26 June 2024 Kpler
What would the power energy mix look like if far-right or far-left parties govern until 2050?
After the EU elections, Western Europe witnessed a rise of far-right parties gaining consensus. Contrary to the Green Deal, the emerging parties present a distinct vision of the current energy agenda in the EU. In this article, however, we take an agnostic approach and focus on France and Germany, presenting our assumptions about the potential power energy mixes that would arise if both left- and right-wing governments were elected.
Political energy agendas As a reference to the far right and far left scenarios we followed the following parties’ energy agenda:
Rassemblement National (RN), Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) for France and Alternative für Deutschland and Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSD) for Germany.
Firstly, let’s have a look at the right-wing parties:
Rassemblement National:
Opposition to wind energy: halt new wind farm projects and decommission existing ones
Emphasis on nuclear and gas: Extend the lifespan of current nuclear plants and build 20 new nuclear plants
Focus on hydroelectric and geothermal power, considering them more reliable. Liberalisation of concessions for hydroelectric dams
No clear stance on solar energy Reduction of VAT on fuels.
Alternative für Deutschland:
Abandon both the Paris Climate Agreement and the European Green Deal
Abandon the Renewable Energy Act used to fund renewable power expansion
Focus on resuming commercial relations with Russia: obtain cheap gas from Russia and immediately repair and commission the Nordstream pipelines (Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2)
Focus on returning to nuclear power
Focus on wind-farm decommissioning and tighten licensing rules for wind power turbines.
Abolish CO2 tax on heating oil, natural gas, gasoline, and diesel. 2 2050 energy mix scenarios
Moving opposite sides, here is a summary of the two left-wing parties:
Nouveau Front Populaire
Raising France's climate ambitions - new emission reduction target of 65% by 2030 (instead of 40% toda
100% of the energy mix based on renewable energies by 2050
Abandon coal-based energies
Abandon nuclear energy
Invest in hydropower, wind, solar and gas in the short term.
Bündnis Sahra Wagenknect
Phase-out from LNG, considered as an expensive gas source, and shift to cheap Russian oil and gas supply by signing long-term energy contracts
Expansion of gas-fired power stations
Development of a hydrogen economy and heat storage plants
Encourage R&D into storage solutions such as batteries
No mention about renewable energies
After analysing their energy agendas, we ran 6 very long-term energy mix scenarios: 2 “far-right” scenarios and 2 “far-left” scenarios based on the above assumptions. Finally, we present two reference scenarios for France and Germany by Kpler, based on current national policies and TSOs agendas as well as our expertise of market trends. Our models include the aggregation of all hourly supply-demand simulations and smaller sources of supply (biomass, geothermal, fossil oil) or interconnection flows, which are not directly shown here. It will not take into consideration installation costs (EPR, wind farms). Finally, volatility between years is due to the use of real weather conditions.
The two graphs above display France's monthly average potential energy mix from 2024 to 2050. The graph on the left corresponds to the “far-left scenario”, the one on the right corresponds to the “Far right scenario”. The charts are comparing monthly granularity demand and cumulative supply capacity.
The Far Left scenario displays a 100 TWh decrease in supplies. Despite the steep increase rate of wind and solar, the overall decrease is mainly due to the gradual phase out from nuclear and any fossil fuel source which currently represent around 70% of the French energy mix.
On the other hand, The "Far Right" shows a 100 TWh increase in total generation. The primary cause of this is the existence of nuclear energy, which maintains the nuclear share at roughly 75% by extending the lifespan of current units and adding new "EPR" nuclear plants (20 according to RN, 14 in this simulation). Moreover, it sees a gradual phase-out of wind power, with its share dropping to zero after 2044, and a modest increase in solar power. The total generation capacity reaches finally 820 TWh. This increase of supply does not compensate for the higher demand trend following the country's high electrification.
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