At night

At night in Klaipėda, looking out of the window from my hotel room, I could see an endless stream of rail cars with Russian hydrocarbons being loaded onto ferries and shipped off to Kiel and Rostock. Each tank car holding more than a hundred cubic meters, they were a very visible reminder of how much the German “Energiewende” is failing. With the last six nuclear reactors being closed down over the next year, another eight gigawatt of low-carbon electricity (equivalent to about 12% of all German electricity production) will soon be lost. Despite massive investments in wind and solar, the German emission trajectory is only going up which, after all, should not be particularly surprising. Rather than being energy sources in their own right, it seems more accurate to describe intermittent wind and solar as “fuel-saving devices” for gas-fired power plants. On days when the wind blows or the sun shines, they sure reduce the amount of gas that needs to be burned but, ultimately, they are inherently part of a fossil paradigm (especially when considering the Chinese coal power needed to build those solar panels in the first place).

It is easy to get frustrated when thinking about these things. Down in Germany, I have some brave friends like Rafaela Hillerbrand who dare to speak out. But for my own part, I am most of all getting tired. For every day, I feel more and more convinced that I should focus on teaching and my pedagogical research rather than risk becoming like Don Quijote and his windmills. At least, I was able to get 5k of treadmill running into my morning schedule, sporting my new black “Trail Kuršių Nerija” t-shirt.