Scramble, scramble. Scramble.

Earlier this month, to much fanfare, British and international media reported that wind farms had generated more electricity over the first quarter of the year in the UK than gas.

A whole third of the country’s electricity came from wind farms, the reports rejoiced. What’s more, solar power generation hit a record in April, the BBC noted, citing the National Grid.

The news followed earlier reports that wind and solar generated more electricity in the European Union last year than gas did. A record 22% of the bloc’s power came from wind and solar during the First Crisis Year, while gas accounted for 20%, according to Ember, the perfectly impartial climate think tank.

For the casual news browser this would look like hard proof that renewables are here to stay and grow because they can totally replace oil and gas, and coal. It’s the beginning of something beautiful, the casual browser might think. The energy transition is working. If only.

Because if that casual news browser continued browsing, they might come across this piece of news that Germany’s economy ministry plans to subsidise industrial electricity users at 80% of their costs.

What’s 30 billion euro between friends, right? Especially since the money will not come from Robert Habeck’s own pocket. It would come from the people that U.S. power market regulators like to call “ratepayers”.

Interestingly and probably entirely coincidentally, the news came a couple of weeks after another upbeat report on renewables: wind and solar made up almost 50% of Germany’s electricity consumption in the first quarter of the year. Another score for the transition!

But then things might get a little confusing with this recent quote from British PM Rishi Sunak: “It makes absolutely no sense to not invest in the resources we have here at home, to import foreign fossil fuels, not create jobs here and import them at twice the carbon emissions as our local resources. It is an economically illiterate policy.”

Wait a minute, the casual news browser might say, why subsidise industrial electricity so massively if wind and solar are growing in output and they’re cheaper, as we are being told? Why pump oil and gas from the North Sea if wind is doing so well? What’s going on here? The short answer is: scrambling. The longer: a lot of scrambling. To keep up appearances in the face of facts.