The construction of new wind and solar power facilities is more economic than the construction of new coal and gas power plants, says an information paper by the Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko Institut), writes Gerald Traufetter in German weekly Der ...
Almost 90 percent of bids from Germany’s second round of auctions for ground-mounted solar PV projects – which was carried-out in 2015 – have successfully been realised and will receive support, writes Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) in a press release. “ ...
72 percent of Germans say that the next government should decide on a timetable for the country’s coal exit, according to a representative survey by Kantar Emnid, commissioned by Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND). 59 percent of respondents said that ...
Germany’s major parties say that they are committed to the Paris Climate Agreement, but climate protection measures specified in the election programmes of CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP and the Green Party are not enough to reach the goal of limiting global warming ...
The NGO Environmental Action Germany (DUH) initiated several additional legal proceedings on emissions limits in German cities, bringing the total number of affected cities to 45, the organisation writes in a press release. “Diesel driving bans in more ...
The market for green bonds is still comparably small, but ecologically sustainable bonds become more significant as climate protection is increasingly important for the population, writes Markus Frühauf in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Green Bonds ...
Business prospects for the German car industry remain strong despite the ongoing debate about the future of the diesel engine, the Institute for Economic Research (ifo) said in its release on the ifo business climate index, the closely watched indicator ...
The federal environment ministry’s statement that software updates are insufficient to improve air quality in German cities makes the August ‘ diesel summit ’ a failure, writes Michael Bauchmüller in an opinion piece in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Action plans ...
Germany’s cities have warned for over a year that the car industry is headed for a front crash since first court hearings in the context of emissions limit violations by diesel cars had started, Jasper van Altenbockum writes in an op-ed for Frankfurter ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel signalling support for an eventual combustion engine ban is putting the onus solely on the car industry, writes Horst Teltschik, former board member at carmaker BMW and former foreign policy advisor of the German government ...
Germany’s current cheapest electric car, the e.GO Life, comes from the small, new manufacturer e.GO Mobile and has the potential to become a bestseller, Focus Online reports. “We aim for a production of 20,000 cars by 2019,” says CEO Günter Schuh, who is ...
Almost half the German population believes the federal election in September has already been decided, Renate Köcher of polling agency Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach writes for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Survey results show 71 percent of Germans ...
Diesel technology has long been hailed as a climate-friendly alternative to petrol but has suddenly come under intense fire, amounting to “ a broadside against Germany’s leading industry,” Alfred Gaffal, president of Bavarian industry association vbw, ...
German environment minister Barbara Hendricks says the software updates for diesel cars exceeding emission limits agreed on at the national “diesel summit” in early August can only be “a first step” and need to be followed by technical retrofitting of the ...
Police in the western German city of Aachen are worried that the planned anti-coal protests in the Rhineland mining region next week could turn violent, Reiner Burger reports for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Dirk Weinspach, chief of Aachen’s police, ...
German industrial services provider Bilfinger intensifies its nuclear power business regardless of the country’s nuclear phase-out, reports Michael Gassmann in Die Welt. The company has been awarded waste treatment orders in the UK and Sweden worth a ...
With her remarks on the “right approach” of banning combustion engine cars sometime in the future, German Chancellor Angela Merkel not only “captured an election topic for herself”, but also “disposed of the strongest dissent with the Green Party for a ...
Many industry observers in Germany warn that a mandatory e-car quota equals a “ planned economy ” and violates free market rules, “but it seems that the free market economy does not know where to go from here either”, Thomas Fricke writes in a column for ...
The Mediterranean island of Mallorca could serve as a gateway for Germans and other tourists to get first-hand experience with electric cars, according to a study by the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences. Mallorca, the most popular holiday island ...
The Greens’ call for an end to the sale of new internal combustion engine cars by 2030 was meant to deliver a “wake-up call to the German industry", said Cem Özdemir, co-head and one of the two leading candidates for the Green Party in the upcoming ...
In 1987, Germany’s first wind park began operation in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, reports the news agency dpa in an article carried by WirtschaftsWoche. Thirty turbines with a total of 1,000 kilowatt capacity were installed. Today, four modern ...
Forty-one percent of German drivers say they plan on buying a new or used vehicle in the coming 18 months, according to a study conducted by fuel and petrol station brand Aral AG. This rate is the highest since the first such study in 2003. Most survey ...
In an effort to expand its existing fleet of electric delivery vans, Deutsche Post DHL Group has teamed up with US carmaker Ford and unveiled a jointly manufactured, larger version of the e-van, the "StreetScooter WORK XL". “With this commitment ...
Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the German environment ministry, said he expected the European Union to come forth with a proposal for a European quota for emission-free cars this autumn, reports news agency dpa in an article carried by Frankfurter ...
A 2030 end date for the internal combustion engine is technically not feasible, and such a ban would be the wrong approach to decarbonising transport by 2050, said independent transportation expert and ICCT member Axel Friedrich in an interview with ...
Despite German Chancellor Angela Merkel “unexpectedly” signalling support for an eventual ban of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, it is unlikely she will actually push for an early phase-out, writes Zachary Shahan in an opinion piece for ...
Chancellor Angela Merkel stands by the German government’s goal to have one million electric vehicles on Germany’s roads by 2020, she said in an interview broadcast live on YouTube. “No, no, no, I have not given it up. […] I only said we have to do more, ...
Despite public denials, the European Commission is considering implementing an e-car quota to be achieved by automakers by 2030, writes Arthur Nelson for Climate Home. “It is looking increasingly likely that [the Commission] will come forward with a ...
Green power provider NATURSTROM offers combinations of solar PV arrays and power storages for lease, reports Sandra Enkhardt in pv magazine. “Consumers can now use home-made power without having to stem the initial costs or worrying about maintenance”, ...
According to many scientists, simply lowering emissions will not be enough to slow down global warming, and we need better technology or at least research into and discussions about ridding the atmosphere of CO₂ already emitted, writes Andreas Mihm in ...
Newly created SolarWorld Industries GmbH has officially taken over the production sites of insolvent German manufacturer SolarWorld AG, writes Sandra Enkhardt for pv magazine. “The new company intends to restart activities with 700 MW of annual production ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has voiced support for the idea of banning internal combustion engine cars sometime in the future, as planned by other European countries, such as France and the UK. “I cannot name a specific date now, but the approach is ...
Rejecting a European quota for electric vehicles by simply denouncing the idea as “ not well thought out ” is an inadequate answer by Chancellor Angela Merkel, Antje Sirleschtov writes in a commentary for Tagesspiegel. There were indeed many reasons to ...
The option for a so-called Jamaica government coalition of CDU/CSU, Greens and Free Democrats (FDP) should be used if there was a majority for it after the general elections in September, according to CDU parliamentary state secretary in the finance ...
Germany’s Federal Environment Agency (UBA) says the country ought to consider abandoning its diesel fuel tax privilege, news agency dpa reports in an article carried by Berliner Morgenpost. UBA head Maria Krautzberger told newspaper Rheinische Post the ...
The Green Party emphasises the importance of solar power in a position paper ahead of the general elections in September, reports Passauer Neue Presse. “The caps for expansion, feed-in and self-consumption have led to an 80-percent slump in annual ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has rejected a proposal by social democratic (SPD) frontrunner Martin Schulz to introduce a mandatory European quota for electric cars, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. “What are we going to do if the quota is not ...
German Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor candidate Martin Schulz’s call for a European e-mobility quota "seems like a shot from a blank gun”, writes Peter Fahrenholz in an opinion piece in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “As a Europe expert, Schulz knows only ...
Greenpeace’s Andrée Böhling welcomed the call for a European e-mobility quota by SPD chancellor candidate Martin Schulz as “a right signal to manufacturers and consumers”, but criticises the lack of a date. “If the chancellor candidate is serious about ...
German holding company Terra E needs 4 billion euros to construct a large battery cell factory that would create about 3,000 jobs, reports Angela Hennersdorf in WirtschaftsWoche. The location – to be decided in September – had to be “close to German ...
Fifty percent of Germans would not consider buying an electric car in the coming years, according to a representative survey by Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach, commissioned by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Only 30 percent of respondents said ...
Social Democratic (SPD) chancellor candidate Martin Schulz calls for a binding European e-mobility quota as a consequence of the diesel scandal, reports Peter Fahrenholz for Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ). “With a binding European e-mobility quota we will ...
The debate about the future of the diesel engine in Germany leaves car leasing providers still largely unfazed, writes Martin Gropp in an article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. A survey by the newspaper had shown that companies were closely observing ...
The coming weeks will see intensified opposition and protest against lignite mining in the western German Rhenish mining district, writes Christoph Parth in a long feature for Zeit Online. A number of protest events are scheduled, and the police also ...
It is still unclear if so-called “environmental bonuses” offered by German car manufacturers to customers switching away from an old diesel car would actually help protect the environment, writes Martin Gropp in an opinion piece for Frankfurter Allgemeine ...
German transport minister Alexander Dobrindt called on foreign carmakers to follow BMW’s, VW’s and Daimler’s example of buyer’s bonuses and introduce “similar measures”, reports Reuters in an article carried by Handelsblatt. Read the article in German ...
Bavarian state interior minister Joachim Hermann calls for the electrification of old train tracks in light of pollution from diesel emissions, reports news agency dpa in an article carried by Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I want us to talk about a special ...
German car suppliers which are largely still “firmly rooted in traditional car manufacturing” must quickly adapt to the electrification of transport and be willing to cooperate with competitors, or they will “fall by the wayside”, according to an analysis ...
The diesel emissions debate has “further sparked” customers’ interest in Deutsche Post DHL’s electric delivery van, said the company’s financial head Melanie Kreis in a telephone conference, reports Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Read the article in ...
In an article with many photographs, Elian Hadj-Hamdi for Deutsche Welle takes a look at the impact of coal mining on people and nature in coal mining regions in western Germany. Read the article in English here. For background, read the 91tv factsheet ...
German car manufacturers “outbid each other” with buyer’s bonuses for customers switching away from an old diesel car, writes Henrik Mortsiefer for Tagesspiegel. Volkswagen launched its “environmental programme”, promising up to 10,000 euros on purchasing ...
Lower Saxony, Germany’s largest wind power state and home to carmaker Volkswagen, will hold new elections on 15 October after a Greens party member defected to the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU). The move had cost the current government coalition ...
The EU Commission is not planning to introduce e-car sales quotas, said a Commission spokesperson in reaction to reports by German daily Handelsblatt, writes news agency Reuters. Read the article in English here. Find background material on the carmakers ...
Germany on average consumed 121 million litres of diesel fuel every day in 2016, resulting in a record share of diesel in total fuel consumption of 65 percent, reports Germany’s Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). Diesel sales increased 30 percent from ...
German sports car manufacturer Porsche is looking at the possibility to phase out the diesel version for its SUV Cayenne with the upcoming new model, writes Susanne Preuß for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “In regards to diesel, we are examining ...
The transport minister of Austria wants to see new registration of conventional cars phased-out by 2030, writes Handelsblatt. “It is my goal that in 2030, only emissions-free cars will be registered in Austria,” Austrian transport minister Jörg ...
It is surprising that climate protection is not a big election campaign topic in Germany, writes Andreas Mihm in an opinion piece for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The government will not be able to avoid “harsh interventions with expensive ...
The public transport companies of several large German cities have formed an initiative to increase pressure on the auto industry to accelerate the development of electric buses, reports Ann-Kathrin Nezik in Der Spiegel. Carmakers had to prove that they ...
The oppositional Social Democrats (SPD) in North Rhine-Westphalia say that the restrictive wind power policy of the new CDU-FDP government coalition endangers 18,000 jobs in the state, reports news agency dpa in an article carried by Aachener Zeitung. The ...
Software updates for diesel cars, decided at the diesel summit in Berlin, are unlikely to reduce emissions enough and prevent driving bans, writes Christian Lindner, head of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in a guest commentary in Frankfurter Allgemeine ...
The buyer’s bonus German carmakers will offer for customers switching away from an old diesel will have little effect, writes Lukas Bay in an article in Handelsblatt. The 2,000-euro bonus incentive wasn’t big enough, said Stefan Bratzel, of the Center of ...
The diesel emissions scandal and the push for e-mobility will allow German automotive industry supplier Continental to “grow stronger than the market” in the long-term, Member of the Executive Board Wolfgang Schäfer told Handelsblatt in an interview. ...
While Britain, France, Spain and Greece are making steps to end the era of diesel cars, “German auto executives and political leaders meeting in Berlin on Wednesday appeared determined to rescue the technology”, write Melissa Eddy and Jack Ewing in New ...
