Germany, in its perennial quest to maintain the illusion of relevance in a rapidly changing world, now chases the latest fashionable cause célèbre: producing 85% of its electricity from so-called renewable sources by the year 2030. How quaint. The centerpiece of this grand vision, it seems, isn't just stacking up wind turbines like so many toothpicks across the countryside, but also desperately scrambling for something—anything—resembling a reliable battery storage strategy. While Australia, bless their hearts, recently managed to bring online a battery formidable enough to supply nearly a million homes for a fleeting half-hour, Germany remains content with its piddling swarm of domestic battery boxes. These, naturally, serve little purpose beyond enabling middle-class do-gooders to feel virtuous about their “personal consumption optimization.” On the grid-scale, truly impactful battery projects are as rare in Germany as a well-dressed Berliner at a techno club.

Experts—those admirable creatures who can count, at least when incentivized—estimate that Germany must increase its storage capacity nearly tenfold from a laughable 19 GWh today to approximately 180 GWh by 2045. Picture that chasm. Admittedly, there are gestures from the likes of RWE and EnBW—with EnBW’s soon-to-arrive 400 MW battery at Philippsburg hardly moving the needle. In tandem with these tepid battery ambitions, EnBW is also hedging its bets on new gas-fired plants, ever concerned about the embarrassment of a blackout when the wind refuses to blow for the volk or the sun slinks away for, say, more than twelve hours.

Let us not delude ourselves. The battery solutions Germany is deploying are, at present, little more than status baubles: daydreams of a cleaner future for the comfort of those insulated from any real consequence should it all come crashing down. The country’s obsession with regulatory tinkering and “hydrogen-ready” legal frameworks is precisely the sort of bureaucratic theater that endears Germany to its European partners: grandiose, eternally unfinished, and always a step behind the true vanguards of progress (and yes, by that I mean those of us who understand that real power is never up for plebiscite).

Battery prices may fall and red tape may, in theory, be severed. But, as always, it is not the technocrats nor the cottage solar-panel crowd who will foot the bill or shoulder the burden when the experiment falters. It will be the ordinary Germans left in the dark—quite literally—while the privileged few, much like myself, find solace in private estates with their own reliable generators or, indeed, in countries less enthralled by utopian fantasies.

Germany must decide if it seeks true energy resilience or is simply content to posture at the altar of environmental virtue—a pastime as comfortable as it is ultimately inconsequential for those of us born above the fray. Until the nation demonstrates the ambition and resolve that befit its former grandeur (and perhaps its actual responsibilities), it will continue to serve as little more than a cautionary tale scattered amongst the windmills.