There is a stretch of land close to the Polish border where the triumph and tragedy of Germany’s environmental policy can be viewed in startling proximity.
Tucked away in a pine forest just east of Cottbus is Lieberose, one of the largest solar power plants in the country. Built more than a decade ago, with the help of generous green subsidies the plant’s 900,000 photovoltaic panels produce enough clean power to supply 20,000 households. Sparkling silently in the winter sun, the whole plant needs just 10 workers to keep it running.
Beyond the treetops, however, a thick white cloud hangs permanently in the sky. Its source is the nine cooling towers at Jänschwalde, a conventional power station that runs on lignite, or brown coal, one of the dirtiest fuels around. By some counts, it is the plant with the fourth-biggest emissions of carbon dioxide in Europe. The lignite itself is brought from an opencast mine a few kilometres away. Viewed from the edge, the mine resembles a vast moon crater, lifeless except for the towering excavators and spidery conveyor belts that operate far below.
In the region that surrounds Cottbus, more than 8,000 workers depend on jobs in the lignite mines and the power plants that use the fuel.
Sun versus coal, renewable versus conventional, climate and environment versus jobs and the economy — Germany has struggled for years to chart a path between these poles. The country has long thought of itself as a green pioneer, setting the pace on issues such as nuclear power, climate change and renewables.
Yet the German economy also remains heavily dependent on the car industry, and fuel sources such as lignite. The challenge in reconciling the country’s industrial demands with its environmental ambitions has rarely been harder — and has become a defining issue for Chancellor Angela Merkel as she enters her final phase in office.
On Saturday a government commission unveiled a plan that calls for the phasing out of coal and lignite power in Germany by 2038. The long transition period reflects the critical importance of coal to the national economy, but is also intended to give affected regions such as Cottbus time to prepare for the inevitable economic loss.
At heart, however, the phase-out plan is designed to help Germany achieve its ambitious 2030 climate targets, and restore the country’s green credentials after years of setbacks. The question facing German leaders now is: can they deliver on that promise?
“What happens in Germany will send out a signal. People are saying: ‘If a country with the wealth and industrial base of Germany is not able to exit coal in an efficient manner, then how can we do it?’,” says Ottmar Edenhofer, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The world is looking at us. We have 10 years to solve the coal problem. What is on the line is Germany’s international credibility.”
In 2000, Germany became the first big economy to place an all-in bet on wind and solar power, passing a much-copied law that offered high guaranteed feed-in tariffs for renewable energy. The move sparked a wind and solar boom that gathered pace under Ms Merkel. When she took office in 2005, renewables accounted for 10 per cent of the electricity generated in Germany. In the years since, that figure has soared to 40 per cent. Now the Merkel government is plotting the next step, with an official target to lift renewables to 65 per cent of the energy mix by 2030.
Since Ms Merkel became chancellor, Germany has committed to closing all its nuclear plants by 2022, invested hundreds of billions of euros in renewable energy and emerged as a pivotal leader in the multilateral effort to combat climate change. Ms Merkel, a trained scientist and former environment minister, has played a key role in all of these efforts, earning herself the sobriquet of the “climate chancellor”.
But as the Merkel era draws to a close — she will not contest the next election, in 2021 — a different narrative is taking shape. Critics point out that, despite all the cost and effort of Germany’s renewables push, the country’s carbon dioxide emissions are barely changed from a decade ago. Last year, Berlin was forced to admit that it would not meet its climate target for 2020, which foresaw a reduction in CO2 emissions by 40 per cent from 1990 levels. The failure dealt an embarrassing blow to the country’s standing as a climate champion, and confirmed suspicions among environmental activists that Germany was no longer the strong ally of old.
Tina Löffelsend, director of climate policy at Bund, a German environmental organisation, says the feeling among green campaigners today is increasingly one of “disappointed love” towards Ms Merkel: “She started promisingly but in the last 10 years nothing has happened in terms of CO2 reductions.”
In Brussels, campaigners have long complained that Berlin tries to block or water down environmental legislation that displeases the country’s powerful car industry or other industry lobbies. At the multilateral level, admiration for Ms Merkel’s record of leadership has given way to exasperation at Germany’s unwillingness to agree a speedy phase-out of coal and lignite. And, closer to home, the air quality in dozens of German cities is so poor that courts have started imposing bans on diesel cars. As she enters the final years of her tenure, Ms Merkel’s legacy as the climate chancellor has rarely looked more tarnished.
“Merkel has been a champion of the Paris agreement and the multilateral framework to deal with climate change in general,” says Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International. “But if you look at her record in Germany, you see that the country has missed its emissions targets and that emissions continue to rise in the transport sector. And then there is the coal issue.”
