Germany is left without access to cheap electricity after the closure of its last nuclear plants

By Carlos Esteban*

The classics used to say that those the gods want to destroy, they first drive mad, and that seems to be the case with Germany, the European industrial locomotive ready to commit suicide in the name of green fantasies.

Not even by looking under the microscope could the German authorities have found a worse time to fulfill Merkel’s old promise to shut down all the country’s nuclear power plants.

When the Russian gas crisis broke out (literally: the US took care of it at the bottom of the sea), Scholz extended that shut down, and many thought it would be extended now. It hasn’t.

All because of a “climate crisis” for which there is not the slightest incontrovertible proof, cheered by interested agents and dismantled by dozens of failed prophecies.

Whatever: even if the IPCC’s climate faith has strictly adhered to the letter, the last thing a serious government should be worried about, with “stagflation” still rampant in Europe, is a one-degree rise in the average global temperature over a hundred years.

Germany, already suffering from an energy deficit due to the loss of natural gas supplies from Russia, has just shut down its last three operating nuclear power plants, leaving the nation without access to cheap electricity and, with residential electricity prices already among the highest in all of Europe, has condemned itself to skyrocket prices in the short term.

As energy prices rose last year due to the Ukraine conflict, certain German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government members were reluctant to shut down nuclear plants as planned on December 31, 2022.

Scholz agreed to a one-time deadline extension but insisted on the final countdown on April 15.

Along with the closure of nuclear plants, German multinational power utility E.ON increased its prices by as much as 45% as of June 1.

According to a company spokesperson, in parts of North Rhine-Westphalia, the new price is 49.44 cents gross per kilowatt hour, which means an adjustment of close to 45% for average consumption.

The irony here is that the shortages experienced this past winter forced the German government to increase the operations of coal-fired power plants, the most polluting in the world and theoretically the worst for “climate change”, something that could have been avoided by going nuclear.

But no, they blindly rely on the pipe dream that renewables will compensate for a lost generation.

There is no logic, no sense in Germany’s energy decisions, which are mutatis mutandis, those of the whole of Europe, and it is impossible to make sense of them unless a “conspiratorial” objective of deliberate degrowth and impoverishment is postulated.

*Fifteen years at the leading economic newspaper EXPANSIÓN, then part of the Recoletos Group, the last three years as head of Interactive Services on the newspaper’s website. Then at Intereconomía, where he founded the Catholic weekly Alba, he wrote the opinion in Época, where he also covered the International section, for which he was responsible when La Gaceta was born (as a generalist newspaper). For the last few years, he has worked freelance, collaborating with different media.

With information from LGI