Germany subsidises climate damage / Lignite plant “in a coma”

Five people are employed around the clock in the control room of the first German lignite plant switched off to protect the climate, according to a feature by Steffen Höhne in Frankfurter Rundschau. They are there to keep the station fit for service but the head of the Buschhaus plant admits it is a challenge to motivate the team to manage a standstill.
In the coming years, seven more plants are to follow Buschhaus into the lignite emergency reserve with a total capacity of 2.7 gigawatts, equivalent to 13 percent of Germany’s lignite capacity. The stations are to remain operational for a period of four years so they can produce power within eleven days’ notice in case of emergency. But many experts doubt that will ever be the case.

Find the article in German here.

Find background material on the lignite emergency reserve in the CLEW factsheet Germany’s new power market design.

Audi, BMW, and Daimler hit the bull’s eye by managing to enlist Intel and Asian investors for their mapping service HERE, which is central to their autonomous driving ambitions, writes Michael Kröger for Spiegel Online. “For the German makers of premium cars, this broad alliance is the beginning of a new era,” writes Kröger. He says carmakers have finally understood that only cooperation can bring the clout necessary to compete with Google and other IT giants in the future mobility race.
BMW, VW subsidiary Audi, and Daimler agreed to buy Berlin-based Nokia mapping unit HERE for almost three billion euros in 2015. Digital maps form the basis for driverless cars, and the carmakers wanted to avoid reliance on Google and Apple mapping services.

Read the article in German here.

For more background on BMW’s and Daimler’s plans, read the CLEW factsheets Reluctant Daimler plans “radical” push into new mobility world and Early e-car starter BMW plans new mobility sprint.

It is high time for a finance transition - in addition to the energy, transport and agricultural transformations - to protect the climate, write Green Members of the German Bundestag Annalena Baerbock and Gerhard Schick in a guest commentary in Frankfurter Rundschau. “The profits in the old energy industry directly contradict the preservation of our planet,” write Baerbock and Schick. The German government had failed to implement the EU directive on corporate social responsibility into national law on time and the current draft was not ambitious enough. Many German cities, federal states or public institutions did not know what companies they invested in owned or did, according to Baerbock and Schick.