“Germany made a huge strategic error” by rushing to shut down its nuclear power plant fleet, a mistake which has exacerbated the energy crisis in Europe, the director of the International Energy Agency said.
The Turkish economist who has led the International Energy Agency (IEA) for over a decade, who is engaged in shuttle diplomacy to persuade first world producer nations to stop throttling their own domestic oil and gas extraction, has said the present contraction in supply would be less severe had Germany not bottled it in the past decade and rushed to become nuclear-free.
Instead, Germany declared it wanted to become carbon-free and denuclearise at the same time, leaving it plugging the gaps around its experiments with renewables with imported gas and oil, largely from the Russian Federation, until the Ukraine War began. This decision was in spite of repeated loud warnings about the danger of undermining the nation’s energy security while hitching itself to Russian influence, including from President Donald Trump.
Speaking to German newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, IEA boss Fatih Birol said of the temporary closure of the Straits of Hormuz in the Gulf: “I don’t get the impression that political decision-makers have yet grasped the magnitude of the problem we are facing”, and that Europe would be in a stronger position with more nuclear.
He said of Germany: “Germany made a huge strategic error—I’ve been saying this for almost 20 years like a broken record—by shutting down its nuclear power plants… The situation wouldn’t be so bad today if Germany still had the power plants”. The paper paraphrased further comments from the economist, stating that:
…he hopes all the more that the right lessons will now be learned from this crisis. Forty percent of all current nuclear power plants in the world were built in response to the oil crisis of the 1970s.
For all his warning against European nations artificially limiting their menu of options for power generation, Birol nevertheless betrayed something of a prejudice against gas and oil. Stating that it was pointless for European nations to start trying to increase domestic production with new drilling now because he thought that new energy wouldn’t come to market for a decade, he also expressed his support for new nuclear in the form of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), which also wouldn’t come online until the next decade.
Nevertheless, Birol acknowledged that he was engaged in a campaign of energy diplomacy, travelling world energy-producer nations including gas and oil producers “Australia, Canada, Mexico, and the USA” to talk them into ramping up their supply.
Iran has held the global economy hostage with threats to close the critical Straits of Hormuz waterway if it wasn’t left alone to export terror and develop a nuclear programme for decades, and has this year attempted to follow through on these threats as the United States and Israel moved to remove the perceived threat. And Birol is not the only person to have called out Germany’s disastrous short-sightedness in killing nuclear in this period.
As reported earlier this month, no less a person than the head of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen — who was a minister in the German government when the decision was made and voted in favour of it — called it a “strategic mistake”.
She said in early March: “This reduction in the share of nuclear was a choice. I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power. This should change”. Nuclear is “reliable, producing electricity all year, around the clock”, she said.
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