The German Chancellor, Olaf Schölzrejected this Saturday the possibility that Germany take on new debt to finance extensive aid programs to the economy as in the past, as well as the possibility of bringing nuclear power back after the last reactors were taken offline in the spring.
“Entering a mode where 100 billion debts a year is totally normal would not be good,” he said in an interview with the “Deutschlandfunk” radio station.
Thus, it ruled out the possibility of heeding requests for large-scale subsidization of the industrial electricity price who have arrived in recent weeks from the sector, from the Christian Democratic opposition and from some factions of its government coalition of social democrats, greens and liberals.
Investments of this type were made in response to the pandemic and the crisis of the triggered energy prices by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he recalled, so that these situations “would not destroy the economy.”
This objective was achieved, but such cases cannot be considered the “rule”, stressed the foreign minister, who indicated that in political terms “everyone has become accustomed to figures that are unjustified in a normal situation.”
“It is easier to propose how to spend money than where to get that money from,” he criticized.
On the contrary, for scholz The solution is to establish the conditions for energy prices to fall structurally thanks to cheap renewable energy production.
The chancellor flatly rejected the possibility of bringing nuclear power back to life, as his liberal coalition partners proposed last week, after the last three active reactors were taken offline last spring.
“The nuclear energy it’s over, it’s not used in Germany anymore,” he said, noting that since the decommissioning of the plants has already started, it is a “dead horse”.
Building new reactors would cost between 15,000 and 20,000 million euros for each unit and would not be operational for another 15 years, he said.
For this reason, it is much more logical to invest in reinforcing the production of renewable energies from sources such as solar, wind or biomass, said the chancellor, to reach the goal by the end of this decade of 80% of electricity is generated cleanly.
“This is the path we are on,” he said.
(With information from EFE)
Source: Gestion
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