December 16, 2024 - 10:00am
A new German compound noun is currently gaining traction in international news: Dunkelflaute. It describes weather that is cloudy and windless — in other words, the kind of conditions that highlight the vulnerabilities of renewable power production. Germany is currently experiencing a prolonged spell with stark consequences for itself and its European neighbours.
The Dunkelflaute began to make headlines last week when the shortages in renewable electricity production caused a spike of wholesale prices. At times a megawatt hour cost up to €1000 — the highest level recorded in 18 years.
In theory, Germany’s energy system is designed to be flexible since solar and wind energy fluctuate so much. Between May and August this year, Germany produced a quarter of its electricity through solar energy. But in November it was only 4.3%.
In theory, increasing wind in the autumn and winter months is supposed to pick up the shortfall. But when the worst-case scenario happens and a Dunkelflaute hits in the winter months when energy consumption is at its highest, fossil fuels are supposed to step in.
Since the war in Ukraine has seen Germany’s access to cheap gas from Russia cut, Europe’s largest economy relies on the dirtiest fossil fuel of them all. In November over 30% of Germany’s electricity was produced burning coal — a fuel Germany wants to phase out by 2038 at the latest. By contrast, Britain shut its last coal-fired power station this year.
Falling back on gas is also tricky since Germany no longer gets it on tap from Russia and had to replace it with more expensive alternatives, mostly from Norway and the US. In early November, Germany’s gas reserves were still 98% full. Within weeks, they have dropped to 85%. Now even oil had to be burnt at maximum capacity for electricity production.
Still, Germany’s fossil fuel plants haven’t delivered enough, and imports were ramped up from neighbouring countries like France and Poland. Data from November showed that nearly a fifth of imported electricity was made from fossil fuels and another 18% from nuclear energy. The latter seems particularly bizarre since Germany switched its last nuclear reactors off last year. For context: at their peak in the early 2000s, German nuclear plants produced a third of the electricity the country needed.
In order to facilitate its ideologically driven withdrawal from nuclear energy and meet domestic climate targets on paper, Germany has increasingly banked on importing energy from other countries even if its neighbours produce this in ways Berlin frowns upon. France produces 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy and Poland generates three quarters from fossil fuels, the vast majority from coal.
Other countries are increasingly concerned about what it means if Europe’s most populous country with its rapacious industry keeps importing more electricity than it exports. This is especially an issue during Dunkelflaute moments since Germany now proudly produces the majority of its electricity through wildly fluctuating renewables.
Norway is particularly affected. Last year, Germany received 43% of its gas from the Scandinavian country. It’s also one of the biggest source countries for electricity imports to Germany. As a result of the spike in German demand, energy prices in Norway have shot up too. On Thursday, the Norwegian energy minister Terje Aasland didn’t mince his words when he told the Financial Times that “it’s an absolutely shit situation”. Renegotiating energy relations with Europe is now set to become an election issue — “a crunch moment for EU-Norway relations,” as one EU ambassador in Oslo put it.
Sweden, which is also affected by the price hikes, was even more explicit about who and what is to blame. The Swedish energy minister Ebba Busch told the newspaper Aftonbladet that “Germany’s energy system isn’t right”. On X she added: “it is a result of decommissioned nuclear power. When it’s not windy, we get high electricity prices”. If Germany was able to produce more electricity for the European network, she argued, prices would stay lower for all of us.
It’s time for Germany to wake up to the reality that cheap, clean and reliable energy doesn’t become a reality by occupying the moral high ground. With snap elections scheduled for February 2025, now is an ideal moment to rethink past mistakes on energy, particularly the nuclear exit. If the next government in Berlin carries on in the same vein as its predecessors, Germany risks not only the stability of its energy supply but also that of its relations with its European neighbours.
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SubscribeHaven’t they figured out how to store electricity generated by renewables yet?
Yes, but it’s very, very expensive and environmentally damaging. Unjoined thinking at its best.
You cannot store electricity. That’s it. It is impossible. You can store the energy it can produce, but that is expensive.
The best method is cryogenic storage, which works, can be done on varying scales and provide months rather than hours of back up.
If you don’t know why we are not all in on this, join the gang. It seems to be almost BECAUSE it works that is being given so little help compared to batteries.
