Admirers of Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War spoof, “Dr Strangelove: Or how I learnt to stop worrying and love the bomb”, might enjoy this assessment of Czech energy policy planning by my colleague Jan Ondřich. It first appeared in Platts Energy in East Europe in January 2012.

If there was an award for Energy Policy Absurdity of the Year, in the Czech Republic it would go to Messrs. Pazdera & Kocourek. The deputy minister of trade and industry, and his former minister are apparently the wise men behind the latest Czech energy policy draft. This draft must be the most absurd policy recommendation since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove urged Mr. President to fill a deep mine shaft with lots of good Americans at a ratio of ten females to every male, and in this way ensure that the US would repopulate itself faster than the USSR after the nuclear war triggered by Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper.

The Czech draft recommends that, in addition to the planned two new nuclear reactors at Temelín, a further eight 1,000-MW reactors be added to the existing generation fleet by 2060. Based on current costs, we calculate the cost of such an investment program to be between 40-60% of Czech GDP in 2010, and all this is to be invested without serious consideration of where the markets are heading and of the potential of alternative energy sources and energy savings in the next half century.

For example, the energy draft assumes that in 2030 the Czech Republic would export 41 TWh per year without addressing the question of to whom. We note that Germany plans to be importing only 34 TWh per year in its nuclear-free scenario, of which less than 5% would come from the Czech Republic.

The Czech draft presents four superficial scenarios, all of which assume that between 80-90% of Czech electricity would be generated from nuclear. The four scenarios differ only in the amount of renewable and gas based generation they assume, and the scenarios with the least amount of this type of generation are recommended. Czech planners do not bother themselves with the economics of the nuclear industry. Matters such as an appropriate fuel mix and the size of the future generation fleet are judged to be issues of Czech sovereignty and beyond the reach of cost-benefit analysis. The question of how much actual demand there might be for the planned electricity production is not even asked. The only issue tackled by Czech planners arising from having almost all generation based on nuclear is how to balance the grid in times when the output of the nuclear plants, which is difficult to regulate, exceeds demand. The proposed solution is worthy of Premier Kissov himself.

The draft recommends that, given the limited potential for pumped-storage hydro plants, Czech heating would be centralized as much as possible and that heating boilers would be heated by the excess electricity produced by the nuclear fleet in times of low demand. This is a somewhat surprising proposal given that demand for both electricity and heating in the Czech Republic is negatively correlated with temperatures. The demand for electricity is lowest in the summer months, when demand for heat happens to be low as well. Regulating demand in this way would have the effect of turning the Czech Republic into one large electric kettle.

Czech planners do not appear to be troubled by the fact that steam is a greenhouse gas, no doubt in deference to the opinion of our president, a vociferous climate change sceptic. Just as Brigadier General Ripper sees water fluoridation as a Commie plot to weaken American bodily fluids, so President Klaus rejects climate change theory as a green conspiracy aimed at undermining Czech sovereignty. Never mind that water is a scarce resource which can be used for drinking, irrigation and even electricity generation without it actually being vaporized.

With such planners in government, it is little wonder that the nuclear energy debate in the Czech Republic is mildly eccentric. In other parts of the world, advocates of nuclear generation argue that nuclear generation is a relatively cheap source of baseload electricity and so has its place in the generation mix. And opponents stress that this relative cheapness is based on low variable costs of production and that if all costs, including decommissioning, unlimited liability for accident, and treatment of used fuel were included, the economics of nuclear power would not be so competitive.

This debate is absent in the Czech Republic. Here the superiority of nuclear generation is taken for granted. No concessions are regarded as necessary to its opponents. One of the more ridiculous side effects of this mental block is that other policy decisions quite possibly as flawed and costly as the energy plan are justified by it.

Perhaps the best example is the government’s stated justification for supersonic fighter jets, which is to protect the country’s nuclear fleet from terrorist attack. A simple valuation model shows that, if you include the cost of acquiring and maintaining 14 supersonic fighters into the calculation, the long run marginal costs of a nuclear power plant, disregarding the cost of capital, increases by 10 per cent.

Looking forward to 2012, we, Czechs, can take comfort from the fact that our government’s nuclear energy vision is unlikely ever to materialize. This is because this plan, like so many before it, will vanish. In the course of this year, we shall find ourselves with no energy policy: that is to say, no clearly stated goals and no clearly defined processes to achieve these goals.