“Climate protection: loser of the election battle”

The election battle in Germany leaves little room for hoping that the country’s climate protection record will improve soon, Ralf Köpke writes in Energie & Management. While the wind power industry currently approaches a new expansion record and struggles to find sufficient equipment for turbine construction, “such worries probably will be gone” by 2019, Köpke says. Hermann Albers, president of the German Wind Power Association (BWE), says expansion volumes in that year might drop by 60 percent compared to 2017, leading to layoffs in the industry. Energy economist Claudia Kemfert, of research institute DIW, says Germany currently was “harvesting fruits of the past” in terms of its renewables expansion record, leading to “a rise in carbon emissions instead of a drop”.

Read the article in German here.

See the CLEW dossiers The energy transition and climate change and Onshore wind power in Germany for more information.