Energy: If the gas runs out in winter: the federal government is preparing coal-fired power plants for emergency use

Berlin. The federal government is planning to require power plants that run on coal or oil to be able to step in again in the event of a crisis. This emerges from a draft of the “Law on the Provision of Replacement Power Plants”, which is available exclusively to the Handelsblatt.

“To ensure energy supply, especially natural gas supply, additional generation capacities should be made available to the electricity market as a precautionary measure in order to save natural gas in electricity generation,” it says.

The federal government is reacting to the tense gas supply situation. This has nothing to do with the current debate about the planned gas power plants, which are intended to compensate for fluctuations in the German electricity system in the long term.

The global supply chains have become fragile as a result of the Iran war, prices remain high and storage facilities in Germany are not particularly well filled. As a further crisis measure, the federal government decided in the cabinet on Wednesday to set up a state gas reserve, which should help in future winters.

If gas actually becomes scarce in the upcoming winter, savings would have to be made. One obvious way to do this is to temporarily not use gas-fired power plants and instead use coal and oil-fired power plants. This leaves the gas for industry and private households, which cannot simply switch their supply.

Coal and mineral oil are ideal for crisis prevention, according to the bill, which is classified as “classified information – for official use only” and is currently being voted on within the government. Coal and oil are available at short notice and their procurement does not directly depend on the affected crisis regions in the Gulf region.

The idea of ​​making additional power plants available for such an emergency has been around for a long time in the federal government, for example in the environment of Economics Minister Katherina Reiche (CDU). In particular, the Union parliamentary group with the vice-chairman Sepp Müller, who is responsible for energy, has repeatedly raised this. It is still unclear how the SPD feels about the plan.

Provision for 30 days

The power plants would be used when the state officially declares a “gas shortage,” meaning the existing gas is no longer sufficient to meet demand. To ensure that the reactors are ready for use in this case, the operators should be “obliged to be operational and to stock fuel”.

How far the legislature will go is still the subject of current discussion. The proposal in the draft is that the power plants must have coal reserves sufficient for 30 days at maximum output. With oil it would be ten days. However, these numbers are still in square brackets, which means they are still being discussed.

The argument in favor of shorter deadlines is that stockpiling involves costs for operators and ties up storage capacity. Longer deadlines, on the other hand, would increase security of supply if a gas crisis lasts not just a few days but several weeks.

All power plants that are already in the grid reserve should be affected. It includes power plants that no longer participate regularly in the electricity market, but are maintained to stabilize the electricity grid.

In addition, plants should be included that would be shut down in 2026 or 2027 as a result of the coal phase-out without the new regulation. It is possible that 2028 will also be included, which is also in square brackets.

The law is supposed to end after two and a half years

The federal government does not want to bring permanently shut down coal and oil power plants back into the regular electricity market, but only wants to help in the tense, current phase. The law is therefore scheduled to expire on March 31, 2028.

It would be the second time that the federal government has legally ordered power plant reserves to be kept ready in the event of a crisis. The traffic light coalition made up of the SPD, Greens and FDP did this in July 2022 in response to the energy crisis that Russia's invasion of Ukraine triggered.

The government also made use of the law at that time. At that time, it brought 15 plants with a total output of around 5.9 gigawatts back online, plus five brown coal blocks from the supply reserve with a total of around 1.8 gigawatts. The traffic light law then expired again in March 2024.