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Europe could have left their nuclear power plants turned on. Or drilled in the north sea. Or built LNG import terminals. These were all policy choices that had nothing to do with the US or Israel.
Yeah, no. Merkel's deal to shut off the nuclear plants to make a coalition was 100% a blunder. Not only in hindsight, with the dependence on russian gas, but in general it was a blunder. Nuclear gives you steady energy in ways that renewables can't. We should absolutely do more renewables, but to shut off working nuclear was not good.
Granted, in Europe a hot dry summer is when solar is at its peak. So it is much lesser problem than a cold winter with a lot of cloudy days with no wind when nuclear energy is ideal.
Still from a perspective of 20 years ago with unknown prospects about renewables natural gas power stations were considered much more reliable and flexible power source compared with nuclear and way more cleaner than coal. Of cause, as long as one gets gas.
Besides being a great friend of Putin one of Germany's previous chancellors was literally an openly paid Russian agent who didn't even try hiding it until 2022 (and who knows what "arrangements" he had before he left office...)
Germany's been a pioneer in incentivizing personal solar installations.
It was too little and too late and Germany only got serious about it when there were no longer any other options.
> personal solar installations
It was entirely insignificant back then and growth pretty much entirely stopped between 2012 and 2018.
The country looks pretty on-schedule to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_transition_scenari...
vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschland.sv...
A decade or so ago, this was described as:
while the German approach is not unique worldwide, the speed and scope of the Energiewende are exceptional
For a more detailed graph showing the scale of nuclear vs. renewable, including the period you're criticising in particular, page 12: https://web.archive.org/web/20160602074457/https://www.agora...
i.e. they understood the risks of relying on Russia and made a conscience decision to build their plan for transitioning into renewables around it.
Just the energy transition.
The economic mess isn't even mostly about the energy, it's a grandfathered (literally) fear of hyperinflation that means the state is terrified of borrowing even when that's a good thing, plus the infamous bureaucracy which they now plan to solve with a 200-step plan: https://www.dw.com/en/german-leaders-plan-to-cut-red-tape-in...
This is also fairly easy to spot with the GDP graph, which is a long term trend of "line go up", just never quite as fast as the US's line, and the recent dip is quite small compared to that growth: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
> i.e. they understood the risks of relying on Russia and made a conscience decision to build their plan for transitioning into renewables around it.
This was more due to the incorrect belief that nations which have an important trade relationship can use diplomacy to avoid conflict, i.e. Germany being an important customer of Russian oil means that Germany can make a credible threat to cause economic harm to Russia by ceasing to buy Russian oil if Russia does something dumb like invade Ukraine. Germany did in fact cause economic harm to Russia by ceasing (or massively reducing, I'm not clear) purchase of Russian oil, however it turned out that Russian leadership didn't care about economic harm to Russia.
We did. Most of the oil and gas there has now been removed and sold. Oil production peaked in 1999, gas in 2001.
If the same place, the North Sea specifically, was filled with wind farms, it could supply about half of the EU's electricity.
(If all the waters around the British Isles had wind farms, it becomes 140% of current EU total primary energy consumption or 660% of the electricity consumption, assuming I did the substitution efficiency multiplier right).
Guess what's getting built?