Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has denied any preliminary decisions on the extension of the operating life of nuclear power plants in the 2022 energy crisis.

"The only question was whether it would help and whether it could be implemented," the Green Party politician said on Thursday before the Bundestag investigation committee. He said that the security of supply after the Russian attack on Ukraine was at the center of his concerns. Even before the meeting, committee chairman Stefan Heck called this statement implausible: "We have to conclude today that this open-ended review did not take place," the CDU politician said. "On the contrary, it was a large-scale deception maneuver." Longer terms were rejected against expert advice from their own agencies. According to Habeck, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) is also to be questioned, who ultimately pushed through a limited extension of the terms.

The committee of inquiry is to clarify whether the federal government has, as promised, examined an extension of the operating life of the last three nuclear power plants without bias. The background to this is that, according to the law at the time, they had to be shut down at the end of 2022. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the lack of gas supplies had once again fueled the operating life debate. Energy prices rose rapidly. After a long struggle within the government, Scholz ultimately pushed through a limited extension of the operating times until spring 2023 in the fall. Habeck had only proposed a reserve of nuclear power plants for emergencies.

Jakob Blankenburg of the SPD said that it had to be clarified why Chancellor Scholz had to use his authority to issue this directive to Habeck. "It sometimes seems as if he didn't have the strength to politically defend an actual extended operation to his party," he said, referring to Habeck and a Green party conference at the time. "It seems as if he needed the chancellor's word of command for that."

(Report by Markus Wacket; edited by Christian Götz. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)