Old coal-fired power plants are only hesitantly connected to the grid

Berlin For Gilles Le Van, the matter is clear: “We have to exhaust all available domestic reserves. For example, the existing and available coal-fired power plants must be connected to the grid,” said the chairman of the Association of Industrial Energy and Power Industries (VIK) to the Handelsblatt. The VIK is the voice of the large, energy-intensive companies in Germany. It represents around 300 companies that account for around 80 percent of industrial energy consumption.

The companies affiliated to the VIK are committed to ensuring that a large number of mothballed coal-fired power plants go online again as quickly as possible. Because that reduces gas consumption and dampens the level of electricity prices. In practice, however, the commissioning of coal-fired power plants proves to be difficult. Le Van demands: “The very bureaucratic regulations for restarting must be relaxed in the short term.”

In principle, the traffic light coalition is also of the opinion that in the current bottleneck situation, coal-fired power plants must be taken from the reserve. That is why the Replacement Power Plant Availability Act came into force at the beginning of July.