Recent issues in Germany arising from the adoption of renewable energy resources offer valuable lessons for U.S. utilities as their country undergoes its own energy transition, staff from ReliabilityFirst said in a recent webinar.
In the regional entity’s monthly Technical Talk with RF series, Courtney Fasca, RF’s senior reliability consultant for external affairs, reminded attendees of RF’s adage that “every instance, good or bad, is an opportunity to learn and adapt.” In her telling, Germany’s “Energiewende” — which translates roughly to “energy transition” — and the resource adequacy issues that partially arose from it qualify as such a learning opportunity.
Fasca dated the beginning of the Energiewende to 2010, when Germany’s legislature initiated a plan to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95% from their 1990 levels by 2050. This would include decommissioning all coal-fired power plants, which under a plan approved by the cabinet in 2020 would have occurred by the end of 2038.
However, subsequent events have called that target into question, Fasca said. Growing public concern about nuclear power, which in 2010 accounted for about 25% of Germany’s generation fleet, led the government to retire all of the country’s nuclear reactors by 2023. To replace the more than 20 GW of resources, utilities turned to natural gas.
Even though “the reliance on natural gas … was only meant to be a bridge between the phase-out of coal and nuclear energy and the transition to renewables,” it ended up contributing to the later challenges, Fasca continued. Germany depends on imported gas to satisfy its needs, which include home heating and industrial uses in addition to power generation, and Russia supplied more than half of the gas the country imported in 2020.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, this dependence on Russian gas imports quickly became a major concern. Amid mutual sanctions, Russia ceased exports of gas and oil to Germany by August 2022. With the final nuclear reactors retiring just months later in April 2023 and retirements of coal plants continuing, “Germany was officially in an energy crisis,” Fasca said.
By July 2022 the price of power had risen to over $600/barrel of oil equivalent, according to the European Energy Exchange, more than $500 higher than a year earlier. Greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector spiked in 2022 after nearly a decade of steady declines because of the reopening of 10 GW worth of coal plants, though they dropped to below 2020 levels the following year as energy conservation measures among industry and the general population took hold.
Further complications ensued in 2024 as Germany endured what has been dubbed the dünkelflaute, “a prolonged period of cloudy and windless weather” that resulted in low output from the country’s wind and solar generators. Wholesale prices spiked as a result, at one point reaching €1000 — the highest point in 18 years. To make up the shortfalls, Germany turned to imported nuclear and fossil fuel-fired energy from its neighbors.
Fasca identified several takeaways from the German experience that could be relevant to U.S. grid planners.
“One of the unique aspects of [the] Energiewende … was to drive the transition primarily through citizens, and [it] sought to involve them more in the policymaking process and to increase the transparency for renewable energy project plans and approvals,” she said. “However, this change in energy composition also required serious infrastructure and transmission upgrades, projects the public wasn’t necessarily supportive of.”
By 2020, she continued, “bureaucratic measures and ‘not in my backyard’” attitudes had slowed several renewable energy projects. At the same time, the retirement of nuclear plants meant energy prices remained high, frustrating ordinary Germans.
Since rebounding from the crisis of the Russo-Ukrainian war and the dünkelflaute, German policymakers have worked to “shield their country from power price fluctuations” and from future supply shocks. One step in this direction is an apparent softening toward nuclear power, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government dropping its long-held opposition to the European Union classifying nuclear energy as “sustainable.”
One critical lesson of the German experience, Fasca said, is the importance of diversifying energy resources. With more generation types represented in the German resource mix, the country could have compensated for the loss of Russian gas imports with less cost to the environment and economy. Long-term planning also must include enough cushion for unpredictable events, whether in foreign relations, extreme weather or any other fields.
“This yearslong energy crisis in Germany did not arise due to a single decision, but a series of them,” Fasca said. “By no means do we place blame or judgment on any of these decisions, but we believe that studying and learning from them can help us bolster the reliability of the grid here in the U.S.”