Google Highview Power.
Actually you can store electricity – use it to fractionate water and save the hydrogen. Later you can use hydrogen fuel cells.
Then that’s storing Hydrogen not electricity.
As Mr/Ms Martell says, you use the electricity to create something with an efficiency of much less than 95%. You use it but you don’t store it. Each time you use it, the efficiency gets worse. Even when you use the electricity to power a chemical reaction, as in a battery, you put AC power into the battery, which can only be retrieved as DC power, which has to be converted again to AC for most uses. These conversions will lose 10-15% of the original power.
You can start with DC power and transport it around the country but instead of one line of pylons you will have two lines. DC requires a return but AC doesn’t.
No. That is using the energy electricity can create. It is true that storage is theoretically possible, but only in amounts that cannot be used for energy purposes. A capacitor can store electricity for periods, but that is mostly as an electronic component, used in the smoothing of voltages and so on.
You can store electricity, in capacitors. Expensive and impractical, but it is physically possible.
A moot point. This storage is not for power usage.
Supercapacitors, or if you prefer the name ultracapacitors, have made it into some power storage applications, particularly in buffering and grid stabilization. Back in 2011 Elon Musk thought supercapacitors were going to replace batteries in Tesla’s cars.
Let’s rely on the climate for our power even though our reason for doing so is that we are experiencing climate change and cannot predict the future climate accurately. Great reasoning!
I can’t for the life of me understand why populism is emerging across Europe.
It’s almost like there is some kind of weird quantum entanglement.
Yes, Europeans are being Dunkelf**ked (as energy expert Robert Bryce puts it) , and they aren’t liking it. The whole German Energiewende has been ill-conceived and ill-implemented. Time to pivot and bring back nuclear.
Norway is even threatening to destroy its two electrical power interconnections to the continent to isolate itself from the German electricity market. An empty threat, probably, but maybe not.
I do not know if this comment is an obtuse or sarcastic! but: Populism comes to power when people feel excluded, unheard, or under threat—whether economically, culturally, or politically. It thrives on emotional appeals, distrust in the establishment, and promises of radical change. By presenting simple solutions to complex problems and emphasizing a return to the “people’s will,” populist leaders are able to channel dissatisfaction into political power. Better it is populism and not revolutionary YET! but those of us here commenting on Unherd are not the majority WHO are pushed to the margins!
I’d be pretty sure it was the “sarcastic” one….
Shutting down functional and paid for nuclear plants – which generate no CO2 – when you claim to afraid of climate change – has to be the high water mark of green / progressive lunacy. I don’t live in Europe but I’ve always thought Germans were rationale people – I guess that is a false stereotype.
It’s quite remarkable that the “Atomkraft, Nein Danke” attitude to nuclear has lasted so long, and presumably is still important enough to win and lose votes. It was always a sort of post hippie German hippie thing – its quite remarkable it hasn’t given way to more realism.
99 luftballons, it’s been going on for a long time.
The habit of marching in formation seems to be quite ineradicable in the souls of the Germans. Their attachment to the Ordnung often has frightening consequences…
It is best not to march in step over bridges….
We no longer produce any coal fired electricity in the UK, the last plant closed at the end of September.
Suggest the author logs on to grid.iamkate.com to update her sources.
Umm, she says, “By contrast, Britain shut its last coal-fired power station this year.”
After I commented – the story originally said 1.7% of our electricity was from coal!
Slow motion economic & industrial suicide. And now the Chinese have learned how to manufacture nearly as well as the Germans. And who taught them.. The Germans…Living by exporting and using cheap energy from Russia, so they sowed the seeds of their own failure
The majority are for moving away from fossil fuels but why get rid of the nuclear alternatives prematurely which has made the whole transformation unnecessarily painful?
The majority of who? The EU? UK? That is certainly not true in the US.
It is the same here. We have super abundant natural resources, but we are importing electricity more, and more frequently, because the wind doesn’t blow, the sun doesn’t shine, ( who knew?), and electricity is impossible to store.
Nutcasery, dangerous zealots are in charge of energy here and elsewhere, and not an engineering brain among them.
True 100%. But the zealots have taken over the schools and all young people KNOW that the zealots are right.
