Civilization tends to congregate around sources of energy, and the freer and less effort required the better, from hunting grounds to floodplains and navigable rivers. Maybe civilization’s problems and deficit of power arose once communities established at those naturally landscaped headlands began to dig for more, and boom towns sounded out untapped reserves. Industrial colonies grew up around mines and wells and sought out these resources in exploitable lands.
Now Germany, not alone in its aspirations, certainly, but possibly exposed to more criticism and dissection, is struggling with its commitment to wean itself away from disinterred sources of energy. This sort of business is forever dirty and not without compromise, and though not the sole source of engineering through subsidies and regulation, the government’s diagram does play an important role in achieving those ends—especially short on sacrifice and innovation.
It seems, however, that the paths to these ends are anything but well marked: progressively higher rates are imposed on consumers and put businesses in an awkward situation either to lobby politicians for tax-breaks or to quit the country over the expense of power, but these premiums are not really being held in trust, as a price maybe more reflective of the true costs. Rather than shoring up extra funds for infrastructure improvements including turning kinetic energy, surplus electricity into potential energy and finding places and means to store it all, it is mostly feuding that emerges unscathed and only contentions are fully mapped out. Each political division has paved and developed its own corridors of power, returning to those original resources of geography and geology, and have their own notions how to best approach the situation—which has the potential to over- and out-do the best intentions of their neighbours, particularly when the central government is reluctant to manage the politics of inefficiency, protectionism and patriotism. Bavaria would rather promote its own solar, bio-mass, or hydro-power than support a circuit from the windmill powerhouse of the North Sea to the voracious south. Multinational energy companies, with different allegiances, have their own ideas, too, which all make for a weird inversion of the not-in-my-backyard mentality that for many years kept nuclear policy off of people’s minds.
