Rainer Kraft, July 5, 2024, Energy Policy

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/182, pp. 23642-23643. 

Right honorable President. Valued colleagues. 

The draft law put forward by the government serves the purpose, cost what it may, of attaining the EU’s planned economic intentions for renewable electricity generation. And to this purpose you subordinate everything – apparently motivated by an eco-mania. You strive for no less than a comprehensive industrialization of the German ocean areas and in your blind mania toss all sensibility overboard. 

            Renate Künast (Greens): Blah, blah, blah! 

If you would interest yourselves with the same élan for the citizens of this country as for the EU’s planning target – in regards the latter, your wet dream becomes true – I would need not stand here today, Frau Künast. You skew German planning, environment and conservation law as you would lead the Bitterfeld chemical combine or a sweatshop in Bangladesh – all in the name of the eco-socialism for an establishment of the green world order. 

You endanger international shipping by which you negligently shorten the clearance of the monster wind parks through the shipping routes. 4,200 meters does not correspond to the requirements of modern shipping. Your ignorance of safety aspects thus endangers human lives and increases the danger of shipwrecks with consequent disastrous environmental catastrophes. Just three years ago, you forbade balloons to the children and replaced plastic straws with paper straws contaminated with perfluorooctanoic acid. Now you want to take care that we release into the sea each year hundreds of tons of microplastic abrasions per windpower park – each year, hundreds of tons of microplastics. Your double morality will here be exceeded only by your economic incompetence, since a customer or circuits for your electricity and your hydrogen on land – that simply does not all exist. 

Let us remain with hydrogen, for which you plan offshore generation. In times in which the German industry cites the energy costs as emigration and insolvency reason number one, you want to establish the hydrogen from offshore electricity as a new energy carrier. Okay, let’s look for once at what that costs. For one kilowatt-hour of hydrogen is needed around three kilowatt-hours for the electrolysis. One kilowatt-hour from your monster park costs for the generation around ten cents per kilowatt-hour. 

            Renate Künast (Greens): Can you speak somewhat more lightly? We are                                    not listening!

We would thus already be at 30 cents in energy costs per kilowatt-hour of hydrogen – pure  energy costs. The production and write-off costs of the electrolysis installations in the midst of the corrosive ocean environment are still not figured in. Just to recall: This government, this coalition, introduced a cap on gas prices of 12 cents per kilowatt-hour so that the gas prices not lead to the impoverishment of the people and the ruin of the German economy. And the same government with the same coalition wants to establish a future energy carrier for which today alone we need to contribute 30 cents per kilowatt-hour in energy costs. Thus, dear coalition, he who needs to use this hydrogen of yours, he can toss the money roll directly into the oven. 

Yet the economy nevertheless still only plays a subordinate role in the Economy Ministry. In the law’s statement of purpose it is quite openly named – cite: 

“The changes are adopted to align Germany’s entire line, its entire climate, energy and economic policy, to the 1.5 degree climate defense path…”

Aha, the German economy, the motor of our prosperity, is for this government only a hindrance which needs to be overcome on the way to the red-green Utopia. This government deliberately incinerates umpteen billion euros in tax money for the construction of a deformed energy system which robs this nation of its entire ability to compete. And the only profiteers will be foreign states, multinational investors and additional subvention appendages. 

To sabotage the output power of our economy by means of over-expensive and scarce energies endangers our prosperity, the future of our children and the social security of our nation. A fundamental change of course in the German energy policy is thus absolutely necessary, and in place of the fulfillment of socialist planning, a cool, virtuous reason needs again to enter. Yet there is this change of course only with the Alternative für Deutschland. 

 

[trans: tem]

Rainer Kraft, April 10 2024, Energy Policy and Politics

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/162, pp. 20812-20813. 

Right honorable President. Valued colleagues. 

After many errors and confusions, the Union again professes nuclear power. This could be debated long, wide and sarcastically. Yet I simply leave it and say: Welcome back to the rational side of German energy policy. 

