Cracks Appear in Climate Consensus as Germany’s Energy Minister Admits Renewable Energy is Ruining the Country

The time for self-deception is over, says Katherina Reiche

When Simon Wakter, Political Adviser to Sweden’s Minister for Energy, posted on X last Wednesday with a simple “Wow, incredible article” and a clapping emoji, he captured the shock rippling through Europe’s energy commentariat. The target of his applause was not some fringe sceptic but Germany’s own Economy and Energy Minister, Katherina Reiche.

In a guest column for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Reiche delivered a verdict that would have been career-ending heresy only a year ago: “One fact has been concealed for too long: an energy transition that ignores system costs will ruin the country it claims to save.” To anyone who has watched Germany’s Energiewende — that totemic experiment in decarbonisation-by-decree — unfold like a slow-motion train wreck, Reiche’s words land like a thunderclap from the Establishment itself.

Here is a senior CDU Minister in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Government openly admitting that two decades of Green-inspired fantasy have saddled the continent’s industrial powerhouse with hidden costs now running, according to estimates she cites, at €36 billion a year and climbing towards €90 billion. Grid expansions, backup power for intermittent wind and solar and the sheer inefficiency of trying to run a modern economy on the weather: all of it, she says, must stop being airbrushed out of the official narrative. The self-deception, she warns, is over.

This is not mere technocratic tinkering. It is the first public crack in the ideological edifice that has dominated German — and by extension European — energy policy since the anti-nuclear, beatnik ‘68ers’ generation seized the cultural high ground. Rupert Darwall chronicled the phenomenon brilliantly in Green Tyranny: how a handful of German Greens, personified by the sneaker-wearing Joschka Fischer swearing in as Hesse’s environment minister, exported their peculiar red-green blend of anti-capitalist zeal and romantic environmentalism across the continent and beyond.