Marie-Luise Wolff is CEO of the energy and telecommunications provider Entega and President of the Federal Association of Energy and Water Management (BdEW).
(Photo: imago images/UJ Alexander, PR)
Even if the Federal Chancellor’s “turn of the era” is quoted and used everywhere, the term “polycrisis” suits me better as a description of the current state of affairs. It was coined by the French sociologist Edgar Morin in the 1970s.
After 2022, pessimism will spread everywhere. People are increasingly feeling the escalation and chaining of several crises into a complex, somehow tangled problem situation from which it seems difficult to find a way out. A poly crisis.
The focus is on the energy crisis, also because it came as a surprise to many. This is the essence of a crisis: Suddenly, problems are revealed that were known for a long time, but for which only experts were interested for just as long and for which little or no provision was made.
Crisis management is always detailed work. A single “blood, sweat and tears” speech or even a turning point speech is not enough.
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We need to make our infrastructure more robust and independent
A year ago, the idea quickly came up of working out a plausible shutdown sequence for business and industry in the event of a gas shortage. An almost impossible task. If we shut down energy-intensive glass blowing plants, vaccine vials would no longer be manufactured, if we shut down chemical plants, the entire auto industry would suffer, farmers would no longer be able to fertilize their fields.
The same applies to the supply chains, whose multiple dependencies showed up at the same time. These are precisely the characteristics of a polycrisis – everything is connected.
The shortage of skilled workers is particularly affecting us in the energy industry, because now, in the energy crisis, we have many technical and infrastructural transformation services in front of our chests, which, in addition to digitality, also require a lot of technical craftsmanship: from building technology, the conversion of Heating systems, the turbo expansion of renewable systems, the construction of new power lines, the planning and construction of hydrogen lines, not to mention the construction of intelligent, bidirectional power grid units, to name just a selection.
Pessimism cannot be the answer. So what to do? The German gas hoarding of the past year was an understandable decision, but it was not a far-sighted one. It has pushed up prices across Europe and once again made our neighbors suspicious of us.
And it threatened to obscure the main goal of our energy policy: independence from fossil fuels. We need to make our (energy) infrastructure more independent and robust. A new, politically exploited debate about nuclear power will certainly not help.
When it comes to building a hydrogen infrastructure, Germany lags behind other industrial nations
The agenda for Germany is obvious. The first is the expansion of the supply of electricity, i.e. the accelerated expansion of generation plants for renewables, including their back-up from hydrogen-capable gas-fired power plants.
The pace of implementation must increase significantly. An urgently preferable measure is the long-neglected expansion of transmission and distribution grids for electricity.
We investors need more powerful financial incentives, especially for the expansion of the distribution grids. With the current return on equity, the urgently needed modernization boom in the networks will not happen, certainly not if interest rates continue to rise.
>> Read here: From now on, Germany has to build six wind turbines every day
The same applies to the turbo in the expansion of renewable energies. As a result of the slow decision-making process, an almost lost year lies behind us. Nothing concrete happened in the development of a hydrogen infrastructure in 2022 either. Compared to other industrial nations, we have a huge gap to catch up on.
There is also a problem in reducing the gas dependency of German industry. Here, too, unambiguous goals, a timetable and clear incentives are missing.
Accelerating an addition to the energy-only market design, where only energy actually produced but not held by reserve power plants is remunerated, is high on Europe’s to-do list. Finally, it should be examined what short-term incentives there might be for the expansion of back-up power plants.
Energy companies and politicians have known all this for a long time, and we even agree in principle on most of the goals. But we are too slow in many ways.
Incidentally, this applies not only to Germany and Europe, but also to the entire world community with a view to overcoming the climate crisis. The sometimes unworthy bargaining for privileges at the climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh and its disappointing outcome are a warning sign for the future of the planet.
If a polycrisis means the unfavorable chaining of individual crises, i.e. if a lot of the worst possible things happen at the same time, then polyopportunities also arise. Everyone knows the way out of the crisis! Let’s get started.
The author:
Marie-Luise Wolff is CEO of the energy and telecommunications provider Entega and President of the Federal Association of Energy and Water Management (BdEW).
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