Chancellor Angela Merkel faced a bid by members of the upper house of parliament to force her to abandon nuclear power as she tried to rally German state leaders behind an overhaul of energy policy.
The main opposition Social Democratic Party put a bill to the upper house in Berlin today calling for the immediate closure of eight reactors and all 17 nuclear plants to be shut within about a decade. The opposition holds a majority in the upper house, the Bundesrat, where states are represented.
The bill, which will now go to committee for further deliberation, steps up the pressure on Merkel to speed the exit from atomic power as she works on an unprecedented shift in the energy mix driving Europe's biggest economy that ministers say might cost as much as 2 billion euros ($2.9 billion) a year.
"The government has to show that they can switch the country's energy supply and there just aren't that many options," said Bernhard Jeggle, an analyst with Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg in Stuttgart. "They'll be placing the focus on renewable energy sources, an expansion of the electricity grid, energy savings and flexible fossil power plants."
E.ON AG (EOAN) and RWE AG (RWE), Germany's two biggest nuclear plant operators, are among the worst performers this year on the 30- member benchmark DAX index. (DAX) E.ON fell 0.5 percent to 22.32 euros at the close of Frankfurt trading, while RWE declined 1.1 percent to 46.14 euros.
Emission Permits
Carbon dioxide emission permits for December rose 1.8 percent to 17.09 euros a metric ton on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London. They have risen about 20 percent this year.
Anti-nuclear activists called a demonstration outside the Chancellery as Merkel, Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle and Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen met with Germany's 16 state prime ministers to try and get them on board after last month ordering a 90-day reassessment of nuclear power as workers fought a meltdown at Japan's Fukushima plant.
"We all want to get out of nuclear power and switch to renewable energy as quickly as possible," Merkel told reporters after the talks. Erwin Sellering, Social Democratic premier of Merkel's home state of Mecklenburg Western-Pomerania, said there was disagreement about how quickly to exit nuclear, with some members of Merkel's Christian Democrats favoring a date of 2035 over the SPD’s preferred timescale of 2022 at the latest.
Merkel, whose government last year pushed through plans to prolong the running time of reactors by an average of 12 years, aims to overhaul the nuclear law as part of the revamped energy policy to put to Cabinet on June 6, she said.
Offshore Wind
The coalition aims to expand offshore wind parks and build more gas plants to plug a potential gap in power generation that would follow a retreat from nuclear, according to a government paper. Merkel's Cabinet backed plans two days ago to allow utilities to pump greenhouse gases underground via technology known as carbon capture and storage.
The shift away from nuclear power could cost between 1 billion euros and 2 billion euros per year, depending on the pace of the transition, Bruederle said on Deutschlandfunk radio.
Speaking before the meeting, Lower Saxony Prime Minister David McAllister, who is also a board member of Volkswagen AG, said the federal and state governments would discuss planning issues that have blocked development of power grids capable of carrying the electricity generated by renewable energies such as new wind parks.
Power Grid
"Whoever says yes to building up renewable energies has to also say yes to building a new power grid," McAllister, a member of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, said on ARD television. "We have to take the people with us better than we have in the past."
Merkel imposed a moratorium on March 14 on the planned nuclear extension, then ordered the seven oldest plants idled pending industry-wide safety checks. Polls suggest the public want her to go further.
Nineteen percent of 1,000 respondents to a poll for N24 television yesterday said that nuclear plants should operate beyond 2020, while 76 percent said they should shut earlier. Of those, 31 percent wanted reactors closed down immediately.
The Social Democrats, who introduced a law to close all reactors by about 2022 when in coalition government with the anti-nuclear Greens, are urging a return to that timetable in their Bundesrat bill. Submitted by six SPD-led states including Berlin and Hamburg, the draft also calls for the seven oldest plants as well as the Kruemmel reactor to remain closed.
Latest Poll
Public sentiment is meanwhile drifting away from Merkel's bloc. Merkel's CDU and its Free Democratic coalition partner trail the Social Democrats and Greens by 38 percent to 50 percent, an FG Wahlen poll for ZDF television showed today. The gap has widened to 12 percentage points from 8 points last month as the Greens soared to a record 23 percent backing.
In switching Germany's energy mix, Merkel must balance voter concern at reactor safety with the need to burden consumers with at least some of the costs of the transition.
Germans will agree to paying more for their electricity if they are convinced it is safer, said Jeggle of LBBW. "But if the government doesn't handle this transformation properly and show that they're keeping costs in checks for all that consumers are funding, then the energy policy won't come out of it unscathed."
