Protests, violence and political controversy erupted as the schedule of Germany’s exit from coal-fired-generation – and by extension its replacement by more renewable power – soared up the country’s news agenda as a flashpoint of its energy transition, the Energiewende.
As a government-backed commission meets in Berlin to come up with a plan to phase out coal and lignite generation in Germany, thousands of protesters marched through the Hambach Forest near Cologne over the weekend in a bid to stop utility RWE from clearing the forest to widen its open-pit lignite mining.