The question of how and when to exit coal has long been among the most contentious political and economic issues in Germany. Business leaders have voiced fears that a rapid phase-out will further raise already high electricity prices, and increase the risk of black-outs. Lignite accounts for more than a fifth of electricity production, and provides jobs to more than 20,000 workers. Plants such as Jänschwalde — which supply lots of cheap, reliable power around the clock — play a crucial role in an energy system that German industrial groups such as Siemens, Daimler and BASF depend on.
“Germany’s prosperity depends to a large extent on the competitiveness of energy-intensive businesses,” Steffen Kampeter, the managing director of the German employers’ federation, warned ahead of the weekend coal deal. Affordable power and the security of supply were “paramount” for the national economy.
Environmental campaigners, meanwhile, have long argued that a speedy shutdown of coal and lignite-fired power plants is the only way for Germany to meet its CO2 reduction targets for 2030, which are even more ambitious than the 2020 goals. Over the next 11 years, Germany is required to reduce its overall CO2 emissions by 55 per cent compared with 1990, with individual targets for every sector of the economy.
The plan presented this weekend seeks to balance those competing interests, in part by throwing vast amounts of money at regions, companies and households: affected coal regions are supposed to receive €40bn over the next 20 years. Agreeing on a phase-out plan for German coal was hard — implementing it will be harder still.
Germany’s dilemmas are largely the result — intended and unintended — of the country’s much-vaunted Energiewende, or energy shift, that started under Ms Merkel’s Social Democratic predecessor. The plan was to gradually replace power generated through nuclear and coal-fired stations with renewable energy sources. Part of the plan worked to perfection: encouraged by generous subsidies, investors rushed to build wind parks on land and at sea. Millions of buildings both old and new were fitted with solar panels. The cost of renewable energy fell dramatically along the way — to the point where new wind and solar installations can today produce energy more cheaply than conventional power stations.
“On the whole this has been a success story,” says Patrick Graichen, director of Agora Energiewende, a Berlin-based think-tank. “We not only managed to lift renewables to 40 per cent of our electricity mix, but 25 per cent of our power now comes from wind and solar — two technologies that everyone used to think were simply too unreliable. This is a tremendous achievement. No other country has done anything like this.”
The problem is that Germany’s renewables boom has done little to lower the country’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. Policymakers had initially hoped that the new solar parks and wind farms would force coal-fired power stations from the grid, in effect replacing the dirtiest with the cleanest form of energy. What happened instead was that renewables put the squeeze on gas-fired stations, which are cleaner than coal plants but also more expensive to run.
“The starting point is that Germany is one of the dirtiest carbon countries in Europe now, with an inability to even meet its 2020 target,” says Dieter Helm, a professor of energy policy at Oxford university. “This is a country that has spent more than anyone else [on the energy transition] and [that] resulted in an outcome that is mostly worse, and doesn’t fulfil its own objectives.”
The push to make German power production less carbon-intensive was dealt another blow by Ms Merkel’s decision to accelerate the shutdown of nuclear plants after Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011. Her move was a natural response to the surge in public fears at the time, but it removed another vital — and largely CO2-free — component from the national energy mix.
“We should have done things the other way around. We should have exited the CO2-intensive energy sources first, and nuclear power second. If you look at the current leaders in climate policy — countries like the UK, France and Sweden — they all have an important nuclear component in their energy mix,” says Martin Neumann, an MP and energy spokesman for the Free Democrats, a centrist pro-business party.
Another crucial failing, according to critics, was that German policy focused too narrowly on the energy sector — and paid scant attention to cars, trucks and the transport sector in general, where emissions today are higher than they were in 1990. Without drastic reforms and a massive shift towards electric vehicles, the 2030 goal of cutting emissions from the transport sector by more than 40 per cent will be out of reach. Germany’s love of the motor car, and its dependence on the industry that builds them, has emerged as perhaps the biggest obstacle on the road to meeting the 2030 targets.
“Transport emissions are out of control,” says Mr Graichen. “What you would need now is a whole package of measures, including raising petrol and diesel prices and in return lowering electricity prices and subsidising electric vehicles. But so far no one in Germany has dared to touch these issues because everyone is afraid of the car lobby.”
As it stands, the Energiewende remains a work in progress at best, the interim result of a decades-old struggle between political priorities that has left business leaders and green campaigners alike deeply frustrated. To Ms Merkel’s defenders, the general unhappiness is proof that Germany’s veteran leader has managed to strike a balance. “She remains the climate chancellor. But as chancellor she also has to keep an eye on jobs, on security of energy supply and the cost of electricity — and that is what she is doing,” says Marie-Luise Dött, an MP for Ms Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the party’s environment spokeswoman.
Elsewhere, however, the coal phase-out is seen as the chancellor’s last chance to restore Germany’s tarnished green credentials — and her own. “She has a very deep understanding of the science of climate change. She knows what is at stake, and she knows that Germany is not where it should be at this moment in history,” says Ms Morgan, the Greenpeace director. “How she squares that with her role as German leader is hard to say. But I would imagine it keeps her up at night.”
