The Economist: Getting out of gas: Germany's reliance on Russian gas is falling

Germany's Energiewende, or energy transition, is an ambitious policy aiming to move the country's electricity generation away from both nuclear and fossil-fuel sources. More a slogan than a coherent plan, the term represents the German government's desire to cut carbon emissions by 70% from 1990 levels by 2040, while switching off all the country's nuclear-power plants by 2022. In the long term that means generating more energy from renewable sources. But more energy from dirty fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas, will be needed in the meantime. Yet so far this year, it seems that one of the policy's unintended consequences has been to put cleaner gas-powered plants out of business.

At first glance, the new policy should have encouraged the use of gas over coal. But the German government's hasty decision in 2011 to close down eight nuclear reactors in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan left a gap in the country's energy mix that was soon filled by coal. Over the next two years the amount of electricity generated from the sooty fuel increased by 11%; in total, more than 45% of Germany's electricity supplies are now produced by burning coal.
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