Berlin, Germany—For years, environmentalists in America have looked longingly to Germany. There, across the Atlantic, lay a small, cold, gray country whose solar energy production dwarfed big, sunny America’s, a nation that last year pledged to get 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by mid-century while Americans proved unable to agree on energy legislation even a fraction as ambitious. Yet in bowing to the country’s strong anti-nuclear movement, Germany appears to have suddenly gone off track: Within the last year the country has gone from a net exporter of electricity* to a net importer, and the carbon intensity of the energy it purchases has risen as well. Now, with its energy politics in turmoil, Germany is serving as a very different sort of model for environmentalists: how not to go green.



At the root of Germany’s current energy struggle is its nuclear power politics. Reports tend to cite Japan’s Fukushima disaster as the starting point of the country’s nuclear turmoil, but really the story begins a lot earlier, in Chernobyl, Ukraine. The Chernobyl plant’s 1986 nuclear meltdown in Germany’s backyard galvanized the anti-nuclear movement and led the country’s center-left parties to commit to phasing out nuclear power—a pledge they fulfilled when the Nuclear Exit Law went into effect in 2002 and mandated the end of nuclear power in Germany within 20 years.

When Angela Merkel’s administration changed course last year and moved to extend the operating life of the country’s nuclear plants, tens of thousands of environmental advocates flocked to Berlin from all over the country (and even from abroad) to protest the reversal. With opinion polls showing that Germans opposed the nuclear extension by nearly a two-to-one margin and Merkel’s political rivals promising to overturn her new policy, the German nuclear industry seemed to be hanging on by a thread.

Then came Fukushima. The German government really only needed the slightest excuse to nix its plans for a nuclear future; instead, it was given a tsunami. Four days after the earthquake struck Japan, and before the implications of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown were fully understood, the government shut down eight of the country’s 17 nuclear reactors. Two weeks later, the Merkel administration announced that the remainder of Germany’s nuclear power would be phased out by 2022.

Environmentalists suddenly had a much more resounding victory over nuclear power than they’d thought possible a month earlier. They cheered the news—for a time, at least. But over the next six months, it became increasingly clear that the fidgety administration, worried by declining poll numbers, had failed to think through the consequences of its abrupt U-turn. Last year, Germany was a net exporter of electricity, drawing from a diverse range of energy sources led by coal, but with substantial contributions from low-emissions nuclear (23 percent of the total mix) and renewable energy sources (17 percent). With half of the country’s nuclear plants suddenly yanked from the grid in March, however, Germany became a net importer of electricity almost overnight.