Last-Ditch Effort: Germany Weighs Electricity Rationing Scheme To Stabilize Its Now Shaky Green Power Grid

Is the German model America’s future?

Putting matches in charge of fighting gasoline fires? Even more interference appears to be the German government’s approach to solving the power grid mess that its earlier meddling created in the first place.

Germany struggles to keep the lights on, looks for a law to prevent its power grid from crashing. 

Before the days of climate alarmism and hysteria, the job of deciding how to best produce electricity was left to power generation engineers and experts – people who actually understood it. The result: Germany had one of the most stable and reliable power grids worldwide.

Green energies destabilized the German power grid

Then in the 1990s, environmental activists, politicians, climate alarmists and pseudo-experts decided they could do a better job at generating power in Germany and eventually passed the outlandish EEG green energy feed-in act and rules. They insisted that wildly fluctuating, intermittent power supplies could be managed easily, and done so at a low cost.

Blackouts threaten

Fast forward to today: The result of all the government meddling is becoming glaringly clear: the country now finds itself on the verge of blackouts due to grid instability, has the highest electricity prices in the world, relies more on imports and is not even close to meeting its emissions targets.

Germany’s rickety and moody power grid now threatens the entire European power grid stability, as we recently witnessed.

The need for “smoothing out” demand peaks

So what solution does Berlin propose today? You guessed it: more meddling and interference, more outlandish bureaucrat solutions. Included among them are shutting down the remaining baseload coal-fired and nuclear power plants, and relying even more on the power sources that got the country into its current mess in the first place.

And new are restrictions as to when power can be consumed by consumers and industry: Energy rationing and targeted blackouts!

Hat-tip. Tichys Einblick

Cutting off e-vehicle battery chargers and industry

To deal with the power grid instability problems, Germany’s Economics Minister Peter Altmaier presented a draft law that would allow electric utilities “to temporarily cut off the charging power for e-cars when there is once again too little electricity available”, an idea known as “peak smoothing”.

“Shutdowns due to power shortages have been practiced for some time. Aluminum smelters, for example, have to put up with having their power cut off for limited periods of time,” reports Tichys Einblick. “These, like refrigerated storage facilities, consume great amounts. It’s a dangerous game because after three hours the molten metal has solidified and the factory is ruined.”

Situation now “too critical”

The situation in the German power grid has deteriorated so much that Tichys Einblick also comments: “The situation in the power grids has become too critical. The only thing that helps are abstruse ideas like: ‘You are not allowed to refuel your car from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day!'”

A law allowing “peak smoothing” has been demanded by power utilities for some time now as they struggle to keep the increasingly wind and solar powered grid from careening out of control and into blackness. This could be done by using targeted blackouts.

And as Tichy Einblick mentions, the increasing number of e-cars on the market will only serve to cause more extreme power demand peaks. Currently Germany is set to make a major push into electric mobility this year.

No electricity for up to 2 hours a day

In the proposed draft law, which has since been recalled because it was deemed so embarrassing, it was written that “controllable consumption facilities” would be able to receive no electricity for up to two hours per day if there was a threat of overloading the grid.

“This includes charging stations for e-cars as well as heat pumps, which can already be temporarily disconnected from the power supply,” reports Tichy.

More burden on the power grid

Currently there are only 33,000 electric car charging points in Germany, a country with over 50 million cars, and the government plans a vast expansion of e-cars in the future, yet isn’t sure what that infrastructure should look like. It’s a policy of going full speed in total blackness, and hoping there won’t be a brick wall in the way.

Government admits it’s not going to function

Tichy comments further: “The German government has recognized that in the future electricity system, it will no longer be possible to satisfy every demand at all times. Therefore, the control of the consumer side should be put on legal feet.” […] “Controllable consumers such as heat pumps, electric heaters and wall-boxes, i.e. charging stations for e-mobiles, would then be switched off variably at times.”

This is the sorry state of Germany’s once highly regarded power grid.




33 responses to “Last-Ditch Effort: Germany Weighs Electricity Rationing Scheme To Stabilize Its Now Shaky Green Power Grid”

  1. Yonason

    A decrease in energy available to the commoners is not a bug. It is a feature of the new world socialist paradise.

  2. Robin

    A topic I warned and had a go at explaining a few years ago.
    https://www.kiwithinker.com/2017/04/electric-power-system-stability/
    Best regards, Robin.

  3. posa

    Freeze in the dark Greenies… war-time rationing will be a permanent feature of once prosperous Germany. I’ve had arguments about Green energy policies with several Germans. As far as I’m concerned they deserve what they get… and they await rescue from V. Putin and NORDSTREAM-2.

