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Ideological blinkers
More worrying perhaps is that the ODS‘ ideological blinkers on green issues could prevent it solving some of the Czech Republic’s biggest domestic challenges.
The first challenge is the need to reduce the country’s damaging dependency on Russian oil, gas and nuclear fuel and technology, a goal that should in theory reinforce the shift away from fossil fuels but could conflict with it in the short term because of the risk of energy shortages.
Czechia depends on Russia for 87% of its gas and virtually all its oil. This week rating agency Moody’s changed its outlook for the country’s credit rating to negative because of this dependence.
Here the government is united – all the coalition parties are strongly anti-Putin – even if there is still some debate on what energy sources the country should prioritise as substitutes, with the Pirates less keen on the nuclear option preferred by the other parties.
Neighbouring Poland has used the crisis over Russian
fuel sources to try to increase coal production again and
to temporarily slow down the green transition – a talking point that billionaire populist and former premier Andrej Babiš has also begun to toy with, along with ambivalence on confronting Russia.
But so far the Czech government, like Viktor Orban’s régime in Hungary, has instead used the crisis to double down on its bet on nuclear energy, rather than pursue green options. It strongly supported the EU compromise pursued by the previous Babiš government on including nuclear power as a sustainable energy source.
The Babiš government had also already excluded Russia from the tender to build new reactors at the Dukovany nuclear
power plant and the current cabinet has taken steps to switch completely to using non-Russian fuel.
Oil and gas remain more problematic because previous governments did little to reduce this dependency. A previous ODS government began sourcing Norwegian gas supplies
but Babiš‘ government had allowed this to lapse. Babiš was also recently accused by Bohuslav Sobotka, a former Social Democrat PM, of deliberately derailing the project of building a gas pipeline connecting Czech eastern regions in Moravia with the recently built Polish LNG terminal.
“Czechia depends on Russia for 87% of its gas and virtually all
its oil. This week rating agency Moody’s changed its outlook for the country’s credit rating to negative because of this dependence”
So far the government, through its majority state-owned energy company CEZ, has secured 3bn cubic metres of annual gas capacity via an LNG terminal in the Netherlands. It is also moving swiftly to fill the country’s gas storage facilities (currently they are at 77% capacity). Nevertheless, the government has said that a full embargo on Russian gas would be extremely damaging.
On oil, the government is also in a very weak position, though it successfully managed to win an exception from the EU sanctions for oil pipeline supplies, putting off the threat of
a shortfall for now.
Czechia has excluded Russia from the tender to build new reactors at the Dukovany nuclear power plant and the current cabinet has taken steps to switch completely to using non-Russian fuel. / bne IntelliNews
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