Germany's energy ministry has prepared draft legislation allowing coal and oil-fired reserve power plants to temporarily return to the open market, reports Argus citing sources

Germany's energy ministry has prepared draft legislation allowing coal and oil-fired reserve power plants to temporarily return to the open market, reports Argus citing sources.

Germany has run a tiered reserve system for years: plants moved into grid or capacity reserve are barred from selling into the market, and reactivation of mothballed coal and lignite units has been the recurring lever whenever gas supply or winter margins tighten. Episodes of this kind have followed a consistent sequence: draft legislation, Bundestag passage, then a window in which reserve units can offer commercially, typically framed as temporary and seasonal. The transmission channel is the German power curve, where returning dispatchable capacity compresses peak spreads and clean dark spreads, and secondarily hard coal and lignite burn, which competes with gas at the margin of the merit order. The actors are familiar: the economy and energy ministry has used this tool before under supply stress, and the operators concerned have previously kept reserve units staffed and fuelled precisely for this contingency. Worth watching is the size of the capacity tranche, the duration and trigger conditions written into the draft, and whether network agency approval follows, since those parameters have historically determined whether the supply addition is material to winter pricing or merely precautionary.