“Hand brake put on”

Germany’s green energy industry has for years dashed from one record to the next, but this trend is set to slow down, Thorsten Knuf writes in a commentary for Frankfurter Rundschau. “Yes to green energy but, please, not too much, such is the government’s demand,” he says. The official line is that the Energiewende needs to be better organised, but one could well imagine that Social Democratic economy minister Sigmar Gabriel “secretly seeks to keep the climate-damaging coal industry alive for as long as possible”, according to Knuf. With general elections less than one year ahead, “arguably no prospect could be worse for a Social Democratic party leader than coal miners and labour unions turning their backs on him”, he writes. But citizens needed to have choice in energy policy between “a courageous restart and an Energiewende with the hand brake put on”.

Read more on Germany’s performance in emission reduction in the CLEW article German carbon emissions rise in 2016 despite coal use drop.

For more information on the upcoming election year, read the CLEW dossier Vote2017 - German elections and the Energiewende.