The EU as suicide pact, or: How Germany is slowly dismantling its electrical grid and why the EU won’t let them fix it

Sometimes it feels like the European Union is a suicide pact.

You may have heard that Germany is trying to complete this insane utopian project called the energy transition. This involves phasing out trusted, reliable methods of electricity generation in favour of windmills and photovoltaic arrays, which are the only acceptable sources of power for the energy transitioners.

The problem is that wind and solar generate electricity only intermittently, while the European electrical grid must provide non-intermittent power everywhere and all of the time at a constant frequency of 50 Herz.

Gas-fired power plants are the way you square this circle, because they can spin up quickly when a cloud moves over the sun or the wind goes suddenly calm. Because Germany is hoping to get rid of all its coal-fired power plants by 2030, we’ll need 21 gigawatts’ worth of new gas plants to replace them and work in tandem with our precious renewables to keep the lights on. That is not a metaphor or an exaggeration. Without these plants we will literally have trouble keeping the lights on.

The problem, as Welt explains in this sobering article, is twofold: On the one hand, no private investors will put money towards the construction of these new gas plants. This is because of the lunatic energy transition itself and its crazy accoutrements, like skycastle plans to convert the new gas plants to hydrogen plants after 2035, when we realise our new green hydrogen energy strategy (which is something that is totally going to happen). There is too much uncertainty here. The German government must therefore subsidise these plants, but this requires the approval of the EU Commission, and the EU Commission are very opposed to allowing any member state to subsidise fossil fuel power generation. It is ideologically unacceptable.

Efforts to convince the Commission otherwise date back to the last government. Then-economics Minister Robert Habeck failed to bring them around, and our present Economics Minister Katherina Reiche has proven no more persuasive. According to our energy transition timeline, wind and solar power are supposed to account for 80% of our electricity generation by 2030. We’ll be screwed without the new gas plants.

The EU Commission doesn’t care, and the energy transitioners don’t seem to care very much either. Their solution until now has been to keep our coal-fired plants around, and if necessary even to prolong their operations after 2030 lest the lights go off unexpectedly. Coal-fired plants pollute much more than gas-fired ones, of course, but that doesn’t bother the energy transitioners for some reason.

This plan has just one flaw. It turns out that if you tell an entire industry that you hope to phase it out in the next few years, that industry actually plans for its scheduled death and makes personnel decisions on that basis. Since the last socialist/Green government brought the coal phase-out forward to 2030, coal plants have hired basically no new staff, and four have already had to shut down unexpectedly because there’s nobody around to keep them running. The Federal Network Agency (BNetzA) – the regulatory authority that oversees our electrical infrastructure – has responded to this looming crisis by decreeing “don’t you dare close bro” that staff shortages are not an acceptable reason for “systemically important” power plants to cease operations, because “demographically-related staff reductions can be countered by training new operating personnel at an early stage.”

Whenever I write about climastist nonsense, many valued readers respond with scepticism that anthropogenic global warming is real. I understand why they make these arguments, but still I tend to regret this approach, because it just doesn’t matter. In response to climatist hysteria, we are doing truly absurd things that would be very bad and that would make no sense even if everything the climatists said were true. All the renewables we are building will have no measurable effect on anything but our wallets. We are risking catastrophic electrical grid failures – the kind of disaster that kills people – for absolutely no reason. And, as always, there is no plan, no justification, just nothing.

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