This is besides an energy policy represented by the AfD since 2013, thus from the time of our formation. Your obligatory expressions for an acknowledgment of the renewables of course still appear in a motion, yet have already retired from your demands, and that is a step forward. Finally recognized is that a reliable and economic electricity supply with contingent energies, dependent on season and weather, is not feasible, and is thus a risk for Germany as a business venue. 

Herr Träger, last weekend, electricity customers needed to pay up to 56 euros per megawatt-hour in electricity disposal costs so that the German excess electricity production could be dumped in foreign countries. 

Generally, a comparison with foreign countries, for example France which you so readily criticize, is eye-opening. German is faced with around 500 billion euros in system integration costs for the massive construction of the network. France does not need this construction. France will not need a hydrogen core network for 20 billion euros. 

            Harald Ebner (Greens): Nevertheless!

France does not need 16 billion euros every 20 years for large electricity storage facilities. And electricity disposal costs for excess electricity no French electricity customer will ever need pay. 

            Beatrix von Storch (AfD): Hear, hear!

Yet what France does have, Herr Träger, are emission values of around 20 grams CO₂ per kilowatt-hour of electricity. I venture in this place a prognosis: With your energy policy, Germany will never achieve this value. 15 million tons of CO₂ – for the science-adverse Ampel coalition, the most dangerous substance on Earth – since the final exit from nuclear power in 2023 will each year additionally be emitted in the German energy sector. 

             Harald Ebner (Greens): Wrong! Wrong! Less than ever!

To 2030, that will total up to around 90 million tons of CO₂. For the Ampel, it’s all the same. 

            Harald Ebner (Greens): No, that’s simply not right! Fake news!

Dear colleagues of the SPD, Greens and FDP, finally admit that, for you, CO₂ emissions are all the same! For you, it’s only about an ideology, business nepotism for the re-distribution of tax billions, and the patronizing of the citizens. Throughout Europe, the hydrogen preliminary projects are dying:           

            Harald Ebner (Greens): Remain with the atom!

Lately, the H₂ Sines Rotterdam project in the billions; earlier, the German lighthouse project “West Coast 100” in Heide. Other projects like Uniper in Rotterdam are put off for the present. Nevertheless, billions in tax monies, provided for in means of promotion, die in one project after another. Yet in the BMWK [Economy and Climate Ministry], one continues to ride the dead hydrogen horse. 

It is thus right and important that the Union sees it as does the AfD, and that the society-splitting firewall falls in the energy policy. Doubts are nevertheless brought up, dear Union. The Union demands forbidding the decommissioning until a new government can conclusively clarify the question. It naturally needs be said more precisely: Until a new Chancellor and his coalition partner decide this. Since it well needs be asked, dear Union. How, with a Green coalition partner, do you want to introduce the fundamental, required change of direction in the German energy policy? 

Dear Union, if you seriously mean it with the return of nuclear energy and an end of the catastrophic green energy policy, then one thing is clear: The firewall must go! 

            Harald Ebner (Greens): Oje, oje!

To sum up. Dear colleagues, your motion goes in the right direction. We agree with it, even if it is faint-hearted and lets miss precisely what this country in the present economic situation urgently requires: A basic avowal for a fundamental, long-term and reliable change of direction in the German energy policy. Since the contingent energies with immense integration costs do not deliver what our industry and citizens need. You thus have a choice: Either you sell out the welfare of our country in an ideological coalition with the Greens, or you decide for cooperation in energy policy with the AfD. 

 

[trans: tem]

Rainer Kraft, October 20, 2023, Hydrogen

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/132, pp. 16606-16607. 

Right honorable Frau President. Valued colleagues. 

The speaking time is brief, yet despite that I need to begin with a joke which the colleague Spaniel told to me here – an engineer joke: The hydrogen, that was the technology of the future; the hydrogen, it is the technology of the future; and the hydrogen, it will also in the future be the technology of the future. 

Michael Kruse (FDP): You simply have nothing to do with a future!

I know: One needs know what a MINT-Fach [Mathematics Engineering Science Technology subject] is, otherwise one does not understand. 

            Götz Frömming (AfD): The Greens are still thinking!

