Spain’s Sanchez Tells ‘Ultra-Rich’ Executives to Pay for Nuclear

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(Bloomberg) — Spain’s high-earning electricity executives should pay the cost to keep nuclear plants running if they don’t want to shut them down, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said, as he seeks to deflect criticism over a record power outage.

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One condition to review a plan to close nuclear power plants is that it’s financially viable “and not at a cost to taxpayers’ pockets but at a cost to the pockets of the ultra-rich executives who run the energy companies that own nuclear plants,” Sanchez said Wednesday in Parliament, speaking about the outage for the first time since last week. 

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Sanchez has a history of clashing with companies and executives publicly, sometimes by naming them personally. Among past targets are Banco Santander SA Chairwoman Ana Botin and the chairmen of Ferrovial SA and Iberdrola SA, Rafael del Pino and Ignacio Galan.

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The Spanish government has yet to explain the cause of the April 28 blackout — the country’s largest ever — and why the state-backed grid operator failed to prevent it. Although the government has said that determining the causes will require analyzing millions of data points, critics say that one reason may be that the high-voltage grid has become too reliant on renewable energy and less on more-stable sources, such as nuclear. 

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Power companies have for more months been calling for a 2019 plan to phaseout nuclear plants by 2035 to be reconsidered. While the government has been mostly reluctant to do so, it has recently been toning down its position and has said that it will consider a review if the companies make proposals on how this would be done — as long as it’s not at the expense of public coffers. The nuclear operators, which include Iberdrola, EDP SA and Endesa SA, have said that nuclear plants are not financially viable and require new financial incentives. 

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“I have met with these businessmen like I’ve met with many others,” Sanchez said in Parliament Wednesday, in reference to electricity company executives. “They told me that of course they wanted to shut down nuclear reactors because they don’t generate profit or are financially competitive. We won’t make citizens put their health at risk or pay higher electricity bills so some companies keep getting richer.”

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Spain has deployed large amounts of solar capacity over the past five years, with spending on the grid relative to clean power investment lagging behind other major European economies, according to BloombergNEF. Nuclear energy accounts for about 20% of the overall power mix.

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