Ramped up renewables expansion will aggravate existing Energiewende problems – opinion

Germany’s new coalition agreement means a visible increase in ambition for expanding renewable energy sources, Hubertus Bardt and Benjamin Tischler write in a guest commentary for Handelsblatt. However, “goals like these are easily made but hard to achieve”, they say. Germany’s last government coalition – which like the new one consisted of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU alliance and the Social Democrats (SPD) – understood that an expansion that is carried out too quickly costs billions. The coalition  therefore introduced expansion caps for renewables. “The new government just scraps this insight,” the authors say. The main problem so far has not been a sluggish growth of renewable power production, but “high costs, a lagging grid expansion and the insufficient orientation of renewables towards demand”, they argue. All of these problems will now be aggravated by ramping up expansion goals, which will make a reform of the renewables support scheme indispensable to avoid “substantial additional costs”.

Find the op-ed in German here (paywall).

See the CLEW interview with government energy policy advisor Löschel, with CDU energy politician Pfeiffer and with SPD energy politician Westphal for more information.