Two of the three remaining German nuclear power plants should still be able to be used until spring 2023 – but only in emergencies. Then she wants to use the Ministry of Economics to stabilize the network.
The Isar 2 nuclear power plant in Essenbach (Bavaria) is to serve as an emergency reserve until spring 2023.
Two of the three remaining German nuclear power plants (AKW) are to remain available as an emergency reserve for power generation until mid-April 2023. This was stated by the German Economics and Climate Protection Minister Robert Habeck on Monday evening. It is about the power plants Neckarwestheim in the state of Baden-Württemberg and Isar 2 in Bavaria, which are operated by the energy companies EOn and EnBW. The Emsland nuclear power plant in Lower Saxony, the third power plant that is still connected to the grid, is scheduled to shut down definitively at the end of the year.
So far, according to the – repeatedly revised – decisions on the German nuclear phase-out, this was also planned for Neckarwestheim and Isar 2. Now, however, the Ministry of Economic Affairs has declared that these two nuclear power plants would also be taken off the grid regularly at the end of 2022. However, they should still be available until mid-April 2023 in order to be able to make an additional contribution to the power grid in southern Germany over the winter if necessary. A legal basis still needs to be created for this.
With this announcement, Habeck draws the conclusion from a second stress test that he presented together with the heads of the four German transmission system operators. On behalf of the ministry, the network operators examined the security of the electricity network for this winter under more stringent conditions from mid-July to the beginning of September 2022.
This grid stress test came to the conclusion that hourly crisis situations in the electricity system in the winter of 2022/23 are very unlikely, but cannot be completely ruled out at the moment.