German National Platform for Electric Mobility

History

The foundation for the promotion of electric mobility in Germany has been set with the Integrated Energy and Climate Programme of the Federal Government decided in 2007. Concrete measures were proposed in connection with the National Strategy Conference on Electromobility at the end of 2008. First fundings followed under the second economic stimulus package in early 2009. Before that, the industry had formed a so-called Innovation Alliance "LIB 2015". This industry consortium committed to invest 360 million euros for research and development of lithium-ion batteries.

The economic stimulus package brought up an amount of 500 million euros for projects in 15 topics. funded by the Federal Ministries of Economics and Technology (BMWi), of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs (BMVBS), for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), of Education and Research (BMBF) and of Food, Agriculture and Consumer protection (BMELV). The actual implementation was mostly coordinated by partners like the VDI/VDE-IT that already coordinated previous developments in electric mobility like research and development of batteries.

In September 2009 Annette Schavan, Federal minister of Education and Research, inaugurated the Forum Electric Mobility ("Forum Elektromobilität") as part of the joint project System Research for Electromobility of the Fraunhofer Society. The forum was assigned to pool the research and development efforts of the 33 Fraunhofer institutes together with the industrial partners. Until 2011 the schemes were funded with 30 million euros from the economic stimulus package. This support constitutes the first step of implementation of the National Development Plan for Electric Mobility.

The Federal Chancellery gave increasingly top priority to the National Development Plan for Electric Mobility. The Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs established the Joint Agency for Electric Mobility of the Federal Government on 1 February 2010 ("Gemeinsame Geschäftsstelle Elektromobilität der Bundesregierung"). With its kick-off it announced the foundation of the German National Platform for Electric Mobility, which was proclaimed on 3. May 2010.

Subsequently, the involved partners committed to establish cross-company and cross-sector working groups and to deliver a first interim report until the end of 2010. The coordination panels of the NPE could build on experts of the existing working groups of the German Commission for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies of DIN and VDE (DKE) of the Association for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies (VDE). The VDE Congress "E-mobility" on 8 and 9 December 2010 in Leipzig was used for technical consultation, from which the first interim report for the Federal Government has been derived. It describes the state of development and the expectations of the representatives of industry and research.

The second report was published in 2011. The report refined the details on development options and proposes support of different projects. In an early statement the German industry expressed the opinion that the current stimulation plan is insufficient to reach the defined goal of 1 million [electric vehicle|electric vehicles] in Germany by 2020. However, the report states that with the right incentive measures the goals of the NPE could still be reached.

At the International Conference of the German Government for Electric Mobility on 27 and 28 May 2013, the representatives of the Government confirmed the objectives and the planned financing and incentives. With its fourth report (Progress Report 2014 – Review of Pre-Market Phase) the NPE completed the pre-market phase (2010–2014) and showed the progress so far. At the same time the NPE presented a package of measures for the subsequent phase of the market-ramp-up (2015–2017), which showed how Germany could achieve the targets till 2020. The report stresses the need for additional incentives to reach the one million target.

In June 2015 the German Bundestag passed the first act on electric mobility ("Elektromobilitätsgesetz"). At the National Conference for Electric Mobility of the Federal Government in 2015, Chancellor Merkel announced a decision on further support measures for the end of the year. In spring of 2016 the decision on a support program was made, which directly addresses buyers of electric vehicles by financial incentives.