“Czech billionaire bets against the Energiewende”

Czech investor Daniel Kretinsky’s purchase of Vattenfall’s German brown coal business, officially completed on Friday, is a bet that Germany will not end coal-fired energy production anytime soon, writes Daniel Wetzel in Die Welt. Kretinsky’s holding EPH believes that Germany will “not be able to renounce a relatively cheap energy source like lignite in the long-term”, according to Wetzel. The purchase of several lignite-fired power plants and associated open cast mines in the German region of Lusatia makes EPH Germany’s fourth biggest power plant operator, with an installed capacity of 8,000 megawatts, according to Wetzel.

Read the article in German here.

Find Vattenfall’s press release in English here.

For background, read the CLEW factsheet Vattenfall's German brown coal: what's being sold and who wants to buy