EU taxonomy

To implement the taxonomy requirements across the Group, we already launched a project in the 2020 financial year. We established a steering committee to work together with the relevant specialist departments in determining the environmentally sustainable revenue, capex and opex, as well as the adjusted EBITDA, related to the Group’s taxonomy-eligible activities.

As of the 2021 financial year, we started applying the EU taxonomy in full to the EnBW business portfolio before the legal obligation began. In doing so, the delegated acts supplementing Article 8 of the Taxonomy Regulation from 6 July 2021 and the associated technical screening criteria for the objectives of climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation from 4 June 2021 were applied. There has been a legal obligation to apply the EU taxonomy since the 2022 financial year.”

In the 2021 financial year, we were already able to demonstrate taxonomy alignment for our activities in the areas of e-mobility, power grids, water supply and power generation from renewable energy sources. In addition to the business activities from the previous year, we reported taxonomy alignment for the first time for the activities involving gas grids, district heating, electricity generation from gas and combined heat and power in the 2022 financial year. The existing business transactions for each activity were analyzed and evaluated with respect to being taxonomy-aligned.

Following the start of electricity generation from gas and combined heat and power, the Complementary Climate Delegated Act of February 2022 also applied for the first time. Gas activities are therefore deemed to play an important role as a transitional activity, making an important contribution to meeting the EU’s climate and environmental objectives. The planned fuel switch plants meet the requirements for the construction and operation of electricity generation plants and combined heat and power plants.

Based on the available documentation for the six environmental objectives of the EU taxonomy (delegated acts for environmental objectives 1 and 2 and drafts for environmental objectives 3 to 6), we carried out an in-depth examination of the contributions made by our business activities. We believe that our main contribution is in the area of climate change mitigation and the contribution made by EnBW’s activities to the other five environmental objectives will thus not be examined further.

The EU Taxonomy defines business activities as being “environmentally sustainable” if they:

(1) contribute substantially to one of the six environmental objectives, verified by compliance with the technical screening criteria;
(2) do not significantly harm the five remaining EU environmental objectives; and
(3) comply with minimum safeguards with regard to labour and human rights.