Ampel-Monitor Energiewende (Monitor of the German "Traffic Light" Coalition’s Energy Transition Targets)
Energy targets of the German government - and where we stand today
Why "traffic light"?
The current German government consists of a coalition between the SPD, FDP, and Greens, commonly referred to as the "Ampelkoalition", or traffic light coalition. This is based on the party colors of red, yellow, and green.
The German government has set itself several concrete targets to drive forward the energy transition. Many of these relate to the year 2030, and in some areas they are also formulated for the longer term, up to the year 2045. Some quantitative targets were already mentioned in the coalition agreement of the so-called traffic light coalition. Since then, new targets have followed as part of various ministry publications and draft legislation, and in some cases the targets stated in the coalition agreement have been made more specific or more stringent in the process. Achieving the targets is important if Germany is to meet its climate protection commitments.
This page presents a selection of indicators from the Ampel-Monitor Energiewende. The German version of this page contains some additional information and may also be more up to date than this English version. All indicators, including the underlying data, are available open source and under a CC-BY-4.0 license on the Open Energy Tracker (OET) data platform, which is regularly updated and expanded. The OET is available in German, English, and French.
The Ampel-Monitor Energiewende is currently based on several indicators for renewable electricity generation, renewable heat, electromobility, hydrogen, energy consumption and security of supply, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy prices. The respective government targets are visualized with the help of interactive graphics and regularly compared with the current status actually achieved. A selection of graphs is shown on this page.
Comparison of current status with 2030 targets for selected indicators
The Ampel-Monitor Energiewende shows that there is a large gap between the current status and the government's targets for 2030 for most of the indicators considered. A selection of seven important indicators is shown here. The gaps are largest for green hydrogen and electromobility, followed by the expansion of offshore wind power, photovoltaics and heat pumps.
What is more, the current pace of the transition is significantly too low for almost all indicators to achieve the 2030 targets. Comparing the expansion trend of the past twelve months with the pace needed to achieve the 2030 targets, onshore wind power and even more so offshore wind power currently lag behind photovoltaics. This indicates a particularly acute need for action on wind power. The pace of electromobility is also still clearly too slow; here, growth must pick up very strongly in the next few years.
Photovoltaics
Note on the graphs
On larger displays, all figures are interactive: in the upper right area of each figure there are buttons for zooming. Individual time series can be shown or hidden by clicking in the legend. On smaller screens, such as mobile phones and pads, the figures are shown as static graphs.
For photovoltaics, the coalition government has presented an expansion target of 215 gigawatts (GW) in 2030 as part of the currently planned amendment to the EEG. At the start of the traffic light coalition in early December 2021, the installed capacity in Germany was only a good quarter of this, at just over 58 GW. To achieve the target, an average of 1.44 GW per month must be added by the end of 2030, with an increasing expansion path from 2022 to 2026. This expansion relates to net capacity additions, i.e., taking into account plants that will be taken off the grid in the future. After 2030, PV capacity is expected to continue to grow substantially to 400 GW in 2040.
Wind onshore
For onshore wind power, the planned EEG amendment specifies a target of 115 GW of installed capacity in 2030. After 2030, the government is aiming for a further significant increase in capacity to 157 GW in 2035.
A key prerequisite for the expansion of onshore wind power is the availability of appropriate land. Nationwide, only 0.7 percent of land was legally designated for onshore wind energy at the end of 2020; by the end of 2021, the value was 0.81 percent. The goal of the traffic light coalition is to designate two percent of the federal territory for wind power by 2032, and 1.4 percent of the federal territory by the end of 2027. More information and an illustration of this can be found in the Open Energy Tracker.
Wind offshore
For offshore wind power, the coalition is aiming for a capacity of at least 30 GW by 2030. At the beginning of December 2021, when the traffic light coalition started, the installed capacity in German waters was only a good quarter of this, at 7.8 GW. To achieve the expansion target, a net average of 0.20 GW per month must be added by 2030. Even after that, installed capacity should continue to grow strongly, to at least 40 GW in 2035 and at least 70 GW in 2045.
Renewable electricity
Explanations on share of renewable energy in the electricity sector
The governing coalition aims to increase the share of renewables in gross electricity consumption to 80 percent by 2030. Five years later, according to the "Easter Package," the electricity supply is then to be based "almost entirely" on renewable energy. To meet the 2030 target, the share must grow by more than four percentage points per year on average from 2021 onward - in the period from 2017 to 2021, the trend growth was only about two percentage points per year. The coalition's targets for the share of renewables lie within the corridor spanned by the Ariadne scenarios.
