"Dunkelflaute" is one of those lovely German compound words. It means “dark doldrums,” a stretch of cloudy weather with no wind. It doesn’t sound so bad. You might even think, Well, it’s cold and cloudy, but at least there’s no wind! But if you think that way, it’s because you are not in charge of Germany’s increasingly dysfunctional power grid.
You see, Germany has spent more than 20 years trying to reinvent how a modern industrial country makes electricity. Partly to burnish their green credentials, and partly due to pressure from the country’s leftist Green Party, German officials have invested about 600 billion euros trying to phase out coal and nuclear power and replace it mostly with wind turbines and solar panels.
They tell us it works pretty well—until it doesn’t. On good days, the country gets most of its power from renewable energy. Consumers might pay some of the highest electricity prices in Europe, but at least they know they are pioneering the “energy transition.” But then there’s the Dunkelflaute. A few days of dark doldrums this past November sent electricity prices soaring to their highest level since the start of the Ukraine war. Grid operators rushed to spin up gas- and coal-fired electric plants and even resorted to burning oil (an absurdly expensive fallback). “We were on our last legs,” one energy analyst told reporters.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Commentary
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor.
Photo by Justin Paget/Getty Images
