Financing the energy transition in times of financial market instability

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesResearch

Authors

One of the most pressing public priorities in Germany at present is how to organize the energy transition. However, the cost of stabilizing the financial sector as well as the fiscal pact and the debt brake mean that the government has limited financial resources. Consequently, the availability of private capital, whether in the form of equity or debt, is becoming a decisive factor in the success of the German energy transition. Recently, there have been increasing indications that banks are very reluctant to provide loans and are focusing on the potential risks of financing the switch to renewable energy. At the same time, however, the financial sector is also wrestling with political decision-makers about the capital requirements of the loans concerned. Yet, reducing the capital base in the banking sector is out of the question. Instead, the government should also call for appropriate involvement of the major banks in financing the energy transition in return for implicit guarantees for those banks, just as financial aid from the government was linked to loans being granted to SMEs in 2008. At the same time, the risks have to be spread more widely. Know-how and financial strength of private equity funds may be of help here.
Original languageEnglish
JournalDIW Economic Bulletin
Volume2
Issue number9
Pages (from-to)3-13
Number of pages11
ISSN2192-7219
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes

    Research areas

  • Economics - sustainable financial architecture, energy transition in Germany, investment in new infrastructure

Links

Recently viewed

Researchers

  1. Marco Hofheinz

Publications

  1. Multiscale performance of landscape metrics as indicators of species richness of plants, insects and vertebrates
  2. Why is there not more demand for redistribution? Cross-national evidence for the role of social justice beliefs
  3. Climate Change Adaptation in Mumbai, India
  4. The Corporate Construction of Transparency and (In)Transparency
  5. The Effect of Market Power on Electricity Storage Utilization
  6. Modeling the low-carbon transformation in Europe
  7. Germany
  8. Elution of Monomers from Two Conventional Dental Composite Materials
  9. Kritik der Kritik oder der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod
  10. Communicative contributions and communicative genres
  11. Entwicklung und Validierung eines Fragebogens zur Erfassung multipler Selbstkonzeptfacetten bei Förderschülern (Schwerpunkt Lernen) und Regelschülern der Sekundarstufe I
  12. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling and tax avoidance.
  13. “Teach like you do in America”—Personal reflections from teaching across borders in Tanzania and Germany
  14. Ecosystem services and sustainability: descriptive means, normative goals and societal transformations
  15. Lagrangian studies of coherent sets and heat transport in constant heat flux-driven turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection
  16. Organizational Decline and Innovation in Manufacturing
  17. Medienerziehung in der Kindertagesstätte
  18. Speech Acts in Corpus Pragmatics
  19. Score-informed tracking and contextual analysis of fundamental frequency contours in trumpet and saxophone jazz solos
  20. Jazz in Czechoslovakia during the 1950s and 1960s
  21. Monitoring European wildcat Felis silvestris populations using scat surveys in central Spain
  22. Statutentheorie
  23. The “New Marx Reading”
  24. Le container et l’algorithme: la logistique dans le capitalisme global
  25. Enhancing pre-service teachers' well-being during long-term internships
  26. An extended kalman filter for time delays inspired by a fractional order model
  27. Power from the Desert
  28. Schritte auf dem Kies
  29. Practicing Willkommenskultur
  30. La-Ni-H metal hydride system aging effects identification
  31. Tausend Ökologien
  32. Das Werk des Staatsminsters
  33. The importance of interests for understanding retirement
  34. Richard K. Nelson’s The Island Within