To supplement this, the figure can also show the shares of renewables in net electricity generation (NEG). They are statistically available with a much smaller delay than the shares in gross electricity consumption (GEC). The shares in NEG are generally higher than those in GEC, partly because GEC is higher than NEG due to self-consumption of power plants.
Heat pumps
Heat pumps play a major role in many future scenarios, especially for space heating, because they use electricity to harness environmental heat and are therefore very energy-efficient (see DIW Weekly Report 22/2022). In its coalition agreement, the government did not set a specific target for the expansion of heat pumps. However, the Eröffnungsbilanz Klimaschutz document provided by BMWK mentions a corridor of "4.1 to 6 million heat pumps" in 2030. In the context of the 2nd Heat Pump Summit in November 2022, the BMWK then stated a target of around six million heat pumps in 2030 and an addition of at least 500,000 heat pumps per year each from 2024. At the end of 2021, around 1.4 million heat pumps were installed in Germany.
After that, the heat pump stock in the Ariadne scenarios continues to grow strongly, to just under 13 million to just over 16 million units in 2030.
Renewable heat
The coalition agreement provides for “a very high share” of renewable energy in heating. However, it does not contain an explicit target for the share, only the formulation that half of the heat must be generated in a “climate-neutral” way by 2030. However, since other options such as imported carbon-neutral hydrogen or CO2 capture in the heat sector seem unrealistic by 2030, this target can be taken as a de facto target for renewables. In 2021, their share of final energy consumption for heating and cooling in Germany was 15.8 percent; in 2022, it was 17.4 percent. Accordingly, this share must increase by almost four percentage points a year until 2030. Since 2012, it has not even increased by three percentage points overall, or by around 0.5 percentage points per year in the trend from 2017 to 2021. In this respect, the traffic light coalition’s plans for the heating sector appear to be particularly ambitious. One concrete measure for achieving the 2030 target is the planned introduction of a requirement that new heating systems must be operated with at least 65 percent renewable heat as early as 2024.
Electric cars
In the coalition agreement, the government set a target of "at least 15 million fully electric passenger cars by 2030". Since significant shares of passenger cars with hydrogen fuel cells now seem implausible, this target can largely be regarded as a target for purely battery-electric vehicles (excluding plug-in hybrids). At the start of the traffic light coalition in early December 2021, there were around 587,000 purely battery-electric passenger cars in Germany. To reach the target, an average of around 132,000 vehicles per month will have to be added by 2030.
Under the alternative assumption of an s-curve-shaped progression with higher growth rates in the future, based on a study by Fraunhofer ISI, the current trend is lacking behind. In addition to the purchase premiums currently being granted, a ban on new registrations of cars with internal combustion engines at EU level for 2035 is likely to make a further contribution to increasing the battery-electric car fleet.
Public charging points
In the coalition agreement, the government set a target of "one million publicly and non-discriminatorily accessible charging points by 2030, with a focus on fast-charging infrastructure". At the end of November 2021, just under 54,000 charging points were in operation, including around 46,000 normal charging points and 8,000 fast charging points. This means that by 2030, an average of around 8,700 new charging points will have to go into operation every month. The trend over the past twelve months was, again, much lower. Compared with this trend, the expansion of the charging infrastructure would have to increase by around a factor of six, assuming a linear progression. Alternatively, assuming an s-curve, as in the case of electric vehicles, shows that the current trend would be largely on track.
Electrolysis
The coalition agreement mentions "an electrolysis capacity of around 10 gigawatts in 2030" as a target. At the beginning of October 2021, electrolysers with an electrical output of just over 60 megawatts (MW) were in operation in Germany. This means that an average of around 90 MW per month must be added by the end of 2030. To date, the installed capacity has barely increased. However, further electrolysers with an electrical output of just under 500 megawatts are currently under construction or in the final investment decision (FID) phase. In addition, there are a further 8.3 gigawatts for which feasibility studies are underway. In addition, there are (less concrete) concepts for further projects with a total capacity of 13.2 gigawatts. A specific year of planned commissioning is not specified for all projects (see column on the right). In order to achieve the target of 10 gigawatts in 2030, not only would all projects with a concrete start date that are currently at least at the feasibility study level actually have to be realized, but also a good portion of the less mature conceptual projects.
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