Tinne Van der Straeten

Tinne Van der Straeten
Tinne Van der Straeten
Minister of Energy
	Incumbent
	Assumed office ; 1 October 2020
Monarch	Philippe
Prime Minister	Alexander De Croo
Preceded by	Marie-Christine Marghem
Member of the Chamber of Representatives
	In office; 20 June 2019 – 1 October 2020
Constituency	Brussels
	In office; 28 June 2007 – 7 May 2010
Constituency	Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde
Personal details
Born	1 April 1978 (age 46); Malle, Belgium
Political party	Groen
Residence(s)	Koekelberg, Belgium
Alma mater	Ghent University; Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Occupation	Politician;
Website	Official website

Tinne Van der Straeten (born 1 April 1978) is a Belgian politician who has been serving as Minister of Energy in the De Croo Government since October 2020. She is a member of the Groen party. She previously served in the Chamber of Representatives for Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde from 2007 to 2010 and later for Brussels from 2019 until 2020, when she resigned to become energy minister.

Early life and education

In 2000, Van der Straeten obtained a degree in

Agalev and she was active in Malle. In 2008, she obtained a law degree at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel

.

Political career

IAEA

meeting Tinne Van der Straeten in 2023

In the

Belgian federal parliament for the first time. Three years later, in the 2010 elections, she wasn't re-elected. In 2018, Van der Straeten re-enters the political foreground. She becomes alderman of Public Works in Koekelberg^[1]

and a candidate for the 2019 federal elections on the Ecolo list in Brussels where she was re-elected as a representative. In her second passage in the Chamber, she worked out an agreement on the capacity remuneration mechanism.

Following the

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Van der Straeten led her party's policy shift of extending the life-span of Belgium's remaining nuclear power plants.^[2] By July 2022, she reached an agreement in principle with energy provider Engie to extend the lifespan of two nuclear reactors — Doel 4 and Tihange 3 — by 10 years.^[3]

In May 2022 she announced that Belgium would be funding work on small modular reactors of 25 million euros a year for four years.[4]