A Trump Debate Comment About German Energy Policy Leaves Germans Perplexed

In his closing statement at last week’s presidential debate, Donald Trump made a blink-and-you-miss-it comment that earned a pointed response from the German government.

“You believe in things like we’re not going to frack, we’re not going to take fossil fuel, we’re not going to do things that are going to make this country strong, whether you like it or not,” he said to his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. “Germany tried that and within one year they were back to building normal energy plants.”

For German audiences or anyone who has followed Germany’s decades-long push to move away from fossil fuels and nuclear power, Trump’s comments made little sense.

They also showed the peculiar place Germany holds in global energy discourse, as an example that can be used to argue for or against just about anything. Germany has had enough successes and failures that one observer can say, for example, that the country has been a model for deploying renewable energy, while someone else could focus on how some of the same policies have provoked public backlash.

Germany’s Federal Foreign Office issued a statement responding to Trump on Sept. 11.

“Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables,” the office said on X. “And we are shutting down—not building—coal & nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest. PS: We also don’t eat cats and dogs.”

(That last part was a winking reference to Trump’s unfounded comments about Springfield, Ohio, residents.)

I’ll note that the office’s post has an error. While it refers to the energy system, the statistics it cites are for the electricity system, which is a subset of the energy system.

Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany during Trump’s presidency, responded to the office’s comments with an apparent threat.

“The blatant election interference from the German government is worse than the Russian and Iranian interference,” he said on X. “We see this clearly and will react accordingly.”

Anna Lührmann, Germany’s minister of state for Europe and climate, also offered an opinion: “Contradiction with facts and humor—that is the right answer to disinformation.”

In 2020, I wrote a series of stories about Germany’s energy transition. To prepare for my reporting there, I read Energy Democracy: Germany’s Energiewende to Renewables by Craig Morris and Arne Jungjohann. The authors argue the transition has roots in anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s. By the 2000s, Germany was a leader among the world’s largest economies in embracing wind and solar power.

I got in touch with Morris this week to see what he thought of Trump’s comments. Morris is a U.S. native who has spent most of his adult life working on and writing about energy policy in Germany.

“You have to remember that energy is not just electricity,” he said in a video call from Berlin.

Germany’s electricity system has made a steady shift from fossil fuels and nuclear to renewables. Wind, solar and other renewables were 54 percent of the country’s electricity generation last year, an increase from 24 percent in 2013, according to a German energy trade group. (For comparison, renewables were 21 percent of U.S. electricity generation last year, up from 13 percent in 2013, according to the Energy Information Administration.)

But outside the electricity sector, Germany has struggled to make a shift away from fossil fuels, including on heating buildings and transportation.

This brings us to Trump’s comments about “normal energy plants.” He doesn’t define the term, but Morris guessed Trump could have confused gas-fired power plants with liquified natural gas terminals.

Natural gas is not a major fuel for power plants in Germany, but it is for heating buildings. The country got the majority of its natural gas from Russia but phased down those purchases in 2022 in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To replace Russian gas, Germany is building LNG terminals to process gas imports, including from the United States.

The construction of LNG terminals remains controversial in Germany, opposed by environmental advocates who would like to see the nation use cleaner fuels for heat rather than spend money to set up infrastructure for additional gas imports.

If you squint, you can see how Trump may have been referring to LNG, a resource whose exports are a high priority for the U.S. oil and gas industry. But it’s not clear what he meant. His campaign didn’t respond to an email seeking clarification.

When he made the comment about German energy policy, Trump was trying to land an attack on Harris about fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a process energy companies use to extract oil and gas from the earth. Harris said in 2019 she supported a ban on fracking but has since said that is no longer her position.

Trump argued that Harris’ change of heart on fracking isn’t genuine and she will try to ban it if she’s elected president, which he hopes will resonate with voters in Pennsylvania, where fracking is big business. (This is puzzling because the president has limited authority to ban an industrial process like fracking.)

I’m not sure why Trump decided to mention Germany, and his campaign isn’t offering any explanations. But it’s not surprising to Morris that U.S. politicians often miss the mark when they talk about German energy policy.

“It hasn’t just been Republicans,” he said. “There have been some very well-meaning Democrats who also completely get the picture wrong. That’s why we write in our book that some of the renewables proponents vastly overstate the case.”

He’s referring to the way some advocates for renewable energy will point to Germany as a success story in a way that downplays or ignores the challenges and setbacks over the decades.

I learned from my reporting in Germany that the country’s energy transition offers many lessons for the United States, but they aren’t as simple as “renewables good” or “nuclear bad” or anything like that.

The most useful lessons, in my view, are about how the energy transition needs to have an enduring political mandate, and how leaders must work constantly to affirm this mandate through ups and downs.

For the United States to build a similar mandate, it needs to get to a point in which both major political parties support investment in renewables and action to reduce carbon emissions, and the debate is about how to execute it, not whether to do it.

Other stories about the energy transition to take note of this week:

Republican Support for the IRA Is Growing: House Republicans increasingly recognize that scrapping all the energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act could be politically unpopular, as Emma Dumain reports for E&E News. Seventeen House Republicans signed a letter in August urging House Speaker Mike Johnson to preserve the credits in any tax bill he may pursue next year. The Republicans don’t want to jeopardize investments that have taken place or may be coming to their districts.

Shuttered U.S. Nuclear Sites Could Be Repowered: The sites of operating or recently retired U.S. nuclear power plants could support up to 95 gigawatts of new capacity from newly built reactors, according to a report from the Department of Energy. The report also looked at the possibility of using current or former coal plant sites as locations to develop nuclear plants, as Brian Martucci reports for Utility Dive.

Tesla Superchargers Finally Open To General Motors EVs: General Motors and Tesla have now opened about 18,000 chargers in the United States and Canada to Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC vehicles, as Mack Hogan reports for InsideEVs. This follows the opening of the Tesla Supercharger network last week to Ford and Rivian vehicles. Customers will need to get adapter hardware to be able to use the chargers. This is a major expansion of the charging infrastructure accessible for those brands.

Ohio Steelmaker Considers Abandoning a $500 Million Biden Climate Grant: Cleveland-Cliffs, the Ohio-based steel company that is in line to receive a $500 million grant to build cleaner steel, is considering not accepting the money because of concerns that there is not enough demand from customers who would be willing to pay more for the product, as Zack Colman reports for Politico. The grant would pay for an overhaul at the Cleveland-Cliffs plant in Middletown, Ohio, the town where Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was raised. The development of new processes for making steel is essential for reducing emissions from industry.

A Polluting, Coal-Fired Power Plant Found the Key to Solving a Clean Energy Challenge: The shutdown of a coal-fired power plant in Minnesota has allowed for the fast development of a solar array because the new project is able to use the coal plant’s grid connection and avoid years of waiting for a new connection, as Ella Nilsen and Bill Weir report for CNN. The experience in Becker, Minnesota, shows a potential shortcut for new projects that could be set up near ones that are going offline and use some of their infrastructure.

Inside Clean Energy is ICN’s weekly bulletin of news and analysis about the energy transition. Send news tips and questions to [email protected].