German carmakers must prove the effectiveness of the measures for better air quality promised at the diesel summit, writes Silke Kersting in an opinion piece for Handelsblatt. “The government must also act” and be strict regarding on-road emissions tests. ...
The German government was much too soft on carmakers at the diesel summit in Berlin, writes Petra Pinzler in an opinion piece for Zeit Online. “In Germany, laws are valid for some, summits are held for others,” writes Pinzler. Even at the summit, ...
The diesel summit is “a beacon of Germany’s lack of digitality” and shows that the country tends to place too much value on improving instead of renewing, writes Sascha Lobo in an article for his column on Spiegel Online. “It is not about the car of the ...
Ecologic criticism of the German agriculture industry plays no role in the campaign for the upcoming general elections, contrary to previous years, writes Jan Grossarth in an opinion piece for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Priorities now lay with topics ...
The diesel scandal is only the tip of the iceberg of the German car industry’s troubles and neither the manufacturers’ CEOs nor Chancellor Angela Merkel have grasped the gravity of the crisis, writes Heribert Prantl in an opinion piece in Süddeutsche ...
The Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Control (BAFA) has received 26,589 applications for the e-car buyer’s premium since the official launch on 2 July 2016, according to a statement. The government aims to reach the critical mass of 400,000 ...
People around the globe identify ISIS and climate change as the leading threats to national security, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. In Germany, 77 percent of respondents identified ISIS a major threat, 66 percent cyber attacks from other ...
Price comparison website verivox has looked at Germany’s parties’ election programmes and examined the different proposals on how electricity is to be kept affordable in the future, the company said in a press release. It is striking that “especially the ...
News registrations of hybrids and e-cars rose 104 and 132 percent respectively in July 2017, compared to the same month last year, writes the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) in a press release. This amounted to about 3 percent of all new passenger ...
More than two-thirds of Germans are most worried about climate change ahead of the general elections in September, according to a representative survey by Kantar Emnid commissioned by Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ). The “surprising result” showed ...
Germany’s parliament decided on allowing tenants to benefit from solar power panels installed on their buildings a few weeks ago and now renters seizing this opportunity say they were able to reduce their power bill with it, news agency dpa reports in an ...
Germany’s solar market is back on a growth track, with new solar PV installations accounting for a total capacity of 900 megawatts in the first half of 2017, writes the German Solar Industry Association (BSW) in a press release. This was an increase of 75 ...
German automotive component supplier Bosch will decide on whether to start its own battery cell production around the end of 2017 or beginning of 2018, Bosch’s chairman of the board of management Volkmar Denner told the Welt am Sonntag in an interview. ...
General diesel driving bans are not a good solution in the emissions debate, as they would basically expropriate German car owners, chairman of Industrial Union of Metalworkers (IG-Metall) Jörg Hofmann told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in an ...
If Germany’s car industry implements its long-announced shift to e-mobility and catches up with competitors in other countries, supplying it with raw materials for battery production and other e-car components could become a major challenge, Daniel Eckert ...
The Green Party might have been the first to call for a phase-out of the combustion engine, yet they could still end up without political gains, Barbara Gillmann writes in a commentary on business website Handelsblatt Online. Setting an end date for the ...
District cooling offers property owners a more climate-friendly and potentially cheaper way to cool their buildings on hot summer days, writes Ralph Diermann in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Water running through buildings’ walls is centrally cooled down to ...
Europe’s carmakers can manage the shift to offer clean, competitive and interconnected transport solutions to stay ahead in the global race, EU Commissioner Maros Sefcovic writes in an op-ed for business weekly Wirtschaftswoche. However, the ongoing ...
British plans to ban the combustion engine in new cars by 2040 make it clear that a change in propulsion systems was needed, Christian Democratic transport politician and former state transport minister of North Rhine-Westphalia Oliver Wittke told ...
The Green Party not being part of the federal government for the past 12 years is a “medium-sized economic and ecologic disaster”, writes Bernd Ulrich in an opinion piece in German weekly Die Zeit. The current emissions and carmaker cartel scandal showed ...
Germany’s Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) called for the removal of five gas grid development measures from current plans because the expansion of the German-Russian pipeline Nord Stream was “still too uncertain”, the agency said in a press release. The ...
SolarWorld’s provisional insolvency administrator is in talks with a group of investors that may be interested in acquiring the company’s German manufacturing facilities in Freiberg and Arnstadt, according to a company press release, reports pv magazine. ...
German environment minister Barbara Hendricks said the German government was “disappointed” with the country’s major carmakers amid claims they formed a cartel to agree on prices, suppliers and technological standards. It would be a major “loss of trust” ...
VW CEO Matthias Müller said the internal combustion engine “will continue to be needed in a transition period towards e-mobility”. Following talks with German environment minister Barbara Hendricks at his company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Müller said ...
The federal German government is currently not planning a combustion engine ban similar to British plans. “A ban of diesel or petrol cars is currently not on the agenda of the federal government. It’s about making possible a low-emission mobility,” a ...
Debates about diesel engines constantly confuse fact with fiction, family enterprise lobbyist Lutz Goebel writes in an opinion piece for Handelsblatt. Regardless of the cartel allegations against Germany’s most important carmakers, seeing the shift to e ...
British plans to ban all new petrol and diesel cars and vans from 2040 show that the combustion engine “is dying” and the national German diesel summit next week “already seems like a sad alumni reunion”, writes Greenpeace transport representative Tobias ...
Bavarian carmaker BMW has put a joint e-car charging infrastructure project with carmaker Daimler on hold after Daimler became the first German manufacturer to make a voluntary disclosure to the authorities over cartel allegations, according to company ...
Germany risks “tacitly joining Donald Trump in turning its back on the Paris climate change deal” as the state governments of North Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg “have vowed to protect” the lignite mining industry, writes Olaf Storbeck for Reuters ...
Allegations of a cartel of Germany’s most important carmakers to agree on prices, suppliers and technology standards have cost the industry a great deal of credibility, the Green Party state premier of Baden-Württemberg, Winfried Kretschmann, has said, ...
German car customers are losing interest in diesel engines as the evolving emissions scandal and looming driving bans in many German cities take their toll on the once dominant technology, Focus Online reports. Diesel registrations fell by 9.1 percent in ...
German carmaker Daimler was the first of the five major companies accused of forming a cartel to voluntarily disclose their activities to the authorities- anticipating a similar move by competitor and alleged accomplice VW, Thomas Fromm, Georg Mascolo and ...
Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW and automotive industry supplier Continental contribute over 40 percent to the total revenue and one third to the profits of Germany’s stock index DAX, which comprises the country’s 30 largest market-listed companies, Daniel ...
The G20 summits will continue to play an important role for climate protection, because “without the pressure on the political level, implementing and monitoring climate targets would hardly be possible in some countries”, write Susanne Dröge and Felix ...
The German government’s decision to determine support payments for bioenergy plants by auctions has almost amounted to “a slam on the brakes” for their operators, news agency dpa reports in an article carried by Handelsblatt Online. Horst Seide, head of ...
If the allegations over a cartel formed by Germany’s five largest carmakers “are just to the slightest extent true, it’s the end of the car industry as we know it”, Markus Fasse writes in a commentary for Handelsblatt Online. Billions in fines, civil ...
Almost no other country hosts as many important car manufacturers side-by-side as Germany and, with about 800,000 employees nationwide, the industry “has an invaluable social responsibility ”, Thomas Fromm writes in a commentary for Süddeutsche Zeitung. ...
Germany’s car industry “ keeps falling deeper into the hole that it is digging for itself ” two years after the dieselgate scandal broke, Carsten Knop writes in a commentary for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Germany’s “poster industry” is not only badly ...
Germany’s carmakers might face a wave of lawsuits after reports over possible collusion to fix costs and technology emerged last week, business newspaper Handelsblatt reports. Tens of thousands of customers might seek compensation for “possibly paying a ...
The head of German carmaker Volkswagen told daily Rheinische Post that he can imagine a deal with the government in which the carmakers agree to a phase-out date for diesel engines in return for more support with e-mobility. “If you act with appropriate ...
Germany’s transport minister Alexander Dobrindt told magazine Focus that the Green Party’s plan to end the production of combustion engines by 2030 was “utter nonsense” because it would massively cost jobs in Germany’s core industrial sector. Organising ...
Shares of German carmakers BMW, VW and Daimler were falling substantially on Monday after allegations emerged on Friday that the companies operated a cartel, followed by an EU probe into the affair, news agency Reuters reports. “The European Commission ...
Germany’s most important carmakers have met in “secret workshops” since the 1990s in order to coordinate their exhaust gas treatment systems and collude to fix technology, costs and suppliers, weekly news magazine Der Spiegel and associated website ...
The German government will organise a summit on 2 August with the aim of bundling the different community and state activities to reduce pollution from diesel vehicles at federal level, a spokesperson of the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital ...
The court case in car industry hub Stuttgart on diesel engines’ nitrogen oxide emissions pits the Baden-Wuerttemberg state’s Greens-led transport ministry against the NGO Environmental Action Germany (DUH). This is a case of “Green versus Green”, writes ...
A coalition of German NGOs has called on the SPD’s frontrunner for this year’s federal election to explicitly endorse Germany’s climate protection targets, the environmental organisation WWF has said in a press release. The NGOs say the decision by the ...
Porsche may give up diesel engines by the end of the decade, Reuters reports. Porsche CEO Oliver Blume said “we have not made a decision on it,” adding the company was “of course” looking into this issue following the emissions cheating scandal that ...
German car manufacturers are willing to pay for certain upgrades and retrofitting to reduce their diesel cars’ nitrogen oxide emissions and help avoid driving bans, Peter Fahrenholz writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung. BMW and Audi signalled to the Bavarian ...
German fishermen want to be allowed to fish between offshore wind turbines in the North Sea but operators are worried about insufficient insurance cover in case of damage to their installations, Birger Nicolai and Daniel Wetzel write on Welt Online. ...
Germany’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020 and by at least 55 percent by 2030 looks to be in grave danger following reports that the state of Brandenburg may drastically soften its climate protection targets. The ...
The cost of wind farm construction in the North Sea continues to decline as these farms become connected to the grid, according to the European electricity transmission system operator TenneT. In the tender for a new substation and its 90-kilometre cable ...
Chancellor Angel Merkel appears to have signalled the end of brown coal in Germany, Michael Bauchmüller writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung. In her traditional summer interview with broadcaster ARD, Merkel stated that working with affected regions to develop ...
Mandatory CO 2 standards for newly registered trucks and buses in the EU could reduce emissions by about one-quarter, a study conducted by the Berlin-based International Council on Clean Transportation Europe (ICCT) has found. The study argues that there ...
This year’s G20 summit was not a major step forward in solving the climate problem, yet it did not result in a major clash with US President Donald Trump either, Brigitte Knopf writes in the T20 blog, an initiative led by the German Development Institute ...
In light of the latest accusations against German carmaker Daimler of having equipped its vehicles with manipulation software for emissions tests, environment and consumer protection organisation Environmental Action Germany (DUH) is ready to file a ...
The governments of France and Germany have vowed to make cross-sectoral climate protection covering all areas “a priority” of their bilateral activities. In a joint statement by the Franco-German council of ministers, the countries’ leaderships said they ...
German carmaker Daimler is accused of having sold more than one million cars with excess emissions for almost a decade, according to a recent search warrant, reports Süddeutsche Zeitung. The company might have used defeat devices in certain motor models ...
More and more carmakers are starting to offer power storage for domestic use in order to have a new source of revenue in times of uncertain e-car sales, Süddeutsche Zeitung writes. In addition to US manufacturer Tesla and Japanese competitor Nissan, ...
German homeowners installed about 25,000 power storages in their houses in 2016, more than in any other European country, but the real boom of “ decentralised power supply ” might only start in 2020, Stefan Mayr writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung. 2020 will be ...
Due to the decommissioning and dismantling of its nuclear power plants, German utility E.ON plans to cut about half of all jobs at its subsidiary PreussenElektra, news agency dpa reports in an article carried by website focus.de. At least 1,000 jobs will ...
Wind power company Senvion has rejected a workers’ council job recovery plan and is set to move rotor manufacturing for its turbines from the northern German city of Bremerhaven to Portugal, citing increasing international competition and price pressure, ...
The new government coalition of CDU, Greens and FDP in Germany’s northern wind-power state Schleswig-Holstein means many wind power projects will need re-examining, Schleswig-Holsteinische Landeszeitung reports. The federal state’s interior ministry was ...
