SeekerBlog

WNN summarizes Siemens projections of the cost of Germany’s massive renewable deployment.

Germany’s energy policy could cost some €1.4 trillion ($1.8 trillion) by 2030 even before the cost of the nuclear shutdown is taken into account.

Germany is to forego 14 years of low-cabon generation from Neckarwestheim 2 (Image: EnBW)

The figures were announced by the head of Siemens’ energy division, Michael Suess, at the Energiewirtschaft 2012 event organised by the Handelsblatt newspaper in Berlin and later confirmed to World Nuclear News by Siemens spokesmen.

For several years the country has planned an ‘energy revolution’ designed to tackle climate change and establish renewable technologies at the centre of a new power supply system. Two years before nuclear generation ends in 2022, Germany wants to have cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, doubled renewables to supply 35% of electricity and cut primary energy consumption by 20%.

Siemens’ calculation of the total investment in generation and transmission to do this came to €1.418 trillion ($1.848 trillion) in the period from 2011 to 2030.

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Two immediate effects of the nuclear shutdown have been a rush to finish building 10 GWe of fossil power plants, and short-term reliance on an oil-fuelled plant in Austria. A Deutsche Bank report estimated that the carbon dioxide increase from the permanent shutdown of the seven reactors and the early phase-out of the rest would result in the emission of 370 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020. Before the shutdown, Germany’s nuclear sector had been the biggest source of low-carbon power.

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