Welcome to Germany’s green economic miracle. The year is 2025!
Germany’s so-called Energiewende (transition to renewable energies) has had one unmistakable result: Germany now finds itself rapidly nearing the brink of a third world country where the power supply is no longer reliable and brownouts becoming more and more a daily routine.
What’s happening is the opposite of what was once promised by the know-it-all climate wisemen: “Green energies would lead to a clean and prosperous country that would be the envy of the world.
So much for their fantasies.
The reality, as reported yesterday by Germany’s leading daily, Bild here: Germans in south Germany are now being told that their laundry and e-car charging are to be done only at certain times!
According to online Bild yesterday: “People in Baden-Württemberg should use as little electricity as possible on Friday from 8 am to 11 am. The transmission capacities of the power lines from the north of Germany to the southwest were over-utilized,”
Consumers were asked to avoid the use of all energy-intensive appliances.
Grid operator TransnetBW issues energy supply red alert yesterday
Recall that Germany’s green energy masterminds decided that it would be best to decommission the country’s fleet on nuclear power plants, and to produce weather-dependent power with wind farms operating in the north of country, and then supply it to southern Germany via power transmission lines. There’s on problem with the masterplan from the green masterminds: the wind doesn’t blow all the time and so shortages result and rationing becomes necessary!
According to the StromgGedacht from grid operator TransnetBW in Stuttgart, to avoid overloading the grid: “Electric vehicles or batteries (of laptops etc.) should also not be charged from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. if this can be avoided.”
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We passed through the Frankfurt airport in July. Seemed like about a third of their lighting was turned off then. We’d been on a river cruise, and once we got into Germany proper the ship had to go on energy rationing.
The Greens really, really want humanity back in the 18th Century, don’t they? Only they wouldn’t allow people to use coal or wood to stay warm…
I think 18th Century is being overtly generous…more like 8th century. Back when Windmills were invented.
You may not know, Frankfurt has no nightflughts.
Really?
I must have flown through Frankfurt Flughafen hundreds of times and never realized that.
Is it for noise abatement?
Let’s face facts. The Greens want to live with every luxury,and what remains of humanity will live in poverty, slaves. To quote Kjerstine Braathen, CEO of Norway’s largest financial services group, told the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland that the runaway inflation and energy shortages that are devastating for families worldwide are “worth it.” One thousand globalists with their private jets were there to agree with that freak.
Story Tip
“ It is all very well signing agreements, treaties, charters to tackle climate change, achieve net zero or what have you. It is quite another matter when it comes to facing up to their implications.”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/us-banks-are-right-to-reject-the-folly-of-net-zero/
Not to be a SpellWart but I believe a couple of words have been Autocorrect/Autoreplaced
I think it also may be, in part, due to a non-native English speaker.
From the report it would seem that it is not a shortage of wind generation as such but rather that the transmission lines are too small for the demand. This indicates to me that they have shut down power plants in that region, which otherwise could have met the demand. It also indicates that should the wind power drop then blackouts would be likely?
Germany, as has the U.K., ignored a fundamental engineering principle that source and consumer should be as close as practical.
As it was in days of old, when power stations were close to industrial and urban locations.
Germany is carpeted with wind turbines, and quite often they produce no electricity at all and for extended periods of time.
In November 2024 they changed from “intermittent” to “non-existent”.
And it’s not as if nobody said this would happen.
And they were canceled by the powers that be.
The Greens actions have caused a new word to be current, Dunkelflaute, for when wind and solar are down. Schadenfreude!
And if they had Nuclear pumping out the electrons at the same 100MW capacity it would basically be a straight line of reliable power rather than a spike ridden deluge of on again off again power that requires some other back-up to flatten the spikes
As the plot above shows, even when the wind speed is high, it is erratic. Electricity is not a commodity like coal; it is produced ON DEMAND.The consequence is that the gaps much be FILLED in to meet demand which does NOT fluctuate as the wind. That requires another source of electricity and second by second balancing of the grid. Little wonder that such electricity is a very expensive LUXURY. It is also an inherently moronic way to attempt to meet energy demand. Now that Germany has turned OFF it nuclear and coal power plants, there is only Russian NG to fill those gaps. Ironic, yes?
