BERLIN — Germany’s new energy minister on Tuesday struck a sobering tone about the country’s ambitious goals for making its energy sector more reliant on renewable sources, saying that rising costs risked losing public support and jeopardizing the powerful German industrial base.

The minister, Sigmar Gabriel, in his first major policy speech, said at an annual energy conference organized by the publication Handelsblatt in Berlin that annual consumer costs for renewables of about 24 billion euros, or about $32.5 billion, were already pushing the limits of what the German economy, Europe’s most powerful, could handle.

“We need to keep in mind that the whole economic future of our country is riding on this,” said Mr. Gabriel, who is responsible for the Energiewende, or energy transformation. “The energy transformation has the potential to be an economic success, but it can also cause a dramatic de-industrialization of our country.”

Mr. Gabriel’s proposals for overhauling the energy law will be presented to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new cabinet on Wednesday. He is chairman of the Social Democratic Party, which formed a coalition government in December with Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats. The country has been awaiting his plans for overhauling the Energiewende, which was put in place in 2011 by the chancellor’s previous government in response to the nuclear disaster in Japan.