Dear reader,
the protests in Lützerath have dramatically raised awareness of climate change and the need to switch to new energies these days.
However, only a few are aware of the extent to which the energy transition is still snagged because the regulation and framework conditions are not right.
Colleague Kirsten Bialdiga has researched the subject among operators of small wind farms with few turbines.
Wind power was one of the first green energy sources to be developed on a large scale in Germany, also with the help of extensive government support.
But in the meantime, the legal requirements are making life very difficult for the many small wind millers in Germany.
Specifically, it is a requirement that the operators of such systems up to a certain size are not allowed to feed their electricity into the grid themselves.
Rather, they need a direct marketer - and one is difficult to get because for such companies, the small-scale business is not always worthwhile.
People are affected, some of whom have only set up one or two wind turbines to make their contribution to the energy transition.
An insignificant part of the market one might think.
But far from it: more than one in five of the 28,400 onshore wind turbines nationwide is affected by the problems.
For Economics Minister
Robert Habeck
, many small problems are becoming a big one - his environmental and climate goals are also at risk, as you can read here in Kirsten Bialdiga's story.
The business news of the day:
The US carmaker
Ford
is increasingly distancing itself from
Volkswagen
.
Both groups recently ended the joint robot car project
Argo AI
.
Now comes the next step: Ford wants to use other technologies in addition to the Wolfsburg-based concepts in future generations of electric vehicles.
No final decision has yet been made about further cooperation with Volkswagen, said Ford's European boss for electric cars,
Martin Sander
, in an interview.
Critical words from
Stefan Oelrich
, the head of pharmaceuticals at the
Bayer
group: Europe is "innovation-unfriendly" and makes "really big mistakes," said the manager of the "Financial Times".
And he made it clear that this expression of opinion does not stop there.
The pharmaceutical and agricultural group draws many more consequences from the recognized grievance - and shifts the focus of its pharmaceutical business to the USA and China.
What else was important today:
There is actually a clear requirement for the supervisory boards of German companies: the Corporate Governance Commission demands that "expertise" in "sustainability issues" must also be represented among the supervisors.
However, a study by the Hamburg-based personnel consultancy Get Ahead, which is available exclusively to manager magazin, now shows that the 40 Dax companies are hardly able to comply with this wish.
Only a minority of them give sufficient consideration to the topic of sustainability on the supervisory board.
After inflation, interest rates have been rising again for some time now.
This has an impact on the business of life insurers - and on the return prospects of the insured.
So can life insurance policy holders breathe a sigh of relief now?
Probably not, says actuary
Axel Kleinlein
in conversation with my colleague Lutz Reiche.
The expert warns of billions in risks in the industry - and sees explosives in new rules for companies.
My recommendation for the evening:
Lufthansa
pilots
and their union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) regularly appear very united in the public eye when it comes to enforcing higher salaries.
Now, however, a fierce dispute has arisen among the aircraft pilots.
The trigger was a letter from long-distance
pilot Jörg Handwerg
, who was the spokesman for the union for many years.
In his letter, Craftsman properly opposes his colleagues.
It is - one would hardly have guessed otherwise - also about money: The well-known Lufthansa man criticizes the allocation of lucrative supervisory board positions by the VC board.
But that's not all, as colleague Claas Tatje writes in his entertaining story about Zoff.
Best regards, your Christoph Rottwilm
PS: Do you have any requests, suggestions, information that we should take care of journalistically?
We look forward to your mail at chefredaktion@manager-magazin.de.
