Germany Asked Austria to Help Balance ‘Critical’ Power Grid
German power grid operator TenneT TSO GmbH had to tap a backup fossil fuel-fired power plant in Austria last month to stabilize the network after the country shut down eight nuclear reactors in March.
TenneT, whose power lines stretch from Germany’s coast to the Austrian border south of Munich and serve about 20 million people, requested to fire up the station on Dec. 8 and Dec. 9 as a “precautionary measure,” Ulrike Hoerchens, a spokeswoman for TenneT, said today by phone.
The move was necessary amid projections of high winds in the North and peak demand in the South while Block C of RWE AG (RWE)’s Grundremmingen nuclear power plant wasn’t available, she said.
The nation’s four grid operators have warned of possible power failures this winter in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, after Chancellor Angela Merkel shut more than 25 percent of German atomic capacity following the Fukushima, Japan, reactor meltdowns.
Germany has since identified 2.1 gigawatts of oil-, coal- and gas-fired plants at home and in neighboring Austria as standby units to stabilize the networks.
While most of that reserve wasn’t needed and no large industrial consumers were affected, “the event shows that there can be tight situations in particular if the winter gets colder,” Per Lekander, an analyst at UBS AG, wrote in a note today. Germany’s average temperatures in December were the fifth-warmest since 1881, according to the DWD weather bureau.
‘Limited Positive Impact’
Temporary bottlenecks “imply upside risk to spot prices, and could also have a limited positive impact on forward curves,” Lekander wrote.
Amprion GmbH, whose 11,000-kilometer (6,800 miles) grid serves about 27 million people in Germany, didn’t have to tap any standby units, Marian Rappl, a spokesman for Amprion, said today. “But the situation is critical and it’s good that we have the reserve capacity,” he said by phone.
EnBW Transportnetze AG, which operates about 3,650 kilometers of transmission lines in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, didn’t tap a backup plant, Regina Koenig, a spokeswoman, said by e-mail.
Volker Kamm and Olivier Feix, spokesmen for 50Hertz Transmission GmbH, the main grid operator in eastern Germany, didn’t immediately answer phone calls and an e-mail.
The German newspaper Die Welt earlier today reported that TenneT tapped the backup plant in Austria.
To contact the reporter on this story: Stefan Nicola in Berlin at snicola2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net
Rate this Page