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Garzweiler opencast mine
Photo: Oliver Berg / picture alliance / dpa
According to SPIEGEL information, the Federal Ministry of Economics has kept a report under lock and key since the end of November 2019, which served as a basis for decision-making for the coal phase-out law.
According to the study, which was finally released on Tuesday, the upcoming resettlement of five towns in the Rhenish Revier could have been averted.
The villages of Keyenberg, Kuckum, Ober- and Unterwestrich and Berverath, which are to give way completely to the Garzweiler II open-cast lignite mine by 2028, are specifically affected.
Some of the residents have already been relocated.
Of the around 1500 people who once lived in the villages, there are currently around 700 left.
According to the report that the research institutes BET and EY prepared on behalf of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the extraction of coal in Garzweiler II could be reduced so far that the villages would not have to be dredged.
Around a third of the lignite in Garzweiler II could therefore remain underground - if the recommendations of the so-called "Commission for Growth, Structural Change and Employment" (short: Coal Commission) were implemented.
The top-class committee had drawn up recommendations for a socially acceptable exit from coal on behalf of the federal government.
According to its final report, which was presented in mid-January 2019, all coal-fired power plants are to be shut down by 2038 - and as evenly as possible over the years.
The federal government did not follow the last part of this recommendation in its coal phase-out law.
Instead of a steady exit path, she chose a kind of staircase model - as a concession to power plant operators and state governments.
At the end of the twenties and the middle of the thirties, a large number of power plant units are to be shut down almost simultaneously.
The need for fuel is therefore higher than recommended by the Commission and calculated by BET and EY in the report.
Accordingly, the opencast mine now needs more space and the villages have to give way.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs is trying to downplay the BET and EY report.
Shortly before the withheld study was released, representatives of the ministry held a workshop with the study authors.
As can be seen from the minutes of the meeting, the ministry emphasized that the researchers' calculations were out of date.
Upon request, the ministry also announced that the scenarios in the report would not meet the requirements of the Coal Phase-Out Act.
This is true from today's perspective.
But the ministry received the study well before the law was drafted.
When the calculations arrived, they were still up to date - and, as it is called in government circles, were incorporated into the legislative process.
If the calculations had become known at the time, they would probably have helped shape the public debate about the coal exit law.
The government would then have had to justify the forced relocation of the five villages.
Accordingly, the report "went into the poison cabinet," says an ex-member of the coal commission.
"Conscious disinformation of the public"
The study was put out to tender in spring 2019, shortly after the Coal Commission presented its final report.
At that time, the Ministry of Economic Affairs commissioned five reports in order to create a basis for decision-making for the coal phase-out law.
At the end of May 2019, BET and EY were awarded the contract for one of them: an impact assessment on the early phase-out of lignite, fee: around 1.2 million euros.
The experts completed the work for the report at the end of November 2019.
Unlike the other four studies, however, it was not published.
Instead, it did not appear at all in official government statements.
When the Vice-President of the Green parliamentary group, Oliver Krischer, inquired verbally on March 11, 2020 and again in writing on April 20, which reports the Ministry of Economic Affairs had commissioned to draft the coal phase-out law, the study by BET and EY was not mentioned.
State Secretary for Energy Andreas Feicht later apologized for this by saying that it was an "office mistake".
Feicht promised that the study would be published within weeks.
But that didn't happen.
Even after the coal phase-out law was ratified on July 3, the Ministry of Economic Affairs kept the report under lock and key - on the grounds that it was still being revised.
In fact, apparently only cosmetic corrections have been made to the paper since November 2019.
The research institute BET writes on its website that the content of the report has remained identical since November 2019.
The changes made were only intended to "make the presentation as understandable as possible".
"You can't beat that when it comes to cynicism"
Krischer accuses the Ministry of Economic Affairs of “deliberate disinformation of parliament and the public”.
"I asked umpteen times for a publication and was always put off," says the parliamentarian.
"Applications for publication according to the Freedom of Information Act were rejected with flimsy justifications that the report had not yet been approved."
From Krischer's point of view, the report shows that the government is abandoning the villages in the Rhenish Revier for “purely economic considerations”.
The MEP justifies his accusation as follows:
In the coal phase-out law, it was anchored that the energy company RWE extracts less coal from its Inden open-cast mine, while the Garzweiler II open-cast mine, which is to give way to the five villages, is allowed to completely exhaust it.
The company is now extracting a particularly large amount of coal where the more profitable power plants are, says Krischer.
Because the Inden opencast mine only supplies the old Weisweiler power station, which will soon be unprofitable anyway due to rising CO2 prices.
The power plants that are operated with the coal from Garzweiler II, however, paid off for even longer.
"RWE's profit interests are weighted higher than people's homeland," says Krischer.
"You can't beat that in terms of cynicism."
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