Hans-Werner Sinn, here:
To cushion the twin phaseout of coal and nuclear, and to close supply
gaps during the long transition to renewable energy, Germany decided to
build a large number of additional gas-fired power plants. Even
immediately before Russian forces invaded Ukraine, policymakers assumed
that the gas for these facilities would always come from Russia, which
supplied more than half of Germany’s needs. ...
Germany’s pledge to abandon coal and nuclear, the very energy sources
that would have given it a degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy, has
thus placed the country in great danger. Not so long ago, Germany was
the world’s second-largest lignite producer, after China. And it easily
could have procured the tiny amount of uranium needed to run its nuclear
power plants, and stored it domestically for many years. ...
Despite the fact that turbines and photovoltaic panels now dot much of the landscape, in 2021 the share of wind and solar power in Germany’s total final energy consumption, which includes heating, industrial processing, and traffic, was a meager 6.7 per cent. And while wind and solar generated 29 per cent of the country’s electricity output, electricity itself accounted for only about a fifth of its final energy consumption. Germany would not have come close to achieving energy autonomy even if the renewables sector had expanded at twice the speed that it did. ...
If Germany suddenly halted Russian gas imports, gas-based residential heating systems, on which half the German population, approximately 40 million people, rely, and industrial processes that rely heavily on gas imports would break down before replacement energy became available. The government would be unlikely to survive the resulting economic chaos, public uproar, and outrage should gas become unavailable or heating costs rise dramatically. In fact, the likely scale of domestic disruption would call into question the cohesion of the Western response to the Ukraine war.
