On Wednesday, the German government is to discuss the new proposals for energy policy revisions. The focus is on price. Craig Morris back-calculated what needs to be done to hit the government’s official targets, for instance for 2020. A draft of what will be discussed tomorrow was leaked over the weekend, and I wrote about it here. My main concern is whether it will even be possible to reach the official targets under the new proposals. So follow my math below. The official target for the power sector for 2020 is still 35 percent. Renewables made up roughly 25 percent of German power consumption (but only 23.4 percent of power generation because the country exported so much electricity) last year. So we lack 10 percent from now to 2020. Power from biomass has been growing by approximately 0.5 percentage points on average over the past five years. If we extrapolate that growth from the current nearly 7 percent, biomass will cover around 10.5 percent of demand in 2020. On the other hand, the new proposals … Continue reading German energy targets: “at most” replaces “at least”