Dear Union, your motion for a hydrogen start-up is completely out of date. The hydrogen strategy was of 2020, thus two decades after the beginning of the failed energy transition,  invented by irresponsible Union politicians so as to save what was no more at at all to be saved. The simple truth is: Hydrogen will not be able to store our electricity in sufficient quantities. 

Since then were billions of euros distributed in research of little purpose so as to ascertain what we all already knew: That hydrogen squanders enormous quantities of energy for manufacture, which we certainly do not have, its storage and transport ability is poor, and its employment quickly has every associated cost at an astronomical height. In the Pkw [passenger vehicle] area, despite your expensive resuscitation efforts, the hydrogen has already twice died. In the bus, trucking and trains area, hydrogen still appears in press articles. Yet the Union again rides a dead horse and thereby hopes to alter the laws of Nature. 

Yet in this the Union is not alone. The Ampel also pays its respects to the dead Gaul. There ultimately is tax money to distribute and posts to be filled with friends and acquaintances. The Ampel can thereby not generally disguise its own cognitive dissonance. According to the Ampel, the same hydrogen is inappropriate for home heating. Why? Because it is too expensive. Yet at the same time these same charlatans assert that the same hydrogen will be sufficiently economic to produce globally competitive green steel and green chemicals in Germany. That does not everywhere go together; thus you either deceive just yourselves, or yet deceive here your sovereign, namely the German people. 

While you thus merrily annihilate additional workplaces, the German citizens shall be forced to install heating pumps because these have a higher efficiency than hydrogen. Yet neither the SPD nor the Greens nor the FDP can guarantee the constant availability of electricity from wind and sun. How thus shall the people heat when Mother Nature someday leaves the German planned economy in the lurch? To that, the progressive coalition, ja, once again has no answer. 

This planned economy of yours also does not stop at the German border. With a new form of colonialism you want to generate energy in foreign states and allow transport back to Germany without a coverage of local requirements. Your entire post-colonial hypocrisy was well summarized by Antonio Osvaldo Saide, Vice-minister for Resources and Energy of the Mozambique Republic: That of course a nation, in which only every second generally has an electrical connection, can besides have no energy for export as long as not everyone in the country has access to economic energy. 

            Götz Frömming (AfD): That is all the same to the Greens!

This position, which he communicated to us at his visit in Berlin, I and my delegation completely share. 

Back to the rainbow colors of the Union’s hydrogen fantasies. In regards all of your color scenarios is noticed that one color in your spectrum is lacking: The so-called red hydrogen, made from nuclear energy. Yes, that would have been a very good opportunity to produce hydrogen competitively and approaching a coverage of costs. Yet unfortunately you, ladies and gentlemen of the Union, have already refused twelve years ago the branch upon which you so happily want to sit. 

Dear Union, your hydrogen fairy tales stop here. Your motion does not perch in the realm of reality, but bestirs itself in a post-factual fantasy world. There is no energy for that from unreliable wind and solar power and there never will be. Your motion is pure wishful thinking and we therefore reject it. 

 

[trans: tem]

Rainer Kraft, July 6, 2023, Emissions Decree

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/115, p. 14242. 

Esteemed President. Valued colleagues.

 The 31^st decree presented for the enforcement of the Federal emissions protection law is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Duty-bound, the protection of labor and environment is addressed, and you promise the new, the healed world. Yet, thought through to the end, your assessment means the zero harm strategy, that the safest workplace is no workplace, and that the most environmentally friendly production is to be a production outside of Germany. 

Chemistry, ladies and gentlemen, chemistry is life; life which you gladly wish to comprehensively control and regulate. Your planned economy shall thereby be in reality implemented by legions of self-named consultants, institutes and agents. You create entirely new job descriptions without any productive activity – to the harm of the entire nation and its citizens who everyday stand at the value-creation front.    

I know, you can only with difficulty imagine; solvents in industry are indispensable. They make possible the manufacture of chemicals, undertake cleaning chores, support the production fabrication, and assist in the optimization of the surface area; in regards corrosion protection, phosphating, chromating, anodization, etching, painting, and in regards to thousands of additional uses which you want to restrict and make more expensive. 

