Uniper makes suggestions for coal exit

German energy company Uniper is the first utility to put forward ideas for an eventual phase-out of coal-fired power generation following the launch of the coal-exit commission last month, Klaus Stratmann reports in Handelsblatt. Uniper CEO Klaus Schäfer suggests a plan to narrow the gap to Germany’s 2020 emissions reduction target based on the model of the 2016 lignite security standby. Under Schäfer’s proposal, lignite-fired power plants would be preliminarily shut down and could only be reactivated in “extreme situations”, before they would be taken offline permanently. This solution would also be “comprehensible and credible” to employees in coal mining districts. Schäfer believes that decommissions in the volume of “three to four gigawatts” of installed power plant capacity by 2020 is both “conceivable and achievable”, according to the article. The additional 3.5GW of lignite capacity in the security standby would cost 500 million euro per year.

Read the article in German here.                                                         

Find background on Germany’s coal exit commission here and running updates on the commission’s work here.