    LMAO.

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  6. Alloytoo

    Since 2008 South African suburbs have burbled from the gentle rumble of portable generators. Their National generator ESCOM failed to add capacity from 1995, finally running out after 15 years of neglect.

    Market response was immediate, companies and private persons invested in portable generation to bridge unpredictable and ever longer load shedding events. South Africans has (compared to Germany) a reli benign climate, without the significant heating requirements.

  7. tom0mason

    How can important politicians, self appointed Green experts, and all those government bureaucrats possibly get it wrong? No they can’t by order of the state! Next you’ll wish for mere engineers to fix the problem but they can’t for the Green lobby and the anti-CO2 monster will prevent them.
    “It will cause a climate catastrophe.” chant the fools while real engineers just shake their heads.

  8. Aussie

    Germans had better get used to supplying their own power it seems. Probably one could actually make money buying a diesel generator and supplying power to others as well…

    1. Seeker24

      That will soon be an offence against the stateXXX Planet. There is already talk of isolation camps for “Covid Deniers”. From there it is a short step to re-education camps for Climate Offenders. One problem, some of the best sites are in Poland…

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  10. pochas94

    America has been overtaken by stupidity. China has succeeded, but in the process has bankrupted itself. More to come (stupidity).

    1. The Indomitable Snowman, Ph.D.

      And China is also being overtaken by a Russian-style demographic implosion…

      This is why I was wondering last week about where all this is going. It seems like every advanced society on Earth is somewhere down the slippery slope to complete collapse. It just starts to look a lot like the c. 1177 B.C. total collapse of the entire Bronze Age world.

      1. pochas94

        When iron weapons became available the ones that had them went on a rampage.

        1. The Indomitable Snowman, Ph.D.

          There was A LOT more to it than that…

          1. Yonason

            On the “up side,” I’m glad we don’t still live in the Bronze Age. I wonder what good will arise to replace the socialist utopia the simple minded leftists want to impose on us. (I am optimistic that there will be progress, though I may not be around to see it.)

          2. pochas94

            “The Dorian invasion is a theoretical migration of Dorian Greeks into Ancient Greece, which is believed to have contributed to the Bronze Age Collapse”

            Visitors from the Iron Age.

          3. The Indomitable Snowman, Ph.D.

            That was the “standard”/”accepted” explanation for a very long time – probably inspired by very little information combined with Gibbon. There *was* a divide in classical Greece between Dorians and Ionians, and there are a lot of late Bronze Age sites in Greece (like Mycenae) and elsewhere around the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East that show destruction by fire; hence, the default explanation was a barbarian invasion and massive destruction.

            There were problems even back a long time back when people looked at this problem – such as Tiryns (close to Mycenae) actually was not only still functioning but was growing *after* Mycenae was destroyed.

            More recently, more details have been noticed – at many places (such as Mycenae and a well-excavated site in northern Israel) the “palaces” were destroyed by fire, but the rest of the cities were untouched. Internal rebellions against concentrations of power are a very likely explanation.

            That’s the similarity to today’s situation. The problem won’t be a barbarian incursion – the problem is that too much power is being horded by a small dysfunctional non-elite “elite”… just as was the case in the late Bronze Age…

          4. The Indomitable Snowman, Ph.D.

            BTW, keep in mind that one of Gibbon’s main purposes (if not THE main purpose) was to demonstrate that what happened to the western Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D. couldn’t possibly happen to the British Empire.

            He developed the idea that the western Roman Empire was overwhelmed by barbarians invading from the north and east… mainly to show that barbarians would have to fight their way all the way across Europe to reach Britain, that “barbarians” were unable to be a threat by then since to be militarily competitive they would have to become civilized and then wouldn’t do barbarian things, etc.

            Who knows if Gibbon really believed what he was writing or just wanted to make his target audience feel good. But internal rot can happen anywhere. When it happens simultaneously to all the actors, you get a collapse as happened c. 1177 B.C.

            Europe and Russia are both pretty far-gone on the rot front, and China is actually sliding along behind them now (demographic implosion really cranking up – that’s why Chairman Xi is in a hurry). The U.S. remained the exception, but with a moronic political class and election-rigging, the U.S. may now go down the chute. There’s no one else to hold the system together…

  11. Larry

    This is amazing. In 2002 the great energy expert Robert Hirsch warned about the cost and risks of over-reliance on interruptible energy sources – like solar and wind. Many other experts have warned since. All ignored by so many policy makers.

    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026246630763

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