The European Commission has approved Germany's new electricity "capacity mechanism", a state-aid scheme, running from 2031 to 2045, that will pay power plant operators (mostly new gas-fired and hydrogen-ready plants) simply to stand ready to generate, on top of whatever they earn selling actual electricity.

The number: the Commission's own press release puts the scheme's cost at up to €35.2 billion, aimed at guaranteeing Germany has enough dispatchable capacity to meet demand even as coal and nuclear close and wind/solar output varies hour to hour.

Why this is exactly the newsletter's beat: this is a live, current, large-scale example of gas power being treated by Europe's largest economy not as an embarrassing backup footnote, but as essential infrastructure worth locking in with tens of billions of euros of public money, for the next fourteen years.

The pushback worth noting: climate groups have already criticised the scheme's design as "pro-gas," since new plants only need to be "hydrogen-ready", capable of eventually switching fuel, not actually running on hydrogen from day one. In practice, most of this capacity will burn gas for years, possibly decades.

The bottom line: the €35.2 billion figure and the gas/hydrogen-ready framing are both confirmed directly from the European Commission's own announcement, one of the clearest current examples anywhere of a major grid choosing to pay for guaranteed gas capacity rather than bet everything on renewables plus storage.