These
two motions under debate deal with either the continuation or the discontinuance
of the Nord Stream 2 project, a gas pipeline which shall yearly bring 55
billion normative cubic meters of natural gas via the Baltic Sea to Germany and
the EU. The predecessor project has been completely utilized since 2018.
This
energy will be urgently required in Germany. With the planned withdrawal from
nuclear and coal energy, power plant capacity in Germany will by 2022 be reduced
by some 8 terawatt hours which last year had been delivered to industrial sites
in Germany – predictable, reliable, of good value; so to say, sustainable. This
electricity will be lacking.
Business
associations and the Federal Ministry for the Economy agree that gas power
plants must in the future fill this deficit. That this, as opposed to
electricity generated by nuclear power, increases CO2 emissions is
apparently a consequence desired by you. In a land of little green elves, it is
of course believed that by a building-up of so-called renewables the deficit
can be closed. That however is, with permission, complete humbug.
The
missing 80 terawatt hours correspond to about half the amount of electricity
which wind and solar altogether have generated in the past year. The creation
of this wind and solar capacity has cost 20 years and hundreds of billions of
euros.
The
most hopeless dreamers in your ranks do not believe it possible to now procure
an additional 50 percent build-up by 2022, especially when in the coming years many
of your installations are omitted from the assessment and then, on account of
being uneconomic, will be permanently shut down.
Your
electro-fidget installations [Zappelstromanlagen]
generate electricity for a great diversity of regions and not for where it is
needed. The necessary electrical distribution lines have in part still not been
planned. In contrast to that, there exists in Germany over 500,000 kilometers
of presently available natural gas lines which can be connected to any of the
newly planned power plant sites. Furthermore, a gas and steam power plant, in contrast
to the low-value energy generation methods compelled by you, delivers great
amounts of valuable district heating.
And
while it may not actually interest you, let us nevertheless speak for once of
the citizens’ money. Gas is currently more expensive than brown or bituminous
coal. With the withdrawal from coal and nuclear power, price increases are to
be expected here which then must be borne by businesses and the people. However,
thanks to Nord Stream 2, the delivered amounts will evidently be increased and energy
experts in fact expect a price reduction per cubic meter of gas – not only in
Germany, but also in the bordering European states. For all the European
nations and for the transit nations Ukraine and Poland, for whom you are
constantly concerned, a reduced gas price is expected, as per the experts of
the EWI and the University of Cologne.
Ladies
and gentlemen, so you see: We need this gas line – in fact on account of your
energy policy. Had we an energy policy built on modern nuclear and coal power
plants, we could have the luxury of questioning the project. Yet you yourselves
with your bungled energy transformation have left no alternative to piping the
gas.
Johann Saathoff (SPD): What has that to do with
sustainability? How is that defined as sustainability?
Not
only we see it so but, according to a poll by the ZDF “Politbarometers”, so do
70 percent of the citizens of this country. The best for last: Nord Stream 2
would be a significant economic factor in an otherwise structurally weak federal
state. This gas supply can produce what you so happily promise in flowery
speeches in the Bundestag: Sustainable workplaces with which people in their Heimat may have an honorable living and
so contribute to a social, progressive Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
Thanks.
[trans: tem]
