While Ivy league pundits sit comfortably in their intellectually sanitized world of academia and discuss the possible virtues and boldness of Germany’s fast-track energy transition to renewable energy (80% less CO2 by 2050), Germany’s media, business and political leaders are now sounding the alarms for disaster.
FOCUS cover story title: “Energy End! Why it it unaffordable and threatens to ruin the country.”
This week’s cover story of Germany’s print news magazine FOCUS carries the title: Energy End. If you can read German, by all means pick up a copy.
One year ago Germany, in a fit of hysteria, ordered 8 nuclear power plants closed immediately and the remaining 9 closed by the year 2022. By 2050 it’s energy supply must be at least 80% supplied by renewable sources – costs be damned.
This has come to be knows as the German Energiewende or “energy transition”, roughly translated. And so the mad rush to renewable energy was on in earnest. Today, just a single year later, the high costs and insurmountable technical problems (we warned them) have spooked leaders and sparked a wave of uneasiness to sweep over the country. Even the once green media are waking up and sounding the alarms.
For example FOCUS reports in its story that companies will start refusing to pay the exorbitant feed-in tariffs to power companies in a bid to force the issue all the way up to Germany’s Constitutional Supreme Court in Karlsruhe. One business manager said:
Energy costs will be the big issue of [next year’s] federal elections.”
FOCUS writes that one year after the ordered shutdown of nuclear power, the readiness of Germans to accept switching over the renewable energy has collapsed.
A FOCUS survey found that 41% of Germans flat out reject paying one cent more for renewables. In East Germany, that number jumps to 52%. Only a small minority of less than 10% could imagine paying $25 a month more.
German leaders are spooked by the spiralling out-of-control costs and government seizure now spreading though the energy sector. Even leaders within the CDU, Merkel’s ruling “conservative” party, once a staunch proponent of renewable energies, are now speaking up – and loudly! For example FOCUS quotes:
Josef Schlarmann, Chairman of the Mid-Size Companies Association, CDU party:
The discussion about the energy transition has started, and no one can stop it now.”
Michael Fuchs, Vice Chairman parliamentary party, CDU economics politician:
In the energy sector we are moving slowly but surely to a completely centrally planned economy. We have to be damn careful.”
Arnold Vaatz, Vice Chairman of the CDU parliamentary party:
The renewable energy transition is going to cost us an incalculable sum of money, and in the end cost us our competitiveness.”
Hildegard Müller, Director of the Federal Association of Energy and Water Management:
A system of increasing goverment intervention is not economically sensible and is not affordable for consumers.”
Gerd Billen, Director of Federal Association For Consumer Agencies:
The citizens just don’t have an overview of what this trip is going to cost and where it is taking them.”
FOCUS reminds its readers that the big price driver is not “greedy” power companies, but government taxes and surcharges, which make up a whopping 45% of the price of electricity. In 1998 the 80 million or so Germans paid about €2.3 billion for various surcharges, taxes etc. on electricity. Today that figure is more than 1000% higher: €23.7 billion!
Not only the costs have become major obstacles, but also the technical feasibility of renewable energies is missing, especially wind and solar, which lack the infrastructure elements for taking the power to the markets that need them. These elements include power transmission lines, back-up energy systems for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, and power storage systems. Costs costs costs.
Schlarmann says: “What we have are highway bridges without highways.”
FOCUS then warns that Germany’s once super stable power grid, once a model of stability and reliability, is now on the brink of collapse. Even SPD (socialist party) honcho and Al-Gore-worshipper Sigmar Gabriel recently said Germany’s handling of its power system was as precarious as “operating on an open heart”. He added, “900 interventions to prop up the power grid in what was a relatively mild winter makes me nervous.”
It most certainly should. If next winter turns out to be a harsh one and the power fails and leaves citizens out in the cold, then there are going to be lots of angry people. Germany’s social powder is tinder dry.
FOCUS ends its cover story by quoting a citizen, Gisela Deckert: “I’m all in favor of renewable energy, but not like this.”
The voice of just one of millions of suckers who had bought into the false paradise promised by greens.
There was time in Germany when the idiot political leaders were more or less separated from the non-idiot leaders: in the days of East and West Germany. Since then guess who has taken over?
