* * *

Was not my intention to misrepresent that. Absolutely true that it has declined in total over that time period.

I never made the claim you state either. The failure is the re-introduction now taking place.

It's a result of a situation largely outside of their control (the war), so I'm not sure if I would call it a failure. It's unfortunate of course, but it's a speed bump in the long run. Maybe it's even a blessing in disguise, without Putin nuclear would have been dead and buried in many countries. Now there is more interest from the public and governments than before, but the economics are still a big issue and the current high-interest (loan interest) environment definitely doesn't help. It would not surprise me if governments agree to unfavorable terms to help finance these things, governments have a huge information disadvantage here.

The situation is fully under their control:

First, because it is a result of their energy policy over the last decade(s).

Second, because the consequences of "the war" are driven by how they decided to react to it.

"The war" is being used as a convenient scapegoat. Everyone could see that the sh*t had to hit the fan one day because of the terrible energy policies in most of Europe... when that happens politicians are always very keen to find reasons "outside of their control"...

How is it a convenient scapegoat? If the supply of gas wasn't restricted we wouldn't be in this situation, I don't see how you can deny that.

Very much like Covid, very much like infrastructure like railroads or highways, very much like the health-care system. Their failure is incompetence fueled by ideology-driven politics for which they tried to undermine the very foundations of the German democracy (e.g., take away state-level authority during Covid).

The US wasn’t the only one who warned the German government about the geopolitical risk they would be exposed to.

Angela Merkel shut down nuclear power in Germany and then tied our industry to Putin.

The war exposed the failure but it was there all along. And I'll go a step further, being a bit more familiar with EU politics: this wasn't "failure" as in "random occurrence", it was set up to fail because of explicit financial interests. We knew the risks 30 years ago and yet German leaders in particular doubled down on reducing resiliency and increasing dependence on a high-risk partner in exchange for financial incentives at higher levels and misguided ideology at immediately lower ones. EU has ran out of capable and reasonably honest leaders, now we have people with more strings attached than a piano. I say this as someone who's literally rubbed elbows with some of these people for years.

Let me frame it in the IT landscape. If your storage kicks the bucket but you had no real backup, no procedures to bring back anything, and no spares you couldn't blame it on a random act outside of your control. If it turned out you had repeated warnings but instead chose to phase out backups and to replace the enterprise storage with SD cards from a shady manufacturer then you really wouldn't be able to claim "random act of God". And if when all is said and done you end up on the board of the shady SD manufacturer that kind of seals the deal on whether you are to blame or not.

I'm not gonna call it a random occurence, it's more like the cumulation of a number of complex issues that have an influence on each other. The combination of financial, environmental and operational advantages of natural gas over the alternatives is pretty obvious so I'm not terribly surprised by their choice given that they wanted to move away from nuclear and coal. I think they should have had more alternatives given that Russia's invasion of Crimea happened in 2014, extending nuclear would likely have been the best bet but opening up for extending nuclear was probably a very difficult sell at the time. Fukushima and the subsequent decision of Germany regarding nuclear was less than 3 years old then.

A matching yt overall ;)

ApoCOALypse Now! [YouTube]:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLThCHzetTU

Not to mention that (retail) electricity prices went up like crazy and are now at up to 50 cents/kWh if you sign new contracts. 35 cents/kWh are pretty amazing already…

The depiction has a breakdown of taxes also and the trend is what I remember. I must admit I’m not 1000% sure whether the page that links it is great though: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/13/german-household-elec...

That did the industry in Germany a real solid: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Schlaglichter-der-Wirtschaf...

Compared to 2015, it is down by 10% or so: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Schlaglichter-der-Wirtschaf...

Now, I certainly advise caution how to interpret these figures and how inflation is factored in, etc. are big factors. Having several family members across Germany working in industrial production, there is a common theme that “production is shifted abroad at scale” though… Also keep in mind: the industry didn’t pay these 35 cents/kWh prices, those were what consumers paid…

The past 17+ years of political failure did the German working class a real solid. When the head of a state advises people to “use a sponge and not shower so often to preserve hot water” it’s almost surreal that a government charging 45+% of tax of a countries GDP is unable to ensure people have hot water, heating or keep up the electrical supply for industry.

Yes, it is a total failure of policy over several decades that has finally been exposed. Hence why politicians are so keen to assign the blame on "the war".

Not arguing against the political failures, but mind that the impressions of "several family members" do not yield figures reliable for any conclusions.

I hear you, but the deliberate and ideology driven manipulation of macro-economic figures and the lack of access to such data calls for the “no bullshit street perception datapoints” at times. E.g., the ECB claiming 2% inflation for decades conveniently leaving real-estate out of their basket etc. I provided the datapoints showing a 10% decline in industry production - adding that there are a couple of considerations that could change the numbers a lot and we don’t have a hell lot of transparency about. Hence backing it up with anecdotes.

As an example: if (!!) the 10% decline was adjusted by the official inflation, would you believe that it was 2% from 2015-2020 or would you rather go for 5% that reflect also real-estate and other commodities relevant for industry (e.g., if steel increased 50%, so might industry output simply because of price changes). So, the “official figures” could be vastly inflated and the situation could be a lot worse even.

I'm in Germany and can absolutely confirm these impressions. Factories are closing and moving abroad. The misguided policies are forcing them to. Publicly traded multinational companies that are beholden to their shareholders cannot stay here, even if the management would like to.

>The past 17+ years of political failure did the German working class a real solid. When the head of a state advises people to “use a sponge and not shower so often to preserve hot water” it’s almost surreal that a government charging 45+% of tax of a countries GDP is unable to ensure people have hot water, heating or keep up the electrical supply for industry.

It is only common sense. Is it surreal that central planning does not work? We know that for a long time.

I am engineer, I was born in Spain. I have a company in Europe. For me it was completely nuts what the german Government did with the money, I worked on those projects because it was were the money was. Spending fortunes on solar panels(manufactured from coal in China) where there is no sun?

I was in favor of putting gas pipelines with Russia, but it was really nonsense not creating alternatives instead of a single provider. Letting a single bomb destroy your entire economy?

High taxes does not protect you against stupidity, on the contrary.

Germans are awakening to reality, and that is a great thing. It will take some time and pain though. But seems people only learn this way.

It is not as bad as in Ukraine. I was in Kiev one week before invasion, everybody was like: "Ohh, Russians will not attack, they never do". Those guys later had to improvise Molotov cocktails against tanks because they were ill prepared, never fired a gun.

You pay a high price for stupidity.

> It is not as bad as in Ukraine. I was in Kiev one week before invasion, everybody was like: "Ohh, Russians will not attack, they never do". Those guys later had to improvise Molotov cocktails against tanks because they were ill prepared, never fired a gun.

To be fair though the government of Ukraine had been preparing since the mini invasions of 2014. Probably a situation where you can never prepare enough.

Also, almost half of the French nuclear reactors were down for maintenance in 2022, requiring German coal and gas power plants to stabilize the European power grid.