> Rock and a hard place, We need to expand renewable's fast enough to reduce our demand for fossil fuels but we still have that demand while it is on-going (and we'll still have some demand even when we've built out the renewable's unless we also build out a vast network of grid level storage or go nuclear).

Federal government of Germany has been the majority shareholder in Uniper since December 2022 with a stake of 99.12%.

In the article "“All my customers in Europe, they have a transition strategy and they're working on investing in renewables. But they're also securing long-term contracts for gas,” Equinor CEO Anders Opedal told POLITICO last week, shortly after signing a 15-year gas supply contract with the German utility Uniper."

German government knows, that despite expansion of solar and wind (they have allocated 100 billion Euro in KTF), Germany will import fossil fuels for a very long time, if they don't want to destroy the German industry (follow UK, Italy). Even legally binding German net-zero legislation don't change the laws of physics.

https://www.uniper.energy/investors/share/shareholder-struct...

https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Web/DE/Themen/Oeffent...