“Short circuit”

Excitement over technological innovations and the digitalisation of the energy system are “only one side of the coin” of Germany’s energy transition, Daniel Wetzel writes in weekly newspaper Welt am Sonntag. “The other side is that planners and architects of the Energiewende don’t know where to go from here,” he argues. Gearing the German energy supply towards renewable sources has not furthered the country’s climate protection targets and produces rising costs. And “young people ‘doing something with computers’ are now supposed to deliver a technological miracle,” Wetzel says. Given that 27,000 wind turbines and 1.6 million solar plants cover “only 3.1 percent” of Germany’s primary energy consumption, “building an ‘all-electric society’ within the next 30 years seems utterly unrealistic”, he says.

Read more about The digitalisation of the Energiewende in this CLEW dossier.

For details on Germany’s energy consumption and power mix, read this CLEW factsheet.