The federal government wants to move forward in the fight against the impending power shortage. Gas and oil power plants are to close the gap and start operating from February or March 2023. These power plants are to supply electricity in the volume of around 80 percent of the Mühleberg nuclear power plant, which has since been shut down. Alexander Fuchs from the Energy Networks research center at ETH Zurich is confident.
SRF News: Are the measures taken by the Federal Council on Wednesday enough to prevent a power outage?
Alexander Fuchs: It definitely supports the way. But there are a lot of uncertainties. Of course, if all nuclear power plants are shut down and all reservoirs are empty all winter, that’s not enough. There are days when you need several thousand megawatts of domestic production for grid security reasons.
The idea is explicit that these power plants do not run all year round.
But we don’t just have that alone. It is the flexibility that supports security and also represents a diversification, whereby hydropower, which currently still represents the main part of domestic production, can be relieved in Switzerland.
These reserve power plants are operated with oil or gas. Will the issue of electricity security now be prioritized over the issue of the environment?
Of course, these fossil fuels, which are then used there, have a worse CO₂ balance and then seem to work against the goals of the energy strategy. The idea here, however, is explicitly that these do not run as an energy source all year round, but that they are used in critical hours.
And if you can foresee the day before that more domestic production is needed the next day than can be procured from other sources on the market, then these are used in individual hours. And so there will not be this worse environmental impact all year round.
You also have to buy oil and gas. Then there are the CO₂ certificates. Isn’t this all going to be very expensive?
Of course that has to be paid for. This results in costs. This is a kind of system service, which is already part of our electricity costs through network tariffs.
However, a gradual increase in part of the network costs is to be expected.
And there are also costs to be expected when building the power plants and then also when operating them, which must be covered either through these network cost electricity prices or through taxes. However, a gradual increase in part of the network costs is to be expected, i.e. not with the kind of price shock that end consumers are already facing due to the rise in gas and oil prices.
Tobias Bühlmann conducted the interview.