Business | Cleaning up its act

RWE, Germany’s biggest power company, is going green

But are its plans ambitious enough?

DH6M9M Brown coal opencast mining Garzweiler near Juechen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, Europe

Oct 6th 2022|BERLIN

It has been one of Europe’s dirtiest companies for more than a century; now rwe is aiming to be among the cleanest. Germany’s largest power generator has recently taken two big steps towards this goal. On October 1st it agreed to buy the renewable-energy business of Consolidated Edison (ConEd), an American utility, for $6.8bn. Three days later it signed an agreement with Germany’s regional and federal governments to bring forward plans to stop generating electricity with lignite, an especially filthy sort of coal, by eight years to 2030. But is this enough to burnish its green credentials?

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Cleaning up its act”