Why clean energy should be at the heart of post-Covid-19 stimulus plans

In June of 1993, Germany’s energy companies took out a series of newspaper adverts . Their message was a grim, possibly self-serving, prediction, that sun, wind and water power would only ever meet four per cent of the country’s needs. Now over half of Germany’s electricity comes from renewable sources, although there has been more scepticism along the way. “In 2002 I was told by two engineers that renewables could never provide more than 10 per cent of electricity in Germany,” says Jan Rosenow, director of European programmes at the Regulatory Assistance Project, an independent organisation aimed at accelerating the clean energy transition. “In the first quarter of 2020 it was 51.9 per cent.” The very notion of a renewables-dependent grid was considered by many engineers as “pipe dream”, says John Murton, the UK’s COP26 climate summit envoy. This week, Britain passed the landmark of burning no coal to generate power for a full two months. A decade ago, about 40 per cent of the country’s electricity came from coal. During lockdown, as much as 30 per cent of power has come from renewables. In previous decades, there was also an idea that power grids could only handle relatively […]

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