Rheinmetall’s stock market valuation reached 23 billion euros at the beginning of 2025, thus exceeding 19 billion that of Volkswagen. What a symbol! The German armaments giant even takes up a automotive factory stopped by the manufacturer. This inversion of industrial fortunes is indicative of a fundamental contradiction that Europe refuses to admit. Rheinmetall must now produce at maximum cadence. The group has announced that it wanted to triple its ammunition production within two years and double its manufacturing capacity of armored vehicles. This rise in power implies a brutal energy reality. The production of heavy armaments systems is particularly energy -consuming, simultaneously requiring a massive amount of electricity and fuels for industrial heat.
For German heavy industry, this distribution generally follows a 40 % electricity ratio against 60 % fossil fuels, mainly natural gas. It is time to stop hypocrisy: no rapid European military reindustrialisation will be possible without significant increase in energy consumption, necessarily fossil for whom has not or refuses the nuclear option. The new German coalition contract translates it perfectly. Immediate measures clearly provide an increased appeal to gas and coal, to which the reactivation of “reserve power plants” refers. Let us recall in passing that the only coal power plant in Neurath is more than 32 million tonnes of CO₂ per year, the equivalent of emissions from several small European countries together.
Absurdity at its climax
In reality, German energy policy could soon be strangely resembling that of the United States: gas and coal on all floors, with welcome pragmatism on the drop in electricity taxes. The crucial question then becomes: Where will German gas come from? United States or Russia? What if it is Russia, in the form of LNG or by gas pipeline? Because many voices are already rising in Germany to return to this Russian-German system, economically unbeatable. The option of an existing nuclear return was the only competitive parade against this energy regression.
The absurdity reaches its climax: do we seriously imagine making ammunition intended to counter the Russian threat using Russian gas? But nothing is impossible in a Europe where the disconnection of reality borders on art. The words of the European Energy Commissioner, Dan Jorgensen, at Cera Week in Texas on March 10, are the perfect illustration: “We do not consider that our energy transition harms our competitiveness.” Europe is unmistering, the energy prices reach stratospheric heights but it continues with the Green Deal, this very present ghost which is just omitted to pronounce the name.
These declarations, simply above ground a few years ago, are today dangerous when European security is at stake. They undermine the credibility of any European claim for industrial and military power. As the US Energy Secretary soberly recalled – because everything is not only assault and absurdity in the Trump administration: “Energy is the spine of the economy: not simply a sector but the sector which allows all the others to exist.”
As long as Europe refuses to admit this principle prior to any reindustrialisation, it will continue its weakening. If a cease-fire intervened in Ukraine, allowing Putin to reconstruct its forces in three or four years, Europe would not be ready. She would find herself wedged between her ineffective conception of the green transition and the categorical imperative of a credible continental defense. This dilemma, Europe still refuses to face it, preferring the illusion of an ideological energy transition to the industrial reality of a world again dangerous.
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