Herbert Diess
“Electric cars are only as clean as the electricity they charge.”
Hamburg Volkswagen leaves the way to a climate-friendly company Rush a business rather than contribute to CO2 emissions by continuing to operate old coal-fired power plants. CEO Herbert Diess wrote on Friday on the LinkedIn career network, he had already canceled several interested parties who wanted to buy the old coal blocks at the main plant in Wolfsburg and rebuild them elsewhere in the world.
He called it “paradox energy transition” when Volkswagen replace his two coal-fired power plants with gas turbines and at the same time 300 kilometers west in Datteln on the edge of the Ruhr area for 1.5 billion euros a big new coal-fired power plant should go online.
“If Germany If the coal phase-out does not go ahead, we cannot expect it from others, ”said Diess. Seven of the ten largest CO2 emitters in Europe German coal-fired power plants, He described the exit date 2038 as despondent. Without clean energy, clean mobility is also not possible. “Because electric cars are only as clean as the electricity they charge.”
Well over 1,000 new coal-fired power plants are currently under construction or planning worldwide. “If they all go online, we will not only miss the Paris climate target of 1.5 degrees. We even exceed the 2-degree mark by far. Global warming would irreversibly continue, ”warned the CEO.
Volkswagen is investing many billion euros in converting it into a provider of climate-friendly mobility and has set itself the goal of to be climate neutral by 2050, Until then, the emission of climate-damaging carbon dioxide should be gradually reduced.
After the diesel scandal four years ago, the Wolfsburg-based company fled to the front and will be focusing entirely on electromobility in the future. However, the high investments will continue to be paid for by the sale of cars with combustion engines, which are also becoming increasingly clean.