The idea was, that gas is certainly much cleaner than oil and coal. And that some gas will be needed in the transition to 100% renewable, gas is ideal for peaker plants. It was of course completely stupid to rely to such a large extend on immported Russian gas, especially since 2014.
It is also a lot to blame the previous government for, who curbed the roll out of renewables, or otherwise germany would be much further ahead with its transition as it is. Nevertheless, producing over 50% of all electricity by renewable sources is an achievement for a large industrial nation.
So Germany, a country that is well behind other European countries on renewables, had an over-dependence on Russian gas and was forced to reopen some coal plants when the price spiked. And you came to the conclusion that this was somehow a fault with renewables?
We decided to continue to use reliable and cheap supplier of gas for heating and industrial purposes, mostly chemicals if memory serves well. Sure, we could have moved to heat pumps faster. Believe me so, even for a consumer gas was just much cheaper than PV powered heat pumps. If heating goes renewable much faster it is a very good thing actually. Saying it was a mistake to not do so because of the war in Ukraine is hindsight. It was a mistake when it comes to climate change, one among a lot of mistakes and by no means the biggest ones. When it comes to climate change the botched Energiewende, closure of nuclear plants and increased coal plant capacity have much more impact.
And the reason would be that profits were frontloaded and needed reforms were delayed.
Germany had a pretty audacious but absolutely achievable renewables plan 15 years ago but Schroeder & Merkel canned it for cheap Russian Gas and now that the price for that has become apparent there wailing and screaming. It’s just normalizing - if the original plan had been pursued, profits would not have been that great but the cost of adapting would have been staggered too.
Green energy is fine, it actually reduces the total amount bought from Putin (and thus invested into Russian army). The problem was disabling the non-fossil-fuel baseload (meaning nuclear powerplants). It was criminally idiotic. I hope Germany finally wakes up because this is making the whole EU project look less and less feasible.
>Regardless of how it works, there are also renewable energies which can fulfil this classical "base-load" idea: Namely organic gas or geothermal power plants.
Why is Germany investing billions in NEW pipeline projects to ship natural gas from Russia for the next few decades? Germany says a lot of nice sweet-nothings, but their actions don't match their words.
Sure but the article says 30% of Russian gas is used for electricity which is fungible with other electric production - nobody denies that Germany needs gas for other things.
Although if greens in Germany were actually committed to reducing energy use they would have subsidized converting buildings from gas heat to using heat pumps instead of subsidizing solar production in Germany.
The whole German agenda on decarbonization is based on Russian natural gas, so call me not surprised. If they had labelled H2 investments as green it would be a whole different thing.
The idea was to build offshore wind farms, but there was a lot of complaining about "subsidies" from the right so the government effectively blocked them. Imagine if offshore wind had been being built by Germany (and all the other EU nations that fell for the same BS) at full speed since 2012.
We'd have a lot more cheaper power and a lot less Government subsidies.
I can't think of anything more dumb than German energy policy in the past decades though personally.
Surely you must agree that the German energy policy for the past decades wasn't exactly beneficial in any way to any nation other than Russia? For Germany it wasn't beneficial either, not geopolitically, nor environmentally (closing nuclear and essentially replacing it with gas and coal) nor economically (some of the highest consumer electricity prices in the world)?
I mean the definition of stupid is when you make decisions that hurt yourself and everybody you like while helping your enemy. This is what Germany/Schroder basically did with the Russian gas corruption.
Indeed. People miss the point that metal smelting and chemical plants are built around gas and can't switch to electric over night. Basically entire sectors of Germany's economy have made themselves dependent on that sweeet cheap Russian gas.
It was just so obviously stupid. I don't have time to wade through German government websites finding the trail.
Modern civilization, like in Germany, requires a certain per capita level of energy resources. If you increase the cost of energy without a matching increase in economic resources you lose functionality in your infrastructure.
Germany willfully chose to cut domestic energy production and increase its own costs. Now its core manufacturing is crumbling.
BASF, for example, is relocating to China[0]. They claim they're using 100% renewable energy there, but such claims are easy to make in China and hard to verify.
The Western sustainable energy policy is like watching a man hit himself repeatedly in the head with a hammer and then wonder why he has a headache.
Yeah, evidently I missed the news that after 20 years of Energiewende, Germany has the 2nd most expensive AND the 2nd dirtiest electricity in Europe and that the old plan of "we'll use wind and solar when the wind blows and the sun shines, and when they do not <a miracle occurs>" really worked out perfectly, particularly when the miracle turned out to be "Russian gas" and exploded in our face, causing us to have to buy up essentially all the gas available on the open market at horrible expense after Russia started blackmailing us.
Note that "buying up all the gas on the open market" is not a strategy that too many countries can follow at once, hence other countries started to look elsewhere. For example, Japan, who were going to exit nuclear, and are now turning more and more of their old plants back on and have announced they will be building more (!), very specifically to replace reliance on LNG shipments.
And yeah, we got really, really lucky with the mild winter of 2022. Apparently not too many other countries think that "luck" is sound energy policy, but YMMV. Also slightly unpopular in the world is our tried and true method of "we'll lower emissions by pushing our economy into recession due to high energy costs". And the constitutional court also took a dim view of trying to hide all the extra costs off the main budget, so the real costs are only now starting to emerge. The farmer demos were probably just the start of the unrest when the pain gets passed onto the population. A population that already now thinks the getting out of nuclear was a mistake:
"Sechs von zehn Befragten (59 Prozent) im aktuellen DeutschlandTrend für das ARD-Morgenmagazin halten die Entscheidung der Politik für falsch,"
Good chance that Green Party received significant support from outside forces to derail a sensible energy policy. Relying on fossil fuels / gas makes Germany way more dependent on the US and Russia, then otherwise.
Germany’s repeated renewables efforts were long subject to the fact that Germany was Russia’s European project to keep fossil fuels going as long as possible.
No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over.
Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.
* About 35% of Germany’s gas is used to generate electricity.
* Eliminating German electricity from gas would thus nearly eliminate Germany’s purchase of Russian gas.
Also some gas plants are used for electricity/heat co-generation so you cannot simply replace them with nuclear. Gas peaker plants have a completely different usage from nuclear plants.
I could forgive any blunder Germany did/does if it at least had:
* A radical plan to expand green energy more than any other country
* Or was one of the leading countries behind fusion or had grand plans for being the first to open up experimental fusion power plants / research as soon as it's available.
Especially after the Russian gas fiasco, I just can't wrap my head around Germany with their plan.
It feels almost like there is none, just how does Germany expect to fulfill any green transition if they aren't investing like crazy in one or the other?
It is also a lot to blame the previous government for, who curbed the roll out of renewables, or otherwise germany would be much further ahead with its transition as it is. Nevertheless, producing over 50% of all electricity by renewable sources is an achievement for a large industrial nation.
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