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.
