Germany attempted to defend its disastrous energy policies in a fact-check-style response to former President Donald Trump who held up Berlin as a warning to the American public in Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Mr Trump urged U.S. voters to reject the green agenda favoured by the Democrats and Harris, noting that even Germany has had to walk back its Energiewende transition as evidence of the foolhardy nature of the green agenda.
“You believe in things that the American people don’t believe in,” Trump said towards Harris. “You believe in things like, we’re not gonna frack. We’re not gonna take fossil fuel,” referencing her long-standing opposition to fracking, a position she has attempted to flip-flop on.
“Germany tried that and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants,” Trump continued. “We’re not ready for it.”
The comments apparently triggered Berlin’s Foreign Office, which wrote on X: “Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables. And we are shutting down – not building – coal & nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest. PS: We also don’t eat cats and dogs.”
However, amid the cut-off of Russian energy, which roughly coincided with the planned phaseout of Germany’s fleet of nuclear power stations, Berlin was forced to turn back to traditional and more reliable forms of energy, and in February approved plans to build between 15 to 20 new gas-powered plants, with the proviso of an eventual upgrade to burn hydrogen within the next 10 to 15 years.
Meanwhile, in 2022, the leftist coalition government in Berlin was also forced to turn back on over a dozen mostly coal fire power plants and granted permissions for 11 more in a move that Chancellor Olaf Scholz described as a “temporary” measure amid the Ukraine War-sparked energy crisis.
Although the “traffic light” government, which includes Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens, had said that it hoped to phase out coal power entirely by the end of the decade, the energy crisis has also forced Berlin to push back the deadline to Angela Merkel’s previous date of 2038. Yet, there have been doubts raised about the viability of the new deadline as well, including by the deputy leader of Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union party Jens Spahn earlier this year.
Even government coalition member and finance minister, Christian Lindner, has raised questions about shutting down coal plants, warning last year that it could result in further energy price shocks if there is not a reliable replacement source. “Put simply, energy is expensive when it is scarce. That’s why now is not the time to shut down power plants,” the liberal politician said last year.
The unreliability of green energy sources, in concert with Moscow’s move to cut gas and oil supplies following European sanctions over the war in Ukraine and the ultimate sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines — a project Donald Trump strongly opposed and sanctioned — has plunged the German economy into chaos, with wholesale electricity prices the first half of this year hitting an average of €67.6/MWh, compared to €38.3/MWh during the same time in 2019, representing over a 76 per cent increase.
Germany, which largely banned fracking for natural gas in 2017, has turned to more expensive Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) shipped in from countries like the United States and Qatar to keep its economic engine churning. However, the soaring cost of energy has been attributed, in part, to hampering German industry, with auto giant Volkswagen even reportedly considering shutting down factories in the country for the first time in the history of the company.
Adding insult to injury, a report this week from Norwegian engineer and researcher Jan Emblemsvåg of the University of Science and Technology in Trondheim found that current German emissions would have been significantly lower if Berlin had invested in nuclear power, rather than abandoning the clean energy source in favour of so-called renewables.
The report found that German emissions would have fallen by around 73 per cent if it had invested in more nuclear power at the turn of the century, while the supposed green transition has only coincided with a 25 per cent drop. Even worse, Emblemsvåg estimated that opting for nuclear would have saved the country some 600 billion euros if it had maintained nuclear and even if it had invested in nuclear, it would have still been 300 billion euros cheaper than the costly and inefficient green sources.