Six of the top ten industrial polluters regarding CO₂ emissions in the EU are German lignite-fired power plants, according to a European Environment Agency (EEA) briefing. Bełchatów in Poland was responsible for the highest amounts of CO₂. The EEA ...
Climate risks have to be included in company reports, writes Peter Wolff, head of department World Economy and Development Financing at the German Development Institute (DIE), in a guest article in Frankfurter Rundschau. The move was demanded by ...
Consumer protection association Environmental Action Germany (DUH) has filed lawsuits against regulatory authorities in ten cities in order to withdraw roadworthiness of VW vehicles affected by the carmaker’s emissions fraud scandal, the association has ...
German prosecutors have expanded their investigations over diesel emissions fraud to sports car manufacturer Porsche, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. The luxury brand subsidiary of Germany’s largest carmaker VW has so far not been in the focus of ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in May that her government was probably going to miss its goal of putting one million e-cars on the road by 2020- but now the mood seems to have changed, Peter Hannen writes in pv magazine. In a response to a ...
The financial sector must quickly incorporate risks and opportunities arising from the global move to a low-carbon economy into their strategies, write German and French central bankers Andreas Dombret and Anne Le Lorier in a guest article for ...
Ilse Aigner, economy minister of Germany’s biggest state Bavaria, aims to make lowering power prices a key topic in the coalition negotiations after the general elections in September, reports news agency dpa. She demands a reform of Germany’s renewables ...
Martin Schulz, the Social Democrats’ (SPD) frontrunner for Germany’s 2017 federal elections, has suggested that the country’s carmakers should not fear a major attack on their diesel technology if he is elected Chancellor in September, Markus Mayr reports ...
The G20 summit’s G19 outcome on climate is “quite acceptable” as Donald Trump was unlikely to change his mind on pulling out of the Paris Agreement, writes Christoph Seidler for Spiegel Online. Little has therefore changed as the countries’ commitments ...
A standstill can still be considered a success during Donald Trump’s time as US president, write Malte Kreutzfeld and Ingo Arzt in an article for tageszeitung (taz). The G20, which isolated Trump on climate, did not bring progress to global climate ...
“Climate change and the challenge of defending multilateralism in an era of Trumpian protectionism has finally given Germany a global leadership role,” writes Jennifer Tollmann in a blog article for E3G. US president Donald Trump’s rejection of the ...
The new governing coalition of conservative CDU and economic liberal FDP in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) is set to undermine the country’s climate protection goals, environmental organisation WWF says in a press release. The CDU-FDP coalition agreement ...
German utility EnBW is to equip the country’s most frequented motorway (Autobahn) service stations with charging stations for e-cars, Bernd Freytag and Susanne Preuß write in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The company wants to have set up 1,000 stations ...
It is “remarkable” that the G20 summit in Hamburg did not end up in scandal given that US President Donald Trump came across like a “grizzly bear among a mountaineering rope team”, writes Stefan Ulrich in an opinion piece for Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Above ...
German prosecutors have made the first arrest at carmaker Audi over the emissions fraud scandal, Süddeutsche Zeitung reports. The former engine developer who worked at Audi until a few months ago allegedly helped develop the emissions manipulation ...
The decision by Swedish carmaker Volvo to equip all its cars with electric engines by 2019 demonstrates the rapid change seen in the international automotive industry, Manfred Kriener writes in a commentary for Tageszeitung (taz). “Volvo has understood,” ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel might enjoy global respect as “leader of the free world” but her current standing also warranted “a more nuanced assessment” of what her country “has done and can do”, Michael Bröning writes in an opinion piece for Politico ...
For Germans, climate change topped the list of the most pressing global issues for G20 to fix, a poll by public broadcaster ZDF showed. Thirty-three percent put solutions to climate change at the top of the list, 29 percent said the migrant crisis was the ...
The topic of climate change should be “treated with utmost intensity and seriousness” at the Hamburg Summit, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said at a press conference before official talks began. Juncker said he was “thankful” that ...
The topic of climate change should be “treated with utmost intensity and seriousness” at the Hamburg Summit, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said at a press conference before official talks began. Juncker said he was “thankful” that ...
For Germans, climate change topped the list of the most pressing global issues for G20 to fix, a poll by public broadcaster ZDF showed. Thirty-three percent put solutions to climate change at the top of the list, 29 percent said the migrant crisis was the ...
The G20 leaders must show readiness for compromise at the Hamburg summit, “without bending their own positions too much”, said German Chancellor Angela Merkel during her opening remarks to leaders of the world’s largest economies, ahead of the first ...
The T20 group of international think tanks are hoping for “G17, G18, G19” solution on the disputed issue of climate protection, where “we know that some of us are moving in the wrong direction”, but the rest grew closer together in their push forward, ...
The wording on climate policies in the final G20 communiqué was still not decided, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters at a press conference after leaders met to discuss the issue. The “large majority” of G20 members expressed their commitment ...
German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble cited the fact that the large majority of G20 countries showed clear commitment to the implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement in the Hamburg summit talks as proof that the summit was a success. In an ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel says her chief task during Germany’s G20 presidency is to “work on options for an agreement and not contribute to speechlessness". In an interview with weekly newspaper Die Zeit ahead of this year’s G20 summit in ...
Germany’s carmakers should follow the example of Swedish competitor Volvo and push for a quick transition towards electric cars, car industry expert Ferdinand Dudenhöffer told Frankfurter Rundschau. Dudenhöffer said he believed the Chinese car market will ...
The average diesel passenger car on Europe’s roads emits less CO₂ than a comparable petrol car, but the compliance cost of meeting the European Union’s CO2 reduction target for new cars by 2025 would be up to 280 euros per vehicle lower with fewer diesel ...
The Hamburg summit must send out the clear signal that the “overwhelming majority” will now implement the Paris Climate Agreement – with or without the US, says environmental NGO Germanwatch in a press release. “The G20 has a special responsibility for ...
Russian natural gas supplier Gazprom’s plan to expand existing direct pipelines to Germany, a project known as Nord Stream 2, is facing international, regional and local opposition, while the German government continues to support it, report Weixin Zha ...
Climate policy should be integrated with the G20 finance ministers’ agenda in order to stay below the 2 degrees Celsius guardrail set in the Paris Agreement, a team of authors including Ottmar Edenhofer, director of Mercator Research Institute on Global ...
Many more buildings than reported by the federal economy ministry can be made accessible for the new tenant power law, according to a study by Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW), commissioned by the Green group in the Bundestag. Read the ...
US President Donald Trump’s decision to take the country out of the international Paris agreement on climate has harmed global trust and will also hurt the US economy, German environment minister Barbara Hendricks told company leaders at a conference on ...
The fraction of Germany’s budget generated by taxing economic activities harmful to the environment and the climate is declining, according to calculations by NGO Green Budget Germany (FÖS). Just 4.3 percent of the public budget- less than the EU-average ...
German car supplier Schaeffler’s lower profit expectation might herald a watershed for the country’s entire automotive industry, Max Hägler writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung. The supplier’s plunge in the stock market could be a “warning shot” that electric ...
Germany’s parliament (Bundestag) has voted to allow tenants to directly source their electricity from solar panels on their roofs, the parliament has said in a press release. The so-called “tenant electricity” concept says that landlords receive a premium ...
Solar modules provided about one-third of Germany’s power in June but fell short of reaching record output volumes despite seemingly perfect weather conditions, Ralph Diermann writes on Spiegel Online. The country’s 1.6 million PV modules produced 30.6 ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is determined to lead the climate negotiations at the G20 summit in Hamburg “in a way that they serve the content and goal of the Paris Agreement”, she said in a government declaration before the federal parliament. After ...
East German federal states Saxony and Thuringia have turned to the country’s federal government as well as the European Union to garner support for their ailing solar power industry, Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten reports. Both states’ economy ministers ...
Despite continuing subsidies for wind power, the technology is likely to prove very beneficial for regional economies in Germany in the long run, Steffen Höhne writes in a commentary for Mitteldeutsche Zeitung. In the eastern German federal state of ...
Companies in Germany’s industrial powerhouse North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) have called for the postponement of the grid fee reform, which the government plans to pass this week, the regional newspaper Rheinische Post reports. Some local branches of the ...
German utility EnBW is reportedly ready to dispatch the first barge carrying nuclear waste casks along the River Neckar in the south-west of the country, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said. Anti-nuclear activists have protested against the impending ...
Germany’s nuclear fund is meant to cover the costs accruing from the country’s nuclear phase-out for generations to come. If – and only if- the fund is managed well, taxpayers will not have to top it up, Helmut Bünder and Brigitte Koch write in ...
Volkswagen is pushing natural gas engines in the desperate hope of remaining below the EU’s 2020 fleet emission targets, writes Christian Frahm in Spiegel Online. “According to sources within the Wolfsburg headquarters, the company will not be able to ...
Grid operator Tennet, one of Germany’s four major electricity network companies, has warned that a toll on power transmission from Germany’s windy north to industrial centres in the south could create substantial obstacles for the country’s planned ...
Sustainability criteria, such as climate protection, are becoming more and more important for major companies, and new developments in data transparency increase the pressure on them to act accordingly, Jan Willmroth writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung. Former ...
The German government plans to introduce new tax incentives for building insulation, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. The newspaper has learned that Chancellor Angela Merkel and Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks propose subsidies, and the ...
Around 50,000 people joined hands on 25 June across the borders of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany to form a 90-kilometre human chain in protest against the incident-prone Belgian nuclear power plants at Doel and Tihange, Rheinische Post reports. The ...
The German news website Spiegel Online has published an interactive map showing the results of research conducted by the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, and the Austrian Institute for Ecology into fallout from possible nuclear ...
The German government and the country’s nuclear plant operators will sign a long-awaited contract about the funding for the final storage of nuclear waste today, Andreas Mihm writes in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The contract formally ensures that ...
The Social Democrats’ (SPD) deputy chair Ralf Stegner has said that as far as he is concerned, the German coal exit is not a question of “if” but “how.” At the debate forum“Sustainability and climate protection: What roadmap do the parties have?”, ...
With a human chain stretching over three countries, activists in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands are to protest against the incident-prone Belgian nuclear plants Tihange and Doel, Tobias Müller writes in Tageszeitung (taz). The organisers of the ...
Peter Mosch, head of the workers’ council of German carmaker Audi, has criticised a management decision to locate production of the company’s second electric car abroad, Philipp Vetter reports on Welt Online. “If the company management shows no ...
The southern German federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg plans to considerably step up efforts to promote e-mobility, the state’s Green-led government said in a press release. “The aim is to make Baden-Wuerttemberg Germany’s centre for the development and ...
To compensate for loss of revenue after Brexit, EU Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger proposes that member states could transfer part of their tax revenues to the EU, including revenues from taxes on CO₂ emission rights, he told German weekly Der ...
Banning diesel cars from entering inner cities at times of high air pollution is the right way to protect public health, a majority of Germans says according to a representative survey commissioned by the Stern magazine. While 59 percent of respondents ...
Central German federal state Hesse is about to inaugurate its 1,000th wind turbine, putting it firmly on its way to ending the state’s reliance on nuclear power, Hesse’s economy minister Tarek al-Wazir told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “We’ll tear ...
Germany’s indignation over the US Senate’s planned expansion of economic sanctions on Russia illustrates “the whole extent of irritation in the current transatlantic relationship”, Richard Herzinger writes in Die Welt. Leading German officials find ...
The path to autonomous vehicles will be an evolution rather than a revolution, and fully “digital cars” won’t dominate Germany’s roads before 2040, according to a Deutsche Bank study. This is due to the industry’s long development cycles, the longevity of ...
More than 300 civil society organisations call on “the remaining 19 members of the G20 to reaffirm their unfaltering commitment” to the implementation of The Paris Agreement after the US decision to leave the accord. The G20 engagement group Civil20 (C20) ...
Pope Francis has urged German Chancellor Angela Merkel to stand firm over international climate protection and protect the Paris Climate Agreement against dissenters, news agency Reuters reports. "The Pope encouraged me to continue to fight for ...
China has moved into pole position in management consultancy Roland Berger’s international e-mobility ranking for the first time. Whereas Chinese e-car sales doubled last year, the German market remains sluggish, potentially causing German carmakers to ...
The world’s largest supplier of diesel technology Bosch will build a new chip factory for around one billion euros to produce future mobility technology in Germany, writes Susanne Preuß in a commentary in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “The new ...
The European Commission wants to directly negotiate with Russia a skeleton agreement on the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea gas pipeline, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. Otherwise, the project would “end up in court”, Commission Vice President Maros ...
