[Skybird]

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
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Crisis prevention expert Herbert Saurugg (Austria) warns of a large-scale power blackout. Mistakes have been made for at least a decade, he says, calling the energy transition unrealistic.

The fear of a widespread power blackout lasting several days is widespread. According to the current trend radar of the software specialist Lexware, more than a third of the self-employed and small businesses surveyed fear that they will not receive sufficient energy in winter. Only 20 percent had an emergency plan in case gas was curtailed, but 75 percent had already started to reduce their energy consumption.

But how many companies have already dealt with a major power outage remains unknown. Although Chancellor Olaf Scholz considers such a blackout unlikely, the current report on the stress test of the German transmission system operators states: "In all three scenarios considered, the supply situation in the coming winter half-year appears extremely tense - in Europe, the load cannot be fully covered in the electricity market."

Austrian blackout expert Herbert Saurugg draws attention to this in an interview with the F.A.Z.. The former major in the Austrian Armed Forces is president of the Society for Crisis Preparedness and a regular contact in the neighboring country's media as an expert on supply security.

And he has been warning of the blackout scenario for a long time, especially since this would be associated with dangerous interruptions in the supply of food or even wastewater. He sees the current stress test on German supply security not only as confirmation of his previous assessment: unfortunately, all concerns have also been reinforced.

Basically, everyone still assumed that a critical power shortage situation should be manageable with a planned power shutdown. "From my daily work, I assume that very few actors are neither aware nor conscious of the consequences of such a planned large-scale shutdown."

Should power shutdowns possibly be required simultaneously in several countries - as is currently becoming apparent - no one knows how such a complex system would then behave and whether these measures would remain manageable. Existing safety systems were not installed for such a situation. "Therefore, there is a very real blackout threat that we should take seriously. The issue is not whether the event actually occurs, but that we are not prepared for it and the damage would be immense."

With the Ukraine war, climate change and drought, he said, unexpected stress factors have been added, and even without them, the problems would have increased significantly. Saurugg is concerned about the increasing number of last-minute changes to plans, because they cannot be implemented at this speed in reality and there is no assessment of the consequences and side effects, if this is still possible at all.

According to him, the problems were already foreseeable ten years ago. The blackout expert considers the fundamental problems to be one-sided and unsystematic economic optimization, the reduction of all fallback levels, reserves and redundancies, and an energy transition that is far disconnected from reality and does not take physics and technical conditions into account.

Here, he points to the non-existent storage and grid capacities, which are particularly necessary for wind and solar energy, which are susceptible to fluctuations. Saurugg criticizes the energy turnaround in Germany because, in his words, ideological demands have pushed technical changes here.

In his view, Germany is virtually unprepared for a major blackout in all areas. This could have catastrophic consequences, he said. "The topic of preparedness has always been ridiculed or equated with right-wing preppers," Saurugg says. As a result, the broad masses have no precautions. For the black start, i.e. until large parts of Germany can be supplied with electricity again, a period of one week is expected, according to his information.

In this context, Saurugg also criticizes the liberalization of the electricity market, as since then only business optimization has counted. "In the meantime, virtually all of the generation overcapacity that was still abundant 20 years ago has been eliminated." As a result, he said, there is hardly any buffer left to respond to unforeseen events. For Saurugg, the current upheavals in the electricity market are just a symptom of the expected shortage.


In the short to medium term, Saurugg no longer sees any chance of changing anything, because far-reaching changes would be necessary for the already very fragile state. In the short term, the escalations would have to be stopped and, at the same time, the causes would have to be addressed: a lack of reliable generation capacities, storage facilities and transmission lines.