Poland, Czech Republic To Block Out Germany’s Unstable Green Electricity – “Coal To Play A Major Role A Lot Longer”

Some big energy developments in Germany lately.

Several readers pointed out an article appearing in the online daily Die Welt here. It seems that Eastern Europe has said “no” to hugely subsidized, unstable German green electricity flowing across the border into their power grids.

One reason is because Germany still has not installed the huge power transmission lines needed to deliver the sometimes massive wind and solar electricity directly to heavy industry in Central and Southern Germany. And it’ll be years before it can, if ever. Therefore Germany reroutes its intermittently massive amounts of wind and solar energy through the power grids of its Eastern European neighbors (mainly Poland and the Czech Republic) and then to its industry to the south.

The problem with this rerouting is that Poland and the Czech Republic now often find their power grids critically and unpredictably overloaded, and thus have decided to install equipment to keep German electricity out when certain levels are reached.

Die Welt writes:

Polish grid operator PSE has agreed to build together with grid operator 50 Hertz so-called phase shifters, with which excessive current flows can be blocked. Their use is planned to be ‘very soon’.”

So what happens if all the windparks and solar farms in Northeastern Germany cannot deliver their power to the industry ín the south via Poland? Stephan Kohler, Chief of semi-state-owned German Energy Agency (Dena) says.

The use of phase shifters will have the consequence that windparks in Eastern Germany will have to be shut down more often in the future because the power will have no way of being delivered to the markets.”

So the windpark operators in Eastern Germany will be getting the shaft, right? Wrong!

Germany’s Feed-In Act stipulates that windparks get paid whether or not their power gets bought. The costs for the electricity that never gets bought is simply gets passed on to the poor consumers.

Such is the world of the government centrally-controlled energy market. Is it any wonder that in just a few short years Germany’s electricity prices have risen to levels that are among the highest in the world?

Germans becoming fed up with green costs

Meanwhile Die Welt reports today that German consumers are fed up with the high prices of electricity, and are now loudly demanding a course correction with renewable energy.

The solutions to the problem now being proposed, however, are almost as lunatic as the idea of trying to power the country with renewable energy in the first place. Germany’s communist PDS party for example is calling for giving consumers incentives to purchase new, energy-efficient appliances. You see, consumers can solve their problem of not having enough money by simply forking out lots of money for new white goods. Make sense?

Another brilliant solution proposed by Greens and leftists is to force industry to pay more for electricity, and thus allow lower rates for little consumers. Of course the masterminds behind that idea still have not thought about what industry will do with the higher prices they’ll have to pay for their power. You don’t suppose they’d get the idea to pass the extra costs along to the consumers, do you?

Clearly we see in Europe that there is a creativity contest to see who can come up with the most lunatic ideas to keep the subsidized renewable scam going.

Amazingly, there are a couple of politicians who recognize the root of the problem, like CSU politician Gerda Hasselfeldt, who says “the SPD socialists and Greens are responsible for the rapidly rising energy prices. We have to try to control the transformation to renewable energy, and not do what Red-Green did: promote an uncontrolled expansion of renewable energy,” she said.

Well, at least she’s on the right track. The solution of course is to do away with the senseless, destructive subsidies altogether.

German coal will be around longer than you think

EU Energy Commissar Günther Oettinger told Die Welt that coal will have to continue playing a major role in Germany’s energy supply and to do so for “a lot longer than what some are prepared to accept.”

Wind turbine lifeime is only 10 – 15 years!

Finally, there’s another bit of bad news indicating that wind power is going to cost consumers a lot more. The Renewable Energy Foundation has published a new study, The Performance of Wind Farms in the United Kingdom and Denmark, showing that the economic life of onshore wind turbines is between 10 and 15 years, not the 20 to 25 years projected by the wind industry itself, and used for government projections. Read more here.

Tough times ahead for the renewable energy pipe-dream.