FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Cut Off from Power, Germany Will De-Industrialize

Jan. 28, 2019 (EIRNS)—If not scrapped, the policy of the government to have the final exit from coal-fired power plants by 2035-38 at the latest would face Germany’s industry and private households with higher prices for electricity anyway and also with a chronic undersupply of power. Wind, solar and biomass will not do the job. Will neighboring Poland and Czechia continue to export electricity to Germany’s eastern regions—electricity generated by coal, and in Czechia also by nuclear power—will Austria and Switzerland continue to export electricity from their hydropower, and France from nuclear, to Germany’s western and southern regions? But the Merkel government and its climate-obsessed experts do not even deal with these questions; they are deadly determined to cut Germany’s domestic energy consumption by one-half by sometime between 2040 and 2050—that is, just the 52% that coal and remaining nuclear are still providing today.

Andreas Pinkwart, state economics minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, one of the traditional mining regions that is to move out of coal entirely, has pointed out that about 250,000 jobs in energy-intensive industry depend on calculable and affordable electricity. In the eastern mining regions (Saxe-Anhalt, Saxony, Brandenburg), about 150,000 jobs in industry are in the same precarious situation. RWE, the leading power generator in North Rhine-Westphalia, has already announced that beginning in 2023, it will have to lay off workers. The same is true for LEAG, the leading power generator in the eastern Lausitz region.