German government proposes compensation scheme for nuclear power plants

Angela Merkel’s cabinet has initiated an amendment to the German Nuclear Exit Act that ensures compensation payments to operators of nuclear power plants who had to shut down their reactors in 2011. The law must be amended because the German Constitutional Court ruled that plant operators RWE and Vattenfall had made investment decisions in good faith after another amendment, adopted in 2010, awarded them longer run-times that were curbed again after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident and were therefore entitled to compensation. The new draft law leaves the actual sum of compensation payments open – they will first be decided in 2023, when factors such as lost generation hours, generation costs, and obtainable power prices are known. While RWE accepted the government’s proposal, Vattenfall criticised it, arguing that it would reduce the amount of compensation too much and would force operators of decommissioned nuclear plants to sell the remaining volume of electricity, Energate reports.
The German Renewable Energy Federation (BEE) has warned that such residual electricity volumes must not be sold to nuclear power plants located in northern Germany, where the grid is already overloaded.
The government estimates that the compensation payable by the state in 2023 will be “a three-figure million amount”.

Find the proposed amendment in German here.

Read a CLEW dossier about the nuclear phase-out here.

Read the energate article in German here (behind paywall).