Germany's plan to accelerate its exit from nuclear power and replace it largely with renewable energy sources isn't impossible, but is ambitious and won't come without cost, a senior official with the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.
Germany
's
plan to accelerate its exit from nuclear power and replace it largely with
renewable energy sources isn't impossible, but is ambitious and won't come
without cost, a senior official with the International Energy Agency said
Wednesday.
"It's not impossible, but it's more challenging, more difficult and will
be more expensive," Laszlo Varro, head of the IEA's gas, coal and power
division, told a briefing at the start of the Saint Petersburg International
Economic Forum.
"The question is not whether
Germany
can
replace nuclear power, but whether it can replace nuclear power and decrease
carbon dioxide emissions at the same time," he said.
Facing a massive public backlash against nuclear power in the wake of the
Fukushima Daiichi plant in
Japan
in
March, German Chancellor Angela Merkel abandoned her plans to prolong the
lifetime of the country's nuclear power stations and instead largely restored
an original plan to end all nuclear generation by 2022. Some older plants will
be decommissioned well before then.
Germany
,
which is
Europe
's largest national energy market, now intends to
raise the share of renewable power in its power supply mix to 35%, to fill the
gap left by nuclear power.
Varro said the country will need a major expansion and overhaul of its national
transmission system to achieve its goal. Many of the nuclear power plants that
are to be replaced are in southern
Germany
,
whereas the bulk of the wind capacity that the country is planning to build is
off its
North Sea
and Baltic coasts. The government has already said
it intends to push through a radical simplification of licensing and
permissioning processes to make this possible.
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