If you subsidize electricity by capping consumer prices, then you have to either cap producer prices (creating shortages) or have the state pick up the difference. The latter option might make individual factories profitable, but it makes Germany even less profitable: now the country as a whole is paying not only to import electricity, but also for administrative overhead of the subsidy and the deadweight loss produced by non-market allocations of a scarce factor of production, electricity.

All these subsidies do is transfer wealth to the industrial and energy sectors from literally everyone else and impoverish the country as a whole.

A subsidy might be justifiable if it covered a temporary market hiccup. These high prices aren't shocks. They're structural. They're foreseeable consequences of state policies that decrease the supply of electricity and thereby make it more expensive than in competing polities.

Imagine the US trying to address oil shocks in the 70s by subsidizing gasoline. Wouldn't have worked. Subsidies cannot create more of a resource.

Also, given the 2028-2030 pension budget crisis you're facing, I'm not sure you guys can afford to impoverish yourselves with subsidies even in the short term.

If you guys want to remain competitive, you need to find ways to generate power under an affordable cost structure and stop lying to yourselves about how, any day now, the Energiewende will produce a cornucopia of electrons. It's just not happening.

Something has to break here. Maybe you accept declining living standards. Maybe you just burn an enormous ocean-boiling amount of barely-not-peat lignite from your western states. Maybe you become a Russian client state and return to suckling the Siberian gas teat.

Or maybe, just maybe, you see that nuclear power works for others and can work for you too if you get over your atomic phobia.