Germany’s energy feed-in act is skidding out of control – and risks causing a social uprising. The power grid is becoming ever more precarious and electricity prices for consumers are at record levels. The German government, on the other hand, is reacting like a petrified deer caught in the headlights. It doesn’t know what to do.
Yesterday, Germany’s number 1 daily by circulation, BILD here, launched a campaign to get the government to take real action – to do something, and quickly!
Hat/tip: Benny Peiser
Germany’s feed-in act forces power companies to buy all energy produced by green sources (wind, solar, bio, etc), whether it’s needed or not, and to force-feed it into the power grid. Power companies are also forced to pay exorbitant prices to the green energy producers. This gross market interference is wreaking havoc on the European power markets. On windy and sunny days, huge amounts of excess energy end up getting dumped on the market and power producers incur huge losses, which of course just get passed on to the consumers.
Sometimes prices on electricity exchanges even go negative. Despite these negative or ultra low prices on the electricity exchanges, consumers are paying record prices. So distorted has the market become.
So Bild newspaper is taking action and is openly demanding the government take action. Bild presents the facts:
What’s absurd: Even when prices on the power exchanges fall (last year it fell from 4.2 to 3.6 ct/kWh), the green energy producers get their money. Effect: The cheaper electricity becomes, the more the consumers have to pay.”
This is what happens when mastermind green bureaucrats, obsessed with the fantasy of rescuing the climate, start interfering with markets with completely nutjob ideas. Bild adds:
The feed-in surcharge is the main driver behind electricity costs. Currently it represents 14 percent of the price. At the beginning of this year the surcharge jumped again by 1 cent to 6.2 cents per kilowatt-hour. A sad record!
To blame for this is a design fault in the EEG Feed-In Act. Here prices are guaranteed for the wind and solar park operators.”
No risk! Bild writes:
This guaranteed price is financed by the feed-in surcharges – paid by the consumers!
Never before have rich, large property owners seen such a risk-free bonanza. Who pays? The poor consumers who cannot afford property on which to install a windpark or solar system! Indeed every year 600,000 Germans get their power cut off because they no longer can afford the exorbitant electricity prices. This is how Germany is reducing its CO2 emissions: The poor are having to go without!
The renewables scam was unsustainable from the beginning. People world-wide need to stand up and say NO!
I am a fan of NoTrickZone and keep referring to your excellent posts in my own blog.
Just a “Verständnisfrage” – a question seeking enhanced comprehension of an issue:
The power cut-offs are temporary, of course, right? Where can I learn more about sources explaining the problem: who’s affected, what happens to the victims, what sources of empirical evidence for the phenomenon are available?
Recently, I’ve come across a different figure of roughly 300 000 affected people, and surely, there will be those who deny the problem or seek to play it down. The matter seems dramatic enough to warrant detailed analysis. Maybe you are even going to dedicate a post to the power cut-offs.
https://notrickszone.com/2012/02/23/600000-households-in-germany-without-power-increasing-energy-poverty-is-alarming/
The very same thing is happening here in Canada, specifically in Ontario. Our Provincial Government used Germany as a “great example” of how wind energy is “good, clean and cheap”!
Obviously this was a massive LIE and now we are paying the highest electricity prices in all of North America!
Hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost due to the high cost of energy and the health concerns across our Province are raising red flags with Health Officials!
People can’t afford their heating any more and we are basically BANKRUPT!
So much for good clean cheap wind energy!
I believe the green-warmists assured us the wind and solar energy was “free” and would save Earth from catastrophe. Something must have gone wrong!
Rubbing Salt into the Energiewunde
Germany’s RWE was forced to shut down the Biblis nuclear power plant in the political fallout of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
The Federal Administrative Court has now determined that the Federal Regulator acted unlawfully in ordering the shutdown. RWE may be paid hundreds of millions of Euros in compensation; funded by taxpayers.
Further claims for compensation by the same and other operators are likely now that the gates have been opened. The cost to German taxpayers could run into the billions of Euros.
(Article at Die Welt)
So let me get this right. Germany (i.e., its citizens and taxpayers) must pay for maintaining the existing nuclear infrastructure (existing nuclear fuel rods, nuclear waste, radioactive containement vessels, etc.), PLUS pay penalties to the operators of these unused nuclear reactors, PLUS import electricity from France produced by French nuclear reactors, …
and get nothing from this huge cost ?
We get a load of solar panels and wind turbines, and biogas converters, and corn to ethanol production facilities , and rape oil to Biodiesel plants.
For a chronically energy resource poor place this might make some strategic sense. CO2AGW scare was used for the marketing campaign. You wouldn’t have convinced the voters any other way.
I suggest the second to last sentence should read, ‘This is how Germany is *trying* to reduce its CO2 emissions.’ Because recently, Germany’s CO2 emissions have been rising. Great article though. And it only had to take time for FITs to fail. They are economically unsustainable. And as more people take advantage of the scheme, the harsher that reality shows itself.
My “solution” to the problem of FIT is to legislate that the FIT shall equal to the price at which electricity is bought by the sometime-generator at times of need.
It’s left as an exercise for the reader to figure out which is the most profitable price point for the sometime-generator. 😉
“Germany’s feed-in act forces power companies to buy all energy produced by green sources ”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24604218
That’s what happens in the UK.
Our politicians have come up with the strategy of blaming someone else.
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