Greens vow to fight climate adversaries/ Pope urges Merkel on climate

The Green Party has failed to learn from past experience that insisting on controversial demands can cost the party dearly in terms of voter approval, Ludwig Greven writes in a commentary for Zeit Online. While the world is “grappling with Donald Trump,” the Paris Agreement “has been shaken” and terrorism and political instability are challenging European cohesion, “the Greens actually make same-sex marriage an indispensable coalition requirement,” Greven writes. “Don’t they have any other woes?” While the party deserved credit for protecting citizen rights by advocating equality for homosexuals, making the demand central to their programme “shows they haven’t quite understood past failures,” Greven argues. The Greens’ traditional insistence on prohibitions, such as a rapid ban of dirty coal plants and combustion engines together with other “red lines” for potential coalition agreements leads Greven to ask “whether the Greens want to govern at all.”

Find the commentary in German here.

See the CLEW dossier Vote2017 - German elections and the Energiewende for more information.

The surplus on Germany’s green energy account continues to exceed five billion euros, compared to 4.3 billion euros in May 2016, reports Andreas Mihm in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. But the surplus will shrink over the summer to pay for seasonally higher solar feed-in. The surplus has risen strongly because the green power surcharge rose to 6.88 cents per kilowatt-hour, because relatively moderate wind speeds put a break on wind feed-in at the start of the year, and because many renewable operators sold their electricity directly on the power exchange due to high wholesale prices, according to the article.

Find the article in German here.

Find the grid operators’ most recent data on the green energy account here.

For background, read the CLEW factsheet Balancing the books: Germany’s “green energy account”.

Successful citizens’ energy projects in Germany’s first onshore wind power auction still have to prove that they can live up to their name, Bernward Janzing writes in the Tageszeitung (taz). While 93 percent of successful bidders in the auction were identified as citizens’ projects, “a closer look” raises the question as to whether the projects actually match their label, he writes. According to the German Wind Energy Association (BWE), the eased requirements for citizens’ projects in the auction “might encourage all market actors to label their projects as citizen co-operatives,” Janzing says. Employees of large project developers were engaged in many citizens’ projects, Janzing argues, fuelling speculation that these projects ultimately might end up in the larger players’ portfolios. The BWE therefore suggests legally ensuring that citizens’ projects cannot change ownership for five years.

Read the article in German here.

For background, see the CLEW article Citizens’ energy projects dominate first onshore wind power auction and the CLEW factsheet High hopes and concerns over onshore wind power auctions.

Social Democrats (SPD) in Saxony have made clear they consider lignite mining to play an important role as a “bridging technology” in Germany’s energy supply for the foreseeable future, Welt Online reports. “We rely on a gradual approach that equally considers the needs of local people and creates a sufficient number of sustainable jobs,” said the SPD parliamentary group from Saxony, where part of  Germany’s second largest coal mining area is located. Saxony’s conservative state premier, together with his social democratic colleague from neighbouring Brandenburg, last week called for more than a billion euros in public money to mitigate the economic transformation that comes with ending coal mining.

Find the article in German here.

See the CLEW factsheet When will Germany finally ditch coal? for more information.