Also read:
– Germany makes energy unaffordable
– 600,000-households without power
– GERMANY’S FAILED TRANSITION
…yet citizens of NRW have just elected a Red-Green government. Which promised to ramp up wind power on the mountain ridges, getting rid of those ugly trees. And proceeds to implement that. In Hesse, where they are in the opposition, they oppose wind power in forests (the policies of the governing CDU there are not even as anti-nature as the ones by the governing Greens in NRW, though).
The Germans have collectively taken leave of their senses.
“The Germans have collectively taken leave of their senses” writes DirkH.
A Red-Green Government may prove as disastrous as a Brown Shirted one.
Students of history might well be alarmed – after all, the Germans have done this sort of thing before. The results are often unfortunate, to say the least. Let us hope Mother Russia does not get in on the act.
Greens have a distinct anti-human trend in their thinking, which is becoming more overt with every passing year – ( “De-Peopling” is the latest neo-Heydrichian policy proposed by Green philosophers, at a recent philosophical Convention in Italy, while others praise Genghiz Khan as a proto-Green! He cut carbon dioxide levels for a generation – pity about the millions of Asian farmers.
So, not anti semitic, not anti bourgeois, but anti-human. This could cost billions- of humans- unless these people are put out to grass and given a garden to tend!
Prove that all our parties are mad:
Development Aid minister Niebel from the FDP sings from the hymn sheet of warmism and the sustainability cult. Demands more competences for UNEP.
Interview, German, warning, sick bag required.
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/rio-20-entwicklungsminister-dirk-niebel-im-interview-a-838905.html
I told you, it doesn’t matter who you vote for. It always will be a socialist. A political flag (green, red, yellow, brown, orange whatever) is a mark for idiots… 😉
Today my alarmist newspaper cited Zoback and Gorelick in PNAS that from buried CO2 no more than one percent should leak away in 1000 years. This former plant food should be treated therefore as dangerous nuclear waste. Hopefully, the Germans have enough money for digging out safe containers.
CCS is outlawed in Germany. All projects have been stopped. The reason is that the Green religion demands that our wealth drops; not that we get around this fate via some technological trick. So of course the German greens were always against CCS, and the CDU, which emulates the Greens to cling to power, willingly obeyed without resistance.
“Carbon capture and storage may have the potential for inducing seismic events”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/17/carbon-capture-and-storage-may-have-the-potential-for-inducing-seismic-events/
I bet your alarmist newspaper is against Hydraulic fracturing for the recovery of gas and oil.
Back in 2009 economists at the Rhine Westphalia Institute made it very clear that renewables (mainly wind and solar) were “Devoid of economic and environmental benefit …” and “massively expensive.
The German government chose to ignore that report.
As a first step they might want to fire-up those nine nuclear plants they shut down. This circus just shows the myth of superior German intelligence.
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“Hundreds of wind turbines could be SINKING due to design flaw”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1265886/Sinking-turbines-cost-British-wind-farms-50million.html
”
Hundreds of Britain’s offshore wind turbines could be sinking into the sea because of a design flaw.”
We can be sure of the following
1/ Wind power will never be economical or produce greener energy than fossil fuels.
2/ Earth based solar power will be less Green than fossil fuels, since the manufacture of solar panels geneates three toxi gases ( fluroethanes) which molecule for molecule are 23,000 times as effective grren house gases as carbon dioxide
Only idiots- ie politicians, especially EU ones, or enemies of humanity( Green activists) can support them, because their hidden agenda is to preside over mass impoverihment as an ideological tyrannical elite. They can only prevail curtailing human freedoms ( ie mass terror and ultimately murder), in the name of “Saving the Planet” – typical Inquisitor’s Bargain, which history reaches us is a fraudulent cloak.
A Gestapo of the Greens is, nonetheless, a Gestapo!
Green energy is an expensive and fraudulent hoax, and being pushed solely to benefit powerful interests whoise real goal is dictatorship, in turn leading to mass impoverishment and loss of life. Last Year even the greek Prime Minister admitted that Green taxes had no environmental benefit or intention, but were a good way to fund a bloated EU bureaucracy…
Mass unemployment is not all bad- a cull of bureaucrats and petty officials world wide would be wonderful…
Michael, they are the last ones to go. First small business owners go; then the rest of the private sector, while the bureaucrats punish themselves with a 10% cut. This is what happened so far in Greece.