Merkel's Green Energy Folly

The singularly inept German Chancellor Angela Merkel has taken the lead in the race toward renewable energy. She will not just be known for foolishly flooding her nation with Muslim migrants but she will also be remembered for shutting down Germany’s nuclear power industry in a fit of tree-hugging righteousness.

For the record, Merkel is not a zany left winger. She hails from the center right.

Now, Die Zeit editor Jochen Bittner brings us up to date on the fallout from Merkel’s embrace of renewables. In the New York Times:

The Merkel government has decided to phase out both nuclear power and coal plants. The last German reactor is scheduled to shut down by the end of 2022, the last coal-fired plant by 2038. At the same time, the government has encouraged the purchase of climate-friendly electric cars — increasing the demand for electrical power. And despite efforts to save energy in the past decades, Germany’s power consumption has grown by 10 percent since 1990.

How much more virtuous can you get?

Bittner continues that Merkel and her advisers did not calculate the practical consequences of the makeover:

Though renewables account for around 40 percent of Germany’s electricity supply, there are limits to further expansion, for reasons that are political rather than technological.

In some rural parts of Germany, people are fed up with ever growing “wind parks”; more citizens are protesting new — and often taller — wind turbines in their neighborhoods. And there is growing resistance to the new paths needed to transport electricity from coasts to industrial centers. According to official calculations, close to 3,700 miles of new power lines are required to make Germany’s “Energiewende,” or energy revolution, work. By the end of 2018, only 93 miles had been built.

Apparently, wind turbines are a noisy nuisance, one that kills large numbers of birds and that harms one’s little gray cells. As for power lines, the nation is behind the curve.

Better yet, in the absence of nuclear power Germany is forced to rely on coal:

By shutting down nuclear plants faster than those for coal, Germany may consign itself to dependence on fossil fuels, and all the damage to the climate they cause, for longer than necessary. Nevertheless, Germans’ opposition to nuclear power endures: 60 percent of them want to get rid of it as soon as possible.

Of course, this is the Democratic party program. Go figure.