You assert that an intensification of the emissions protection would have no effect on the consumer prices. That – and it needs be said quite clearly – is a lie, and a bad one at that. For of course added certifications cost money. Of course additional expertise costs money. Of course additional bureaucratic positions in Brussels cost money. And of course the unnecessary re-equipment of industrial installations costs money. 

It is the taxpayers’ money which you here, with your dream of an eco-socialist Utopia, throw out the window by the handful. Many, many small and mid-sized businesses require in one form or another simple solvents. What else remains for these businesses as a result of your price hustling than to shift the costs onto their customers? 

As if that were not enough, the product quality will also suffer. The quality of paints and colors will diminish. Metals will rust sooner; woods will more quickly rot. Your reducing plan is the way back to the Dark Ages. That has something to do neither with sustainability nor with environmental protection. It will simply cost money and workplaces. 

We of the AfD say no; no to your irrational fear of everything which human ingenuity and the urge to create has brought forward; no to your agenda hostile to economy and freedom, and no to measures which serve environmental protection only on paper. The Federal emissions protection decree should serve the German people and not put together an additional stimulus program for India or China. We, the AfD, want to export goods, not workplaces. We reject the decree.

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

  

 

 

Rainer Kraft, March 31, 2023, Nuclear Power

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/95, pp. 11423-11424.

Honored President. Valued colleagues.

For over 60 years, the German nuclear power plants have supplied our country with safe, economic [preiswert], and sustainable electricity. In 15 days, this German success story shall go to an end. In Bavaria, the nuclear plant Isar 2 goes from the network after 35 years of productive operation in which 404 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity were produced. That corresponds to nearly the entire amount of electricity generated in Germany by photovoltaic, generated from just one nuclear power plant. From this place, a hearty thank you to all the nuclear power workers who have made possible this engine of prosperity.

In so far as one wants a well-to-do, competitive industrial nation, and does not have the good fortune to be geographically blessed with geothermal or much water, one needs to produce in another way his reliable and economic electricity. That then occurs by means of burning carbon materials or by the use of nuclear fission, since contingent energy like wind and sun are not compatible with the attribute “reliable”. All nations worldwide follow this pattern; there are no exceptions. The laws of physics are stronger than ideology.  

Germany is therein the wrong-way driver of global energy policy. Nowhere is this so clear as in the question of nuclear energy. Despite a global energy crisis, the Federal government clings to the withdrawal decision and wants next month to take from the network nuclear power plants with 4,000 megawatts of economic and low CO₂ output. By 2022, these three nuclear power plants have generated around 32 terawatt-hours of energy. This energy in the coming year will be bitterly lacking for industry and our citizens.

To generate these amounts of electricity in Germany, 10,000 wind energy installations, or eight to ten gas power plants, need to be erected as a replacement. Here, we put the question, dear government: Where are these replacement constructions? To where can I drive to see them? To where can I drive to reach them? Then comes the answer: This replacement simply does not exist. In the past year, 2022, despite all the money squandering in Germany, just a net 213, instead of 10,000, windmills were erected – 213 instead of 10,000 installations which were certainly needed so as to replace the energy of just three remaining nuclear power plants. And how many gas power plants were built? None were built; a replacement was not made. That means, you take production from the network without making a replacement. The consequences  are further energy scarcities and rising prices for taxpayers and consumers who already stand before financial ruin as a result of other government measures and the inflation of the common currency.

How does it look outside of Germany? You may want to deny it, yet nuclear power is economic. France wants to build fourteen new nuclear power plants, Poland six, the Netherlands two, Czechia two, Slovakia two, Hungary two, the United Kingdom four, etc. – yes, that can be applauded. – One sees: All responsible governments take care for reliable, economic and green electricity for their citizens and for their industry.

            Maik Aussendorf (Greens): They are subvention diggers!

And what does our government do? They take economic and reliable electricity from the market and burn much more expensive gas. In the end, private and industrial electricity customers pay the bill – to the harm of the entire Republic.

Our Economy Minister hoped for a mild winter, and he got it.

Stephan Brandner (AfD): Thanks to climate change! Otherwise, there would have been nothing!

