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The Green Libertarian

Market forces for planetary survival

Technical Deep Dives

The Energiewende Katastrophe: How to Spend €520 Billion on a Clean Future and Still Burn Coal

Picture this. It's October 2025. As the wind turbines sit still and solar panels languish under a grey autumn sky, Germany is in dire need of electricity. The bureaucrats in Berlin and Brussels are trading blows over building new gas capacity. Meanwhile, coal, supposedly a relic of the dirty past, has temporarily won this fight. This is not the green clean future German citizens were promised by their government.

What went wrong? The answer is two German words: Energiewende and Dunkelflaute. Without turning this blog post into a German lesson, we will dig into the facts behind these Teutonic terms to understand the mess Germany is in. And how it can learn from its mistakes and become a true European champion of renewable energy instead of a cautionary tale of bureaucratic ambition gone horribly wrong.

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An anti-capitalism own goal: How the Trump Administration's war on US East Coast Offshore Wind is driving up the cost of electricity for Northeast consumers

"Windmills are driving whales crazy", "they are not truly green", the current occupant of the White House has said at the beginning of the year as he was about to take office. Nearly a year later, amid record rises in retail electricity prices, it's the Trump administration's systematic attempts to undermine offshore wind development on the US East Coast that is driving people crazy. Especially the working-class Americans who are the most vulnerable to the affordability crisis that drove them to vote for the Republicans in the last election. Unfortunately for these workers struggling to make ends meet, the Trump administration is scoring an own goal by actively stymieing the development of US coast offshore wind, development which has the potential to mitigate the rapid rise of retail electricity prices in the North East.

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