Climate change is arguably one of the most urgent challenges facing our planet. Decarbonisation calls for a comprehensive structural transformation cutting across all sectors of the economy, all of society and almost all areas of life. This also determines the way forward for EnBW in its business activities.

EnBW is committed to actively supporting the Paris Climate Agreement and the resulting decarbonisation targets for the EU and Germany. Achieving the German climate protection targets involves all stages of the electricity and gas value chains in which EnBW is active, from switching generation away from fossil fuels and towards renewable sources such as wind and solar power to expansion of the grid infrastructure, and all the way through to customer-focused areas such as energy efficiency, e-mobility and energy services for households.

In 2013, we began a process of systematically transforming and realigning our portfolio, with a corporate strategy increasingly focused on sustainability. Even before the German Coal Phase-out Act, we voluntarily parted with about 40 % of our carbon-intensive generating capacity, for both environmental and economic reasons. We have transformed a power plant portfolio that previously consisted mainly of conventional generation into a portfolio that is already planned to consist of equal shares of thermal and renewable generating capacity by 2025.

Continuing our sustainability program from 2020 marks the next step in our corporate strategy, which has increased the focus on sustainability since 2013. We have set ourselves the goal of climate neutrality by 2035 at the latest. By this we mean net neutrality in relation to our Scope 1 and 2 emissions. We base this on a residual budget of 150 megatons, which follows from the definition of the German Advisory Council on the Environment for achieving climate neutrality in accordance with the requirements of the Paris Climate Agreement. A major milestone on this path will be halving our carbon emissions by 2030. Some Group companies, such as Energiedienst, have already been climate-neutral since 2020. In 2021, Netze BW plans to become one of the first distribution grid operators in Germany to achieve climate neutrality.