RWE has no claim to compensation over coal exit – parliament lawyers

The German state is not liable to compensate coal plant operators over the coal phase out, Birgit Marschall says in an article for RP Online. The federal parliament’s research service concludes that while compensation might be paid in certain cases of “otherwise unreasonable economic burden”, the coal exit, as proposed by Germany’s coal commission in January, did not put any such burden on individual plants. The conclusion comes despite the coal commission recommending that compensation could be paid to operators like RWE on the basis of “mutual agreements” between the companies and government. Green MP Oliver Krischer commented that no one could understand why the average taxpayer should pay for power stations that had been written off for decades and with which RWE had already earned billions.