Thyssenkrupp AG chief executive Miguel Angel López has dismissed German government efforts to promote solar and wind power in the country as uneconomical.
“I have not seen any plan that facilitates green electricity in central Europe at competitive costs,” he said in an interview with weekly magazine Focus. Competitive green energy would only be possible on the Iberian peninsula and Scandinavia, where costs would always be lower than in Germany, he added.
“My point is pure mathematics. If you compare the costs in Scandinavia, the Iberian Peninsula, or the USA with those here, and extrapolate them into the future, the result will always be the same,” he is quoted as saying. Billions in public subsidies for solar and wind energy is therefore wasted money, he argues. Solar power will not pay off in Germany, while wind power does not have sufficient available surface area to be rolled out, he added.
The interview appeared prior to the group’s annual press conference on Tuesday, but the topic was not broached then by executives. However, one critical commentator questioned whether Iberian and Scandinavian green energy would be made available to other countries in sufficient volumes. “They might need it for their own projects,” Kallanish heard him say from the conference floor.
In the interview, López made a stand for the strength of Germany’s manufacturing industries, and warned that de-industrialisation has already begun. He rejects public subsidies to strengthen local industry, and instead favours financial incentives that have been successful in other countries. As an example, he cites London, which created attractive jobs by granting temporary tax reductions for wealthy tax payers willing to move to the UK.
Christian Koehl Germany
