Chief Executive Johannes Teyssen of German power giant Eon announced yesterday the spin off of its fossil fuel and nuclear generation operations, saying it will focus instead on renewables like wind power, energy efficiency technology, and smart grids. The announcement yesterday sent shock waves through Germany’s power generation market and the political landscape.
The moves produces a host of important questions? Who will take over the massive conventional power generation operations Eon is spinning off? In a nutshell, what is going to happen to a large part of Germany’s steady base-power supply in a power grid that is becoming increasingly dangerously precarious?
Daniel Wetzel at Die Welt writes of the “hidden dangers of the power revolution” and that Eon’s move is of “importance for the future of the German energy market, for the electricity supply security and the competiveness of the entire nation.”
Another blow was delivered on Monday as Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was cancelling the construction of the South Stream pipeline as a result of political conflict over the Ukraine crisis. The pipeline was planned to deliver huge amounts of natural gas to stabilize the European energy grid.
Over the past years, government intervention has made fossil energies unattractive and is forcing a shutdown of its 9 remaining nuclear reactors by 2022.
Where will the power come from when the wind doesn’t blow?
Today Holger Steltzner at Germany’s flagship Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes that the Eon move presents the German government with 2 major problems: “It has to make sure that the decommissioning of the nuclear power plants succeeds, and it must explain where the power will come from when the wind doesn’t blow.”
23 billion euros to subsidize 2 billion euros of renewable power
Steltzner describes a hostile German power market that has been grotesquely distorted by massive government subsidies in wildly fluctuating renewable energy sources. Stelzner writes:
With 23 billion euros annually, the government subsidizes renewable energy that is worth only 2 billion on the market.”
An irresponsible and reckless experiment?
In summary Germany’s wildly executed Energiewende experiment has just gotten a whole lot more interesting: a major gas supply pipeline from Russia has been cancelled, and the future of a large part of Germany’s electric power supply backbone is now in the dark. And if the trend continues, a whole lot more risks ending up in the dark.
Over the past years, government intervention has made fossil energies unattractive and is forcing a shutdown of its 9 remaining nuclear reactors by 2022. –
And France shutting half it’s nuclear supply in the same period (10 stations I think). OMG. Europe is going to be in deep deep do dos. Plus during the same period the EU is moving into full Kremlin mode, taking direct control of all european states back to Bruxelles.
Oh MY God. Help !!!! Save me from these criminals.
What a mess. YJCMTSU!
Looks like we hit peak Culture Revolution.
Ukraine, immigration, energy, currency, genderism.
Media is so desparate that they occasionally start telling the truth.
System rings like a bell. Breakage is near. And many unemployed journalists.
“…unemployed journalists.”
No problem. The Arbeitsamt will retrain them into Lufthansa pilots. They already have comparable reasoning ability. Anyway, it will be less adventurous than living on electricity from wind and overcast German skies.
“The Arbeitsamt will retrain them into Lufthansa pilots. ”
Oh, please no. How about having them be professional strikers for
the Deutsche Bahn. At least they’re already at ground level all the time
(Stuttgart 21 notwithstanding….). (grrr…how to take a perfectly good
station and turn it into a third-rate sub-terminus….grrrrrrrr).
Stuttgarters are Green crazies. There are underground railway stations in Kassel and Hanover and even those people, as leftist as they are, didn’t make a fuss about , the horror, their station being modernized.
Goodnight Germany, and, like dominoes, the rest of Europe.
When Winter strikes and the power fails, riots will begin. Armed Police Forces will not quell the outrage felt by ordinary citizens for the profligate ignorance of their so-called politicians, the very persons who have created this completely avoidable crisis.
We in Britain are already teetering on the edge of power cuts with an estimated power reserve somewhere between 2% and 4% over peak demand. Our resident population is growing at a grotesque rate because of the Schengen Agreement
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2795000/immigration-surge-means-42-000-homes-need-built-london-year-cope-demand.html) and our infrastructure simply cannot cope.
There is dire trouble ahead.
Please send a postcard when the fun starts so we can come and watch.
I don’t know when all of you will leave or where you will go but I can see a wave of “climate refugees” spreading across the globe. This doesn’t seem to fit the migrations foreseen by the UN-IPCC/Greenpeace/WWF types – they had islanders in mind. Anyway, send a postcard when you wash up on some distant shore.
[Sorry, could not resist.]
That made me think of atomic power, but somehow electricity wasn’t involved….
Bikini Atoll, anyone?
Just hope that the Russians don’t buy them!
I’d rather depend on a rational Russian than on irrational Swedes.
Dirk, you obviously don’t live in one of the former Eastern Bloc countries!
I said rational.
Yep, he lives in one of the new, Western Bloc countries
(thanks, Mutti Merkel)…. 🙂
Although if things continue the way they seem to be going,
maybe Ice Bloc countries would be more fitting…..
Hi Pierre,
I believe there is always two sides to every argument, and never take sides in a divorce, the couple might reconcile, tell each other everything, and then turn on you.
You repeated the meme in the MSM about the cancellation of the South Stream project, you may be right, however, I just read an article on the Russian Insider – obviously a most biased and untrustworthy news source – written by a journalist Alexander Mercouris that gives a totally different perspective on that story.
http://russia-insider.com/en/politics_business_opinion/2014/12/04/12-02-27am/real_reason_russia_cancelled_south_stream
It is the EU that stopped the South Stream pipeline, so, you can still get your gas, just buy it from Turkey. And do pay cash.
Sell Eon
Why would they sell off perfectly good coal and nuclear stations and head to renewables?? Jerry Maguire comes to mind = “SHOW ME THE MONEY”
“With 23 billion euros annually, the government subsidizes renewable energy” it is a shame that they did not listen the Google scientist findings on renewables over the gangle of euros!!
You poor bastards are going to freeze you brass monkeys off before someone wakes up!!
The world has always considered the German people to be up there amongst the smartest of people.
Which begs the question – how did the Germans manage to be so easily conned by the dangerous man-made global warming deception that is now creating a huge risk to German energy security?
It is well established that based on the geologic data of the past, nobody would even suspect carbon dioxide ever played a role in changing earth’s climate. Yet despite this, the Germans clearly decided climate model predictions is is the way to go … the new scientific method.
I hope the German people soon come to their senses, and remove the wool from over their eyes, and begin to wean themselves off their green enviro-gasms.