The Energy Transition, in Spreadsheet
Open the spreadsheet. Column A: the plan. Column B: reality. The German energy transition is the distance between the two, measured in gigawatts and regret.
The plan — the Energiewende — was magnificent on paper: renewables everywhere, coal gone, and, in a flourish no spreadsheet could justify, the nuclear plants switched off first. The result, any engineer could have told you, was arithmetic: the wind does not always blow, the sun sets daily, and the gap was filled by — this is the part the Greens whisper — coal, and then gas, and then coal again. We phased out the clean, steady power to make room for the clean, intermittent power, and bridged the difference with the dirty kind. The spreadsheet does not lie. It merely embarrasses.
Industry noticed. The chemical giants, the carmakers, the Mittelstand machine-builders who are the actual Germany — they read the electricity prices the way a doctor reads a fever chart. Some are building their next plants in America, where the subsidies are vulgar and the power is cheap. Some are building them in China, where the solar panels come from anyway — the awkward fact being that the Energiewende runs on Chinese hardware, which means our green transition has a supply chain shaped like a dependency.
And yet — and yet. The engineering culture that built the problem is the same one that will solve it: the grid expansions, the hydrogen bets, the quiet competence of people who measure twice. The eurozone watches Berlin the way a family watches its eldest child: with pride, worry, and the suspicion that the lectures about fiscal discipline land differently when your own power bill arrives. The transition is real. The timeline was fiction. Somewhere between the plan and reality, in Column C, is the Germany that actually gets built. I have seen the draft. It is late, over budget, and — typically — it will work.