From the article: "Wind, solar and other renewable sources, which account for 55 percent of German electricity capacity, are even more subsidized than coal mining, adding about 25 billion euros to power bills last year."
In contrast, the coal subsidies propped up a well-established industry with few players, with no end in sight and little oversight (as stated upthread: "No one really knows how much money exactly went in there").
Setting up wind power plants will necessarily also have the building phase as the highest cost, but then direct running costs will be much lower as there's no raw material and much less personnel.
The subsidies that you are looking at currently for coal are essentially spent to avoid the mining operations and coal plants from making a loss.
The subsidies for wind power are primarily to finance new turbines to be built (& infrastructure). But you don't actually subsidise the operations.
In other words, if you look at current wind subsidies they are mainly to add capacity, if you look at coal subsidies they are to ensure the previously built capacity is used/available.
In addition, you have to remember previous subsidies- those of building, renovating, etc the coal mines and plants. If you do count those and calculate them eg per year of lifetime you get much higher amounts of 'real' subsidies, it's just that that money has already been spent.
A big downside of it all though is that Germany lost most (all?) of its wind & solar power manufacturers - so it's buying stuff from China, rather than supporting local industry. That is an element the government urgently needs to address ..
Keeping coal mining on life support makes no sense. In the Ruhr area, the consequences of coal mining will still be felt for a very long time. It is necessary to run pumps for centuries to come so that the toxic mine water does not reach the groundwater level.
The companies that built solar power generation in 2004 got a guarantee of a certain price for x years, and a guarantee that the people who built in 2005 would get a lower price. IIRC the price decrease was set in advance. In effect a market introduction price, for a limited time. The sums are low/high until the market introduction ends, and the producers knew that as long as they could innovate 10%/year they'd make a profit. (Except that the actual number wasn't 10%.)
The companies that ran coal mines got a subsidy with no defined end-by date, and one cannot by any stretch of the imagination call it "market introduction aid" or "conditional on 10%/year innovation".
Killing people can be a net savings for health services. The dead consume no services.
Yeah, sure, and I'm not saying something that kills people early always saves health system money. Just that it can (a lot of analysis of cigarette smoking have showed that reducing smoking in many countries has a net public cost, considering the aggregate of health and public pension payments, and I think in some cases that was true of health costs alone.
> Not to mention the fact that unhealthy levels of pollution can lower the quality of life for a great many citizens, something most people think that governments should care about.
Sure, quality of life is another important concern aside from health costs. I'm definitely not saying deadly pollution is a net good, even if it might save public health costs.