Germany's grid just crossed over. The hard part is just starting.

Energy transitions do not end when renewables pull ahead. They enter the harder phase, where the remaining fossil share sits in dispatchable plants the grid still depends on, the politics turns openly hostile, and every additional point of clean capacity is contested by the legacy system it replaces.

That is what Carbon Brief's analysis of the 2025 Energy Institute data makes legible. The German grid crossed a line last year, and the next decade is the argument, not the celebration. The 8 TWh margin between wind-and-solar and fossil generation is not a victory lead. It is a 1-point gap in a country still building new gas plants, where the far-right AfD is actively opposing wind buildout, and where Chancellor Friedrich Merz has publicly called the nuclear phaseout a 'strategic mistake' without reopening it.

The pattern: when a power system flips its majority, the binding constraint moves from building clean megawatt-hours to keeping the old ones honest. The grid needs flexibility and storage that the Energiewende has not yet built at the scale its targets demand. The EU crossed the same threshold in 2025, per Carbon Brief, so the German milestone is regional in both directions.

The far right is reading the cost, not the climate. The coalition is reading the climate, not the cost. The milestone is the moment those two readings stop being able to coexist.