“Electrifying battle”

Municipal utilities say Germany’s four transmission grid operators (TSO) are establishing a new “energy oligopoly”, because of their request to construct and also operate “network stability” gas power plants in southern Germany, writes Frank-Thomas Wenzel for Frankfurter Rundschau. The country’s grid operation and power production are usually unbundled and local utilities fear they will lose revenues to TSOs, writes Wenzel. Grid operators want to build the new power plants to keep the grid stable through re-dispatch measures when Germany’s last nuclear power plants go offline by 2022. They say these facilities would not be part of the regular power market and only run in exceptional situations.

Read the article in German here.

For background read the CLEW factsheet Re-dispatch costs in the German power grid.