EWE will become carbon neutral by 2035

Oldenburg, Germany, 7 December 2020. The Oldenburg-based energy and telecommunications Group EWE will become carbon-neutral by 2035. The company is thus remaining on the pathway that it chose decades ago. Having been a pioneer in onshore and offshore wind energy, electric mobility and the intelligent management of the electricity network, the company is further focusing on sustainability. To enable this, EWE is incorporating climate protection into all the Group’s strategic decisions as a matter of course.

EWE CEO Stefan Dohler explains: “By 2035, EWE will be carbon-neutral. In future, our focus will be on renewable and climate-friendly energies. We will soon end the production of electricity from coal in Bremen. In addition, we are offering our customers an ever-growing number of green products to facilitate this transition to carbon neutrality.”

EWE calculated the company’s greenhouse gas emissions for 2018 based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG). In 2018, the company and its customers emitted a total of 22,400 kilotonnes of CO2-equivalent through the use of its gas and electricity products and supply lines. EWE will reduce the emissions directly attributable to the company as far as possible by 2035 and will only offset them in exceptional cases. The company also expects emissions to decrease by at least 65 per cent in relation to its customers and by a minimum of 50 per cent with regard to purchased goods and services.

To achieve these targets as well, EWE will invest EUR 7 billion in the coming years. More than half of this amount will be spent on expanding energy networks and increasing renewable energies, such as onshore wind energy and hydrogen solutions for the industry. In addition, the company will invest in energy-efficient services and products as well as sustainable mobility solutions for customers. The wide-ranging carbon neutrality of entire regions in the future will be based on digitalisation, an area in which EWE will also invest EUR 1 billion via the joint venture Glasfaser Nordwest.

The energy revolution is already a priority in EWE’s networks today: over 95 per cent of the energy needs in the EWE network area come from renewable energies, such as photovoltaic and wind power facilities. Intelligent network management already makes it possible today to harness the great value of this form of weather-dependent electricity generation. This management system is supplemented by innovative storage solutions provided by the EWE subsidiary “be storaged”, which has already demonstrated through the large-scale hybrid storage facility in Varel how wind power can be stored in order to counterbalance short-term fluctuations and stabilise the electricity network. In the area of e-mobility, the company EWE Go is the market leader for the public vehicle-charging infrastructure in northwest Germany, with over 900 charging points.

EWE has more than 40 years’ expertise in gas storage in underground caverns and operates caverns with a capacity of around two billion cubic metres. This means that EWE meets the prerequisites necessary to potentially engage in the large-scale storage of green hydrogen, which will be an essential component of a sustainable and climate-friendly energy system. The EWE fibre optic network, with a length of more than 32,000 kilometres at present, provides the ideal foundation to connect as many households as possible in northwest Germany directly to unlimited internet, thereby enabling the process of digitalisation.

“Our task now is to drive the process of digitalisation forward and take part in the carbon-neutral energy revolution. This is a task that EWE will gladly take on. We are repositioning ourselves as a company, have a specific target and are taking climate protection and carbon neutrality into account in all our decision-making. We have the necessary investment capital to achieve this and will steadily reduce our emissions and those of our customers over the coming years in the areas of energy generation, energy transport, and products and services. In the years ahead, we will continuously devise the measures that are needed to enable this. A utility company cannot become carbon-neutral overnight. It is part of a longer pathway that we will continue to travel,” says Stefan Dohler.