The moment they tell the kids they can no longer use their mobile phones to save electricity or because of blackouts the game will be over. Never tell addicts they can’t have their drugs.
Nah, too easy to get around. All you need are a couple of power banks and your phone will stay charged for many hours without plugging into a wall. Then you charge the power banks when the all clear from Big Brother is given.
Not much use when the towers have no power.
Just need more power banks. I’ve got quite a few that I haven’t had to use in a few years.
Germans in the north have fought against installing new transmission lines through their localities to the south.
Also, don’t charge your laptops? That has to be an insignificant power draw compared to EVs.
Can’t have anybody thinking that EVs are the problem, now can we?
Another angle to consider besides not singling out the most ridiculous waste of power is that asking the faithful to perform acts of climate penance will help them feel morally superior. Something like participating in the sacrament of recycling.
Ahh BEV’s…. I hear it’s only time before the “new” battery technology is here and you can charge your 600 mile range BEV in 10 minutes!
Let’s see:
At an efficient 25kwh/100 miles, it takes 150kwh of energy to fully charge. So an 80% charge would require 120kwh. To provide that in 10 minutes will require a demand of 720kw!
Does this mean I can’t start work until 11am?
Yeah. that’s the old Boomer concept of engineering.
It’s different this time. After all, the wind is always blowing someplace right?
All we have to do is…….pretend.
“Factory closures highlight the turbulent shift to a green economy, exposing political challenges and the urgent need for a equitable move to net zero”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/03/the-guardian-view-on-a-carbon-free-economy-no-just-transition-in-sight-yet
Nobody can make deindustrialising equitable, not even the Germans.
And why does it need to be “equitable” at all? As long as everyone is better off it wouldn’t matter if some were betterer off.(sic)
(I ask this without actually knowing what the word “equitable” means…)
Socialists are obsessed by equity for a simple reason:
Equality. Equal opportunities etc
Equity. Equal outcomes
“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A better definition is the elites prosper and everyone else suffers equally under reduced opportunity.
It is a political word with no clear meaning. But high electricity prices are definitely not equitable as they hit the poor hardest. Think energy poverty.
I think the meaning is quite clear:
“should we also ensure that the outcomes, the results of those chances, are fair and equitable?”
…
It advocates for a fair distribution of wealth, resources, and opportunities so that everyone can achieve similar living standards.
https://polsci.institute/political-theory-concepts-debates/equality-of-outcomes-economic-social-equity/
Equally miserable.
Lowest common denominator.
It means ‘as long as someone else pays its fine by me’, or ‘some animals are more equal than others’.
It also means “free stuff”.
Most EU countries now have upwards of 10 % in energy poverty already, with Spain, Portugal and Bulgaria above 20%.
That is equity.
“Equitable” is one of those words that means whatever the caterpillar wants it to mean.
I presented a scenario to a young socialist while in college.
He got 10% raise, but some rich guy, would also get a 20% raise.
Without missing a beat, he declared that he would forgo the raise.
Neither do they. Language has become very fluid – words mean what they need them to mean at the instant, then can change as needed.
It would be better to describe transmission lines and load as a network–not a single transmission line from generator to customer.
The transmission network is why/how cities and industrial customers interconnected in the first place–for stability, reliability and availability of electric service.
An electric circuit, the transmission grid connects all major load centers (customers, and their instant capacity demands) to all major full time, dispatchable generators. All points in the electric network are affected by all load changes in real time (managed in cycle times– not hours or days).
All managed area grids are connected to neighboring grids, and managed between area grids to provide for outages, weather, maintenance and more.
