Mr Krebber, in past discussions about the Power Plant Safety Act you called for swift action. You also criticised the proposed legislation by the “traffic light” coalition of Social Democrats, Greens, and Liberal Democrats. If you needed to choose between renegotiating the legislation with the German government as well as the EU Commission after the elections and speedy implementation, which option would you go for?

Krebber: We must try both. We need a Power Plant Safety Act that will not unnecessarily drive up costs. Cost efficiency will be crucial in terms of ensuring continued acceptance of the energy transition. However, at the same time, we need the legislation to be implemented as soon as possible, because we urgently need to build new power plants. With regard to the EU Commission, I expect that they will want to strike the right balance between implementing the energy transition and ensuring industrial competitiveness, something I would translate as cost efficiency. In summary, the new German government should present the new regulations to the Commission and then put them to the vote as quickly as possible.

What year would you expect the new power plants to go out to tender?

Krebber: If the new German government is in place and ready to act by the summer, then there is no reason for the amended act not to be introduced by the end of the year and the tenders not to go out at the beginning of next year.

According to the polls, the Christian Democrats will most likely form part of the new government. Friedrich Merz, their candidate to become the new Chancellor, recently mentioned 50 new gas-fired power plants. How many of those do you expect RWE to build?

Krebber: That depends on the tender design and on whether we will be successful in the tender process. I am not too worried – if the tender is reasonably designed, we will definitely participate. We are planning to build at least 3 GW by 2030 to provide backup capacity for the coal phase-out. That is still possible.

In terms of the market situation, do you think 50 gas-fired power stations are a realistic number?

Krebber: With this number, we are probably talking about more than a decade.

Your colleague Nikolaus Valerius, the CEO of RWE Generation, recently said that an energy system being fed by 80% renewables would be more efficient than one based 100% on renewable energy. In the view of RWE, will the remaining 20% be supplied by gas-fired power plants?

Krebber: We need three things: Renewables that provide the bulk of electricity generation, storage capacities that can provide the necessary balancing energy, especially in the short-term or for a few days, and finally, we need secure backup capacities. Those will come in the shape of gas-fired power plants. How quickly they will then be decarbonised depends on the CO2 price.

If the operation of gas-fired power plants is to become climate-neutral using carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology instead of hydrogen, two parallel infrastructures would need to be built. How can that be efficient from a system perspective?

Krebber: It is necessary to develop a framework which allows us to bring all technologies into play that prevent carbon emissions. This could be done using green hydrogen at one location, blue hydrogen at the next, and possibly CSS somewhere else. It is clear that a complete parallel infrastructure should not be built across all of Germany, but the market can decide which technology is the right one.

Would a hydrogen infrastructure still be profitable then?

Krebber: We urgently need a hydrogen infrastructure because industry needs hydrogen as a basic product and it is also needed as fuel for the gas-fired power plants. Their capacity utilisation will be relatively low in the future and it will thus likely be cheaper to transport the fuel to the power plants than installing CSS systems at each plant.

You as RWE know the market very well. When will we see a ramp-up of hydrogen technology to produce sufficient volumes for the gas-fired power plants?

Krebber: We need to simplify things. There is no clear timeline for the ramp-up of blue hydrogen and green hydrogen is being made unnecessarily expensive and slowed down by the rule that the electricity needed to produce it must come from a renewables plant nearby and be generated just in time for use. Since the electricity sector is subject to the EU Emissions Trading System anyway, no extra emissions savings are being made in this way. At the moment there is not enough coming onto the market, it is too expensive and therefore no one can invest in the demand. And without demand there won’t be supply. We have a chicken-and-egg problem.

Do you need blue hydrogen to supply the gas-fired power plants in the first place?

Krebber: We need blue hydrogen to make sufficiently large volumes of hydrogen available quickly and at reasonable prices.

The onshore wind business in the U.S. has ground to a halt for now due to Donald Trump’s executive orders. What impact does this have on RWE’s business?

Krebber: We are waiting until there is more clarity before making new investments. Until then, we won’t be making any investments in offshore wind. However, for our onshore plants we are seeing a much more positive effect thanks to the favourable economic trends and the growing demand for electricity in the U.S.

Would you not have made an investment decision this year anyway?

Krebber: We would not have made an investment decision, but continued to develop our projects, for example through environmental impact assessments or examining options for grid connections.