The European Commission has approved under EU state aid rules the transfer of radioactive waste liabilities to a new public fund in return for the payment of about 24.1 billion euros by nuclear power plant operators in Germany, the Commission said in a ...
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau disputed a report by German weekly Der Spiegel which claimed he proposed to strike the references to the Paris Agreement from the upcoming G20 communiqué in a telephone call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “No, ...
Hamburg-based wind turbine manufacturer Senvion and German utility EnBW concluded a cooperation agreement for onshore projects totalling several hundred megawatts (MW) throughout Germany, Senvion announced in a press release. Find the press release in ...
Germany’s capital Berlin is the country’s only city to make it into the top ten of a ranking by the IESE Business School of global smart cities, the IESE has said in a press release. Berlin ranked 9 th in IESE’s Cities in Motion Index (CIMI) and scored ...
An expansion of the available area for solar power plants has led to “a significant drop of the price level” in the latest round of PV auctions in Germany, the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) has said in a press release. The average support rate for new ...
Germany and the rest of Europe should redouble their efforts to fight climate change after the United States’ decision to leave the Paris Climate Agreement, Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the annual meeting of the Christian Democratic Union group in ...
Eastern German states Saxony and Brandenburg demand at least 1.2 billion euros in federal funds to finance the economic transformation of their shared coal-mining region Lusatia, Jens Blankennagel writes in Berliner Zeitung. “ The end of coal mining there ...
The mayor of BMW hometown Munich is considering a ban on diesel cars to curb emission levels in the south German metropolis, Nina Bovensiepen writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “As much as I’d be happy to do without this kind of bans, I don’t see how we will ...
German environment minister Barbara Hendricks welcomed the commitment to climate protection that all G7 members except the United States made in the final communiqué of the environment minister meeting in Italy, according to a press release. “The Paris ...
In the race for developing the best storage technology for electric vehicles, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s strategy is “not trying to overtake the mighty Asian competitors” in conventional lithium ion-battery technology “but forging ahead with a ...
Germany is home to the world’s largest and most diverse reusability system for beverages, which saves natural resources and contributes to environment and climate protection, according to a new consumer campaign by Environmental Action Germany (DUH) and ...
The German environment ministry (BMUB) published a fact-check of US President Donald Trump’s announcement speech to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. To Trump’s statement that the accord was a “deal that punishes the United States”, BMUB replies: ...
With a record amount of 5.57 terawatt hours (TWh), Germany’s solar power plants in May almost generated as much electricity as all of the country’s nuclear power plants combined (5.65 TWh), the German Solar Industry Association (BSW Solar) said in a press ...
The US will join the G7 in the communiqué of environment ministers meeting in Bologna, but it will acknowledge points of disagreement, a German official told reporters attending the meeting, according to a Bloomberg article by Chiara Albanese and Brian ...
Germany and the US state of California are teaming up to tackle climate change, after US President Donald Trump announced that the US would leave the Paris Climate Agreement. California’s Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. and Germany’s environment minister ...
The refunds that nuclear utilities E.ON, RWE and EnBW can expect after Germany’s constitutional court ruled the nuclear fuel tax law unconstitutional should be used to lower electricity prices, according to the Consumer Organisation Baden-Wuerttemberg, ...
It will be difficult for other parties to beat German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the upcoming federal elections, because she regularly takes proposals and demands of others and makes them her own, historian Martin H. Geyer told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in ...
The European Union, together with China, Canada “and other important partners” must take on a leadership role in international climate policy, after the US announced that it would pull out of the Paris Agreement, environment minister Barbara Hendricks ...
German representatives used the first meeting by the German-Belgian nuclear commission “to convey the worries of the German population [about Belgian nuclear power stations Tihange 2 and Doel 3] and remind them of the request by environment minister ...
Marc Etzold, Angela Hennersdorf, Andreas Macho and Cordula Tutt examine the political forces in Germany that favour US President Donald Trump’s attitude toward the Paris Agreement and find fault with Germany’s Energiewende – some openly, some less so, in ...
German utility EnBW’s planned windpark in the North Sea reckons with rising electricity prices and cheaper technology for wind parks, but it is not clear whether these assumptions will hold true, according to an article by Angela Hennersdorf in German ...
Deutschlandfunk’s Theo Geers blames the government, and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble in particular, for the Constitutional Court ruling over the nuclear fuel tax. “Clumsy errors mean champagne corks were flying in the executive boardrooms of E.ON, ...
08 Jun 2017
Volkswagen’s diesel engines are still emitting nitrogen oxide above legal limit, even after being recalled and upgraded, Gerald Traufetter writes for Spiegel Online, citing a report by ZDF. In the wake of the VW emission scandal, German Transport Minister ...
Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt told the Passauer Neue Presse that Germany will have the word’s most modern transport system by 2025, with electric vehicles and automated buses playing a key role, FAZ reports. “In order to further improve air ...
German pension institutions aren’t taking account climate risks in their investment strategies, according to a survey commissioned by WWF Germany. “This can have serious consequences,” Matthias Kopp, director of sustainable finance at WWF Germany, said in ...
German nuclear utilities E.ON, RWE and EnBW can hope for the repayment of about 6 billion euros after the Federal Constitutional Court declared the nuclear fuel tax law invalid and incompatible with basic law, reports Reuters. The federal government did ...
Eastern German regions will receive 1.23 billion euros over the next five years for the recultivation of former lignite mines, according to the federal finance (BMF) and environment (BMUB) ministries. The federal finance and environment ministers signed ...
The German and Russian governments agreed to deepen their cooperation in the areas of environment and climate protection, it was announced after consultations in St. Petersburg. “Especially now that the US announced their exit from the Paris Agreement, it ...
The leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) dissociated itself from a paper by a conservative group within the party – “Berlin Circle” – that had criticised “increasingly aggressive policy goal setting, especially the CO₂ ...
Vattenfall plans to cut up to 60 percent of its 420 full-time employees working in its German hydro power division, the company announced in a press release. “Due to the price development on the German electricity market and the regulatory framework for ...
As long as Donald Trump is president of the US, it is “basically irrelevant” whether or not his country remains a party to the Paris Climate Agreement, development economist Stephan Klasen says on Zeit Online. Even if the US remained within the treaty, ...
Germany will have to build new power plants in the south of the country to preserve supply security after its nuclear exit in 2022, according to the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA). Rapid response plants with a total capacity of 1.2 gigawatts will be ...
A regional branch of Germany’s Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) intends to push for a moratorium on wind power expansion in northern federal states in order to protect birds from being killed by wind turbine blades, David Joram writes in ...
Germany and China vowed to continue their fight against climate change hours before U.S. President Donald Trump announces whether he will quit the Paris Agreement, according to a Reuters report. "We are living in times of global uncertainty and see ...
Despite the outcome of last week’s G7 summit in Taormina, Italy, a consensual statement by all leaders “should be the aspiration” for the G20 summit in Germany in July, said Lars-Hendrik Röller, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s economic advisor and the ...
The Green Party in the Bavarian state parliament says that Germany’s largest nuclear power plant Gundremmingen, operated in part by RWE, has exceeded power output limits several times over the past year and a half by up to 20 percent, writes Süddeutsche ...
Think20 (T20), which brings together research institutions and think tanks from the G20 countries, presented key policy recommendations for G20 policy makers at the T20 Summit in Berlin. The proposals include recommendations on climate policy, such as ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s criticism of the current US administration’s stance on the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as her call for greater European assertiveness, have met with broad support from German politicians and business representatives, ...
The dismantling and recycling of hundreds or even thousands of old wind turbines is set to pose a “huge problem” for Germany’s waste management system, news agency dpa reports in an article also carried by WirtschaftsWoche. The turbines’ large rotor ...
Electric bicycles were present in 1.9 million households across Germany in early 2016, equalling over five percent of all households, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) said in a press release. The total number of e-bikes in the country rose from ...
German chancellor Angela Merkel has described the climate talks at the G7 meeting in Italy as “very unsatisfying”. The US’s reluctance to say whether it will remain in or leave the international Paris Agreement on climate protection had created a “six ...
The search of Daimler offices last week by prosecutors reveals that the diesel engine has become the biggest and most dangerous problem for German carmakers, writes Grischa Brower-Rabinowitsch in a commentary for business daily Handelsblatt. The companies ...
The lack of emotional advertising by carmakers is an important reason for the slow uptake of e-cars in Germany, writes Thomas Fromm in a commentary for Süddeutsche Zeitung. “If only they had worked on the image of hip e-cars on time, instead of constantly ...
Future CO 2 regulation of cars and trucks will play a substantial role in climate policy because of road traffic’s key position in mobility, according to the Cologne Institute for Economic Research. In a compendium on European CO 2 rules, the institute ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s advice for other countries to invest now in climate friendly technologies proves a “boomerang“, because her own government has too often been content with the status quo, writes Michael Bauchmüller in an opinion piece for ...
The German car industry and transport sector receive hundreds of billions of euros in state support through different systems, writes Manfred Schäfers in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Diesel is taxed at a lower rate than petrol, meaning the government ...
A global emissions trading system would be the ideal instrument to fight climate change, according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “It would be best if damaging emissions had a price world-wide. A global carbon market would be an incentive for the ...
G20 countries must promote climate protection and the implementation of the Paris Agreement, said the Federation of German Industries (BDI), Germanwatch and Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) in a joint press release ...
Carmaker Daimler plans to develop a new generation of diesel engines regardless of pending driving bans in many German cities, according to a report by news agency dpa carried by manager magazine. “From today’s point of view, there is no reason to say ...
Denmark is the only European country where customers pay more for power than in Germany, Michael Höfling writes in weekly newspaper Welt am Sonntag. Danes pay about 31 euros for 100 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity – one euro more than the Germans and ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for intensifying the country’s battery-cell research efforts, the Federal Government (Bundesregierung) says in a press release. In her weekly video-podcast, Merkel says “we know that the car industry faces some ...
Russian oil company Rosneft is set to increase its business activities in Germany, Daniel Wetzel writes in Welt Online. Russia’s largest oil producer is doubling its investments in the country to 600 million euros over the next five years, CEO Igor Sechin ...
A significant drop in the price of PV modules has so far had only a moderate effect on solar power investments in Germany, according to website strom-report.de. Prices for PV modules fell by more than 70 percent between 2010 and 2016 while at the same ...
The presidency of this November’s UN Climate Change Conference, the government of Fiji, is “very optimistic” about the outcome of COP23, while the US administration still has not decided on its international climate policy positions. “The rest of the ...
Chancellor Angela Merkel has angered her coalition partner SPD (Social Democratic Party) with her statement that Germany will probably miss its target of bringing one million electric cars on to the roads by 2020, writes news agency dpa. Economy minister ...
Almost all bids from Germany’s first round of auctions for ground-mounted solar PV projects – which was carried-out in 2015 – have successfully been realised and will receive support, writes Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) in a press release. “The result ...
German utility RWE’s stock price rose to a 10-month high as the company announced its first quarter results and confirmed the 2017 outlook, reports Tino Andresen for Bloomberg. “We got off to a good start this year and confirm our optimistic outlook as ...
Tesla will do in three years what Porsche took a decade to do, Evercore ISI analyst George Galliers said in a research note, reports CNBC. Following the buildout of the Model 3, Tesla had the potential to achieve sustainable gross margins comparable to ...
Germany will probably miss its target of bringing one million electric cars on to the roads by 2020, according to Chancellor Angela Merkel. “As it looks at the moment, we will not achieve this goal,” Merkel told fellow lawmakers, reports Michael Nienaber ...
While the state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia were largely decided on local factors, “in more ways than one this was a dry run for the general election,” writes Jeremy Cliffe in a blog article for The Economist. “Thrusting social reformism went up ...
Electricity in rural areas costs on average 2 percent more than in German cities, writes price comparison website verivox in a press release. Households consuming 4,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year on average paid 1,138 euros in rural areas, while the ...
Green politician and state premier of Baden-Wuerttemberg Winfried Kretschmann called on car manufacturers to speed up the transition to e-cars, as Chinese competition required greater efforts, reports Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “We want to be a ...
Modern natural gas heating systems have played a major role in reducing CO₂ emissions, Stefan Kapferer, head of utilities lobby BDEW, says in a press release. Ending support for fossil-fuelled heating is therefore misguided, he argues. “The government ...
Three days before parliamentary elections in Germany’s most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU party has taken the lead in polls, ahead of the governing SPD, national TV station ZDF reports. The CDU ...
In its 2017 first quarter results report, German renewables utility innogy warned that prospects in the British retail market had sharply deteriorated as a result of fierce competition, Reuters reports. Overall, the company posted an increase in earnings ...
