Germany’s Energy Disaster

The Biden administration remains committed to some version of the Green New Deal, despite devastating blackouts in California and Texas that should serve as warnings of the consequences of depending on inherently unreliable sources of electricity. Germany is one country that has advanced far down the path that “green” advocates want to take the U.S. So what has been the German experience, and how does it relate to the disasters we have seen in California and Texas?

At AmericanExperiment.org, Isaac Orr lays out the facts in detail. His long post is worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few excerpts:

[A]n audit by the German government reported by Reuters indicates the country’s energy policy is causing electricity prices to skyrocket, and it is putting reliability at risk.
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Germans pay 37.64 cents per kilowatt-hour for their electricity, which is 2.8 times more than the prices paid by Minnesota families, as you can see in the graph below. Taxes, fees, and subsidies that prop up the wind and solar industries account for approximately half of the cost of electricity for German households.

And Minnesota’s electricity rates, as a result of foolish “green” policies, are now above the U.S. average.

Germany’s Green Leap Forward is also undermining the reliability of the system, reports Reuters:

The audit office also warned of a looming energy supply shortfall as utilities prepare to turn off the last of their nuclear reactors and the government spurs a pullout from coal.

There is likely to be a shortfall of 4.5 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to 10 large coal-to-power generation plants, on the power grid between 2022 and 2025, the audit office report said.

The report said the economy ministry’s approach has been “too optimistic and [its assumptions] partly implausible” and had tip-toed around addressing the worst-case scenarios, a view echoed by grid operators.

The government strategy calls for improving cross-border flows to spread localized and temporary supply risks, but its neighbors are doing the same.

Tip-toeing around addressing a worst-case scenario is exactly what Texas and California have been doing for years, and it is the primary reason why these states have suffered rolling blackouts.

Germany’s plan to increase cross-border flows of electricity is the California model of planning to fail. The Golden State shut down reliable coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants and has become increasingly reliant upon wind, solar, and imports from other states.

Wind and solar are essentially obsolete technologies. Nothing can be done about their inherent unreliability. Isaac continues:

As we learned during the blackouts that affected Texas in February, wind and solar are reliably unreliable. This is why Germany needed to increase electricity from natural gas, lignite, which is brown coal, and black coal. It will be more difficult to fill these gaps after the nuclear plants are gone.

updated tracking of Germany's electricity supply shows Q1 wind down a whopping 32%.
Drop was compensated by increased gas, lignite, reduced exporting and coal (in that order).

Meaningful point would be more about capacity than emissions (which look to still be down from 2019) pic.twitter.com/VV4ZYrPEwE

— Cold Air (@ScottLuft) April 2, 2021

Germany is a great example of what the U.S. should not do when it comes to energy policy. Nevertheless, the Biden administration, and American liberals generally, are determined to follow the same destructive path.