Meeting its targets looks hard
, co-leader of the Green party and the economy tsar in Germany’s ruling coalition, floated a bill last spring that mandated replacing gas and oil boilers with cleaner heat pumps, he got more heat than he bargained for. Tabloids screamed his “heat hammer” would push millions into debt. Whipped-up fury against “Green fascism” boosted ratings for the hard-right Alternative for Germany party. The minister spent much of the summer tweaking his bill. His patience paid off.
Yet the new law may prove a sign of things to come. For one thing, the spring storm exposed just how fast and how low enthusiasm for environmental initiatives can sink the moment they threaten wallets. Mr Habeck’s compromise also showed that despite much progress in Germany’s, the now two-decade-old national effort to shift entirely to clean energy remains a steep uphill climb.
There is another problem. For all their efficiency, heat pumps draw on electricity that in Germany is largely still supplied by hydrocarbons. True, on good days solar and wind power now generate well over half the power supply. But with demand expected to grow by 20% by 2030—pushed up by millions of new electric cars and now heat pumps—the addition of renewables capacity will need to speed up markedly.
And so, say many experts, will investment in dirty old thermal plants. A recent report on bottlenecks to German growth from Deutsche Bank is categorical: “The basic problem is that no cost-effective electricity-storage technologies on a large industrial scale are in sight…Germany will therefore continue to rely on traditional back-up power-generation capacity.
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