Fritz Vahrenholt, a German chemist, former SPD politician published an article in early January 2026 titled “Eine grundsätzliche Lehre aus dem Terroranschlag auf das Berliner Stromnetz” (translated: “A Fundamental Lesson from the Terrorist Attack on the Berlin Power Grid”).

His Monthly newsletter refers to the arson attack on January 3, 2026, on high-voltage cables in southwest Berlin, claimed by the far-left extremist group Vulkangruppe.

This sabotage caused a multi-day blackout affecting tens of thousands of households, businesses, hospitals, and public transport. German authorities investigated it as a terrorist act.

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From The Klima Nachrichten

Monthly newsletter from Fritz Vahrenholt

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

the global temperature continued to decline significantly in December 2025. It is only 0.3 degrees Celsius higher than the long-term average. Overall, 2025 was significantly cooler than 2024. The cooling trend continues.

A fundamental lesson from the terrorist attack on the Berlin power grid

The shutdown of the electricity supply in the south of Berlin has made us aware of the fragility of the policy of the energy transition. The aim of the energy transition is not only to convert the electricity supply to wind and solar energy, but also to convert the other two pillars of the energy supply, namely the heat supply and the transport sector, to electricity. Everything on electricity means doing without gas and oil in the heating sector and oil (petrol/diesel) in the motor vehicle sector.

Sector coupling was the name given to this narrowing of the energy supply to one energy source. This sector coupling was disseminated and celebrated by the green high priests as a sustainable model for the future. In its origin, it was an attempt to correct the weakness of renewable energies, which lead to unusable surpluses in times of high wind and solar power. These useless surpluses were to be pushed into the heating sector and the motor vehicle sector after storage. The fact that this sector coupling leads to an exorbitant increase in costs has been described often enough here. Frontier economics estimates the total cost of the energy transition by 2045 at an unaffordable 4800 to 5400 billion euros.

But now the attack in Berlin shows us that such an energy system, based solely on electricity, is highly vulnerable. We learn that in the event of a power failure, the heat supply also fails, at least if it is to be generated by heat pumps. And to make matters worse, we learn that in sub-zero temperatures, heat pumps are threatened with total loss due to bursting pipes. In any case, this package insert has not yet existed with Habeck’s heating law, which the black-red federal government wants to continue seamlessly. The content of the law will remain the same, but so that the citizens do not really notice it, the name of the law is to be changed.

We also learn that in the event of a large-scale power outage, e-vehicles can only help if they happen to have been charged before the bang. Otherwise, this use will also be cancelled. Until now, there has been a great deal of resilience associated with being able to rely on two storable systems for 75% of the energy supply, namely the gas supply for heat and the fuel supply for mobility. The fact that the third pillar, the electricity supply, which has so far provided 25% of energy consumption, is now also being made weather-dependent and is then supposed to serve all three pillars, has turned out even more clearly since the Berlin events to be a left-green ideological pipe dream that will not survive the reality test.
The text of the first claim of responsibility makes use of the context of the justification of green and left-wing ideologies of climate anxiety:

“In the greed for energy, the earth is drained, sucked dry, burned, maltreated, burned down, raped, destroyed. Entire regions are made uninhabitable under the heat. They simply burn. Or habitats disappear under the floods during floods or due to rising sea levels. Shutting down fossil fuel power plants is manual work.”

Except for the last sentence, one could read similar formulations in party congress resolutions of the Greens, the Left and the SPD. The sentence “Entire regions become uninhabitable under the heat” even comes from a UN report from 2022. The ideological justification for the energy transition stems from the same context of climate alarmism that the Vulkangruppe uses to justify its criminal actions.
 

On our own behalf

This newsletter is shorter, because I would like to spare myself the intensive research that you are used to so far, in this and the next newsletters. I have started to write a book, together with Björn Peters, about the future of nuclear energy. The book will be published by Langen-Müller in autumn and requires intensive research. That’s why I have to cut back on the newsletter, which has always cost me 4-5 working days, for two or three months. I hope you understand.