“Inside the Energiewende: Policy and Complexity in the German Utility Industry”

The German Energiewende has a “mixed, but very troubling” record, Christine Sturm says in a long article on the Energiewende for Issues in Science and Technology, an online magazine from The University of Texas at Dallas. “On the plus side is continued public support and a very impressive ramping up of RE [renewable energy] capacity. But on the deficit side of the ledger are exploding energy costs, failed policy tools such as the German and European Union trading schemes, and hard-hit institutional actors – above all the major utilities, which increasingly look as though they have been consciously sacrificed to help Germany to meet its ambitious GHG emission targets. But these targets are not being met,” writes Sturm, who worked for German utility RWE until 2016.

Read the article in English here.

For background read the CLEW dossiers The energy transition and climate change and Utilities and the energy transition.