|German Nuclear Plants (Wikipedia)| Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
government says RWE AG’s new power plant that can supply 3.4
million homes aids her plan to exit nuclear energy and switch to
cleaner forms of generation. It’s fired with coal.And Herr
Dieter Helm, energy policy professor? Also not impressed:
“Angela Merkel’s policy has created an incentive structure which
has the effect of partially replacing nuclear with coal, the
dirtiest fuel that’s responsible for much of the growth in the
world’s greenhouse-gas emissions since 1990,” Dieter Helm, an
energy policy professor at the University of Oxford, said by
phone Aug. 17. Building new coal stations means “locking them in
for the next 30 years” as a type of generation, Helm said.The
problem is that natural gas, inexpensive here, is expensive in
Germany, so it isn’t as viable a fuel for large installations.
As we’ve seen, Germany’s grid isn’t equipped (yet – let’s be
optimistic) to handle the intermittency of solar and wind
stably. What Merkel is doing actua