By P Gosselin
A Fundamental Lesson from the Terrorist Attack on Berlin’s Power Grid
By Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt (Newsletter)
The shutdown of the power supply in southern Berlin has brought the fragility of the “Energiewende” (transition to green energies) policy clearly to our attention.
The goal of the transition to renewable energy is not only to switch the power supply to wind and solar energy but also to transition the other two pillars of energy supply—namely, heating and the transport sector— over to electricity. “Everything to electricity” means abandoning gas and oil in the heating sector and oil (gasoline/diesel) in the motor vehicle sector.
This narrowing of the energy supply down to a single energy carrier was called “sector coupling.” This sector coupling was propagated and celebrated by the “Green high priests” as a sustainable model for the future. Originally, it was an attempt to correct the weakness of renewable energies, which lead to unusable surpluses during periods of high wind and solar production. These useless surpluses were intended to be pushed into the heating and vehicle sectors after storage. It has been described here often enough that this sector coupling leads to exorbitant cost increases. Frontier Economics estimates the total cost of the energy transition until 2045 at an unaffordable 4,800 to 5,400 billion euros.
But now, the attack in Berlin demonstrates to us that such an energy system, based solely on electricity, is highly vulnerable. We are learning that when the power fails, the heat supply also fails—at least when it is supposed to be generated by heat pumps. And to make matters worse, we are learning that in freezing temperatures, heat pumps face total loss due to bursting pipes. This particular “warning label” was certainly not included in the “Habeck heating law,” which the CDU-SPD federal government intends to continue seamlessly. The content of the law will remain the same, but to ensure citizens don’t quite realize it, the name of the law is to be changed.
We are also learning that during a large-scale power outage, electric vehicles can only help if they happened to be charged before the “bang.” Otherwise, this utility also fails.
Until now, there was great resilience associated with being able to rely on two storable systems for 75% of the energy supply: namely, gas for heating and liquid fuel for mobility. Since the events in Berlin, the fact that the third pillar—the power supply, which currently provides 25% of energy consumption—is also now being made weather-dependent while being expected to serve all three pillars, is revealing itself even more clearly as a Left-Green ideological pipe dream that will not survive the reality test.
The text of the first letter claiming responsibility utilizes the reasoning context of Green and Leftist ideologies of climate anxiety:
“In the greed for energy, the earth is drained, sucked dry, burned, maltreated, scorched, raped, destroyed. Entire regions are rendered uninhabitable by the heat. They simply burn. Or habitats disappear under floods or due to rising sea levels. Shutting down fossil fuel power plants is manual labor.”
Except for the last sentence, one could read similar formulations in the party conference resolutions of the German Greens, the Left, and the SPD social democrats. The sentence “Entire regions are rendered uninhabitable by the heat” even comes from a UN report from 2022. The ideological justification for the energy transition stems from the same context of climate alarmism that the “Vulkangruppe” (Volcano Group) uses to justify its criminal actions.
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Intelligent people, to be polite, would call it “Putting all your eggs in one basket”
Stronger language would be more appropriate.
Only things connected are the dots…
You missed out the “l” in the word dolts.
I agree with what you said, albeit all the homes I’ve owned were heated with natural gas or propane. What I’ve learned was that without electricity, the furnace couldn’t start, and of course, the blower couldn’t circulate the heated air.
We live in the mountains a good distance from any utility except electric. To make sure we don’t freeze (or are left in the dark) we have a generator. It is run off propane.
The point is you have to have electricity to run a modern home.
Yes. You seem to be describing a situation in North America based on hot air heating, but the same thing applies to the UK based on hot water radiators central heating. UK gas (or oil) heating systems work like this.
You have a thermostat, mains powered. When this is triggered it turns on a mains powered valve. Typically in the UK this is a two way valve, directing the heat to either central heating or hot water. A larger house may have three of these. This will give two heating zones, typically upstairs and downstairs, and hot water.
The mains powered valve opens, this triggers a hot water pump. Also mains powered. The pump circulates the working fluid. Depending on which valves are open, this may send hot water from the boiler heat exchanger through the radiator system or through pipes in a hot water storage cylinder.
The water circulating through the heat exchanger then triggers the internal thermostat of the boiler which fires with mains powered ignition and heats the working fluid. There are of course safeguards so that gas supply cannot be turned on in the absence of ignition. The gas supply…. you guessed it!
No mains power, no heat or hot water. Instant off. No boiler, no rads, nothing. This is 85% of UK homes. Some have a slightly different system where hot water is not stored but is heated on demand, but the mains dependencies are the same.
