Will the lights go out in Bavaria soon? Without nuclear power, the Free State would have an electricity problem, Markus Söder warns almost every day. A new “stress test” should now bring clarity – the result could throw old certainties overboard.
Between photos from the Samba Festival in Coburg and visits to the summer festival of the Chamber of Crafts, Markus Söder’s Twitter account currently only knows one topic. “It is completely pointless to also switch off nuclear power in this situation,” wrote the Bavarian Prime Minister on July 10. “In the case of nuclear power, the traffic light delivers one contradiction after the other,” he rumbled on Wednesday.
Söder tweeted about nuclear power a total of 14 times in the last two weeks or shared the pro-nuclear positions of others. In addition, of course, there are dozens of speeches, interviews and other requests to speak. In parts of the public, the CSU man finds an open ear, with the federal government in Berlin they react to the daily Söder with annoyed eye rolls. “The fact is: We currently have a gas problem, not an electricity problem,” Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) told the editorial network Germany (RND) on Saturday. The message: Continued operation of nuclear power will not help.
That may be true for Germany as a whole, but not necessarily for Bavaria. The Free State has long since become the energy policy problem child of the Federal Republic. Because in the end, if things go really, really badly, Bavaria could actually have both: a gas problem – and an electricity problem.
“Of course, we’re already worried about whether our electricity might not be scarce,” says Bavaria’s Economics Minister Hubert Aiwanger (free voters) to FOCUS Online. “Things could get very tight for the power supply situation in Bavaria next winter,” warns Detlef Fischer, General Manager of the Bavarian Energy and Water Industry Association (BDEW). Because the majority of electricity generation for Bavaria “can by no means be considered secure”. Where does the fear come from?
The theory goes like this: In recent years, electricity generation in Bavaria has been built on the pillars of nuclear power, gas and photovoltaics. Almost 60 percent of gross electricity generation in Bavaria in 2020 came from these three energy sources. But when it comes to gas, which generates 15.9 percent of electricity, no one really knows what will happen in winter. Will Russian President Vladimir Putin turn off the gas supply at some point in the course of the Ukraine war? Will we manage to get enough replacements by then, for example in the form of liquid gas LNG? !function(){var t=window.addEventListener?”addEventListener”:”attachEvent”;(0,window[t])(“attachEvent”==t?”onmessage”:”message”,function(t){if (“string”==typeof t.data
The traffic light coalition’s plan is to replace the proportion of gas previously used to generate electricity with coal. According to experts, this makes perfect sense:
But in Bavaria it’s not that easy with coal, Aiwanger warns: “We don’t have as many coal-fired power plants here as in the north, east and west of Germany, which can then supply themselves with coal locally”. What the south has instead: gas-fired power plants.
When it comes to nuclear power, the phase-out of nuclear power gets in the way of Bavaria. At the end of 2021, the last reactor of the Gundremmingen nuclear power plant was taken off the grid, and the last remaining nuclear power plant Isar 2 near Landshut is to follow at the end of 2022. A total of 27.5 percent of Bavaria’s gross electricity generation will be lost in just two years.
And when it comes to renewable energies, Bavaria is hitting its first home-grown problem. Although the Free State is the nationwide leader in the expansion of photovoltaics, 17 percent of electricity generation comes from solar systems, according to the State Ministry of Economics. But in winter, when it gets dark earlier and the sun shines less often, you can hardly rely on photovoltaics.
The good news: where photovoltaics cannot help, wind power can step in. Solar and wind complement each other exceptionally well – when the sun isn’t shining, the wind usually blows. The bad news: the CSU-led state government has systematically delayed the expansion of wind power in Bavaria.
With the introduction of the famous “10-H rule”, which stipulates strict distance rules for wind turbines, the expansion of wind power in Bavaria has practically come to a standstill. In 2021, a total of three wind turbines were erected in Bavaria, and this year there are already six. In terms of the number and output of wind turbines, Bavaria is well behind federal states such as Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt, which are much smaller.
However, it is nothing new for Bavaria that the self-produced electricity cannot cover the demand. Since 2018, when the first block of the Gundremmingen nuclear power plant was shut down, Bavaria has been dependent on electricity imports from abroad and other federal states.
