German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier received on Wednesday the symbolic ‘last piece of black coal,’ marking the end of Germany’s two centuries of hard black coal production, while the country struggles to keep up with European peers in curbing emissions. Germany closed its last black coal mine in December 2018. In January this year, Germany became the latest large European economy to lay out a plan to phase out coal-fired power generation, aimed at cutting carbon emissions—a metric in which Berlin has been lagging in recent years. A government-appointed special commission at Europe’s largest economy announced the conclusions of its months-long review and proposed Germany to shut all its 84 coal-fired power plants by 2038 . While Germany will mostly seek to replace coal capacity with renewables, the country’s suppliers of natural gas expect to benefit from the coal exit because natural gas-fired capacity could offer steady supply. Germany, where […]