September 2025 |
250902 |
ENERGY CHRONICLE |
On September 15, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Katherina Reiche (CDU) presented the “Monitoring Report on the Energy Transition,” which the CDU/CSU and SPD agreed upon in their coalition agreement in early April and commissioned BET Consulting GmbH and the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne (EWI) to prepare on June 26 (PDF). “Building on this,” as the ministry's press release states, she has formulated “ten key measures that are friendly to the economy and competition” for a realignment of energy policy. However, these are merely its already known declarations of intent (250801, 250803), which it is presenting for the first time in summary form and in the most euphemistic language possible (PDF).
Reiche had announced the monitoring report as an urgently needed “reality check” even before the contract was awarded. This gave rise to fears that the result would be a commissioned work in line with her wishes. This was also consistent with the fact that the service description attached to the commission contained the explicit instruction: “The options for action to be developed are not bound to the federal government's previous target scenarios. A critical examination of these scenarios and their assumptions is explicitly desired.”
However, the experts refused to comply with this unmistakable request for propaganda support, limiting themselves to taking stock of the studies examined and pointing out various options for action. In any case, they did not deliver a partisan “reality check” in the sense desired by Reiche. Rather, they stated: “Weighing up the options for action mentioned is a political task that should be carried out in a necessary discourse following this report. In order to be able to make this assessment in the political arena, a quantitative and holistic view is indispensable.”
If Reiche is now allegedly “building” her ten-point program on the monitoring report, she is only pursuing legitimizing purposes with this claim. Insofar as the report actually had an influence despite the short time available, it was positive at best. It is striking that Reiche now wants to grant the planned gas-fired power plants at least a “prospect of conversion to hydrogen.” She also reassures us that, despite the planned cuts in renewable energy subsidies, she intends to meet the target set in the EEG of increasing the share of green electricity in gross electricity consumption to 80 percent by 2030.
Reiche is also unwilling to budge on the requirements of the Climate Protection Act, which stipulates that German greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by at least 65 percent by 2030 and by at least 88 percent by 2040 (always relative to 1990 levels). The goal of “net greenhouse gas neutrality” is to be achieved by 2045. However, these goals are as ambitious as they are distant. Reiche's claim that he is striving to meet them therefore means very little, as the current federal government will long be a thing of the past by then.
According to the coalition agreement, the monitoring report commissioned by the German government on June 26 was intended to “review the expected electricity demand, the status of supply security, grid expansion, the expansion of renewable energies, digitization, and the ramp-up of hydrogen as a basis for further work by the 2025 summer recess". It therefore covers the same topics as the report on the status of the energy transition, which a four-member expert commission has also been compiling annually since 2011 on behalf of the federal government (111015) and whose latest version (PDF), published in June 2024, was supplemented by a “status update” (PDF). However, the report agreed upon in the coalition agreement is structured differently, as it is a meta-study that evaluates a good dozen other studies that deal more or less intensively with the topics mentioned. The “Expert Commission for Monitoring the Energy Transition” is merely mentioned among the two dozen institutions whose experts were consulted. Their reports are completely ignored and not even mentioned in the bibliography.
What the coalition partners hoped to gain from the additional meta-study remains a mystery, as the annual reports on the status of the energy transition provide a very solid basis of information. They are also much easier to read and search for specific information than the supplementary product that has now been published. The 259 pages with the very casual title "Energy Transition. Efficient. Do." initially suggest something else. However, it must be said in favor of the two commissioned institutes that it is not at all easy to work through such an extensive catalog of additional smaller studies and summarize the findings within eleven weeks – the deadline for submitting the final report was set for September 11.
Supplementing and contrasting this are the latest statements from the official expert commission on energy transition monitoring: