Never Go Full German

By James B. Meigs

Sunday, December 22, 2024

 

‘Dunkelflaute” is one of those lovely German compound words. It means “dark doldrums,” a stretch of cloudy weather with no wind. It doesn’t sound so bad. You might even think, Well, it’s cold and cloudy, but at least there’s no wind! But if you think that way, it’s because you are not in charge of Germany’s increasingly dysfunctional power grid.

 

You see, Germany has spent more than 20 years trying to reinvent how a modern industrial country makes electricity. Partly to burnish their green credentials, and partly due to pressure from the country’s leftist Green Party, German officials have invested about 600 billion euros trying to phase out coal and nuclear power and replace it mostly with wind turbines and solar panels.

 

They tell us it works pretty well—until it doesn’t. On good days, the country gets most of its power from renewable energy. Consumers might pay some of the highest electricity prices in Europe, but at least they know they are pioneering the “energy transition.” But then there’s the Dunkelflaute. A few days of dark doldrums this past November sent electricity prices soaring to their highest level since the start of the Ukraine war. Grid operators rushed to spin up gas- and coal-fired electric plants and even resorted to burning oil (an absurdly expensive fallback). “We were on our last legs,” one energy analyst told reporters.

 

It could have been worse. History shows that every five years or so, northern Europe gets a cloudy, still period that lasts a week or longer. And these tend to fall in cold months, when people also burn more gas to heat their houses. Today, after Germany has shut down all its nuclear and many of its coal and gas plants, such an extended Dunkelflaute could lead to blackouts. There’s just not enough backup power.

 

In short, Germany has put its entire electric grid at risk in pursuit of becoming the world’s climate champion. (Ironically, while the country’s greenhouse emissions have declined, they haven’t fallen as fast as those in the U.S., which has been less aggressive in rolling out renewable energy and which is trying to revive, rather than banish, nuclear power.) Germany is an industrial nation, with thousands of factories turning out everything from sportswear (Adidas) to pharmaceuticals (Bayer) to luxury cars (Mercedes-Benz). And, while this might be news to Germany’s green policymakers, factories run on electricity. Chronically high energy prices are bad for business. The risk of blackouts is worse. The country’s manufacturing sector is struggling.

 

German industrial output is down almost 20 percent since 2017. VW, the country’s largest employer, recently cut worker pay by 10 percent and is planning to close at least three factories. The steel giant Thyssenkrupp plans to cut about 40 percent of its workforce by the end of the decade. And the overall German economy has been shrinking for the past two years.

 

Dark doldrums indeed.

 

We think of Germans as sober, disciplined people. How did they get themselves into this mess? Well, they listened to Green Party radicals, for one thing. Europe’s Green Party movement got its start in the 1970s when activists hit the streets protesting both nuclear weapons and nuclear power. (They didn’t see much of a difference.) Unlike traditional socialists, who profess to care about the kind of people who work in factories, the greens had a fuzzier, crunchier philosophy. They liked organic food and were suspicious of big business, modern medicine, and high technology.

 

This kind of worldview is still popular today. In the U.S., it often goes under the name “climate justice,” a movement that tries to meld concern about global warming with the full panoply of far-left, intersectional causes. The Berkeley, California–based Climate Justice Alliance, for example, proclaims on its website that “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine.” Last year, I wrote a report for the Manhattan Institute about the Biden administration’s sweeping environmental- and climate-justice policies. I discovered that, while Biden ran for the presidency as an old-school moderate, once in office he embraced all sorts of kookiness. To advise his team on environmental justice (EJ) policy, for example, the White House put together a committee that included the Climate Justice Alliance and other radical activists.

 

Like the European greens, these groups offer a warm, misty vision of the kind of post-capitalist world they seek. The Climate Justice Alliance says it supports a “Just Transition away from extractive systems of production, consumption and political oppression, and towards resilient, regenerative and equitable economies.” They describe a world in which poor neighborhoods become neo-pastoral collectives where food is grown in community gardens, electricity is produced and distributed locally, and wealth is shared. Biden’s EJ advisers also have some strong ideas about what kind of world they don’t want, advising the White House to “sunset investment by 2030 in fossil fuels, plastics, dangerous chemicals and nuclear energy.”

 

I learned that these activists aren’t very concerned about whether their policies actually bring down emissions. For them, the “just transition” doesn’t just mean substituting, say, low-carbon energy for coal. It means a transition from what they see as a harsh, exploitative capitalist system to a gentle, collaborative one. Renewable energy—and solar power in particular—is a big part of this movement. Climate-justice activists see concentrated sources of energy as part of the old oppressive system. They advocate instead for “decentralized energy,” with solar panels sprouting on every rooftop in poor communities and local groups deciding how that power should be distributed. (Never mind that urban rooftop solar is far more expensive per kilowatt-hour produced than big rural solar farms. Efficiency isn’t the real goal for these crusaders; they care about “community empowerment.”)

 

The Biden administration listened to these climate-justice advisers and made sure the Inflation Reduction Act included $7 billion in a Solar for All program. That program funds grassroots groups that say they want to “help community members install and use solar power,” as one Austin, Texas, nonprofit puts it. That’s just one of many Biden programs showering billions on leftist green groups.

 

Germany’s Green Party was way ahead of American activists when it came to hijacking climate concerns as a tool for radical change. They also have their own version of the “just transition,” the Energiewende, literally “energy transition,” which calls for phasing out every form of energy the left doesn’t like. And, like the left-wing activists Biden invited into the White House, Germany’s greens managed to convince the country’s supposedly serious political elite to implement their anti-industrialist scheme.

 

Over more than two decades, Angela Merkel and other putatively centrist politicians didn’t only embrace Energiewende, they bragged about it at every Davos meeting. Germany was going to show the world what climate leadership looked like. Even when prices rose and energy shortages loomed, Merkel’s government doubled down, backing expensive offshore wind farms and closing the last of Germany’s clean, safe nuclear plants.

 

Now it’s all falling apart. The European business press talks about the “Energiewende disaster.”

 

Even the government is falling apart. The coalition led by Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, has collapsed, largely due to concerns about the failing economy. I’m not so sure the old greens who got the Energiewende ball rolling think it’s a disaster, though. They never much liked factories, or high technology, or the capitalist system itself. They always thought the modern world was too consumerist, too technology-hungry, too modern. If people have to go back to heating their homes with firewood, that suits the greens just fine.

 

There’s a lesson here for American leaders: Never let people who hate you and your economic system lecture you about policy. And never go full Europe.