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Gas-powered combined heat and power plant from Stadtwerke Tübingen: It generates electrical energy and heat at the same time based on the principle of combined heat and power
Photo:
ULMER press photo agency / IMAGO
Car heaven comes from Tübingen.
Headlining is the name of the textile covering inside a car. And the high-quality fabrics often come from Rösch.
A textile company founded in Tübingen in 1949, which is run as a family business in the third generation.
More than 500 people work for Rösch in fabric production on huge machines.
Nothing works in textile finishing without gas.
So far, the company has asserted itself in an extremely demanding market in Germany.
But if the gas tap is turned off this winter, production will come to a standstill.
If Rösch can no longer fulfill the delivery contracts, the customers are gone after a few days and do not come back.
An example of the impending industrial meltdown caused by a gas shortage.
Saving gas is the order of the day.
The FDP chairman Christian Lindner therefore demands that the generation of electricity from natural gas must be stopped immediately.
"We have a heat problem, not a power problem," said Green Party leader Ricarda Lang, rejecting Lindner's demand for longer operating times for the three remaining nuclear power plants.
Gas is not saved in this coalition dispute.
This would certainly be possible if political energy were focused on the concrete problem instead of conducting a fruitless debate about nuclear power.
We are not saving any gas simply by extending the lifespan of nuclear power plants.
This will only succeed if market conditions for gas-fired power generation are adjusted.
Robert Habeck had attempted to make natural gas so expensive through a penalty that generating electricity was no longer worthwhile and other power plants stepped in.
The FDP prevented that.
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The example of Stadtwerke Tübingen shows why gas-fired power generation has continued without restrictions.
The municipal utilities are the largest gas consumer in Tübingen, even ahead of the industrial companies.
Around 20 percent of the total consumption is burned in their combined heat and power plants, which generate electricity and district heating at the same time.
According to the current legal situation, this should remain the case even if the Rösch company has not received gas for a long time because private heating customers enjoy special protection.
In order to keep the apartments in Tübingen warm, one would not have to burn gas.
A district heating network always needs boilers for peak loads and as a safety reserve, and unlike natural gas engines, these can be fired with oil without any problems.
From a technical point of view, the changeover would be easy to implement, and oil is available in sufficient quantities.
However, the natural gas engines continue to run because it would mean an economic disaster for the public utility company to switch to oil operation.
This is only partly due to the relatively high oil price.
The real reason lies in the design of the German electricity market.
The Stadtwerke have already sold the power generation from their combined heat and power plants to Tübingen customers over the long term.
If they now stop generating electricity, which would go hand in hand with the switch to oil, they will have to buy the same amount of electricity on the exchange as a substitute to meet their delivery obligation.
However, electricity is currently about five times more expensive than the production costs in your own combined heat and power plant.
Because the public utilities have also bought the gas for a long time at a fraction of the current market price.
A forecast for the second half of the year shows that not using gas to generate electricity would result in a loss of around 14 million euros.
A municipal utility can do that
Economically, the calculation looks different.
Natural gas generation still accounts for around 12 percent of gas consumption.
About two-thirds of these are combined heat and power plants, which could generally be converted to oil-fired boilers.
This would quickly save more than 5 percent of the total gas consumption.
This is the largest currently untapped natural gas replacement opportunity.
It is possible that this amount of savings could just about prevent shutdowns for the industry.
Compared to the damage caused by an industrial meltdown, the cost to operators of switching to oil is small.
If you apply the conditions in Tübingen to the whole country, around 5 billion euros would have to be raised this winter.
That doesn't seem like too much to make industrial process shutdowns less likely.
Christian Lindner could follow up his demand for an end to gas-fired power generation with action.
He would have to offer operators of combined heat and power plants a premium for switching to boiler heating with oil.
The exact amount could be determined in a bidding process in which the operators name the amount they need to stop gas-fired power generation.
Depending on the offers and its own assessment of the situation, the federal government could then buy up the natural gas volumes released and reallocate them to industrial companies.
The question that remains to be clarified is where the electricity that is no longer generated in combined heat and power plants should come from.
Nuclear power plants could play a role here.
In extended operation, i.e. beyond the turn of the year, their output would be available on a similar scale to the failure of electricity generation with natural gas.
According to Robert Habeck's plan, Germany will have made itself independent of Russian gas by the winter after next, so that nuclear power would then no longer be necessary as a substitute for gas power.
As part of a package to reduce gas-fired power generation, an extension of the running times only makes sense until spring 2023.
The Greens could then say yes more easily.
On the other hand, anyone who starts an abstract dispute about the lifetime of nuclear power by 2024 will rightly receive a clear no as an answer.
So that car heaven continues to come from Tübingen, the FDP and the Greens should tackle the problem of natural gas power generation together.
