We on this side of the pond are well advised to take hard lessons regarding affordable green energy fantasies from economically and socially suicidal Western European experiences — Germany most particularly.
Two months ago, a shaky three-party coalition headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz that has governed Berlin since 2021 collapsed in large part due to a dispute over acceptable environmental spending.
Whereas Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) is internally divided on climate issues between its labor-union base and its upper-income urban wing, its other large coalition partner, the Green Party, is all-out committed to fighting “climate change” at any cost.
This leaves Free Democratic Party (FDP) junior partner headed by Finance Minister Christian Lindner somewhere ineffectually lost in the muddled middle between green ethos sympathy and its concurrent anti-business hostility.
Bending to obvious lack of public confidence, Scholz has called for an early election in February which prevalent odds predict he will lose.
This has occurred after he fired Linder who published a paper arguing that meager global benefits of net zero policies to decarbonize Germany aren’t worth the consequential fiscal and economic harms.
German electricity currently costs 30 cents per kilowatt hour — more than twice the U.S. price, and three times more than China pays.
Simultaneously, Germany has installed enough solar and wind power to supply nearly 70% of its electricity needs with a huge caveat: It excludes cloudy and windless days as have occurred twice in recent months when these “renewables” delivered less than 4% of daily power requirements. And Germany’s entire emergency battery storage is limited to about 20 minutes.
Since modern societies require around-the-clock power depending in this case upon two systems, renewables and reliable backup, this leaves a need to always have a ready supply of mostly natural gas turbines on hand to make up the difference, although operating at low efficiency and profit margin costs for suppliers who are forced to charge more.
This natural gas dependence price escalation has been exacerbated by Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion that has occasionally driven wholesale prices to a staggering $1 a kilowatt-hour.
The Ukraine event also triggered a German national-defense crisis which prompted Scholz to pledge to expand military spending by at least €100 billion in coming years — in turn competing with already burdensome energy budgets.
Topping off all this are self-destructive government coalition net zero fetishes that have not only worked to phase out coal, but incredulously shut down noncarbon nuclear power as well.
Meanwhile, China has added more coal than solar and wind over the past couple years, while other large energy consumer India has added three times more.
A resounding public wakeup call from woke German green energy subsidy extravagance came in the form of a 2023 top constitutional court order mandating that government climate spending must be paid and accounted for on a balance sheet rather than hidden via off-balance borrowing as the Scholz coalition obviously intended.
This meant that if the government wanted to fund the green transition, it would need either to raise new revenue or to seek and implement offsetting spending cuts elsewhere.
The court order exposed embarrassingly basic unanswered coalition questions regarding climate war cost benefits — or lack thereof — and quantifiable impact burdens upon energy consumers and taxpayers, along with a calamitous decline in industrial production and employment.
Adding grief to misery and peril to pain, the German EV mandate is not only transferring more energy demand to the electric grid, but depleting auto workers’ lunchboxes as well. Volkswagen, whose third quarter year-over-year after-tax profit fell 64% is considering closing three factories, axing 10,000 jobs, and slashing pay for those who remain employed.
Other national governments have avoided coming to terms with the same fundamental trade-off issues.
As pointed out by Copenhagen Consensus President and Stanford University Hoover Institute visiting scholar Bjorn Lomborg, many countries with the greatest reliance upon solar and wind power — who along with Germany include U.K., Spain, and Demark — have some of the world’s most expensive electricity.
The International Energy Agency’s latest data (from 2022) indicates that increased solar and wind power generation costs across 70 countries have yielded 12 cents per kilowatt-hour higher average energy costs.
It appears that citizens of more and more countries are beginning to wise up to the fact that renewable energy doesn’t come free.
The French government has warned that meeting its net zero targets will require households to lower winter temper thermostats and reduce travel plans.
Meanwhile, Britain’s Labour Party government has announced plans to scale back its 100% green electricity pledge made last summer along with an electric vehicle mandate.
There are even more optimistic signs of emerging energy sanity in America, with major U.S. banks and asset managers retreating from United Nations net zero commitments in response to threats of antitrust lawsuits by several state attorneys general charging violations of fiduciary duty to customers and investors.
Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo are finally retreating from the U.N.s’ 140-member Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), and JPMorgan Asset Management, BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors have exited the U.N.’s Climate Action 100+ compact.
Above all, just as pursuit of destructive green fantasies played a key role in toppling Germany’s government, grateful recognition is also warranted for an American wakeup call regarding inflationary Democratic Party net zero policies contributing bigly to Donald Trump’s reelection, a GOP majority Congress, and a promised recovery of former fossil energy-driven prosperity free of attempted U.N. sabotage.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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