Above all, the dependence on the north, which can produce renewable energies in abundance, has been growing steadily since then. In principle, the northern federal states and also countries such as Denmark or Norway have enough electricity to supply Bavaria in winter. But this is where a second home-grown problem of the Free State comes into play: nobody really knows whether there is enough capacity in the lines to transport the required electricity from north to south in the event of a real shortage.
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“The power lines to Bavaria may not be powerful enough,” says Aiwanger. The north-south divide in power generation hits a bottleneck here. The two large power highways SuedLink or SuedostLink should have provided a remedy, but the completion of the two important lines has been delayed for years – also thanks to the CSU.
When nature conservation associations and local citizens’ initiatives protested against the cables, the CSU sided with them. The Prime Minister at the time, Horst Seehofer, railed against “monster routes” because the cables were to be laid above ground for cost reasons.
In July 2015, Seehofer managed to get the cables underground, which resulted in years of delays. SuedLink will probably not be finished until 2026 instead of 2022, while SuedOstLink is aiming for 2030. According to data from the Federal Network Agency, ten of the eleven currently planned power lines in Bavaria will only be completed years later. “Hopefully, these two routes will never come,” said Aiwanger in April 2017.
But how is the situation now in terms of transmission capacities to Bavaria? Are the lines enough or not? That cannot be answered in general terms, says Ina-Isabelle Haffke, spokeswoman for the responsible transmission system operator Tennet. The alternating current network within Germany and Europe is too complicated for such simple mind games.
“It’s clear that every kilowatt of power helps us,” explains Haffke. “Regardless of the current geopolitical situation, our network management is becoming increasingly challenging. The phasing out of nuclear power and coal, the increasing demand for electricity and the integration of renewable energies make regulatory interventions in the grid more and more common.” For example, it is becoming increasingly common for wind turbines to be closed off in the north because the grids no longer have the capacity to transport them. Instead, replacement power plants have to be ramped up in the south to cover the demand there – “redispatch” is the name of such measures in technical jargon.
“Regarding the special situation in southern Germany, it should be noted that ongoing market power plants in the south generally reduce the need for redispatch,” says Haffke. This means: The more Bavaria can produce itself – in whatever way – the better. “Otherwise, the hope will be to be served by the neighboring countries of France, Austria and the Czech Republic,” says Aiwanger. “Although the French still got electricity from Germany in the winter. So it’s going to be a close game and we can’t make any more mistakes here.”
And an end to nuclear power in Bavaria, without extending the lifespan for at least a few months, seems to the state government in Munich to be just such a mistake. Apart from “purely ideological Basta arguments”, there are no arguments against such an extension, Söder complained in June. “In addition to a real gas problem, we will have an additional power shortage in the winter from January 1st.”
In fact, nuclear power is much more important for Bavaria than for the rest of the Federal Republic. “If you don’t want to let Bavaria freeze, you have to keep the Isar 2 nuclear power plant running,” says Fischer from the BDEW. And Economics Minister Aiwanger appealed to FOCUS Online to the federal government “to also see this special role of Bavaria”. A “special role”, however, into which the Free State has maneuvered itself.
To be on the safe side, the traffic light government is now putting everything to the test again. A first “stress test” between March and May showed that there is no risk of shortages in Bavaria in autumn and winter, even with gas prices increasing again. But now the Federal Ministry of Economics wants to carry out a second test with more stringent parameters.
“These include, for example, even higher price assumptions than in the first stress test, an even more serious failure of gas supplies and a greater failure of French nuclear power plants,” the ministry said on Sunday. The French are going through a full-blown energy crisis themselves, because half of the nuclear power plants are currently offline for technical reasons.
The second test now wants to pay special attention to the situation in Bavaria, according to the Ministry of Economic Affairs. Results should be expected in a few weeks. And if Bavaria does not pass the “stress test”, nothing is unthinkable – not even nuclear power. “If you see that, unlike all the numbers so far, a power shortage is to be expected, we will of course put all the measures back on the table,” announced Green Party leader Ricarda Lang, also on Sunday in Anne Will’s ARD talk on.
In the end, the problem child Bavaria could decide whether nuclear power still has a future in Germany, at least for a few months. There is only one thing that the Free State does not want to have anything to do with nuclear power: waste. “We are convinced that Bavaria is not a suitable location for a nuclear repository,” says the coalition agreement between the CSU and the Free Voters.
