Laying out key priorities for the EU’s upcoming Clean Industrial Deal, German Economy State Secretary Sven Giegold said on Monday (30 September) he wants the Commission to prioritise renewable energy, taking a tough line on nuclear power and France’s renewable targets.
Alongside a quicker roll-out of renewable energy facilitated by “further exemptions from [environmental impact] assessments,” Giegold outlined several other German priorities for the EU’s upcoming strategy.
Based on the 2030 renewable energy targets, the EU should also set up a 2040 framework, complemented by new, more ambitious targets for energy efficiency, he said.
“It should include new heating standards, a heat pump action plan and a renovation initiative,” he explained, noting a heat pump action plan was last shelved in 2023.
Hydrogen, made from renewables, should be governed by a “a pragmatic framework,” the German politician stressed, reiterating calls from his boss, Economy Minister Robert Habeck (Greens), to delay strict production rules into the late 2030s.
Afaik, German reactors were designed to be throttled to 60% capacity, within around a week. And doing that too often wasn’t safe either. And there was no economic incentive to do so because a reactor throttled is not a reactor earning—you have to do a bunch of extra work to throttle the reactor and you’re only conserving negligible amounts of fuel.
I am not deep enough in the topic to know whether that’s a limitation due to all the German reactors being particularly outdated. But “30 min” and “20%” sounds more like an emergency protocol to me rather than any kind of standard procedure.
The PWRs most prevalent in Germany did control their power output by modulating the boron content of their primary loop coolant in regular (non emergency) operation. This is a slow process, but it was done deliberately, because using control rods for this purpose would lead to inefficient fuel use due to uneven fuel burn.