That of Katherina Reiche (CDU) The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) maintains that it had no influence on the monitoring report on the energy transition. “The BMWE has not made any changes to the final report of the experts,” says an answer to the written question from the former Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and current Green Bundestag member Michael Kellner, which is available to the taz.
Reiche commissioned the Energy Economics Institute at the University of Cologne (EWI) to produce a report on the status of the energy transition. The monitoring published in September is intended to serve as a basis for further energy policy. According to its own information, the EMI sent the ministry a first draft on August 29th and the final report on September 11th. According to research by the environmental organization Greenpeace The two versions differ in 28 points. After that are Statements have been changed and adapted to the political agenda of energy transition critic Reiche.
According to the newsletter portal Table.Media, email correspondence between the ministry and the EWI shows that the experts explicitly stated on August 29th that not wanting to make any more changes. The ministry is said to have announced to the institute that it would like to inform it “whether and what adjustments will be necessary”.
The ministry explained the changes by saying that the Federal Network Agency’s report on security of supply, which was published on September 3rd, had to be taken into account. According to Table.Media, this was already available to the EWI as a draft.
Waiter thinks answer is untrue
State Secretary Frank Wetzel had already replied to a question from Kellner in September that the report had been “published unchanged”. Now the Green member of the Bundestag wanted to know how the ministry explained the discrepancy between this answer and the results of the Greenpeace research.
The ministry’s protective claims are ridiculous
Michael Kellner, former Secretary of State
Wetzel replied: “Changes made to Greenpeace in the context of their request under the Environmental Information Act, on which the research cited in the question is likely to be based, are due exclusively to changes made by the experts themselves.”
Kellner doesn’t think that’s credible. “The ministry’s protective claims are ridiculous,” he told the taz. “My impression is that people are tricking, deceiving and lying to Parliament here.”
The EWI did not clearly answer the question as to whether the changes were made at the suggestion of the ministry. “The report (draft or final version) does not contain any statements or priorities that would not be covered by the expert assessment of the experts or that would have been included in the report at the insistence of the BMWE,” it told the taz. The institute admits that the Federal Network Agency’s report was available to the experts as a draft when they prepared the first version of the monitoring.