Recall the NYC blackout (circa 1960’s)–one Pennsylvania transmission line was disconnected (manually!) to isolate NYC from PJM to the west and south.
All of Germany should be able to be instantly connected or disconnected from neighboring grids…
isolating mechanical failures and customers–blackouts for some, continued electric service for others.
Mandating sporadic, intermittent, non-dispatchable solar/wind—and shutting down reliable generators caused this problem.
Shame on them, shame on us.
Networking is an interesting concept – a sort of EQUITY.
Consider that, in 1965, when NYC went down, the entire region went down, as far south as central New Jersey. The grid did not save it, the grid simply brought everyone down – EQUITY!
By central Jersey, there was time to disconnect before the collapse, so the grid network did disconnect, and Philly was fine – INEQUITY.
I came home from my lab at Princeton to find that all Philly TV stations were on and all NYC stations were off. We were just outside the region where the network collapsed.
What value was the network then? Great communist idea – sharing in failure – EQUITY.
Then, you have another interesting problem – a black start. More EQUITY.
Better, if nuclear/coal power plants were distributed, e.g. within states, with sufficient capacity to meet peak demand, with NG turbines and pumped power to load follow. Then, each would look to its own stability. EQUITY is for socialists and Communists.
Unfortunately, the bigger the grid the more stable it is, due to it’s “spinning inertia”.
the German public needs to be referred to the readily available Mauna Loa CO2 data to see what their sacrifices are achieving – absolutely nothing.
Au contraire! Decimating once-proud German industry greatly benefits China.
It happened in Australia not too long ago. The climate change mad politicians destroy what has worked for decades to rely on solar and wind renewable energy. It’s expensive. It’s unreliable. It’s not viable.
We have whiteouts and we used to have blackouts when the electricty was shut off.
What is it with these brownouts? This look like a rather disingenous way to minimize the problem?
The politically correct term is now “load-shedding”.
Usually brownouts mean the voltage in the distribution system has dropped so much that the transformers (and capacitor banks) can no longer manage to keep the voltage within limits. This dop in voltage caused the incandescent lights to dim. A major cause of this is air conditioning with all the motors that don’t have voltage correction built in.
In more technical terms, the reactive power component (MVAr) has exceeded the operating limits. Also called the power factor and expressed as a decimal less than unity.
I have always considered the term “brownout” to essentially mean rolling blackouts.
Where is Nick Stokes? He keep telling us Wind and Solar are cheaper and better than conventional énergies, yet here is empirical evidence to the contrary.
Probably searching for a nit to pick.
He would point out that it wasn’t a renewables generation problem, but a transmission lines problem.
And we just need to spend a hundred trillion jillion dollars on batteries.
In the past, he’s declared that he personally has never called for the removal of all fossil fuel plants. He takes no responsibility for the fact that everyone else in the climate scare movement is saying.
He take no responsibility for anything he says.
Just another hypocritical parasite.
“Where is Nick Stokes?”
Who cares !!
Be fair – he’s always good for a laugh!
Where will they put all those wind turbine blades when eventually they come to their senses and go nuclear? I doubt the once flagship of industrialization in Europe will put up with this for much longer and it will get worse before it gets better.
Of course it will get worse. And I have not the slightest sympathy with any of the Germans. They chose this madness, voted for it in a string of elections for decades. Now they’ve got what they wanted. Hence this is what they deserve.
One thing you need to keep in mind about Germany is how far north it is. The southernmost point in German is at the same latitude as Lake Itasca the headwaters of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota, and Hibbing Minnesota the hometown of Bob Dylan who wrote “Girl from the North Country“.
Munich Germany is the southernmost big city in Germany. At this time of year, Munich gets about 8.5 hours of sunlight and the Sun barely gets 20 degrees above the horizon. They are not going to generate a significant amount of solar power and it will be really cold — a lot.
You can’t run BMW (which is HQed in Munich) factories on “renewables” in Germany.