Then you have cooking, which a generation ago might have been gas and is now almost all electric.
The reality of a national blackout is sitting there with no heat light nor cooking, nor any way to refuel your car. And probably, anyway, no place to go even if your car is already fueled up. This going on for a ove1r two weeks.
This is just on the private dwelllng side for gas heated homes. You also then have to think of what happens to gas station pumps, to refrigerators and freezers everywhere, to streelights, hospitals…. all kinds of public facilities. Phone masts? A lot more of them will go down than you expect, and ordinary landlines in the UK are being converted to digital, which run on…. yes, mains!
It is completely mad to think that the risks of moving electricity generation to weather dependent systems while at the same time moving everything you can find to run on electricity are acceptable. No rational government could seriously consider this, the current plan, to be in the best interests of its people.
“. No rational government could seriously consider this,”
We haven’t had one of those in the UK for 50 years (:-((
***
To keep the gas heating running in a power cut, you need –
a 12v 1500W Pure Sine Wave Inverter ~£80 (must be Pure Sine Wave to protect electronics).
a 12v 130Ah leisure battery ~£70 (if you get 2, you can recharge one in your car)
Get an electrician to re-wire your boiler to run from a single 13A plug, so in a blackout, you can swap to the inverter.
Resilient heating for approx £250 (:-))
I don’t have a mains operated thermostat in my gas central heating system. The temperature of the circulating water is set on the boiler operating system. Each room radiator has its own thermostat which operates according to the temperature in that room. When the room is at the chosen temperature the thermostat/s shut/s off the water to that/those radiator/s. When all the rooms are at their chosen temperatures all the thermostats in the system are shut and the pressure switch on the water side shuts off the gas and the water circulating pump. When a room falls below temperature those radiator thermostats open, the water pressure falls and the system fires up and runs until all the thermostats shut again.
Still needs electricity for the water circulating pump, though, and I have a multifuel fireplace in the living room for when the electricity or gas supply fails which can keep the house reasonably warm and boil the soup pan and kettle if necessary.
I’m sorry, but exactly how do the thermostats cause work to be done on the valves? Are they all connected mechanically? Most control everything via electricity derived from the main. Like old style doorbells with a small transformer.
“how do the thermostats cause work to be done on the valves?”
Each room radiator has its own TRV Thermostat Head, which operates according to the temperature in that room.
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The head has a capule containing wax. As the wax contracts / expands, it mechanically forces the radiator valve open or closed.
Gives good zoning control; simple, reliable, cheap.
Sometimes installers do install systems without any conventional thermostats. And the individual radiator thermostats work exactly as 1saveenergy says.
Your question is how does the radiator thermostat trigger the boiler in these systems? Because there is no connexion between it and the boiler.
The answer is that the pump, the one which circulates the working fluid, the one which circulates the hot water in the radiator system, must be on all the time in these systems. Then what happens, the radiator valve opens, the pump then circulates the cooled water from that rad through the whole system, the working fluid falls below the temp required by the boiler thermostat, and this triggers the boiler.
I think its more common to have a mix of systems, wall thermostats and thermostatic rad valves, and its now obligatory for every new radiator to have one of these thermostats on it. Their great advantage is it makes balancing the system much easier, Also you can turn down the temp in an unused room to one which protects against freezing but doesn’t fully heat it.
To explain balancing, in the old fashioned systems without radiator thermostats it could be that distant radiators would get hot much more slowly than nearby ones. So installers balanced the system by setting the flow rate on the input radiator valves. This was a one-off and you were pretty much stuck with it. [ Well, there are actually two valves per radiator, so you can turn them on or off with one of them.] Radiator thermostats are a much more flexible way of doing things, and probably save money by not over heating rooms you don’t require to be very warm. And it means you can, for instance with a guest bedroom, easily turn up the heat for a couple of weeks and then turn it down again and know you will not be overheating the room, and that your guest can set it accurately to their preference.
Personally I think its worthwhile to have a wall mounted thermostat. But that’s a detail, whether you have one or not, the situation regarding mains power doesn’t change. In a blackout, pump won’t work, ignition won’t work and you’ll be sitting in a cold dark house eating a tin of cold beans by candlelight or torchlight, and not even a cup of hot tea or hot water bottle. For a couple of weeks or more, if the nationwide blackout I speak of happens.
