Plans to invest billions of Euro in renewable energy projects in Germany has prompted renewables businesses to call for preferential treatment to emerge for the sector from the energy summit that began last week.
The renewable energy industry called for the summit to address the supply of heat and fuels, setting the course for replacing imported oil and gas by renewable energies and energy efficiency.
Frank H. Asbeck, head of Solarworld said: “We must get away from expensive energy imports and climate hazardous energy sources.” The renewables players called for the summit to step away from the polar debate of building new coal-fired capacity or extending the life of nuclear capacity. Said Ulrich Schmack, head of Schmack Biogas: “This discussion will lead in no steps forward, if we want to fetch away Germany from the import dependency of oil and gas.”
The German Renewable Energy Federation (BEE) group added that in the next decade Germany will more invest in renewable energies than in conventional power plants with investments amounting to €70 billions through to 2012, of which €40 billion will go on the electricity sector.
The summit agreed to set up three working groups to investigate German energy with the findings due to be discussed at a next energy summit in September 2006. One commission led by the German foreign office and the federal ministry for economics is to consider the international questions of energy supply, the second, led by the federal ministry for economics and the federal ministry for the environment will look into the national problems of energy production, and the third will examine the problems of energy research and efficiency under the federal ministry for the environment and the federal ministry for research.
Nuclear generation was not on the summit agenda.
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