German energy companies are short of as much as 30 billion euros ($34 billion) of the money they need to set aside to build a safe disposal site for nuclear waste as part of the country's exit from nuclear power, Spiegel Online reported on Monday.
E.ON, RWE, EnBW and Vattenfall are due to switch off their nuclear plants by a 2022 deadline set by Chancellor Angela Merkel's government after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011.
OSLO, June 23 (Reuters) - Sweden's OKG, a part of E.ON group, said on Tuesday it would decide in the third-quarter whether to permanently shut down two nuclear reactors at its Oskarshamn plant in Sweden.
"E.ON has informed of its intention as majority owner of OKG AB to pursue a direction to permanently discontinue electricity production at OKG unit 2 as soon as possible," OKG said in a market message.
The 638-megawatt reactor has been offline since May 2013 and may never restart if OKG board
ESSEN, Germany, March 10 (Reuters) - A sale of uranium enrichment company Urenco won't happen before the second half of 2015, RWE Chief Executive Peter Terium said, adding that a disposal could even take longer than that.
RWE and peer E.ON jointly hold one third of Urenco's shares, with the Dutch and British governments each owning a third, too.
Terium said the stake in Urenco was the last major item on the company's list of disposals.
LONDON/PARIS (Reuters) - German utility E.ON's breakup has led to worries that funds set aside for decommissioning reactors will not suffice, but globally the cost of unwinding nuclear is uncertain as estimates range widely.
As ageing first-generation reactors close, the true cost of decommissioning will be crucial for the future of the nuclear industry, already ailing following the 2011 Fukushima disaster and competition from cheap shale gas, falling oil prices and a flood of renewable energy from wind and solar.
British lobbying to reduce monitoring of EU countries’ action on climate change has sparked outrage among MEPs and environmentalists.
EU states agreed last October to cut their carbon emissions 40% by 2030, but a UK plan co-authored with the Czech Republic proposes that countries’ emissions cuts should only be overseen with a ‘light touch’ regime with a diminished role for Brussels.
Germany’s push toward renewable energy is causing so many drops and surges from wind and solar power that more utilities than ever are receiving money from the grids to help stabilize the country’s electricity network.
Twenty power companies including Germany’s biggest utilities, EON SE and RWE AG, now get fees for pledging to add or cut electricity within seconds to keep the power system stable, double the number in September, according to data from the nation’s four grid operators. Utilities that sign up to the 800 million-euro ($1.1 billion) balancing market can be paid as much as 400 times wholesale electricity prices, the data show.
Embattled E.ON and RWE turn to the government and the courts for help
Jun 7th 2014, BERLIN - RECENT years have brought little but bad news for Germany’s power generators. Having overinvested in gas- and coal-fired plants before the financial crisis, the two largest, E.ON and RWE, ended up with excess capacity in the ensuing downturn—just as lavish subsidies to wind- and solar-power producers were bringing a host of new competitors to the market. After the nuclear accident at Fukushima in Japan in 2011, the German government decided that all nuclear plants in the country must close by 2022, bringing forward the huge costs of decommissioning them. To cap it all, ever more industrial consumers of electricity have gone “off the grid”, generating their own power. Shares in the two power giants have fallen by almost half in the past five years, whereas Germany’s DAX stockmarket index has almost doubled in that time (see chart).
Germany’s nuclear industry is fighting Berlin over a plan to transfer the risks of shutting down facilities to a publicly owned foundation that would act as a “bad bank”.
The power companies are engaged in a decommissioning exercise with an estimated cost of more than €30bn after Berlin announced an accelerated exit from nuclear energy following the Fukushima disaster in 2011. The work includes demolishing nuclear plants and disposing of radioactive waste.
RWE npower, one of the big six power suppliers, has warned ministers not to seal a long-term subsidy deal with the nuclear industry behind the backs of consumers and saddle them with "unnecessarily high bills" for the next 40 years.
The warning from Paul Massara, RWE UK's new chief executive, comes as the Guardian can reveal that up to 15 private sector executives with links to the atomic sector have been seconded to government departments or other public sector roles.
LONDON (MarketWatch) -- Toshiba Corp. is weighing plans to bid for Urenco, the nuclear fuel producer backed by the U.K., the Netherlands and two German energy giants, the Sunday Times reports without citing sources.
The newspaper says the Japanese industrial giant, which owns the nuclear reactor builder Westinghouse Electric, wants to bid for the business if and when it comes on the market.
Urenco, which enriches uranium for nuclear fuel, is owned by the U.K. and Dutch governments and German firms RWE A.G. and E.ON S.E., who own a third each.
