The German Bundesrechnungshof, or the Federal Audit Office, is an independent government body charged by statute with overseeing the economic management of the Federal Republic. Last week, they published a devastating “Report … on the implementation of the energy transition” in Germany. Every one of its fifty-eight pages represents a brutal slap in the face to our Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck. German energy policies have not only made us the laughing stock of the developed world; they are deplored even by our own bureaucrats.

The report says clearly what everybody knows but nobody in charge will acknowledge, namely that wind and solar are relentlessly intermittent power sources, which require “a largely redundant” backup system to provide “secure, controllable power” when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. Habeck’s much-ballyhooed “power plant strategy,” unveiled in February, will “probably not be sufficient” to supply these “secured, controllable backup capacities.” This is because the “strategy” plans for a mere half of the capacity that was originally envisioned, because it is not clear whether conditions will be attractive enough to entice any power plant operators, and because nobody can say when the backup will come online. We are transitioning from a functional electricity system into a lot of insubstantial aspirations, which are not the kinds of things that keep the lights on.