The insolvency of former German PV champion SolarWorld is first and foremost down to CEO Frank Asbeck’s inability to find an appropriate business strategy to react to cheap Chinese competition, Daniel Wetzel writes in Die Welt. Most European PV companies ...
Partial diesel bans aimed at improving local air quality are possible in most of Germany’s 20 largest cities, according to a survey by business daily Handelsblatt. 13 cities told the paper they would consider such bans, five said they were undecided and ...
The federal economy ministry (BMWi) has made available an English version of last year’s Fifth Energiewende Monitoring Report, together with the accompanying expert statement. Find the report in English here, the expert statement in English here and an ...
RWE’s CEO Rolf Martin Schmitz plans to reorganise the company’s senior management, writes Jürgen Flauger in Handelsblatt, citing company sources. Subsidiaries RWE Power – responsible for lignite and nuclear power – and RWE Generation, which deals with gas ...
Environmental groups called on participants of the UN’s Climate Change Conference in the German city of Bonn to not be sidetracked by the “distracting fire” of US President Donald Trump, reports Andreas Mihm in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Details of ...
The Christian Democrats’ (CDU) win in the Schleswig-Holstein state election is "a black eye" for Social Democrats (SPD) and their federal frontrunner Martin Schulz ahead of September federal elections, writes Politico.eu. Results in the last ...
Germany’s transport ministry and carmaker association VDA hope to prevent diesel driving bans in the country’s cities by retrofitting older diesel cars to make them cleaner, report Gerald Traufetter and Christoph Stockburger in Spiegel Online. An ...
Germany does not even come close to its claim of being a leading market for e-mobility, writes Lukas Bay in a commentary for the Handelsblatt. “Germany makes lots of announcements, but delivers very little.” German carmakers still don’t have attractive e ...
The Auto Shanghai has become the world’s leading automotive trade show, dwarfing the German leader IAA in Frankfurt, car expert Ferdinand Dudenhöfer writes in a column for bizzenergytoday.com. “While Shanghai has hosted more carmakers than ever before, ...
The nuclear exit bill for power companies in Germany is set to rise by some 300 million euros, Stefan Schultz writes on Spiegel Online. The nuclear fund for financing the intermediate and final storage of the country’s nuclear waste will now climb to a ...
The offer by some bidders in Germany’s first offshore wind power auction to build their projects with zero financial support has raised a lot of questions, Michael Bauchmüller writes in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Wind parks have been sponsored by the ...
German PV plants learn to swim: authorities in the Bavarian municipality of Eggelstetten have allowed construction of 32 floating solar power islands that are to operate on a quarry lake and provide electricity for nearby gravel plant, Christian Sebald ...
The German parliament’s inquiry committee into the diesel cheating scandal is set to conclude that the responsibility lay solely with carmaker Volkswagen, news site Spiegel Online reports, based on a draft of the committee’s final report. Neither other ...
The misery of fossil utilities means lignite mines and power plants no longer ensure regional prosperity, writes Jeffrey Michel in a blog post for energytransition.de. The situation in eastern German lignite mining region Lusatia is particularly dramatic ...
Large utilities mainly operating fossil power plants have had much more top-level contacts with government than the renewable industry, reports left-wing newspaper tageszeitung (taz). Since October 2014, RWE has held 40 talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel ...
Hamburg is the first German city to ban older diesel cars from main thoroughfares all year round to improve local air quality, reports Nils-Viktor Sorge for Spiegel Online. Even though only two roads are affected, the decision “has a highly symbolic ...
Volkswagen considers a publicity campaign in cooperation with other carmakers to improve the image of the diesel engine, CEO Matthias Müller told industry publication Automobilwoche. With reference to looming diesel bans in German cities, he said modern ...
Financial support for pv installations in Germany has fallen slightly for plants starting operation in the second quarter of 2017, the Federal Grid Agency (BNetzA) said in a press release. Remuneration for small pv plants fell from 12.30 to 12.27 cents ...
German environment minister Barbara Hendricks will travel to Washington from May 15-17 to meet her US counterpart, EPA head Scott Pruit, and talk about climate and environmental protection, the Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMUB) said in a press ...
The use of batteries to level out intermittent solar and wind generation in the Tennet and Sonnen project shows that “the Energiewende is making progress,” writes Andreas Mihm in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “New offshore wind parks have been approved ...
Only two in five diesel car drivers plan to stick with the technology when buying their next car, while the rest are unsure or want to switch to an alternative drive, according to a survey by pollster forsa, reports news agency dpa. Most respondents said ...
German postal service Deutsche Post has found the first major customer for its in-house produced electric vehicle Street Scooter, Florian Zerfass writes in weekly Bild am Sonntag (BamS). Fish wholesaler Deutsche See is buying 80 scooters for distributing ...
Renewables support does not increase consumer power prices in Germany, Ralph Diermann writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung, based on an analysis by price comparison website Stromauskunft.de. While the EEG surcharge that finances renewables development has risen ...
Germany needs a four-pronged strategy to get its Energiewende on track to meet emissions and renewables targets, writes Felix Matthes, head of the Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut), in an opinion piece for weekly newspaper Die Zeit. The country ...
The diesel engine could remain the most economic option for many drivers if the car industry manages to get clean diesel cars to the market at affordable prices, Eric Heymann writes in a note for Deutsche Bank Research. The industry must regain trust and ...
The tenant electricity draft law introduced by Germany’s economy ministry (BMWi) is an “utterly wrong” policy approach that turns the principle of “competition instead of allocation” upside down, Andreas Mihm writes in an opinion piece for Frankfurter ...
Germany’s approval of Vattenfalls Moorburg coal-fired power plant was in breach of EU environmental rules because its cooling system endangers protected fish species, according to a ruling by the European Court of Justice, reports Montel. Find the Montel ...
The Moorburg ruling means the plant will have to stop using river water for cooling, and instead run with its cooling tower only- making it dirtier and less efficient, writes Sven-Michael Veit in a commentary for left-wing newspaper tageszeitung (taz). ...
German car part supplier Continental increasingly bets on electric engines as an emerging business, Stefan Menzel writes on Handelsblatt Online. “The shift to the e-car will come, it can’t be stopped anymore,” Menzel writes, saying Continental will expand ...
The Green Party has put out a “Clean Car Roadmap” with detailed proposals aimed at speeding up the move towards a low-carbon transport sector. The goal remained to end production of combustion engine cars by 2030. The paper urges a number of immediate ...
The Energiewende and digitalisation will increase mergers and acquisitions in the utility sector because they break down boundaries between markets and put traditional business models in doubt, consultancy PwC said in a press release. The consultancy is ...
Germany’s resistance to an emissions testing overhaul shows that the government continues to protect the auto industry, writes Markus Balser in an opinion piece in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “No [EU] government has taken legal steps against its car ...
Green power-utility innogy has assured its shareholders that it will raise its profits and make high dividend payouts, Frankfurter Rundschau reports. “We want to make money and pay dividends,” CEO Peter Terium said at the first annual stockholders’ ...
The federal German government is blocking tighter controls of the auto industry in Europe, report Markus Balser and Michael Bauchmüller in Süddeutsche Zeitung. The EU Commission is currently working on an emissions testing overhaul that would allow closer ...
Exiting coal-fired power generation in Germany is a matter of when, not if, according to a meta study by the Wuppertal Institute, commissioned by the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU). The study analyses position papers and scientific ...
By not publishing CO₂ emissions test results, the federal government is protecting Germany’s auto industry and thus hindering important innovation in efficiency and climate protection, writes Bernhard Pötter in an opinion piece in taz. “If in ten years ...
Dismantling Germany’s nuclear power plants is a lucrative business for companies carrying out the task, and final costs are hard to predict, writes Konrad Fischer in WirtschaftsWoche. “Nobody has experience with such a task, so how is one supposed to ...
The EU needs to take a leadership role in addressing fossil fuel subsidies and the G20 platform is “an obvious way for EU leaders and ministers to showcase their efforts and actions to eliminate” them, writes Maeve McLynn, finance and subsidies policy ...
Companies for whom offshore wind parks are a core business, but were not successful in Germany’s first competitive auction for the technology, will “have a problem”, as only one more auction was planned for offshore expansion until 2025, writes Andreas ...
Diesel cars use more fuel and thus emit more CO₂ than carmakers specify, according to previously unreleased test results by Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA), reports Bernhard Pötter for tageszeitung (taz). In the course of investigations ...
Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche is wrong to say consumers will ultimately decide the fate of diesel cars in China, Hendrik Ankenbrand writes in an opinion piece for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. China is not a market economy and the government has decided in ...
Dutch company Fastned has announced it will start expanding its network of rapid e-vehicle charging points along European highways into Germany. In a press release, the company said it would cooperate with the municipality of Limburg, hotel chain Van der ...
The complex risks arising from climate change, fragility and conflict could contribute to the emergence and growth of non-state armed groups, according to a report by consultancy Adelphi, commissioned by the German Federal Foreign Office. The report found ...
With the future of e-mobility being decided in China, German carmakers have to get a move on to not fall behind, writes Sebastian Schaal for WirtschaftsWoche. An “actively shaped, distorted technology race” was unfolding in China, according to Sebastian ...
Tesla CEO Elon Musk criticised the Industrial Union of Metalworkers (IG Metall) and insisted there would not be any job cuts at German car supplier Grohmann in the coming five years, reports news agency dpa in an article carried by Handelsblatt. IG Metall ...
German carmaker Volkswagen plans to comply with China’s planned quota for e-cars without buying additional credits from competitors, reports Jake Spring for Reuters. "We are fully with all forces working to be able to fulfil this quota system already ...
The car is becoming less important to Germans, and drivers are growing more open towards alternative ways of transport, writes Dagmar Dehmer in Tagesspiegel. Two thirds of Germans wish for a better bicycle infrastructure and 61 percent of urban motorists ...
The German population’s awareness of environmental issues shown in a recent survey by the federal environment ministry is commendable- but the reality showed that respondents did not live up to their own values, writes Christoph Behrens in an opinion ...
An average successful bid of less than half a cent per kilowatt hour for offshore wind in Germany’s first competitive auction for the technology showed that renewables support did not need to be as big as it has been in recent years, writes Timot Szent ...
The Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) published an interactive map on Germany’s public e-car charging station infrastructure on its website. The map currently shows the location, type of plug and charging capacity of 3,335 charging points across the country ...
German utility EnBW has received official permission to decommission and dismantle the Philippsburg-1 nuclear power plant, according to research and consulting firm Enerdata. However, the Philippsburg-2 unit will continue operations until late 2019. The ...
The decision by logistics company Deutsche Post DHL to double production of its self-developed electric van is an embarrassment for established truckmakers, according to an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “The industry believed for a long ...
Deutsche Post DHL is eyeing global production and sales of its electric van, StreetScooter. Board member Jürgen Gerdes told Rheinische Post: “In the long run, global sales of 100,000 units per year are conceivable with ten production plants.” He said he ...
German power consumers might face a further rise of electricity costs caused by grid expansions required for e-mobility, according to a report by news agency dpa carried by the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Supplying e-car charging stations with electricity ...
According to German Solar Industry Association BSW, the industry’s business climate has reached a seven-year high, reports Brian Parkin for Bloomberg. The association said it expects solar companies’ order books to keep growing in the coming months thanks ...
Germany will assist Fiji in preparing the 23 rd UN climate conference, the Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMUB) has said in a press release. Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the environment ministry, met Fiji’s Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe ...
Deutsche Post DHL will double production capacity for its self-developed electric van, and start Streetscooter sales to third parties due to strong demand. The logistics company said in a press release it will commission another production location to ...
The beginning of the decommissioning of the nuclear plant Neckarwestheim should have been a moment of joy for all anti-nuclear activists in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg but instead it was met with protests once again, Josef Kelnberger ...
The German attachment to “gas-guzzling autos” is part of the reason for the country’s sustained high CO 2 emissions, Jill Petzinger writes on website Quartz. According to transport expert Gregor Kolbe, “RIP”, a combination of range, infrastructure and ...
Many operators of nuclear, gas or coal-fired power plants in Germany do not throttle feed-in at times of “ negative power prices,” the Federal Grid Agency (BNetzA) has said in a press release. Although operators of conventional plants have to pay for ...
It remains uncertain whether Mercedes’ and Porsche’s hometown Stuttgart will introduce diesel driving bans next year as currently planned, according to the regional government. Green state premier Winfried Kretschmann told local newspapers the bans were “ ...
