Towards a Climate-neutral Germany. Policy Options for the Technological Transition, Reducing Consumption and Carbon Management

To achieve a climate-neutral energy supply, Germany will need to roll out the relevant technologies and expand the necessary infrastructure. It will need more renewable energy, more heat pumps, more electric mobility and upgraded electricity and hydrogen grids. But this alone will no longer be enough to achieve climate neutrality. Experts from the Academies’ Project ESYS have investigated how Germany can become climate-neutral.

The experts focused on the following areas:

• the importance of reducing consumption in order to meet the climate targets,
• the role of faster technology rollout in helping to meet the targets,
• the requirements that would need to be met in order to achieve a climate-neutral energy supply before 2045,
• the measures required to enable climate-neutral industrial production and sustainable consumption, and
• the role of negative emissions in these strategies.

The position paper concludes that the necessary system transformation will call for ambitious measures in all of these areas, so that successes in some areas can compensate for missed targets in others. The 22 policy options outlined by the ESYS experts set out how the transformation can be achieved.

The discussion is based on the authors’ own simulations and a systematic analysis of existing energy scenarios. These are described in detail in the ESYS study “Szenarien für ein klimaneutrales Deutschland” (German only).

To the press release

acatech/Leopoldina/Akademienunion (Eds.): “Towards a Climate-neutral Germany. Policy Options for the Technological Transition, Reducing Consumption and Carbon Management ” (Position Paper), Series on Science-based Policy Advice, 2024. ISBN: 978-3-8047-4424-0.