Losing one energy source may be misfortune. Losing two is carelessness. And losing three is alarming if you’re the world’s third biggest industrial nation. But to endanger your fourth energy source, the one that’s supposed to replace the first three, seems akin to a death wish. Amazingly, this is where Germany is now heading with its bungled energy transformation, or Energiewende, which some Germans still bizarrely insist is a model for the world.

In the mad rush for net-zero by 2045, nobody gave much thought to back-up conventional power plants

In the mad rush for net-zero by 2045, nobody gave much thought to back-up conventional power plants

The first energy source to be axed was Germany’s nuclear fleet, which used to supply over 30 per cent of the nation’s electricity. The last nuclear plant closed in 2023, following decades of anti-nuclear campaigning and legislation by the Greens. The closedown timetable was first slowed under Christian Democratic Chancellor Angela Merkel and then abruptly speeded up after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

The second source getting the chop are coal-fired power plants. Many are already shuttered or have reduced operations and the last coal plant will close no later than 2038.

Production of Germany’s third, potentially major, energy source, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of natural gas, has been mostly banned under a 2017 Merkel-era law. Nobody really knows how much fracking gas Germany could produce, because it’s not worth doing the geological research, but it’s estimated up to 20 years of total, current annual gas needs might be supplied from domestic fracking. Others say fracking could supply a quarter of long-term annual gas demand.

Now, the fourth energy source, the white knight of renewables that was supposed to replace all of this, is lurching into crisis as feed-in payments for green electricity plummet, costs skyrocket and crucial power lines and battery storage aren’t built.

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I have been attempting to establish a wind farm with my neighbours in Brandenburg state for the past six years. Glacial bureaucracy is still blocking approval of the 15 wind........

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