Emissions from road traffic continue to be high, and new wind turbines are also stuck in traffic jams.
Photo: dpa/Roberto Pfeil
Which year and which federal minister do these sentences come from: »So far, the energy turnaround has primarily been an electricity turnaround. In the heat, building and transport sectors in particular, the energy transition has not yet reached the necessary pace.« The resolution: This is what CDU Economics Minister Peter Altmaier wrote in 2019 in the second progress report on the energy transition. In the last few years of the grand coalition, it could be heard everywhere that this was essentially hidden behind the socket. What that really means, however, only becomes clear under the traffic light.
Subscribe to the »nd«
Being left is complicated. We keep track!
With our digital campaign subscription, you can read all issues of »nd« digitally (nd.App or nd.Epaper) at home or on the go for little money. Subscribe now!
When he explains his energy and climate policy, the current economics minister, Robert Habeck, likes to draw a comparison with the grand coalition. We come from a time when Germany persuaded itself that the decision to be climate-neutral by 2045 alone would already have achieved this goal, said the Green politician this week at the annual meeting of the renewable energy sector in Berlin. The Ampel government has cleaned up this in two ways: First, at the beginning of the legislature, they made an honest assessment, in the style of “brutal harshness”. On the other hand, if decisions and reality do not match, you either have to change the decisions or the reality – in contrast to Groko, the traffic light stands for the latter.
If you look at the reality at the halfway point of the government’s traffic lights, it can be said that the transition to electricity is actually progressing faster. This was ensured by numerous legislative packages – but above all the expansion of wind and solar energy now enjoys the legal priority of a »public interest«. And so this year in Germany more than 10,000 megawatts of photovoltaics will be connected to the grid – twice as much as in 2021 and a record increase. 2.6 million systems with an output of 71 gigawatts have now been installed, and the necessary rate of expansion has already been reached. The situation with wind power is more difficult. Around 4,000 megawatts are expected to be added this year. That’s two-thirds more than last year, but the 10,000 megawatts needed here every year are still a long way off.
The industry has meanwhile said goodbye to the Chancellor’s requirement that four to five wind turbines should be erected in Germany every day. An unexpectedly large problem is currently evident when transporting finished systems by road, which are increasingly stuck in traffic jams.
Above all, however, in the first half of the traffic light it turned out with quite brutal severity that the heat and transport turnaround represent different political calibers than the electricity turnaround. The rifts that opened up around the heating law or the end of combustion engines were not only torn open by populists. Climate protection is no longer hidden behind the socket, but breaks out in your own garage or in the boiler room and occupies your wallet. That’s a different quality.
There will still be a lot of debate about how much the traffic light government underestimated or ignored this important difference to the electricity transition. It is much more annoying that Habeck no longer follows his own imperative – take decisions seriously and change reality accordingly. If reality no longer fits, the decisions are now also changed at the traffic lights. The worst case is the reform of the climate protection law. By abandoning the emission reduction targets for the individual sectors of transport and buildings, the government is giving up the previously binding climate protection, as environmentalists rightly criticize. Millions of tons of CO2 will be emitted too much – until the showdown threatens in 2030.
Like his predecessors in office, Habeck now shows a penchant for nice calculations. This is how his ministry calculates in a background paper: With the reformed climate law, the federal government can close up to 80 percent of the climate protection gap in 2030 through measures already enacted or planned. Habeck says this to critics and skeptics from the climate movement and the public across the country – according to the motto: What do you want, we are on the way to achieving the climate target for 2030.
In fact, however, not even 70 percentage points are reasonably secured by the measures that have been decided. It contains, for example, the climate effect of the old draft of the Building Energy Act (GEG), which was practically rewritten in the last two weeks and, in its current version, extends the service life of fossil heating systems by years. The trick with the hydrogen-capable “H2-ready” heaters in the GEG, the LNG boom and last but not least the thousands of megawatts of planned backup power plants for the future electricity system are also questionable for the climate balance. They also call themselves “H2-ready” and still run for years on natural gas instead of green hydrogen. At the same time, the green electricity industry, if left to its own devices, could bridge the times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, largely with renewable energy.
Even with the enormous boom in solar power, one cannot be completely happy. Because the more sunny days push the electricity price down to zero on the exchange for hours, the more operators of large solar parks are beginning to ask themselves how they should refinance their investments under such circumstances.
A high proportion of renewables behind the socket is all well and good. However, the energy transition is still limited to an electricity transition. In terms of heat and traffic, Germany has partially fallen behind the starting line under the traffic light.