He will nevertheless not be able to rely on it. The gas supply is indeed stable at a high level. That however is based on that we have simply bought out the market for gas from the developing and rising countries. The consequence is that countries in southern Asia, as for example Pakistan, have announced to quadruple their energy production from coal power. The consequence of your ideological withdrawal from nuclear power plants is then thus a global increase of CO₂ emissions – and that, even though you here ever, ever and ever again stress that for you the CO₂ removal is the most important of all. Apparently, that is not so.

The result: After 20 years of energy transition, the citizens know that the supposed minimal additional cost of an ice cream cone was a willful falsehood. The promises, that other than the generation methods nothing will change and price and reliability will remain the same, are exposed and seen through. Yet if the people are simply asked what to them in regards the energy supply is really important – electricity without nuclear powr plants on one side, or economic, reliable and truly green electricity on the other side – then is the vote of the sovereign clear, namely a distinct affirmation for nuclear power.

            Stephan Brandner (AfD): And that is right!

If electricity and energy in Germany are thus to be economic and reliable, if our industry is to meet with competitive parameters,  and if our citizens are not to be impoverished by their electricity bill, then this nation needs to go the way of other people’s communities and provide large quantities of economic, reliable, modern and by all means also low CO₂ energy for the welfare of the state.

            Wolfgang Kubicki (FDP): Herr colleague, please come to a conclusion.

That means: Continued operation of the three remaining installations, ordering new fuel rods and, yes, an affirmation for construction of new nuclear installations.

 

[trans: tem]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rainer Kraft, October 20, 2022, Energy Security

German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/63, pp. 7097-7099.

Right honorable President. Valued colleagues.

It is, ja, meanwhile a platitude that, due to a false energy policy, Germany has fallen into existential difficulties and that here reprimand of the Russian aggressive war simply helps nothing. Since already in the spring of 2019, thus three years prior to the Russian invasion, the German energy policy was quite appropriately designated by the Wall Street Journal as the world’s “dumbest energy policy”.

Throughout the country, the country arms itself against the dangers of unprecedented electricity outages or even many hours of electricity shutdowns; and that, even though Germany according to the statements of responsible ministers has at no time today an electricity problem. At the same time, since 2020, power plant capacities of 8 gigawatts for nuclear energy and around 10 gigawatts for coal-generated electricity have been withdrawn. That at least the latter was not so good an idea, the government has sufficiently demonstrated with the introduction of the replacement power plant readiness law. In parallel, Germany now enacts two laws. With one of the laws is demanded the ban on the operation of any coal power plant, and the second permits again the operation of precisely these coal power plants. What energy policy nonsense! The same will be expected of us in regards nuclear power. One law will need come about which permits one operation, even though by law the operation is nevertheless actually forbidden.

It appears similarly in regards to natural gas. To generate methane from so-called unconventional generation methods, colloquially designated as “fracking”, is forbidden in Germany. At the same time, the import of fracking gas generated in foreign countries has been massively increased. For that, an extra law was created, the so-called LNG acceleration law. This then again allows things which, from the right, would otherwise naturally be forbidden.

These examples show us quite clearly: The German energy policy is hopelessly stuck and will only be kept alive by means of makeshift cobbling. The costs for these fading patients, called an energy policy, are thereby so great that they are no longer able to be shouldered by a constantly increasing number of private and business purchasers. And the consequences are the emigration of value-creating industry and the impoverishment of the people.

What this and the preceding government obviously have not understood: Energy is the basis of our prosperity, it is for our economy and people as important as oxygen is for us; and for that, sufficient quantities have to be available and may not by means of costs unnecessarily burden the customer.

The energy policy of the past twenty years has however done the opposite of this. New forms of energy production were established with billions in tax money,

Timon Gremmels (SPD): And atomic was not subsidized, or what? Atomic power was always free of charge?

although no evidence existed for the technical feasibility of these ventures.

Before the replacement of tested methods of energy production, questions of the reliability and questions of the regionality of generation from a technical viewpoint ought to have been asked, this concept of the so-called renewables needed to be tested on a small scale so as to investigate the feasibility and real costs. In such an effort, it then would have been quite quickly noted that the price lay far above that of an ice cream cone and that the reliability of the supply of energy is faulty.

