The federal government of Germany has approved the Draft Structural Strengthening Act for the Coal Regions, which plans a €40bn aid over the next two decades to the regions most affected by the coal phaseout (by 2038). The states to benefit from the aids are Brandenburg and Saxony, where regional elections were held just before the publication of the support measure in late August 2019, the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt and North Rhine-Westphalia in western Germany.
In July 2018, the German Ministry for Economy and Energy published its legislative strategy to phase-out coal by 2038. The phaseout foresees reducing coal-fired capacity to 30 GW in 2022 (including 15 GW of lignite-fired power plants), to 17 GW in 2030 (9 GW lignite) and to zero coal-fired capacity in 2038. Germany currently operates around 41 GW of coal-fired power capacity that supplied more than a third of the country's power generation in 2018.