“In a blackout, pump won’t work, ignition won’t work and you’ll be sitting in a cold dark house eating a tin of cold beans by candlelight or torchlight, and not even a cup of hot tea or hot water bottle.”
Not true, read my earlier post …
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/01/09/berlin-blackout-shows-germanys-5-trillion-green-scheme-is-left-green-ideological-pipe-dream/#comment-4152139
In our house we have a wood stove (very low emissions, 80%+ efficiency) and a radiant propane heater. Neither requires electricity. We also have a passive solar design with lots of glass facing south and high levels of insulation. We don’t worry about freezing when the power goes out even for an extended period. But we do need electric power to pump water and operate refrigerators and freezers so a back-up gas powered generator is a must.
People who live in cities and apartments obviously don’t have alternatives that we do so a reliable grid and low-cost energy should be the top priority. Too bad it isn’t for the ideologues in power these days.
A difference is that a small generator happily runs essentials like the fridge, the hot water heater controls/fan, and the furnace fan. To run a heat pump and an electric hot water heater, a much larger generator is needed.
“electric hot water heater”
Why would you heat hot water? 🙂
To prevent it from ever absorbing the devil gas, CO2 (:-))
My house uses a heat pump for heating, and it is NOT connected to the generator. When we had an extended power outage mid-winter, it was our fireplace that saved us from having to leave.
If you have a gas stove and oven, you can run it to keep the kitchen warm at least. If you have a gas water heater, you will also have hot water, at least as long as the water pressure doesn’t go to zero. (Most cities use elevated storage tanks to create the water pressure. As long as there is water in the tanks, there will be pressure. However electric pumps are used to keep the water tanks full.)
Are you sure you will have hot water? Ignition? Gas valve?
“…the heat supply also fails—at least when it is supposed to be generated by heat pumps.”
It also fails when electric fans, pumps or thermostats are required to distribute heat in a fossil fuel heating system.
Not in the past. Gas boilers had pilot lights, central heating was gravity-fed from a header tank using convection to get hot water from the boiler up to the tank. Hot water – maybe from an open fire with a back-boiler – was stored in copper cylinders with a cold water header tank, and the taps gravity fed. No electricity required.
Modern systems were more efficient, requiring less pipework, narrower pipes, smaller rads, and reduced gas use from pilot lights which could go out and be an explosion risk.
However that change to and electric powered systems took place when the electricity supply was designed, powered and operated by people who were not in a lunatic asylum.
The problem is that these guys aren’t in asylums, even though they belong there.
As I’ve always said, it’s a short line between being committed and ought to be committed. These guys have crossed that line.
No, you still needed a pump, at least in water driven radiator systems. And there was still electric control of gas input, so that when the pilot light went out the gas supply was cut off.
Electricity cannot be compared to oil or gas in any sensible way. Firstly oil and gas are enrgysources where electricity is an energycarrier.
Secondly but maybe more important, oil and gas are goods where electricity is a service.
You cannot store electricity in any meaningful way. Generation and consumption are synchronous. Sun and wind are intermittent and so is “renewable electricity”.
Oil and gas can be stored easily and as such you create buffers for when demand and supply are disconnected solving the intermittency problem.
That is impossible to do with electricity. Another disadvantage is the central control of electricity. Since it is a service any large enough party (like the government) can switch it off.
Impossible with goods like oil and gas.
So basically electricity is a communist plot and should be avoided like the plague
The problem is our overlords think electricity is like water. We just need reservoirs for it.
Let’s not forget that wonderful but much demonised gift from the past…Coal!
Also much easier and safer to transport and store than oil and gas.
Is there any place on Earth that is rendered uninhabitable due to heat (active volcanoes not included)? There are many places rendered uninhabitable due to a lack of heat, at least not without very expensive gear/habitat modules, and an extensive support network.
I think Antarctica alone is a bigger cold uninhabitable place on earth than all heat-uninhabitable places combined on earth.
That should give as a hint that heat is not the problem.
On top of that a warmer planet would increase growing seasons of the most fertile regions = black soil belt around the world and even free up the parts in Siberia that are covered by permafrost.
I live in one of the warmest regions on the Earth, as defined by mean annual temperature, the Coromondel coast of India, and currently it is quite pleasant with highs of 27-28 C and lows of 19-20.
Just FYI, but when the power goes out, even my forced air gas furnace doesn’t work so well. You really need that electricity in the modern world.
You just need a manually operated bellows like in old style blacksmith forges.
It could be powered by a windmill !! (:-))
It is hard to sympathize with people who have worked so hard to do the wrong thing.