At ten o’clock on Saturday morning, the government summit will examine the talks with Engie. The Prime Minister will provide an update on the negotiations in a digital meeting. No agreement has been reached with Engie at the moment.
Prime Minister Alexander De Croo (Open VLD) said just before the Christmas break that he still intended to close the deal with Engie before the end of the year to keep the two youngest nuclear power plants open longer. The promise to reach a final agreement with Engie by the end of the year was made in July. At the time, the two had already concluded an agreement in principle that Engie itself still labeled as non-binding. It was the first step Engie was lured into the trap, but an insufficient step to force Engie to actually make that extension work with actions.
• Will the light stay on after 2026?
The agreement that is currently being worked on should make that commitment much more binding with a new step, and should above all ensure that Engie and the nuclear watchdog Fanc begin preparations for Doel 4 and Tihange 3 as soon as possible after the holidays of Christmas. opened ten years longer from 2026. Because there is still a long process before the extension. That’s why an agreement needs to be reached quickly, even if it won’t happen a day or so. ‘It’s not like the lights go out if there’s no agreement tonight’, the deadline is strongly scaled even within Vivaldi himself.
The deadline for the new year is above all a political deadline that De Croo has imposed on himself. But if the agreement is not reached until next week, there will be no political problems either. Even then, political activity still proceeds at a slow pace. Parliament is still in its Christmas recess, so the prime minister won’t have to immediately run the gauntlet if the deal is finalized a little later. It is more important that the agreement is well defined.
Nuclear waste repository
And those negotiations are constructive but difficult, it was said on Friday. ‘With ups and downs’, one could hear. Elsewhere it has been said that progress is being made ‘millimeter by millimetre’. Prime Minister and Energy Minister Tinne Van der Straeten form together with their cabinet chiefs the core team. Several technical teams circle around him. Documents are sent back and forth. Trades are usually conducted physically, but can also be conducted by phone or video call if Engie CEO Catherine MacGregor is involved in the talks.
They are therefore very complex negotiations. First of all, greater clarity is expected on the distribution of the benefits and burdens of the extension. It was agreed in the summer that the younger nuclear power plants would be placed in a separate company, of which Engie and the government would each own half. Day-to-day management of this remains in Engie’s hands. These negotiations should, for example, shed a little more light on how much the government has to contribute to the company to acquire half of the nuclear power plants and how exactly the costs for waste disposal resulting from the grant will be shared.
Also, the key question remains how much money Engie should allocate for past waste disposal. Engie wants a maximum bill. But it’s not easy to record until it’s clear how and where nuclear waste will be disposed of. It is already clear that this will be an agreement with many outstanding issues, but with enough rules to resolve those outstanding issues so that the first effective steps towards an extension can be taken.
