europe

https://www.ft.com/content/e10a0a2a-e51c-4ac5-bba9-afea037c791d (https://archive.ph/KWte8)

https://www.kbb.eu/en/hausordnung

https://archive.ph/QXX0F

At the beginning of this month, the German electricity supply reached its limits.

In the evening hours of November 6th, the price of electricity rose extremely quickly and extremely sharply — to more than 800 euros per megawatt hour. This made it around ten times more expensive than usual. There was a brief outcry, but it didn’t last long. Yet the whole situation was more than just a warning shot.

Phases in which wind and sun only produce a limited amount of electricity (a so-called Dunkelflaute, or dark doldrums) are normal. And they will always be noticeable, so we need to be prepared. To ensure stability — the stability of the system as a whole and the stability of prices in particular. After all, these high prices are an absolutely reliable indication of the state of supply security in Germany. They are the result of too little supply.

So let’s take a look at the figures from November 6th: Demand was around 66 GW. It was covered by domestic production (around 53 GW) and imports (around 13 GW). Almost the entire domestic supply was available (only around 4 GW was not available, which is not unusual). In terms of import capacity, only around 3 GW of interconnector capacity was unavailable (also not unusual).

In concrete terms, this means that the same situation would not have been manageable on another day with a higher peak load. For example, in January. The highest demand for electricity of the year was on January 15th, at more than 75 GW. Almost 10 GW more than on November 6th!

And in Germany, we have been acting (for years) as if the issue of adding secure capacity is something that can be postponed. Yet we can already clearly see today what happens when we switch off capacity and do not provide any backup for renewables.

No, we don’t have any more time, quite the opposite. Time is running out. The expansion is urgent.

Tusk won over the critics of this culture-war programme by pledging to return Poland to its rightful place at the heart of the European Union and touting no less than a hundred policies that he planned to introduce during the first hundred days of his administration: introducing same sex civic partnerships, making abortion legal during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, raising the salaries for public-sector employees by 20% and abolishing state subsidies to religious organizations.

Today, the vast majority of these pledges have been abandoned. This is partly because of parliamentary opposition: when the government introduced measures to loosen abortion laws, one of its coalition partners – the Polish People’s Party, which forms part of the Third Way – joined with PiS to block them, in a manner that will no doubt be repeated with any future attempts at liberal reform. But it is also a matter of political will and priorities. For it is increasingly clear that Tusk’s government wants to prove its European credentials not by safeguarding democracy or women’s rights, but by ramping up the campaign against refugees.

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Tusk is not only consolidating Poland’s position as a bulwark against migration; he is also turning it into the EU’s leading military spender. While the PiS government hiked the military budget to 4.1% of GDP, KO intends to raise it further to 4.7% – roughly €44.23bn – next year, outpacing all other NATO members. When Tusk and Duda visited Washington this March, they returned with the promise of a $2bn loan to buy a vast range of armaments, adding to the $31bn that Poland had already funnelled into the US war economy in 2022-23.

Its main suppliers are based in the US, hence Sikorski remarking that up to 90% of the state’s spending in this area ‘goes directly to create American jobs on American soil’. Any hopes of Polish military Keynesianism are therefore misplaced. Nor is there a clear route to passing progressive social measures, given that conservative forces within the coalition have clearly stated their opposition to abortion rights and same-sex partnerships.