Historical irony here. At the end of WWII, the US floated an idea called the Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize Germany. The idea was rejected. But, the Germans are now imposing it on themselves.
It serves the right to suffer.
Pierre Gosselin’s “No tricks Zone” is an excellent and informative insight into the German world. A further issue to be considered here is that in AC grids not all electricity is equal. Solar panels and batteries are DC suppliers – Reactive power does not exist in DC. Wind turbines are almost as bad in supplying little useful Reactive power. As a result long distance transmission becomes much harder.
Darx does a very good explainer into the needs for Reactive Power starting with a description of the 2003 North American black out that is well worth reading.
https://www.drax.com/power-generation/silent-force-moves-electricity/
The German problem is going to get much worse (as it is in the UK) long before it can get better.
mleskovarsocalrrcom: “Where will they put all those wind turbine blades when eventually they come to their senses and go nuclear? I doubt the once flagship of industrialization in Europe will put up with this for much longer and it will get worse before it gets better.”
With one or two exceptions, it is not possible at this point to recover the twenty-two German nuclear power plants which have been decomissioned.
Replacing those 22 plants with new Gen III+ 1,100 MW equivalents would cost four to six times what the legacy plants originally cost and take twenty years or more once regulatory approval for their construction had been granted.
Nuclear power construction and operation is an intensely industrial activity. The cost and schedule issue here for a return to nuclear in Germany isn’t a consequence of excessive regulation. It is a consequence of the deindustrialization of western nations in favor of a service economy.
For example, the cost overruns seen at Vogtle 3 & 4 here in the US were a consequence of four major factors: (1) extreme project management incompetence, (2) a deeply withered US nuclear construction industrial base, (3) a withered national US industrial base in comparision with what we had thirty years ago; and (4) growing worldwide competition for nuclear construction resources and expertise.
My prediction is this: Germany will not abandon its Net Zero ambitions any time soon, regardless of how serious their power shortages become. The process of German deindustrialization will go forward mostly unchecked. Power shortages will feed the process of deindustrialization, the process of deindustrialization will result in more power shortages.
The greens have been quite successful in replacing a forward-looking positive attitude towards Germany’s industrial legacy with an attitude of contempt and self-loathing for past German success.
The same thing is now being seen in the UK. Once the UK and Germany have been fully deindustrialized, it’s not likely those two western nations will be able to recover from what the greens have done to them, with the consent of the UK and German citizenry.
Those German nuclear plants are done.Once a steam plant is shut down with no immediate intent to restart, its piping systems deteriorate through corrosion very rapidly. Right now, all of the plants shut down in 2012 and 2015 are a pile of scrap metal. The ones retained in operation into 2022 will be little better now. So your thought about the deindustrializing of Germany is correct.
The fate of the UK is less established. It depends entirely on whether or not EdF continues to build new nuclear power capacity in England to replace the loss of the AGR plants over the next six to ten years. But this won’t happen as long as the idiot Starmer and Labour remains in power.
and it all could have been avoided if ONLY ONE NATO member had said NO to Ukraine membership.
They all bowed to the bidet who I have no doubt ordered the destruction of the pipelines
There has been no vote in NATO regarding Ukraine membership.
Ukraine has every right to join NATO if they want. The fact that Ukraine wants to join is in response to Putin repeatedly attacking the Ukraine and seizing territory. Russia shared a border with one NATO member prior to the latest invasion and two other countries that share borders with Russia have joined NATO since the invasion.
I have no doubt that the unused and empty pipelines had small holes blown into them on the order of Putin. The damage is limited and easily repaired, should the pipe ever actually be needed. Putin has gotten more propaganda benefit than the cost of repair will ever be. The usual useful idiots can always be counted to blame the US for everything.
What can I say, the German people need to wake up, their government isn’t going to fix this, it is up to the people.
The hidden purpose of the green environment movement has nothing to do with the betterment of our environment. It is all about destroying mankind by using guilt and creating a strange “noble cause” to enslave people.
So it begins in earnest.