The latest absurdity of European energy politics. Whenever you think it can’t get worse, something new pops up. Here’s the latest:

European grid operators have noticed significant, growing, systematic declines in grid frequency every night at exactly 10.00pm, particularly large on days with high wind energy production. Normal grid frequency is 50Hz; a decline below 49.8Hz leads to instability and shutdowns like in Spain last year. Last week, the 10.00pm decline reached 0.193Hz, very close to the critical threshold, and equivalent to a production loss of more than 3GW.

What happened? Turns out, operating permits for German wind energy include noise emission limits. So every night at 10.00pm, wind park operators have to scale down energy production to comply with noise limits - all of them, all at the same time. The production gap last week was equivalent to almost all of Europe’s reserve capacity. If any large electrical generation plant goes down the same time, the grid is toast.

This is no April Fool’s joke. These are the realities of a system in a death trap.