A Fundamental Lesson from the Terrorist Attack on Berlin’s Power Grid

The shutdown of the power supply in southern Berlin has brought the fragility of the “Energiewende” (transition to green energies) policy clearly to our attention.

The goal of the transition to renewable energy is not only to switch the power supply to wind and solar energy but also to transition the other two pillars of energy supply—namely, heating and the transport sector— over to electricity. “Everything to electricity” means abandoning gas and oil in the heating sector and oil (gasoline/diesel) in the motor vehicle sector.

This narrowing of the energy supply down to a single energy carrier was called “sector coupling.” This sector coupling was propagated and celebrated by the “Green high priests” as a sustainable model for the future. Originally, it was an attempt to correct the weakness of renewable energies, which lead to unusable surpluses during periods of high wind and solar production. These useless surpluses were intended to be pushed into the heating and vehicle sectors after storage. It has been described here often enough that this sector coupling leads to exorbitant cost increases. Frontier Economics estimates the total cost of the energy transition until 2045 at an unaffordable 4,800 to 5,400 billion euros.

But now, the attack in Berlin demonstrates to us that such an energy system, based solely on electricity, is highly vulnerable. We are learning that when the power fails, the heat supply also fails—at least when it is supposed to be generated by heat pumps. And to make matters worse, we are learning that in freezing temperatures, heat pumps face total loss due to bursting pipes. This particular “warning label” was certainly not included in the “Habeck heating law,” which the CDU-SPD federal government intends to continue seamlessly. The content of the law will remain the same, but to ensure citizens don’t quite realize it, the name of the law is to be changed.

We are also learning that during a large-scale power outage, electric vehicles can only help if they happened to be charged before the “bang.” Otherwise, this utility also fails.