TenneT foresees a power shortage in 2030. The nature & environment department wants to close all coal-fired power plants by 2025. These two completely incompatible messages illustrate a 21st-century retreat into their own bubble of like-minded people, as we saw 100 years ago with socialism, liberalism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. This is especially detrimental to energy and sustainability because the (im)possibilities of natural sciences are leading in those departments and not all sorts of human convictions and ideals.
As a grid operator, TenneT has known for a long time that we cannot phase out stable power producers (coal and nuclear power stations), build up unstable power producers (wind and solar), and also very quickly create more power demand with impunity (electric cars and heat pumps). The nature & environment department should know this, in constructive dialogue with TenneT. After eight years of misplaced idealism, the governing party Die Grünen in Germany must therefore agree to an extended operating life of nuclear power plants and increased lignite extraction under the sacrificed village of Lützerath.
The current power shortages in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are not the result of the war in Ukraine. After eight years of increasing short-sightedness and polarization since the Russian invasion of Crimea, we have created it ourselves. Now, with Putin as an evil genius, the recent ban on nuclear power plants and fossil investments is off the table, but we really caused our so-called energy crisis ourselves.
This article was previously posted in Duurzaamheid (in Dutch) on January 15, 2023.
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