About 8 years ago I was working in Japan. On a Friday afternoon it was time to fly home but there was a delay and I ended up in a long queue in the airport. I started talking to a very polite young Japanese man behind me – he spoke brilliant English. He said that he was just about to graduate in Environmental Sciences. I couldn’t resist saying that I was an engineer in the electrical industry and didn’t believe in all of this pseudoscience. He smiled and was very calm and polite and said, “Our professor has told us what to say to people like you. We have to ask you what you think of all of the plastic in the oceans.”
Where is here for you?
Sorry. The UK. I mentioned that as some posters are not.
And yet, here in Britain, we just blunder on. Miliband wants us to become a net exporter of electricity but seems not to have twigged why Norway is turning against it. At least Ofgem seems to be slowly catching on: last week it refused a number of applications for interconnectors to Europe.
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/decision/initial-project-assessment-window-3-interconnectors-decision
We are nowadays only intermittently exporters (except to Ireland, which needs a GW which we pass through to them) now we have no coal and fewer nuclear plant. French, Norwegian , Danish, Dutch and Belgian electricity utilities are very happy to send juice to us as we pay the highest prices. But when it is calm and dark, and things get tight, they will be under pressure to serve domestic markets first, so we will have brown outs, especially in the years before any new nuclear capacity come on stream.
I like those German words that have no direct translation into English. Zeitgeist is one. Schadenfreude is another.
Dunkelflaute translates directly to “dark doldrums”. No light. No wind.
I did actually realise that (being a German speaker).
A completely disconnected and impotent German political class, a wildly unequal and broken German financial system, a complete breakdown in morality and tradition in the name of “liberation” in Germany…. Hmm seems familiar where have I seen this before?
Dunno. Where?
More than “where?” it is “when?”. He’s referring to the Weimar Republic era in Germany.
Oh, I didn’t realise that he’d lived through the Weimar Republic. He must be very elderly.
Why does ANYONE support the Greens at this time? They are completely wrong about everything. It’s Green policies that have destroyed German industry.
See my post above. Young people have been brainwashed. It is an age thing. Are there any people on this site who support these climate initiatives – that is to focus on solar and wind power and stop burning fossil fuels and ignore nuclear? Please come out and say and don’t be shy.
I would like to understand the terms of the energy-sharing agreements between European and Nordic countries. For example, to what extent are countries such as Norway required to share energy with Germany when Germany requests it?
As I understand it, the countries are not required to share, but when Germans are willing to pay a high price that raises the market price domestically as well. It’s enough of a problem that Norway has mooted the idea of severing its two electrical power interconnections to the continent in order to isolate itself from that market.
The German people are not stupid. Wake up Germany and connect the existing NordStream pipeline. Get the energy flowing and demand the USA pay to repair the three damaged pipelines. Cheap energy from Russia will save Germany and Europe. Forget Ukraine. The US started the war in Ukraine. Demand the US work with Russia to end that war.
Whatever you do, don’t reconnect NordStream! NEVER trust the Russians!
What does trust have to do with it?
If you connect to Russian gas, the Russians will blackmail you, as they tried to do at the time of the Ukraine invasion. Why would you sign up to be a permanent Russian hostage?
Germany can take the gas as long as Russia decides to sell it. That would not make them a hostage to Russia. No trust is involved. Many contracts are like that, terminable by either party if they decide they want out of the deal.
Uh huh. Unfortunately Germany has got rid of its coal and nuke power stations. Had it not done that, it wouldn’t have to stoop to buying Russian gas.
The evidence suggests the prussians are preternaturally stupid.
Which “evidence” would that be (speaking as someone whose mother is Prussian)? I’ll say one thing for them – they have no love for the Russians (an entirely sensible attitude as far as I can see),
2105 – 2025 is going to be remembered when we let progressive children run our societies with disastrous consequences. It is not enough to go back to normal – we must overturn the education systems that are creating these credentialed clowns.
Dumping nuclear was not ideological but a rational decision made on grounds of safety, and, moreover, everybody knows that. It was one of the few good decisions made by AM during her long tenure as Chancellor.
“…wildly fluctuating renewables….”
You don’t say. Who would’ve thought.
Too bad half-baked climate ideology isn’t as combustible as natural gas. We could immediately fuel the world’s energy needs forevermore.