Five years ago, German energy giants reacted to the (original) nuclear exit with plans for dozens of (mostly hard coal) new coal plants – according to their rhetoric, a necessary investment to fill a gap with something reliable and cheap before the rollout of renewables; in my view, an attempt to secure market share and to create a climate in which at least part of the projects can be built. A lot of these plans were successfully sabotaged, however, as I wrote in Where is my coal renaissance? three years ago.

Now taz reports that yet another plan, and the biggest at 1.82 GW, seems definitely dead: one of the main contributors is to drop out. This was achieved by a combination of NGO activism and political changes. The plant was to be built at the nuclear plant site Brunsbüttel in Schleswig-Holstein state, but the new government of the state includes the Greens, who made no new coal a government goal, and announced that the real estate reservation for the plant site won't be extended next year. However, the on-going court activism of the NGOs make a completion of the approval process unlikely by that date. With this at hand, they could pressure a comrade, the mayor of Tübingen (in the southern Baden-Württenberg state) to effect the city utility's exit from the project.

taz also gives a short summary of the state of fourteen projects which were on-going in 2009. Others (including stopped, contested and in-construction projects alike) are lacking from their list, however. So is a major story in connection with most of the in-construction plants: a steel quality problem forced the partial replacement of boilers, causing multi-year delays, and there goes the theory of cheap coal electricity.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}