Staudinger Power Station Expansion

Staudinger Power Station Expansion is a proposal by E.ON Kraftwerke for a 1,100 megawatt station with a notional commissioning date of 2013 and a construction cost of €1.2 billion.

Future location of Staudinger Power Station Expansion - approximate area only

Background
Staudinger is an existing power station is at Grosskrotzenburg near Hanau. It was announced in November 2012 that E.ON shelved the its plans to add an additional 1,100 MW unit at the same location, but did not cancel the project altogether.

Power Station Proposal
Power in Europe reported that in February 2008 the "state elections give no clear outcome, and so no clear guide on planning yet." It also noted that the company's plans to have construction start in "late 2008" "but had been "delayed at least a year, as E.ON seeks local planning consents amid environmental opposition. Planned start-up slips to 2013." In June 2008 Power in Europe noted that "despite local and state opposition" E.ON "lodged an application for a permit under the federal protection against emissions law on May 23, after making an application under local planning procedures in April. Ironically, on May 21 the state of Hesse’s parliamentary economic and transport committee voted against the planned coal plant on environmental grounds." E.ON proposes that following the commissioning of the new station it would decommission the existing three units: 1 and 2 both have 250 megawatts installed capacity while unite 3 is 300 megawatts. E.ON is defending the proposal on the grounds that the new plant would be 20% more efficient than the existing units and therefore it would 'save' 1.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

In February 2009, E.ON announced that they would build a 1 megawatt pilot Carbon Capture and Storage plant at the site. Reuters reported that a spokeswoman for Siemens said that the pilot plant would cost less than 10 million euros and would be run on "flue gas from Staudinger's unit 5 between mid-2009 and the end of 2010."

Permit for Staudinger plant
On December 29, 2010, E.ON AG received approval from a governing council of the state of Hesse to build a sixth coal-fired power generation block at the Staudinger site with a capacity of 1.1 gigawatts. The new EUR1.2 billion plant would replace three old generation units built in the 1960s and 1970s. In a written statement, however, the company said it won't make a final decision to build the facility until it has weighed up the legal issues surrounding likely lawsuits that opponents of the project have previously announced. In a separate statement, the Darmstadt-based governing council said the first approval for the Staudinger plant allows E.ON to build facilities such as the power plant's boiler and engine houses or its cooling tower. Approval for the actual operation of the power plant hasn't yet been issued, the governing council said. It added, however, that the first partial approval includes "fundamental regulations" that E.ON has to abide to when eventually operating the plant.

E.ON has also faced legal challenges at a similar power plant project in western Germany, the Datteln Power Station.

E.ON had previously said it sticks to its plan to build the new Staudinger power plant despite partner Stadtwerke Hannover's decision earlier this year to exit the project. Stadtwerke Hannover, the local utility of the northern German city of Hanover, in November 2010 said it will sell its last remaining 12.6% in the Staudinger project to E.ON due to the German government's new energy policies that affect the profitability of coal-fired power plants - the federal government in September 2010 presented an energy policy to 2050, which includes extending the legal operating lives of the country's 17 nuclear power plants.

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