Germany’s “Energy Transition” Hits the Ice: LNG Crisis Exposes the Costs of Shunning Nuclear and Baseload Power

Charles Rotter

Germany’s week-by-week battle to keep its LNG imports flowing isn’t just a story about weather and stuck ships. It’s a tale about energy policy choices made over decades — choices that sidelined reliable baseload power sources like nuclear and coal in favor of intermittent renewables and imported fuels. The recent incident in which “Germany’s largest LNG terminal … ran out of gas because the tanker got stuck, and the icebreaker broke down” is an apt metaphor for a system that was designed more for political signaling than for robust, weather-proof reliability.

The SOTT piece notes that Germany’s largest LNG regasification hub at Mukran on the Baltic Island of Rügen “stopped shipping gas to the country’s gas transportation system since early February,” because a tanker became immobilized by ice and the icebreaker sent to free it “broke down.” With LNG imports cut sharply and German underground gas storage at historically low levels, the situation is not a trivial inconvenience but a systemic weak point.

But this vulnerability didn’t arise in a vacuum. It was engineered over time by policy decisions that eliminated some of the most reliable sources of domestic power generation and replaced them with inherently intermittent ones and imported fuels that require long logistics chains.

Until April 15, 2023, Germany maintained a fleet of nuclear reactors that once provided a significant percentage of its electricity. Those reactors were dismantled in accordance with the long-standing Atomausstieg (nuclear phase-out) policy, which had been enshrined in law well before the current crisis. Germany did not pause permanently when other countries doubled down on nuclear as a way to balance grids dominated by renewables. Instead, it completed its nuclear exit — even though nuclear plants had historically contributed roughly a quarter of German electricity and provided steady, dispatchable baseload power. (agora-energiewende.org)

Critics have long argued that removing these zero-carbon, continuous output plants from the grid would leave Germany exposed when weather-driven sources like wind and solar falter, and when imported fuels become constrained or expensive. It’s obvious that maintaining nuclear operations would have reduced gas-fired generation and lowered electricity prices during the recent energy crunch. For example, postponing the nuclear shutdown as was briefly done during the 2022 energy crisis reduced gas generation and held down power prices by an estimated €9/MWh before the reactors were finally taken offline.

Germany’s phase-out of coal is also underway. After decades of reliance on lignite and hard coal for consistent, high-volume power generation, the plan is to shut coal plants down by 2038. Coal historically provided a large share of dispatchable electricity, and even recent years saw the temporary restart of coal plants to conserve gas when supplies were tight.

What remains in Germany’s energy mix today is heavily skewed toward intermittent renewables, a growing share of imports, and fuels like LNG that must clear logistical bottlenecks before they enter the grid. Renewables are a major part of the production mix — but they cannot on their own supply the steady baseload that economies depend on day in, day out. Nuclear and coal both do supply baseload; wind and solar do not, by design. That’s why systems that rely on them either need dispatchable alternatives, massive storage, or extensive interconnections — and Germany’s grid and storage infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with the rapid pivot.

The current LNG fiasco brings these deficiencies into sharp relief:

• The LNG import system’s vulnerability to ice and mechanical failure highlights the fragility of relying on long, weather-dependent supply chains for critical fuels.
• The absence of on-demand domestic baseload power — nuclear reactors that could have been kept online, or coal plants maintained until firm replacements were in place — forces Germany to lean heavily on imported gas when renewables underperform.
• Renewables’ intermittency remains a core challenge. Without dispatchable sources operating in the background, any shortfall must be covered by imports or backup generation — both of which are subject to volatility, whether geopolitical or meteorological.

Some voices in Germany, particularly in the political center-right, have begun to reopen the debate about nuclear. During the 2025 federal election, leaders such as Friedrich Merz and other CDU figures campaigned on an energy policy that would reconsider nuclear’s role and prioritize pragmatic solutions to energy security. Those proposals did not make it fully into government plans, but the dialogue reflects growing unease with the existing strategy and its vulnerability to events like the LNG disruption.

This rethinking is overdue. Baseload power sources — whether nuclear or coal — were dismissed prematurely with pie-in-the-sky magical-thinking that a renewables-centric system could replace them quickly. But the reality of an industrialized society is that demand does not pause when the wind stops blowing or when Baltic ice slows a tanker. In that context, abandoning dispatchable power before firm, proven alternatives are in place looks less like foresight and more like ideology driving policy.

Germany’s latest energy travails are a living demonstration of the importance of robust, reliable baseload generation as part of any real-world energy mix. The LNG terminal running out of gas because hardware failed to function in predictable winter conditions is a direct consequence of decades of policy choices that underestimated the complexity of powering a modern economy.

If Germany truly wants secure, affordable energy — not just aspirational percentages on a graph — then reintegrating reliable sources like nuclear and maintaining sufficient flexible dispatchable generation will be unavoidable parts of that conversation moving forward. After all, baseload doesn’t wait for the wind to blow.

H/T ozspeaksup