It’s hard to be sympathetic when this situation was so obvious and preventable. This is what short term greed and irresponsible governance looks like.
So the majority might be partially responsible. If you disagree hard, we'll be heading into "politeia" discussions, king-philosophers and what not.
In Sweden, the green and socialists have been running the show for the past 8 years and during this period shut down 4 nuclear reactors that had at least 20+ years left of steam.
...so no, I continue to have little sympathy to any issues Germany will have this winter.
Gas from the US or the middle east maybe?
Assigning someone with dumb ideas to run the country, not checking and correcting them, and then scapegoating them when it goes wrong... That's not democracy, that's laziness and cowardice.
(Even quebec, which is very used to extreme winters, lost electricity for nearly a month back in 1998. On the other hand, I can't think of anything similar to this train wreck situation europe managed to get itself into, not since the 70s at least. So it is a pretty unique fuck up due to very bad policy, and one that's been happening in slow motion)
It'd be great if you didn't lower yourself to name calling as well. (Note: I don't much like the comment you're responding to, but let's be civil here)
And the share of renewables in Texas was negligible when the frid broke down, that was due to failing gas power plants because of low temperatures.
The real problem with this situation is we are at a point at which deploying fixes to these problems take so long that even discussing it feels useless.
Also, because this is about peak demand, increasing base load generation is of limited help. There is a shortage of power plants that are cheap enough to keep idle most of the time but can be adjusted quickly. That means hydro and natural gas. Even coal is too expensive. Storage may be the long-term solution, but we are not there yet.
Of course, but in a system trying to avoid fossil fuel use, it smooths out the rough edges in significant ways: during non-peak times, by preventing blackouts or brownouts when there are medium to long term wind & solar outages (which no realistic storage can cover yet in places without pumped hydro), and during peak times by reducing the amount of additional energy required.
The real irony of your comment however is that you are actually looking to Texas now. The EU is now relying in large part on the US for LNG and much of the LNG is being shipped from the Gulf Coast in Texas. The majority of the US excess natural gas supply is now being shipped to Europe. As of April that was 74%. [3]. I'm guessing it's even more now.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/18/texas-winter-storm-b...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/15/texas-power-grid-win...
But joining the war this year was crazy given the current situation, Europe is doomed.
But doing the short-term irrational thing and joining the economic (and in weapons support, kinetic) war against Russia is exactly what the fucked-up initial conditions require. When you've worked yourself into that kind of lose-lose situation, making the rational choice has a long-term game theoretic downside.
The next Putin that manages to maneuver a Western country into a bind can't count on them rolling onto their backs and crying for mercy, even if that seemed like the rational choice. We've seen it demonstrated, also disproving that Westerners are lazy, fat, spoiled and unable to handle significant pain for a greater cause.
This is certainly a lesson for the West, but it's also a lesson for the autocrats.
If we didn‘t join this war, the war would come to us. Most Europeans fortunately understand this.
There were SO SO many public warnings about this.