According to Ilse Aigner, President of the State Parliament, the CSU’s opposition to the construction of new power lines was a mistake. This is another reason why Bavaria is “more dependent than others on nuclear power plants for electricity and there are bottlenecks in the lines from north to south”, said the boss of the Oberbayern-CSU time online.
Aigner emphasized that in 2015, as Bavarian Minister of Energy, she had campaigned for the routes to the then Prime Minister Horst Seehofer and the then Minister of Home Affairs Markus Söder (all CSU), but could not get her way. “Unfortunately, I didn’t always get through with the facts,” said Aigner. Nevertheless, the criticism that Bavaria has overslept the expansion of renewable energies is “to a large extent” unjustified, stressed Aigner. “We are clearly at the forefront when it comes to expanding solar energy, hydroelectric power and biomass.”
At the same time, she warned against further escalating the dispute between the federal states in the energy crisis: “If you try to weaken the south, the north will soon run out of money too. You can calculate how much money comes from the south every year flows into the financial equalization of the federal states. Nobody can have an interest in weakening the industrial location in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.”
In order to make their contribution to the energy crisis, they now take shorter showers, said Aigner: “We don’t have to pay for every kilowatt hour that we don’t use as a society,” she said. In the state elections in Bavaria in 2023, the CSU will fight for Söder’s re-election, said Aigner, who was meanwhile considered the fiercest competitor: “He is without a doubt a very strong Prime Minister, that is obvious, undisputedly very hard-working and very assertive. The CSU is nevertheless only strong as a team, but Markus Söder knows that too.”