[tomohawk]

They can't because Merkel and co led them down this path of increased dependency on Russian natural gas to replace nuclear and coal. They have massively beefed up intermittent / renewable sources, but that cannot replace the nuclear and coal. For that, you need natural gas.

Germany already has very high energy prices to pay for this transition. They would have to increase prices even more to back out of this failed bet on Putin.

They just turned off 3 nukes in Dec, which could be turned back on. That plus the 3 they will turn off this year constitute 13% of their base load power. To make up for this with gas, they will need a 30% increase in gas capacity from Putin.

It's not like they weren't warned that this was a bad bet years ago.

In fact, when it became known that Merkel was hell bent on turning off the nukes and depending on Putin, the US offered to put together a different deal to get natural gas from elsewhere (Mediterranean, S America, US), but Merkel turned it down in favor of Putin.