The German car industry has not given up yet on its highly profitable combustion engine, reports Sebastian Schaal for business magazine WirtschaftsWoche. “Electric propulsion remains Plan B, because Plan A is simply working too well,” he wrote. At an ...
The share of taxes and levies German households have to pay for power has reached a new all-time high, price comparison website Verivox said in a press release. The state’s share in the power bill “now accounts for 56 percent for private customers – an ...
The Fraunhofer ISE institute in the southern German town of Freiburg has set a new world record for the most efficient solar cell, Bernward Janzing reports for tageszeitung (taz). The cell converts 21.9 percent of absorbed sunlight into electricity. Yet ...
Germany’s Technical Inspection Authority (TÜV) increasingly relies on drones to inspect solar power and on- and offshore wind parks, Michael Kuntz writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung. After a two-year trial phase, drones have proven to be very efficient for ...
The German car industry has stepped up its rhetoric against looming diesel car bans, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. “Whoever wants to ban diesel is also against climate protection,” said the head of the German carmakers’ association (VDA), ...
US e-car pioneer Tesla is now worth 53 billion dollars on the stock market, overtaking domestic market leader General Motors for the first time, reports Thomas Jahn in business daily Handelsblatt. “Slowly, Tesla is appearing in German carmakers’ rear-view ...
The VW emissions scandal and looming driving bans in Stuttgart and other cities are beginning to have a serious impact on diesel car sales, reports Philipp Vetter in a front-page article for newspaper Die Welt. The share of diesel vehicles in new car ...
Sales of e-cars in Germany almost doubled in March, according to statistics by the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA). Registrations of new fully electric vehicles rose 98.5 percent year-on-year to 2.191 units (0.6 percent of total registrations), ...
The German Federal Environment Agency (UBA) has issued a study that compares climate protection strategies in six European countries. Researchers from the Fraunhofer ISI in Karlsruhe and Ecologic Institute in Berlin analysed national long-term climate ...
Fuel cells are no longer a major part of Daimler’s plans, reports Fortune. CEO Dieter Zetsche said declining battery costs have made fuel cell vehicles uncompetitive with electric cars, according to a report by news site Smart2Zero. Zetsche’s statements ...
A large-scale transition to e-cars could shift the power balance between German carmakers and their suppliers in favour of car component producers like Bosch, ZF or Continental, Martin-Werner Buchenau writes in Handelsblatt. The engines have always been ...
German lignite plants make up seven out of 10 of Europe’s biggest polluters, according to an analysis of European ETS data by climate NGO Sandbag. “That is because lignite power plants, especially in Germany, continue to run nearly 24 hours a day x 7 days ...
Stuttgart, the city where the automobile was born, has the dirtiest air in Germany and is threatened by a global drive to electric vehicles, reports John Vidal in the Observer. Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Bosch and many other major auto suppliers are based in ...
The government of Germany’s most populous state North Rhine-Westphalia has strongly rejected bans on older diesel cars to improve air quality in polluted cities. “Diesel bans should be banned,” the region’s Social Democrat (SPD) transport minister Michael ...
03 Apr 2017
German utilities RWE and EnBW are not well prepared for the transition to a low-carbon future when compared their European peers, according to an analysis by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). Austrian Verbund, Spanish Iberdrola and Finnish Fortum are ...
The decision by Czech mining company EPH, the new owner of eastern German lignite-mine operator LEAG, to cut back its extension plans for the Lusatia region might provide local actors with “some planning security” but is “without a doubt a step towards ...
The German government’s trademark Energiewende policy has failed, write Angela Hennersdorf, Niklas Hoyer, Andreas Macho and Dieter Schnaas in a feature article for business weekly WirtschaftsWoche. Despite ongoing high public support for the project, ...
Average German wholesale electricity prices fell almost nine percent to 28.96 euros per megawatt-hour last year, according to a power market review by grid operator TenneT. Redispatch volumes fell for the first time since 2013, due to a decrease in wind ...
The head of Chinese solar panel producer Trina Solar, Gao Jifan, has said German competitor Solarworld was “ a company with no competitiveness ” that would inevitably “die”, Stephan Scheuer writes in Handeslblatt Global Edition. Gao, whose company is the ...
Russian gas and oil producer Gazprom plans to axe nearly every second job at its German subsidiary, Jürgen Flauger writes in Handelsblatt Global Edition. Apart from cutting Berlin staff from 230 to 130, Gazprom Germania was also “replacing German ...
Mercedes-Benz owner Daimler is accelerating its electric car programme, after it failed to cut fleet emissions in Europe for the first time since 2007 last year, Ilona Wissenbach and Edward Taylor report for Reuters. “In the coming years, the company will ...
Solarworld still is Germany’s largest producer of PV and other solar installations, but its outlook is becoming more and more grim, Hannes Koch writes in Hamburger Abendblatt. Last week, the company announced a loss “equalling half of our capital stock.” ...
Strong demand for heavy sports utility vehicles (SUVs) means German carmarker Daimler has failed to reduce average emissions from its vehicle fleet for the first time since 2007, Handelsblatt Online reports. For the second year in a row, emissions stood ...
Germany needs a vision for the transport system of the future, writes Alexander Möller, managing director of Germany’s largest automobile club ADAC, in a guest commentary in Handelsblatt. “We don’t think big enough and seldom visionary. We need a target ...
The federal state of Saxony wants to change the law in order to exclude itself from the search for a final nuclear waste repository in Germany, Michael Bauchmüller writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung. Saxony wants to exclude granite from the rock varieties ...
Changing renewables funding from guaranteed feed-in tariffs to auctions will drastically reduce revenues in the wind power industry, Daniel Wetzel writes in Die Welt. The renewables surcharge power customers pay with their electricity bill currently ...
Voters in the German federal state of Saarland have clearly rejected a coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and Left Party (Linke) by giving the governing conservatives of the Christian Democrats (CDU) a clear mandate to continue their grand coalition with ...
German chancellor Angela Merkel has defended diesel cars as environmentally friendly, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. “Diesel cars are as good for climate protection today as they were yesterday and the day before yesterday,” Merkel said ...
The emissions fraud scandal engulfing Germany’s largest car manufacturer Volkswagen is not the only case in which companies manipulated their diesel engines to fulfil exhaust regulations, Martin Gropp writes for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Also ...
A group of scientists including Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) are proposing a “carbon law” to halve anthropogenic CO₂ emissions every decade, aimed at achieving zero net emissions by mid-century. In ...
Representatives of the G20 dialogue forums business (B20), civil society organisations (C20) and think tanks (T20) have together called on the Group of Twenty member countries to take the lead in implementing the Paris Climate Agreement. They demand a ...
Germany’s largest oil and gas company Wintershall has resisted the oil sector’s crisis and reported earnings before interest, taxes and special items of 517 million euros for 2016, writes Franz Hubik for Handelsblatt. Wintershall last year sold its 50 ...
The European Union was a stroke of luck for environment protection, says German federal environment minister Barbara Hendricks in a press release on the occasion of the 60 th anniversary of the Rome Treaties signing. EU regulation made possible ...
Germany may boast an image as a frontrunner for decarbonising economic activity but the country’s love of big car engines has foiled aspirations to steadily lower greenhouse gas emissions, David Charter writes for The Times. “While only 11,000 Germans ...
The German authority responsible for ensuring the correct functioning of smart electricity meters examines whether tighter regulations for producers are necessary, Hanna Decker writes on Frankfurter Allgemeine online. Following a Dutch study, according to ...
German engineering heavyweight Bosch is going to bridle at the impending driving ban for cars with diesel engines in its hometown Stuttgart, Susanne Preuss and Carsten Knop write in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner argues the path ...
Renewables support for German offshore wind power will be “considerably below 10 cents per kilowatt hour” (ct/kWh) for the upcoming auctions, according to experts of business consultancy PwC. “The times of exploding costs for offshore projects have come ...
The director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), Ottmar Edenhofer, criticises the Christian church’s lack of commitment against climate change in an interview with Bernhard Pötter for tageszeitung (taz). “It’s ...
Aspiration and ambitious targets are needed to make the transition to a low-carbon economy, but the German federal government has done too little, according to emissions data by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), writes Michael Bauchmüller in an ...
Germany will release a G20 plan on addressing climate change next week, which will outline how member states can lead by example to implement the Paris Agreement, report Joe Ryan and Brian Parkin for Bloomberg. Germany was “taking cautious steps ...
Saxony’s federal state parliament has voted for aligning grid fees across Germany, news agency dpa reports in an article carried by Welt Online. The parliament called on Saxony’s state government to work towards repealing “existing regional imbalances on ...
The German federal government proposes a partnership on resource efficiency for G20 member countries. “We need a strong partnership of all large economic powers so that we don’t keep exceeding our planet’s limits,” said federal environment minister ...
The job cuts announced by E.ON are a further example of the Energiewende’s impact on employment in the industry, according to coal mining union IG BCE. “The conventional power industry does no longer earn enough money to pay its employees […] That’s ...
The language used by German car manufacturer Audi and its parent company Volkswagen to handle its emissions fraud scandal speaks volumes about how their managers still underestimate the crisis, Carsten Knop writes in a commentary for Frankfurter ...
The emissions fraud scandal by Volkswagen now has fully engulfed the German carmaker’s subsidiary Audi, Hans Leyendecker, Georg Mascolo, Klaus Ott and Nicolas Richter write for Süddeutsche Zeitung International. Police officers and prosecutors on ...
Baden-Württemberg’s Green state premier Winfried Kretschmann has defended the diesel technology as “the best combustion engine there is”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. “Clean diesel engines exist” and “we’re going to need them for a long time to ...
Leading retailers in Germany plan to significantly expand their network of e-car charging stations in 2017, report Brían Hanrahan and Florian Kolf in Handelsblatt Global Edition. About 200 new stations will be built in customer parking lots of supermarket ...
Volkswagen’s sound annual balance for 2016 encourages the German carmaker heavyweight to devise ambitious plans again- despite the ongoing diesel emissions fraud scandal potentially threatening the company’s survival in its current form, Max Hägler writes ...
French utility Engie is considering buying German utility RWE’s renewables spin-off innogy, writes Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. The deliberations were preliminary and may not lead to an offer, writes Bloomberg. Read the Bloomberg ...
At first glance, the split of German utility RWE was done in a smarter way than that of E.ON, as RWE spin-off innogy just posted a net profit and plans to pay shareholders a dividend, writes Jürgen Flauger in an opinion piece for Handelsblatt. “Yet it ...
Operating profits of Volkswagen Group’s core brand slipped in 2016 amid higher marketing costs related to the diesel emissions scandal and plunging demand in key markets, reports Reuters. But VW Board of Management member Frank Witter said in a press ...
The G7 and G20 summits provide European leaders with the opportunity to carefully “push the Trump administration to take a stance on climate”, write Sara Stefanini and Andrew Restuccia for Politico. German chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to the White ...
The costs for grid congestions management in German grid operator 50Hertz’s control area in north-eastern Germany were almost halved to 180 million euros in 2016, compared to 354 million euros in 2015, according to 50Hertz. “This very clearly shows: grid ...
Germany should specify its mid-century climate ambitions soon, according to Chancellor Angela Merkel. “From my point of view, this must be decided at the start of the next legislative period,” she said at a conference by local utility association VKU. ...
Innogy launches with “solid profits,” in contrast to parent company RWE, writes Jürgen Flauger in the Handelsblatt. He calls Peter Terium’s switch from RWE to innogy CEO a “successful changeover,” saying that “In 2017, Terium even wants to increase ...
The federal government and Germany’s four nuclear power station operators have agreed on contract details for last year’s agreement on financing the nuclear clean-up, report Helmut Bünder and Manfred Schäfers for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The ...
G20 finance ministers may encourage private funding for climate change instead of government pledges, according to a draft statement for the upcoming G20 finance ministers meeting, writes Joe Ryan for Bloomberg. This was a significant shift from what ...
The Local reports on plans by transmission system operators from Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands to build a giant artificial island in the middle of the North Sea where wind farms would create power for 80 million people: the North Sea Wind Power Hub ...
An automatic control system that turned the blades out of the wind too late is likely responsible for severely damaging several wind turbines at various locations in northern Germany during storms in December 2016, reports Stefan Schultz for Spiegel ...
Germany needs an upper limit for state-set levies and taxes that comprise large parts of the consumer electricity price, in order to relieve power consumers of rising costs, the state economy minister of North Rhine-Westphalia told Handelsblatt. “We have ...
E.ON will announce a record loss next week, reports Jürgen Flauger in Handelsblatt. Company sources told the business daily the net loss will exceed 12 billion euros. With the publication of yearly results, scheduled for next Wednesday, E.ON will also ...
