EU Taxonomy
EU TAXONOMY REGULATION
EU Taxonomy at a glance
The EU “Green Deal” comprises the ambitious goal of achieving CO2 neutrality in Europe by 2050. To succeed in this, the EU Commission has defined a series of measures within the “Sustainable Finance” action plan to channel capital flows into environmentally sustainable activities. A core component is the EU Taxonomy Regulation 2020/852 (“Taxonomy Regulation”): This includes a uniform and legally binding classification system in order to classify economic activities as environmentally sustainable (Taxonomy-aligned) activities.
First, companies have to determine which activities are considered as Taxonomy-eligible, i.e., that are described in the Commission’s delegated acts and thereby potentially contribute to at least one of the environmental objectives, depicted in the following figure. Eligible activities become Taxonomy-aligned if they make substantial contribution to at least one of the environmental objectives according to Annex I and II of Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2021/2139 while at the same time not significantly harming any of the five other environmental objectives (DNSH criteria) and complying with Minimum Safeguards according to Regulation (EU) 2020/852.
TAXONOMY ELIGIBILITY ASSESSMENT
Our business activities are primarily contributing to the first environmental goal, “Climate change mitigation”. Additionally, we are also contributing to “Climate change adaptation”, for instance in product development by adapting our wind turbines to extreme climatic conditions. To avoid double counting, however, we assign the contribution of our business activities exclusively to the first environmental objective if an activity contributes to both objectives at the same time. For our core business, two of the economic activities currently listed in the Taxonomy Regulation (Annex I of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2021/2139) are relevant (Taxonomy-eligible) for the environmental objective “Climate change mitigation”:
- Electricity generation from wind power (4.3)
- Installation, maintenance and repair of renewable energy technologies (7.6)
In addition, the following supporting activity for the environmental objective “Climate change mitigation” that relates to the production and installation activity of the Taxonomy-aligned economic activity (4.3) is relevant for the Nordex Group:
- Sea and coastal freight water transport, vessels for port operations and auxiliary activities (6.10)
TAXONOMY ALIGNMENT ASSESSMENT
While having adequate processes and procedures in place to ensure the compliance with the requirements of the Minimum Safeguards, we did not identify a violation of them for any of our activities. Furthermore, our turnover-relevant activities “Electricity generation from wind power” (4.3) and “Installation, maintenance and repair of renewable energy technologies” (7.6) both meet the applicable Technical Screening criteria (Substantial Contribution and DNSH criteria) and are hence considered Taxonomy-aligned. The leased vessel for transporting wind turbine components allocated to activity “Sea and coastal freight water transport, vessels for port operations and auxiliary activities” (6.10) does not meet the Technical Screening criteria due to the lack of compliance with prescribed CO2 limits, resulting in non-alignment of the relating CapEx.
OUR KPIs
In accordance with the Taxonomy Regulation, the Nordex Group discloses three key figures for the economic activities which are considered environmentally sustainable: share of revenues (turnover), operating expenses (OpEx) and capital expenditure (CapEx).
A comprehensive summary on our Taxonomy reporting can be found in our Sustainability Report 2022.