Ukraine War: Germany's Energy Policy in Ruins

It was going so well: Russia supplied cheap oil and natural gas, Germany paid. Well, that's life, many things go well until they don’t. The few warnings over decades about becoming totally dependent on an unreliable candidate were branded as doom-mongers or Cassandra callers. At the same time, this energy policy of Germany and other European states provided Russia with the foreign exchange to rearm and strengthen itself for a military and imperialist adventure like the current Ukraine war – even with German military technology.

Expansion Slowed Down

Yet the story could have been written differently, relatively easily. If the expansion path of renewable energies in Germany had been pursued further. In 2011 and 2012, the expansion amounted to almost 11 GWp. Thereafter, it fell – mainly due to successful lobbying by the energy industry and an unambitious energy policy of the Merkel government – to sometimes only 5 to 6 GWp per year. Had the expansion been maintained or even slightly increased ten years ago, today it would be possible to draw on around 240 GWp of installed renewable capacity instead of approximately 145 GWp, bringing the share of renewable energies in gross electricity generation close to the 80 percent mark – precisely the threshold where, according to experts, there is enough electricity in the grid most of the time to also produce cost-effective hydrogen via electrolysis for heating or road traffic. Instead, the share of renewable energies in the heating sector has stagnated at around 14 to 15 percent for eight years, and in the transport sector it is a meager 7.5 percent (data from 2020; source: Renewable Energy Working Group).

Fatal Dependence

It has come differently due to our own fault. Germany's dependence on Russian gas is high, with a share of total imports amounting to 55 percent. For oil from Russian sources, it is 35 percent. In the short term, Germany will have to look for other sources increasingly, but the alternatives are not necessarily encouraging: extremely climate- and environmentally harmful natural gas and oil obtained via fracking or from oil sands in Canada and the USA, petroleum products from crisis countries like Venezuela and Libya, or from extremist and nationalist regimes like in Iran or Saudi Arabia. There is even a current danger that gas and oil storage tanks may not be sufficiently filled for next winter, causing heating to stay cold or vehicles to come to a standstill – an extreme scenario, but not completely out of the question.

The changed situation will also impact the German transport sector. Fuel prices will inevitably and significantly rise. All the more reason to switch fleets to battery-electric drives as quickly as possible, since electricity supply in Germany is currently the only reliable factor in the German energy supply.

Author: Claus Bünnagel