After years of protests and dispute, Germany will re-start its search for a final repository location for highly radioactive waste. Germany will be a “blank map” and anywhere with the right geological rock formation for an underground repository will be ...
The new procedure laid out in the reform bill to search for a final nuclear waste repository is a step in the right direction, but involving the public will not prevent protests, writes Uwe Westdörp in an opinion piece in Osnabrücker Zeitung. “In the end, ...
German carmakers Volkswagen, Daimler, and BMW are likely to build more than 106,000 e-cars this year, an increase of 54 percent compared to last year, according to a forecast by business consultancy PwC. Production of hybrid models by German carmakers ...
German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected the suggestion that German carmaker VW’s emissions cheating was a “failure of government”. The failure was with VW, not the German state, she said in a hearing before an inquiry committee of the federal parliament. ...
It is plausible that Chancellor Angela Merkel first heard about the VW emissions scandal in the media, as even industry experts were surprised by the extent of the problem, Roland Pichler writes in an opinion piece in Stuttgarter Zeitung. “Yet the ...
German Volkswagen is presumably not the only company to cheat on its emissions data- and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) of US state California will examine other manufacturers, said CARB chairwoman Mary Nichols in a hearing before the German ...
The sale of Opel to French PSA Group could be the chance of a new beginning for the carmaker which evolved from a “German flagship brand” to a global “dwarf” under General Motors, writes Carsten Knop in an opinion piece in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. ...
Germany lags behind in the worldwide expansion of e-mobility, according to a new report by environmental NGO WWF and German renewable power provider LichtBlick. “We are only at the beginning, but the trend towards e-mobility is gaining momentum globally. ...
German utility EnBW and petrol station operator Tank & Rast will expand their partnership beyond the federal state of Baden-Wurttemberg to set up and operate fast-charging stations for e-cars on the Autobahn, the companies announce in a press release. ...
Inner-city driving bans for diesel cars threaten the economy, consumer interests and even the environment, writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) in a long, front-page article. Diesel cars emit up to 20 percent less CO₂ than petrol cars ...
Germany’s governing coalition of Social Democrats (SPD) and Conservatives (CDU / CSU), together with the Green Party, will introduce a bill in parliament next week that starts the search for a final repository for the country’s nuclear waste from scratch, ...
Impending driving bans for diesel cars in several German cities could spell the end for the technology in the country, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports. Driving bans in Stuttgart and Munich have been substantiated in the past weeks and pending ...
A new 300 million euro government subsidy programme designed to promote electric car charging stations in Germany is bearing fruit, according to Handelsblatt. Several utilities are preparing to install several thousand charging stations, whose number ...
The EU’s proposed emissions trading system (ETS) reform spells 20 lost years for climate protection, Michael Bauchmüller writes in an opinion piece for Süddeutsche Zeitung. According to the proposal, certificates would be put in a “reserve” from 2019 and ...
A week after Daimler and Porsche hometown Stuttgart said it would impose a diesel ban to improve local air quality, a court has told BMW hometown Munich to also prepare a concept for such a measure. The city and the state of Bavaria, of which it is the ...
Mining Union IG BCE has rejected the Green Party’s proposal for a lignite phase-out, report Silke Kersting and Frank Specht in Handelsblatt. It did not do justice to the topic to “simply view it from the perspective of campaign planning for the upcoming ...
China has decided to relax its ambitious quotas for electric and hybrid car production after holding high-level discussions with Germany, business daily Handelsblatt has learned from three sources. Chancellor Angela Merkel and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang ...
Automotive supplier SHW is confident it will soon boost its revenues by providing parts for vehicles with alternative engines- despite losing a major order worth 100 million euros by US e-car manufacturer Tesla, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. CEO ...
Today’s judgement by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg on import tariffs on Chinese pv modules will determine the course of a possible resurrection for the industry in Germany and other EU countries, Michael Bauchmüller writes in Süddeutsche ...
A large-scale shift to e-cars would drastically reduce the number of people employed in Germany’s car manufacturing sector, Richard Rother writes in taz. “ Replacing cars with combustion engines with e-cars will eliminate a large part of value creation,” ...
Germany will help Iran implememt its national climate protection targets, the Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMUB) says in a press release. During a visit to Teheran, German state secretary Jochen Flasbarth also aims to strengthen cooperation on ...
Last year’s agreement on financing the nuclear clean-up between the German state and nuclear power providers does not seem to have brought permanent peace as utilities refuse to drop the lawsuits against the nuclear fuel tax, write Jürgen Flauger and ...
Environmental NGO DUH, which sues many German cities over excessive air pollution levels, calls the measures agreed in Stuttgart a “Mickey Mouse driving ban” because it only affects certain diesel cars on certain days. “We need driving bans for all ...
More than half of Germans are in favour of temporary diesel driving bans when air quality is bad, according to Greenpeace. In a survey by pollster Emnid commissioned by the NGO, 61 percent of interviewees answered “yes” to the question: “Do you believe ...
Of all places, the region now developing really clean diesel engines publicly withdraws confidence from the technology, comments local newspaper Stuttgarter Nachrichten. Local politicians fighting against combustion technology seem to forget which ...
Stuttgart had run out of options to cut nitrogen dioxide pollution, a poison that makes people ill and even kills them, writes Jan Heidtmann in a commentary for Süddeutsche Zeitung. He argues the state government also wants to put pressure on federal ...
Germany must draw up a plan to exit from coal-fired power generation next year if it is to fulfill its climate targets, according to Uniper CEO Klaus Schäfer, reports Andreas Lochner for Montel. “From my point of view it is no longer a matter of whether ...
With about 100,000 new solar heaters in 2016, a total of 2.2 million solar heating systems are now installed in Germany, the German Solar Industry Association (BSW) and the Association of Heating Industry (BDH) say in a joint press release. “The ...
The Green Party plans to base its campaign for the autumn federal elections on the core topics of environment and climate protection, announced Green parliamentary group head Katrin Göring-Eckhardt, writes Stefan Braun in Süddeutsche Zeitung. She said her ...
The German government tried to bring climate and sustainable development into the mainstream of international politics at the G20 foreign affairs minister meeting in light of leadership changes in several member states, writes Irene Quaile for Deutsche ...
Most member companies of German oil traders group Avia will only sell “climate-neutral” heating oil in the future, writes Andreas Mihm in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The group invests in climate protection projects around the globe to save almost the ...
The EU must make clear to the new US administration that “transatlantic security discussions need to always include the fight against climate change”, at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference, writes Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace ...
Foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel wants to “demonstratively foster multilateral cooperation” with the G20 foreign minister meeting in Bonn- but concrete outcomes are unlikely, writes Stefan Braun in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Mission saving the earth’s ...
The G20 foreign ministers will have to talk about global warming at their meeting in Bonn, as climate change increasingly is a threat to world peace, writes Christoph Bals of environmental NGO Germanwatch in a guest article for Zeit Online. “The intensity ...
The state government of Baden-Wurttemberg wants to introduce selective inner city driving bans for older diesel cars if plans for a nationwide ‘blue badge’ are not realised, reports Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). A cabinet decision draft by the ...
The Green Party is slumping in national polls as security and migration overshadow the party’s core topics of the environment and climate, writes Silke Kersting in Handelsblatt. “Yet, the conditions for the party to again play a bigger part on a national ...
Germany’s excess power spilling over into Poland and Czech Republic on days with high renewables generation creates political and economic tension, writes Zeke Turner for Wall Street Journal. “The fallout has become acute for Polish and Czech coal power ...
The price for emitting one tonne of CO 2 under the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) has been frozen at five euros for years because “the EU reaches its climate targets either way”, Hendrik Kafsack writes in a commentary for Frankfurter Allgemeine ...
Considerations within Germany’s governing conservative party CDU to transfer 152 containers with radioactive fuel elements from a research reactor to the US could deal a blow to the country’s search for a final repository for its nuclear waste, Michael ...
The German government wants to make climate change a central topic at the upcoming G20 foreign affairs minister meeting in Bonn and is ready to challenge the new US administration on the issue, report Brian Parkin and Patrick Donahue for Bloomberg, citing ...
Russia and Germany have pledged to intensify their cooperation on implementing the Paris Agreement ’s climate protection targets, Germany’s Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMUB) said in a press release. Jochen Flasbarth, state secretary in the BMUB ...
The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is far too complex- and current reform efforts seem unlikely to lead to the necessary changes, writes Klaus Stratmann in an opinion piece for Handelsblatt. “The complex system of free allocation, product ...
The lignite industry is central to the local economy in the Lusatian town of Boxberg, reports Carla Mattern in regional newspaper Sächsische Zeitung. Of its population of around 4,750, 1,882 are employed in the town’s large lignite power station or its ...
Unlike many companies in the German automotive industry, component manufacturer Schaeffler regards the anticipated shift to e-mobility as a major growth opportunity rather than a threat, Henning Peitsmeier writes for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. ...
Climate protection is part of the Green Party’s “core profile”, which makes it a prime campaign topic in the upcoming federal elections, scheduled for autumn, Winfried Kretschmann, state premier of Baden Wurttemberg told Berliner Zeitung. “I don’t see ...
German federal state governments are unlikely to allow hydraulic fracking test drillings on their land, writes Dirk Fisser in Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung. The newspaper had asked representatives of state governments about their willingness to carry out one ...
In its report “A stress test for coal in Europe under the Paris Agreement," the Berlin-based climate research institute Climate Analytics says the EU will have to end CO₂ emissions from all coal plants by 2030 in order to meet its commitments under ...
Tenants and flat owners in apartment buildings in Germany face high legal hurdles if they want to retrofit on-property parking areas with an e-car charging station, Berrit Gräber writes in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Even those who agree to pay for the ...
The German natural gas industry group Zukunft-Erdgas has produced a study “Heating market 2050”, which examines the role of regenerative gases in meeting CO2 reduction targets. “The CO₂ intensive heating oil will not play any role in the heating market of ...
Germany’s environment minister Barbara Hendricks believes the country might introduce a scrappage bonus for cars with combustion engines in a few years’ time. “It can’t be ruled out. We don’t have to take a decision on it in the coming two or three years. ...
Insolvency administrators believe e-cars will lead to the loss of more than 100,000 jobs in the German car supplier industry, according to a report by newswire dpa carried by Spiegel Online. Many companies will not manage the transition, said Martin ...
G20 president Germany will press the Group to reaffirm its commitment to fighting climate change when finance ministers meet next month for the first time since the election of Donald Trump, G20 sources said, report Noah Barkin and Jan Strupczewski for ...
German business leaders, trade unions and government officials are presenting a common front against US president Donald Trump’s protectionism, Klaus Stratmann writes in Handelsblatt Global Edition. In a joint statement, Germany’s new economy minister ...
German experts say the global carbon floor price proposed by government advisors in a paper for the German economy ministry is unlikely to be agreed, Dagmar Dehmer writes in Tagesspiegel. “Implementing a sufficiently high floor price seems unrealistic in ...
German utility E.ON and Danish e-mobility provider CLEVER have agreed to jointly build a network of ultra-fast e-car charging stations along major European motorways, according to an E.ON press release. “The joint ambition of the partners is to now ...
German electric carmakers have shied away from producing their own battery cells because of competition from Asia, report Franz Hubik, Lukas Bay and Stephan Scheuer for Handelsblatt Global Edition. China plans to take a leading role in the e-car battery ...
An extensive underground thermal heat storage system proposed in Hamburg could supply roughly a quarter of the city’s heating needs with waste heat from industrial and power plants, Jeffrey Michel reports for energypost.eu. “If successful, it would make ...
The Energiewende deeply affected not only fossil power plant operators like RWE and the old E.ON, but also companies involved in their construction, such as Siemens and US-rival General Electric, reports Martin Wocher in business daily Handelsblatt. The ...
Swedish utility Vattenfall said it will replace all its vehicles by electric cars over the next five years, reports Deutsche Welle. The company noted the measure was required to become "climate-neutral" by 2050. Starting in January 2017, ...
Warnings from representatives of Germany’s conventional power industry that the country’s power supply security was in danger during dark and windless periods like in January as more and more conventional plants are becoming uneconomical and are set to ...
The transition of Germany’s car industry from combustion engines to electric motors means workers’ representatives in supervisory boards will have to “approve of their own amputation,” Markus Fasse writes in Handelsblatt. Premium manufacturer Daimler, for ...
The compulsory switch to smart meter readers will lead to higher costs and threats to the privacy of power customers “without holding any observable advantages up to now,” Kathrin Emse writes on shz.de. “Smart grids help grid operators ” by allowing them ...
