Germany’s leading daily in terms of circulation Bild recently featured an op-ed piece that harshly criticizes Germany’s Energiewende (transisition to renewable energies).
Clearly the Energiewende is not even coming close to living up to what is was originally billed to deliver. Despite adding more than 70 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity that will cost consumers some $200 billion, German CO2 emissions have not decreased to speak of. Coal-fired power has actually risen.
In summary German electricity prices have skyrocketed and poor consumers are being hit hard. Energy-intensive industries are off-shoring operations – and jobs!
A number of experts are calling the Energiewende the greatest wealth redistribution from poor to rich scheme in Germany’s history as wealthy property owners cash in with subsidized zero-risk wind and solar installations. The poor consumers are forced to cough up the money.
“Enough with green power!”
So it’s little wonder that major German media outlets are beginning to express doubts. Bild features an opinion piece titled: “Enough with green power!”
The popular German daily calls the promises of cheap power from wind and sun “a fairy tale”. It writes:
Indeed the truth is: The price of power continues to climb. Just in the past five years the power price exploded 29 percent.
The reason is simple: In the energy market, central planning rules and not the free market.”
Disfigured market
Today there is so much installed capacity, Bild writes, that “on days with lots of sunshine and wind, the green power has to be sold to foreign countries” – even if they don’t need it. When that happens the highly subsidized power gets sold at negative prices. The result? Huge losses for power companies. This is how disfigured the electric power market has become.
In summary Bild concludes that the price of power is much more expensive than it needs to be and that it is a product that needs to remain affordable. Germany’s energy policy is on the wrong path.
Unfortunately there are no signs things will change anytime soon in Germany, which now has the world’s second highest electricity prices in the world after Denmark.
I thought no country/government could be more stupid than the UK.
Our bill from 2015 to 2020 is “only” going to be £90 billion, that is £3485 per household. This is the dangeld to be paid to mainly foreign windmill owners. See http://www.notalotofpeopleknowthat.co.UK. Paul Homewoods blog place.
Domain now https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/
Just to add some context: German daily “Bild” is a tabloid paper and definitely right wing.
The average raeder of “Bild” hates the “Energiewende”.
Bild is centrist. It has published many climate scare stories and pieces in favor of green energies in the past. It is not as sod would like you to think it is. Interestingly sod shifts to name calling rather than addressing the reality of the “energiewende”: high prices, wealth from poor to rich, unstable supply.
i really did not want to call any names.
But i think that everybody will agree with wikipedia on Bild:
Political alignment:
Right-wing populism
Euroscepticism
National Conservatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild
Bild is a polpulistic paper, that is the explanation for the occasional “climate scare”…
I will try to answer the questinons raised in the editorial when i have a little more time at hand.
Surely you can do better than Wikipedia.
Bild is social democrat/green. Friede Springer, the owner, is BFF of Merkel ; Merkel’s CDU adopted all programmatic points of the SPD and the Greens – including subsidies for renewables, limitless mass immigration, anti nuclear policies, minimum wage. There is no conservative party anymore in Germany.
Merkel’s CDU is for limitless subsidation of uneconomic power sources – her social-democrat CDU pushes the construction of off shore wind farms forward.
It seems that the more ruinous the energy source is, the more taxpayer money the social democrat CDU is willing to steal from taxpayers and redistribute into the coffers of rich wind energy tycoons.
Doubtlessly Friede Springer will reprimand the rebellious writer at her paper for criticizing the wholy fraud of renewable energy subsidation.
Wikipedia is an open source internet application that cannot be held up or quoted as an authority on the topic of what stands as left wing/right wing. To use them as your source indites the credibility of your position.
And ‘Wil the Con’ is still making continual changes to anything regarding climate, removing any truth what-so-ever on the subject.
Its not even trustworthy for ‘trivial pursuit’.
…Subsidation of the uneconomic renewable energy sources costs 20 bn EUR a year, about 1% of GDP, and delivers about 1% of Primary Energy COnsumption.
So, given this ratio, we can conclude that if we spend 100% of our GDP on renewable energies, we will be able to generate 100% of our energy needs with uneconomic renewables.
We will not be able to afford food or anything else though. So, if sod wants to have 100% of his primary energy consumption satisfied by uneconomic renewables she should be willing to reduce her standard of living maybe by a factor of 3.
Sorry Dirk, but your numbers are wrong.
renewable power now provides 11.1% of primary energy consumption (2014).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
So you are off by a factor of 10.
But your calculation of price is false as well, as it only counts costs (via the “EEG Umlage”) and completely ignores all benefits.
For excample the addition of wind and solar has massively driven down spot prices and the industry is directly profiting from this effect, which might even be BIGGER than the cost of the EEG.
“What’s more, the cost impact of renewables in Germany (the renewable energy surcharge or EEG-Umlage) amounted to 20.4 billion euros, but the researchers found that this investment offset some 31.6 billion euros in conventional electricity – a whopping 50 percent return approximately.”
http://energytransition.de/2015/02/renewables-made-power-cheaper-for-german-industry/
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There is a problem with a fair share of costs and benefits of green power that i agree with.
The poor and average households shoulder the costs, while rich companies and upper class house owner benfit from spot market prices and subsidies for solar panels.
If we assume that the Bild paper is centrist (and this will turn many left wing fighters against the Springer Verlag in their graves), then the now extremely socialist “SPD” should change that fairness problem very soon 🙂
The real problem with Germany is that its politicians allowed themselves to fall under the spell of the environmental doctrine.
I hope, one day soon, the German people wake up to the reality that the largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity is no longer socialism or communism but, rather, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.
“The most important political office is that of the private citizen.” Justice Louis D. Brandeis
All power is inherent in the people if they choose to use it.
Just the growing pains of the new renewable energy industry. Solar power is here to stay. Prices are only going to decrease for solar in the coming years. Viable storage technologies are on the way as well. This is the final key for the dominance of renewable energy.
That’s great to hear, Nick. As we both agree that there will be no shortage of solutions someday in the future, we therefore can stop subsidizing the stuff while it is ruinous, and jail the responsible criminals, and switch to renewables as soon as the solutions are available.
As I understand it Denmark cannot sell all their excess energy (wind and solar) to Germany now as there is so much resistance in southern Germany to the building of north/south interconnectors to take excess energy from north to south Germany. So it follows also that excess energy produced in north Germany cannot go south either.