“He who comes too late is punished by life,” Michail Gorbachev told Erich Honecker – the leader of a crumbling East Germany – before the wall came down in 1989, the former Soviet leader recalled in his memoires.
Just as the former Communist GDR reacted too late to changes in society it couldn’t control and was subsequently swept away, German utilities – despite their government’s first nuclear phase-out decision coming as long ago as 2001 – have reacted too slowly and incoherently to the forces unleashed by the energy transition.