Exiting coal in Germany is a generational project that takes 30 years, says Helmar Rendez, chairman of Germany’s LEAG, the company responsible for lignite operations in eastern German region Lusatia. Rendez plans to decide by the summer if LEAG will ...
The Paris Climate Agreement is unlikely to be the right way to reach the goal of limiting global warming, according to the federal economy ministry’s independent academic advisory board, writes Andreas Mihm in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). In a ...
German utility RWE warns of structural breaks in the Rhenish lignite mining area in western Germany if the government decides on an early coal-exit date, writes Carsten Sommerfeld in Neuss-Grevenbroicher Zeitung. “We need time for structural adaptation. ...
German premium car manufacturer Daimler faces possibly the greatest change in its history, Max Hägler and Stefan Mayr write in Süddeutsche Zeitung. With 30 billion euros in investments within the next two years, Daimler’s CEO Dieter Zetsche seems ...
German utility Uniper is set to put its new coal plant Datteln 4 into operation despite a dire outlook for the industry in the country, Craig Morris writes on energytransition.org. “With a billion euros already sunk in the plant, Uniper’s decision to ...
The German state missed out on about 8 billion euros in taxes in 2015 because diesel is taxed at a lower rate than petrol, writes Dagmar Dehmer in Tagesspiegel, citing a federal government’s reply to a parliamentary inquiry by Green member of the ...
Car component supplier Bosch has agreed on a settlement to pay 328 million dollars to claimants in the US for its role in Volkswagen’s emissions scandal, Max Hägler writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “But they don’t talk about their role,” Hägler writes. He ...
The government of the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein wants a fairer distribution of grid fees in Germany and will introduce a draft law in the council of federal state governments (Bundesrat). “The draft is to enable the federal government to bring ...
There are no significant adverse effects to human health stemming from wind turbines, according to a study by Germany’s Federal Environment Agency (UBA). Scientists analysed the health risks wind turbines might pose due to noise emissions (including ...
The German Green Party has criticised the Social Democrat candidate for chancellor, Martin Schulz, for not having taken a clear stance on climate protection yet, news agency dpa reports. The Green’s parliamentary group chairman Anton Hofreiter told dpa ...
Driving cars might be very dear to large parts of the German population, but it is not a fundamental right and can be harmful to health and environment, writes Svenja Bergt in an opinion piece in tageszeitung (taz). Instead of half-hearted diesel bans, ...
385 primary power providers have increased their prices since the beginning of the year or announced price hikes within three months, the price comparison website check24 has said in a press release. For standard households with an annual consumption of 5 ...
A consortium of German companies has made a fresh attempt to establish battery cell production in the country, Alfons Frese writes in Tagesspiegel. Plant manufacturers Thyssen-Krupp, M+W and Manz have teamed up with cell producers Litarion, ...
Economically, it makes more sense to consume excess power in Germany than to export it, but high taxes and fees on electricity discourage domestic companies from ramping up production when wholesale prices are low, according to the Association of German ...
Climate change is just “fiction” and the Energiewende is a “global socialist redistribution action“, said Ralf Borschke of the right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in a session of the state parliament Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, reports ...
The federal government plans to phase out the tax privileges for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) next year, according to a draft law seen by news agency Reuters. “Originally, the privileges for the comparably climate-friendly liquefied gas were supposed to ...
SMA Solar, a German global player in solar converter manufacturing, generated record sales in 2016 with more than 8 gigawatt (GW) of inverter output sold (2015: 7.3 GW), according to provisional figures announced by the company in a press release. Sales ...
Outgoing economy minister Sigmar Gabriel runs an election campaign at the expense of eastern German power consumers, some of whom pay grid fees twice as high as consumers in the west, writes Norbert Block in a commentary in Thüringische Landeszeitung. He ...
The grid reform proposal threatens to undermine the economics of decentralised power stations, according to utility association BDEW. “The government risks that controllable and flexible decentralised power generators are pushed out of the market,” said ...
The government cabinet has approved a law proposal to enable highly automated driving on German roads. “We are enabling drivers to take their hands off the wheel during highly automated driving, to surf the internet or check e-mails, for example,” said ...
The law for automated driving is not detailed enough and creates legal insecurity for drivers, according to critics. Green party transport expert Stephan Kühn told Spiegel Online that it lacks a definition of what drivers are allowed to do while their car ...
Carmakers’ claims about the pending transport revolution are overblown, writes Stefan Voswinkel in mass-tabloid Bild. Whereas the companies promise realistic e-car driving ranges of 500 kilometres, that distance shrinks dramatically under adverse ...
Germany’s environment minister Barbara Hendricks regards the new US administration’s sceptical view of climate protection as a monition for Germany and Europe to foster international efforts to curb global emissions, Dana Heide writes in Handelsblatt. ...
There will be no nationwide grid fee alignment in Germany according to a proposal by the economy ministry approved by the government cabinet, contrary to earlier press reports. However, the proposal for a grid fee reform will gradually abolish payments ...
Martin Schulz, the designated federal elections frontrunner of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), could provide new drive to his party but has little chance of winning against Chancellor Angela Merkel, writes Nico Fried in an opinion piece in Süddeutsche ...
The Green Party has criticised the Bavarian environment ministry for giving the go-ahead to tear down a nuclear power plant. The Isar I plant is to be demolished despite around 300 tonnes of radioactive material which cannot be removed for storage until ...
The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) hopes to engage developing countries in mobilising green finance projects with a new investment platform, according to NAMA News. Around 25 countries involved in the “dialogue” ...
Climate change is a threat to financial markets not just because of potential natural disasters, but also due to a tightening of climate protection measures, writes Michael Bauchmüller in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, citing a report prepared for the German ...
The global market for e-mobility is being pulled by China, where half a million e-vehicles and plug-in hybrids were sold last year, according to an analysis by the Center of Automotive Management (CAM). This is in contrast to Germany, where only around 25 ...
Eighty-six companies and business associations from Germany’s North, East, and South have complained to Chancellor Angela Merkel about “unfair” grid fees, reports Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. They argue in a letter that grid fees must be the same all ...
A rule governing taxi registration is holding up the transition to e-vehicles, Martin Buchenau writes for Handelsblatt. As of the end of 2016, only vehicles manufactured for use as taxis may be registered. The regulation is aimed at preventing tampering ...
The federal finance ministry’s plan to tax solar power produced for self-consumption has failed due to opposition from the federal economy ministry, writes Manfred Schäfers for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, citing government sources. The finance ...
Tesla is confident it will enter the German business fleet market on a large scale with its upcoming mid-range e-car Model 3, according to Jochen Rudat, who heads the company’s operations in Germany. “After talks with many German companies, I’m very ...
VW is considering including the iconic Beetle in its electrification plan, Automobile reports. “There have been no decisions so far,” Volkswagen’s head of design Klaus Bischoff told the publication at the Detroit auto show, “but it’s possible the Bug’s ...
G20 agriculture ministers called for more sustainable use of resources in a joint declaration following the first G20 ministers meeting under the current German presidency. “In light of the growing global population and the goals of the Agenda 2030, ...
The German car industry says that diesel technology is “at least in the mid-term” indispensable to reach climate targets, writes the German Bundestag in a press release. In a hearing before the parliament’s committee of inquiry for the diesel emissions ...
The Energiewende must be steered more intelligently, and the key is a price tag for CO₂, writes Klaus Stratmann in an opinion piece in Handelsblatt. While it might be naïve to bet on this instrument – because it has been neglected over the past years – ...
Many climate scientists are worried that incoming US President Donald Trump’s administration will confound international negotiations, Michael Bauchmüller writes in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “There’s either a scenario Bush or a scenario crazy in store for US ...
Germany’s electricity industry is at the cusp of a tide of transactions and new models of cooperation, a study by consulting agency PwC has found. Due to “dwindling profits and rising cost pressure”, market conditions for both larger private and smaller ...
Germany’s largest car manufacturer VW struggles to comply with China’s planned quota for e-cars, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports. “The e-quota certainly is going to be a challenge,” a VW manager for China told journalists on Thursday in ...
The EU must take over America’s role and keep China and India on board with global climate protection efforts to get ahead during Donald Trump’s presidency, according to environmental organisation Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH). The EU is a global leader in ...
The government must push ahead with the roll-out of a reliable charging infrastructure for e-cars and increase support for e-mobility research and development, according to German utility association BDEW. In a “roadmap to eco-mobility”, the utilities ...
Hesse’s Green economy minister Tarek al-Wazir wants Germany’s financial capital Frankfurt to become a “Green Finance Hub” for “all of Europe”, Falk Heunemann writes in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). The state’s green-conservative coalition ...
The state government of Brandenburg was involved in sales talks concerning Vattenfall’s former German lignite operations much sooner and more intensively than previously thought, according to Greenpeace Germany. And it failed to use its legal options to ...
German utility innogy will assist the country’s telecommunication heavyweight Telekom in expanding its broadband internet access, Ina Karabasz and Jürgen Flauger write in Handelsblatt Global Edition. Initially reluctant to rely on partners to develop high ...
German farmers show a willingness to put more effort into protecting the climate and resources in a position paper by German Farmer’s Association (DBV), writes Henrike Roßbach for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Cultivation must not lead to harm” to the ...
The Philippsburg nuclear power plant’s second generating unit near the German city of Karlsruhe will stay offline longer than planned, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports. According to a spokesperson of Baden-Württemberg’s federal state ...
For Germany to meet the Paris Climate Agreement targets, a phase out of coal-fired power generation must be complete by 2035 and the oldest facilities shut down as soon as 2019, according to a study by the Institute for Applied Ecology (Öko-Institut) and ...
16 Jan 2017
The subsidies for natural gas introduced with the new combined heat and power regulation (CHP) put pressure on German hard coal-fired power generation in 2016, according to German Coal Importer Association (VDKi), reports Dow Jones Newswires. Consumption ...
A new online tool by the German Development Institute (DIE) compares national climate action plans submitted under the Paris Agreement. The “NDC Explorer” offers an analysis of 60 different categories like mitigation, adaption, and finance, and visualises ...
The German Federal Court of Auditors’ criticism of how the economy ministry has managed the costs of the Energiewende holds true for the past, but not the current legislative period, economy minister Sigmar Gabriel told Frank Capellan in an interview for ...
Pulling out of nuclear power production in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster has been “the most expensive panic decision a German government has ever taken,” statistics professor Walter Krämer said in an interview with manager magazin online. “In ...
The Green Party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag (federal parliament) has decided on a programme for an “ecological modernisation of the economy” that would overturn the current economic order in Germany, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports ...
The Green parliamentary group in the federal parliament (Bundestag) approved a resolution on a timetable for a coal-exit in Germany at its new year’s meeting in Weimar. “With the step-by-step, economically and socially compatible coal exit, we as the ...
Volkswagen has confirmed that a settlement with US authorities regarding the company’s emissions fraud scandal is within reach. VW “negotiated a concrete draft of a settlement agreement” which contains “fines with a total amount of USD 4.3 billion”, ...
Environment minister Barbara Hendricks’ proposal to aid the breakthrough of e-mobility with a mandatory quota for e-cars is misguided, argues Klaus Stratmann in a commentary for business daily Handelsblatt. He says EU emission limits are a suitable ...
It is surprising how long it takes for the subject of “negative emission” to make its way from scientific models into climate policy mainstream, write Oliver Geden from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) and Stefan Schäfer ...
German car suppliers are in good shape thanks to the current global success of the country’s carmakers, but the industry faces an uncertain future, write Imelda Flaig und Inge Nowak in Stuttgarter Zeitung. The international move to electric and shared ...
Two former Volkswagen employees serving as key witnesses for US authorities have accused former and current members of the German carmaker’s top management of trying to cover up VW’s emissions fraud scheme, Claus Hulverscheidt, Georg Mascolo and Klaus Ott ...
The Detroit Car Show is testimony to the close alliances forged between carmakers and IT companies in order to beat Google, report Max Hägler, Claus Hulverscheidt and Joachim Becker in Süddeutsche Zeitung. BMW is cooperating with Intel and Israeli sensor ...
German premium carmakers BMW, Daimler and Audi compete with each other on car sales year after year, writes Thomas Fromm in a commentary in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “The premium crown, sales records, pure size – carmakers have got so much used to these units ...
Politicians in the Eastern German state of Thuringia have called on the federal government to align power prices across the country, Thüringer Allgemeine reports. Federal economy minister Sigmar Gabriel’s backtracking on plans to standardise electricity ...
