities RWE AG and Uniper SE say they are prepared for the coal exit and have developed their own phase-out plans stretching into the 2040s. Meanwhile, the German government has agreed to cease subsidizing uneconomic hard-coal mining later in 2018 after spending €2.6 billion (approximately $3 billion) in 2017.
Where coal is still king
Policymakers in the United States are also concerned about job losses and perceived grid reliability risks in shutting down coal. In December 2017, U.S. Energy Undersecretary Mark Menezes claimed that the troubles encountered by Germany's Energiewende, or energy transition, helped inspire the Trump administration's September 2017 proposal to save struggling coal and nuclear power plants by compensating them for their contribution to grid reliability.
Unlike U.S. coal plants, however, coal-fired generation is still lucrative in Germany, explained Dave Elliott, a professor of technology policy at the United Kingdom's Open University, in a post for Physics World: "Germany now has regular surpluses of power, despite the phase-out of nuclear, and that surplus, mostly in effect from coal plants, is being exported very profitably."
Kirsty Gogan, executive director of the European pro-nuclear environmental group Energy for Humanity, dismissed the idea that Germany will retire "any sizable amount" of coal capacity over the next 20 to 30 years, as coal-fired generation is still needed to prop up a "fragile" power system.
"Only with keeping nuclear capacity, some coal could have been shut down," Gogan said in an email. She said it is a "widespread myth that wind and solar capacity can replace baseload capacity." The annual reports of German transmission operators reached the same conclusion up until 2015, she said, and "the laws of physics haven't changed."

