People in southern Sweden and southern Norway now have to pay $5 for a 10-minute shower.

Until a few years ago I’d never heard the term Dunkelflaute, which combines two German words: “dark” (dunkel) and “lull” (flaute), but I’m loving it now because it may be applicable globally to the farce that is wind and solar power, with variations like that in the title.

It’s been less than a month since I posted about the last Dunkelflaute energy crisis and this is the second crisis so far this winter, which means they’re almost level pegging with Cuba who have had three grid collapses in the last couple of months!

I’m not going to repeat the graphs showing the resulting explosion in German energy costs because that’s just par for the course now when this happens, the long-predicted result of the German Energiewende effort that’s cost Germany $746 billion between 2002-2022. But it’s the impact on the rest of Europe that’s interesting this time around:

At one point power prices in Germany and Denmark approached $US 1,000 per MWh.

No, the interesting outcome this time is that the neighbours have had it with German energy stupidity, starting with Energiewende and culminating with Angela Merkel’s bone-headed decision to shut down Germany’s nuclear reactors. I knew that Germany was buying electricity from the French, since they have some spare power from their nuclear reactor fleet, but I didn’t know that Germany was buying from other nations, with bad results for them:

Electricity prices in Norway, which gets 90% of its power from hydro, hit record prices this week despite having full hydro reservoirs.
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“It’s an absolutely shit situation,” said Norway’s energy minister Terje Aasland cited by FT
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Visegrád 24 also quoted Sweden’s deputy prime minister and energy minister, Ebba Busch, as being “furious with the Germans.” The article continued, explaining that due to Germany’s decision to shutter its nuclear plants, “people in southern Sweden and southern Norway now have [to] pay $5 for a 10-minute shower.”

Talk about sharing the pain! As you can guess the citizens are pissed off and in a rare case of representative democracy actually being representative the leaders of the nations are as well. So pissed off in fact that Norway is threatening to cut the interconnectors to Germany (and possibly Britain), while the Swedes have blocked building new ones.

Norwegian politicians are promising to dismantle the undersea power cables that connect Norway’s grid to mainland Europe to protect Norwegians from Europe’s tumultuous electricity market.
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“The Swedish government has turned down an application to build a new subsea power connection between Sweden and Germany, the 700 megawatts Hansa PowerBridge project, because the German market is not efficient enough…We can’t connect southern Sweden, which has a large deficit in electricity production, with Germany, where the electricity market today does not function efficiently,….That would risk leading to higher prices and a more unstable electricity market in Sweden,” – Ebba Busch

It’s not a question of the markets failing to be “efficient enough” or “unstable”. The market, via prices, is reflecting back upon the Germans and the Danes – and now Sweden and Norway – the stupidity of their alternative energy decisions of the last twenty years in vastly expanding wind and solar while shutting down baseload (24/7) power stations, whether coal, gas or nuclear.

This morning, I talked to a US energy industry veteran who is currently in Berlin attending an energy conference. I asked about the sentiment in Germany amid the Dunkelflaute. The veteran told me it was so cold in Berlin that he bought an extra hat to stay warm. “It’s super cold, and there’s no wind and no sun.” As for the sentiment at the energy conference, he told me, “German industry is fleeing.”

And so…

Yet Germany has announced that they’re going to kick in another $US 17 billion in subsidies for their wind sector, adding to the existing subsidies, which the University of Cologne estimates will cost $US 19.3 billion in 2025.

If these people are so fanatical they can’t learn even from disasters staring them in the face then what hope in Britain (already with the developed world’s highest electricity prices), with Energy Minister Ed Milband doubling down:

Miliband hit the airwaves on the Today Programme this morning to defend his plan. Nick Robinson pressed him on the obvious flaw: what happens when “the wind doesn’t blow” or “the sun doesn’t shine?” Miliband responded with that’s “why we have [oil and gas] reserves” – an ironic nod given that renewables accounted for just 8.3% of the UK’s energy yesterday… When pushed on why his plan wouldn’t necessarily lower bills, referencing the National Energy System Operator boss who admitted lowering prices for consumers was “not what we set out to do”, Miliband admitted that they said there was “no guarantee” his plan would lead to lower bills. Miliband finished strong: “It’s exciting… there will be bumps along the way… but this transition is unstoppable.” 

Oh I don’t know about that sweetheart; industrial collapse and poverty have been showstoppers for a lot of things throughout history. Also, so much for the Labour election promise to “help families save up to £300 off their energy bills.”, which was as equally as stupid as the similar promise by the Australian Labor Party in 2023 that consumer energy bills would be cut by $A 275 per year.

In both cases because these moron politicians still believe that since the wind and sun are free and the cost of wind turbines and solar panels are dropping, that having even more wind and solar power stations will reduce costs when the exact opposite is happening, backed by solid reasons which were always knowable to these political idiots.

Despite NZ’s already massive renewable portion of power production (80%) via hydro and geothermal, we’re not going to be immune to these energy/finance facts either if we expand wind and solar power.