BERLIN: Renewable energy provider Greenpeace Energy plans to sue the European Commission over its decision last year to allow the UK to build a new nuclear reactor.
The Hamburg company says that the huge subsidies involved in the UK project will upset German energy markets and harm small renewable energy providers. It argues that the European Comission should not have given the project the go ahead because the subsidies would distort competition in the energy market.
Silvia Brugger, director of the Climate and Energy Programme at the Heinrich-Böll Foundation – closely linked to Germany’s Green party – told The Local that the lawsuit is “justified” and an “important signal,” and denied that a favourable ruling would threaten Germany’s subsidy programme for renewable energy.
[This process] should expose the full costs of nuclear energy and conversely highlight the competitive advantages of renewable energy,” said Brugger.
As part of its strategy to reduce carbon emissions, in 2006 the British government announced plans to build the country’s first nuclear power plant in a generation at Hinkley Point in southwest England.
Two new nuclear reactors were to be built at a cost of €40 billion and were supposed to be operational by Christmas 2017. But the project has been beset by problems and controversy, meaning it is now five years behind schedule.
Finally the government had to entice investors with €22 billion of subsidies and a guaranteed electricity price of €0.11 per kilowatt-hour – twice the current market rate.