Timon Gremmels (SPD): The most economic form of energy production is photovoltaic, mein Gott!

Yet that was not done. Unprofessional, – here, certainly one cries out clearly – over-paid people without presentable credentials, with Luddite zeal wrecked all the technique and fundamentals of the energy basis of this country.

Last week we in the Bundestag had a visit of a Ukrainian colleague from the Verkovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. The chairman of the gas committee, Andrei Zhupanyn, depicted for us in moving words how the Ukraine’s present energy infrastructure is being destroyed by targeted Russian attacks. The goal of Russia is obvious. The Ukraine, by means of the destruction of the potentialities for generating, distributing or even selling energy, shall be forced to its knees.  

For that, here n Germany, is required neither rockets nor bombs nor Iranian kamikaze drones; since the foundations of the energy supply are being demolished by the government itself.

Since 2011, for example, 14 modern nuclear power plant blocks have been idled,

            Bernhard Herrmann (Greens): Shame on you!

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): Shame on you!

with a rated power output of 20 gigawatts – power plants which presently not only for the Ukraine would be finger-lickin’ good – and you have disconnected them.    

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): That is just unbelievable!

So as to make that clear, an example:

            Ingrid Nestle (Greens): Is your motion actually about the inquest commission?

If we still had 17 nuclear power plants, then the energy produced by these could be projected at approximately 180 terawatt-hours.

            Bernhard Herrmann (Greens): Come to the theme!

The entire production of electricity from coal and gas in the past year, 2021, was 240 terawatt-hours. And that means that two-thirds of the fossil energy production could have been replaced in the past year by nuclear energy. So much for your alleged climate saving measures. The same also applies for this year 2022, in which the government now begs after gas and coal. If we had nuclear energy, we need not send packing the town of Lützerath.

The energy carriers extolled by the government, wind and solar, have in 2021 delivered only about 150 terawatt-hours. And that means: After 20 years of permanent subsidization, these chance energies do not do it, even only for substituting for the performance of nuclear power plants, and here nothing is to be said of a replacement of coal and gas. These are the hard facts in your energy transition fairy tales.

I ask myself, where should all this lead to? Quite simply: The goal is that Germany again has an energy supply which corresponds to the guidelines of the Agenda 2030: Affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern. That will be the duty of this commission.

Because here the entire time come objections to the so-called renewables: No one questions the capability of wind industry installations and photovoltaic to be able to produce electricity. It would also be an outstanding and good thing if the amount of generation would be adapted to the corresponding consumption.

That unfortunately is as good as never the case. We therefore must continually grasp at expensive replacement measures so as to bridge the entire deficit.

             Bernhard Herrmann (Greens): Perhaps both can be done! Then it is better suited.

In the future then, energy which is generated shall be converted into a storable form, so as then to be activated in times of continual under-production. It is then necessarily the goal to generate vast additional amounts of energy so as to compensate for the thereby occurring losses. This is presently a megalomaniacal idea. Since not only should the present energy supply be replaced one for one, but, beyond that, giant amounts of energy should be generated with the only purpose of compensating for the gigantic transformation losses – into the hydrogen, out of the hydrogen, into the battery, out of the battery – thus, generating energy with the only purpose of again squandering it.

            Bernhard Herrmann (Greens): Nonsense!

            Norbert Kleinwächter (AfD): It is so!

            Enrico Komning (AfD): It is logical to me!

The evaluation concerns now only the electricity sector. Yet will be increased by many magnitudes when you shall, as planned, take hold of the entire primary energy sector. 

We confirm: The energy sector in Germany is in considerable need of reform. The government meanwhile tinkers with the symptoms in monthly reports.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): The symptoms are a Russian war of aggression!

On that account, it is time that the legislative branch gets back to the roots so as to re-direct onto the right track, onto the right path, the energy policy, the basis of this country’s welfare.

            Timon Gremmels (SPD): That was nothing, to be sure!

            Enrico Komning (AfD): Everyone should have understood that!

 

[trans: tem]