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With winter fast approaching and the feared effects of high fuel value levels and looming volatility, as well as unprecedented uncertainty over fuel supply, it has been suggested that the governments of Germany and France take extreme intervention measures to keep their country’s largest utilities afloat.
On September 30, the German government announced that it would nationalize Uniper, its giant app that has about 33 GW of generating capacity, roughly equivalent to the total capacity of the Netherlands, and a fuel portfolio of about 400 TWh (enough to heat 22 million German homes). The German federal government said the energy company, which supplies two hundred municipal utilities across the country, “is of decisive importance for Germany’s fuel and electric power supply. “As the largest importer of Russian fuel, “the company is in an acute emergency scenario due to the lack of fuel deliveries from Russia and a sharp build-up in fuel prices,” he said.
France, for its part, introduced on October 4 a procedure of taking one hundred percent of EDF, an electricity giant of which it already owned 8four%, with the aim of cutting the group’s financing prices through a total nationalization. pressure from the French government to restart nuclear production. More than a portion of EDF’s fleet of 56 reactors is out of service lately, in part due to corrosion problems discovered at some sites.
The German government’s moves to take over 99% of Uniper, buying entirely from Uniper’s former owner, Finnish energy company Fortum, for €480 million, stem from a move announced in July, in which the government proposed to acquire a 30% stake in Uniper. The government also announced in September that it would use a €7. 5 billion credit line provided in the past through Fortum.
The Finnish company, which paid 6. 5 billion euros for its first tranche of shares in Uniper in March 2020, said Uniper was losing around 100 million euros per day and had racked up nearly 8. 5 billion euros in losses similar to fuel relief so far. Therefore, additional measures to the scenario were mandatory as Uniper and Fortum were exposed to significant dangers,” Markus Rauramo, president and CEO of Fortrum, said at a press conference on September 21. future. Fortum will be able to refocus on generating blank Nordic force as a core business once the transaction closes,” he said.
The German government, for its part, said its acquisition of Uniper “is because the scenario has changed again significantly and has worsened since the announcement of the Federal Chancellor [Olaf Scholz] on July 22,” Federal Economic Affairs Minister Robert Habeck told a news conference. liberation. Since Sept. 1, no fuel has passed through Nordstream 1, Europe’s largest herbal fuel pipeline, Habeck said.
Habeck noted that Germany has made progress in ensuring its energy security in recent months. By October 2022, Germany had accumulated herbal fuel garage grades of up to 90% and fuel prices, after a brief recovery, rose from €350/MWh in summer. to 200 €/MWh.
However, for Uniper, “this has particularly intensified and exacerbated the situation. Uniper owns 50% of Russia’s fuel in its portfolio and accounts for 40% of Germany’s fuelArray,” Habeck explained. “This, taken together, forced us to act. After market research and a review of alternatives, we took this resolution to ensure safety in Germany,” he said.
First, the French government has begun a review of EDF’s troubled management, opting for a former senior Schneider Electric executive, Luc Rémont, to become its chairman and chief executive, the appointment of Rémont remains subject to parliamentary scrutiny. The government also introduced a €9. 7 billion takeover bid to buy minority shareholders. France’s priority will be to revitalize the functionality of the company’s nuclear fleet. Disruptions to its fleet of 56 reactors have plunged nuclear generation to its lowest point in 30 years, forcing France to import electricity. And think deeply about your energy security as winter approaches.
EDF’s 56 reactors are pressurized water reactors discovered at Westinghouse, most of which entered service between the late 1970s and early 1990s (Figure 5). The company’s troubles began in October 2021, when a ten-year inspection revealed defects. in the protection injection lines at the 1. 5 GW Civaux 1 plant. Additional clues were discovered in Civaux 2, Chooz 1 and 2 and Penly 1. These failures led EDF to accelerate inspection plans. Inspections of protective injection pipes for similar degradations in spring 2022 revealed clues about 4 other reactors: Chinon 3, Cattenom 3, Flamanville 2 and Golfech 1, basically 1,300 MW and 1,450 MW reactors. It has reported that weld repairs, deviations from general welding procedures, and thermal stratification in stagnant lines could possibly have influenced cracking.
Currently, 12 reactors (among the last in the fleet) will need shutdowns to repair stress corrosion, while EDF estimates that another 16 may have a “high sensitivity” to corrosion. The company says its fleet will be fully inspected until 2025. ASN has evaluated EDF’s research and repair strategy.
However, the near-term outlook remains bleak. EDF further lowered its nuclear production forecasts in September to the “low end” of a range of 280 TWh to 300 TWh. It warned that a decrease in nuclear generation would reduce its core income by 29 billion euros by 2022. EDF also said it would target a nuclear generation of three hundred TWh to 330 TWh in 2023, which is still well below the annual application average of recent years.
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