The knockout blow for the financing of offshore wind farms is the so-called matching maturities rule which was aggravated to stabilize the financial markets. “Offshore wind farms cannot be financed by anyone. We have just been banned from doing this.”
Next bad news for the German Federal Government: Stricter regulations of the financial markets are endangering the green energy transition.
Everything depends on everything else, it is said forever. But who would have thought that this also applies to the banking regulation and the green energy transition? At a meeting of the Council for Market Economy, supported by the Association of Bavarian Industry (vbw), Commerzbank board member Markus Beumer granted insight into applied political chaos theory.
He doubted that the switch to offshore wind power generation will occur. The dream, he said, was founded on “wind farms that cannot be financed by anyone.” What particularly upset the banker: “We have just been banned from doing this”. The host and President of the Association of Bavarian Industry Randolf Rodenstock commented dryly: “When it comes to the green energy transition, nothing surprises me anymore. If there are no profitable businesses, then the transition will simply not take place.”
Federal Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen has already been confronted by the financial industry about this problem. The Christian Democrat minister turned pale. That’s because the giant mills off the German coast were supposed to provide the mass of green electricity in the next few decades. Off shore, the wind is blowing stronger than on land, so that wind turbines would be profitable much faster than solar technology that is being subsidised to the tunes of billions. Offshore, wind mills do not blight the landscape and cause less public protests. And now this!
The knockout blow for the financing of offshore wind farms is the so-called matching maturities, which was aggravated to stabilize the financial markets. Due to this regulation, banks should secure their loans with a refinancing of a similar maturity. After all, in the banking crisis, banks which had borrowed money for long-term loans only for short-term got into serious trouble.
