The European Commission has positively assessed Germany’s fourth and final payment request under the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the centrepiece of NextGenerationEU. The request is worth 6 billion euros. With it, the Commission says Germany has implemented all the reforms and investments in its recovery and resilience plan, corresponding to a total of 30.3 billion euros.
The Commission found that Germany has satisfactorily completed the 8 milestones and 19 targets attached to this payment. They cover the clean transition of transport and energy infrastructure, energy efficiency in housing, and the digitalisation of healthcare and public administration.
The flagship measures the Commission lists are concrete. More than 36,000 buildings have had energy efficient renovations. More than 1,100 projects to decarbonise district heating systems received support, along with funding for the purchase of more than 3,000 electric and fuel cell buses, more than 550 commercial electric vehicles and 1,000 charging stations. Public authorities can now securely retrieve standardised data from government databases, and projects to digitalise processes and infrastructure across more than 1,600 German hospitals received support. The payment also covers support for an Important Project of Common European Interest on renewable and low carbon hydrogen and for hydrogen research projects.
Status discipline matters here. A positive Commission assessment is the greenlight step in the facility’s payment process; it is not itself the transfer of funds, and this story does not report a disbursement date because the release does not give one. What has changed is that the largest member state’s plan is now fully assessed as delivered, which closes the German file of the pandemic era recovery programme while the institutions argue, in the 2028 to 2034 budget debate covered elsewhere in this edition, over whether anything on this scale should exist again.