Ottmar Edenhofer, director of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said the decision on a roadmap was generally good news for climate action in Germany, but added that the plan makes ending coal "unnecessarily expensive". The high compensation payments to plant operators would "undermine the polluter-pays-principle" and instead reward operators for stopping to pollute.

"That's why operators have left some plants running longer than what would have been economically sound – to now pocket the compensation payments." Edenhofer said a market-based solution in form of a CO2 price would have been a better solution and warned the government to make sure to cancel emissions allowances following the decommissioning of plants to avoid a so-called waterbed effect in the European emissions trading system (ETS), where emissions simply move to a different country.

Kerstin Andreae, head of energy industry association BDEW, criticised the maximum compensation payments for hard coal plant shutdowns. The cap would mean "substantial losses" for Germany's municipal utilities. "Hard coal plants cannot fill the gap opening up in all those years in which no lignite capacity was taken offline," Andreae said, arguing that the law could threaten heating energy supply, which is often covered by the hard coal plants' process heat.

The government, federal states and coal companies already agreed on a phase-out roadmap for the country's lignite power plants in mid-January. According to the agreement, the last plant will be shut down no later than 2038, with compensation to reach 2.6 billion euros for western German operator RWE and 1.75 billion euros for operations in Lusatia, owned by Czech investor EPH. Moreover, the government plans to disburse up to 5 billion euros in so-called adjustment money for older coal workers that lose their job due to the phase-out plan. Additionally, the government has agreed to cushion the effects on coal regions with around 40 billion euros.

The phase-out roadmap includes four review dates meant to assess whether capacity reduction does not cause excessively high power prices, keeps supply security intact and accomplishes the desired emissions reduction. Reviews are planned in 2022, when Germany shuts down its last nuclear plants, and again in 2026, 2029 and 2032. The reviews will also serve to find out whether the entire phase-out can be completed three years earlier in 2035.

After the government has given the coal exit draft law the green light, it now is parliament's turn to decide. The government aims for the entire legislative process to be finished in the first half of 2020.