Germany’s Leading Daily Calls For An End To Green Energy Subsidies! Calls Green Promises “A Fairy Tale”

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.

 

16 responses to “Germany’s Leading Daily Calls For An End To Green Energy Subsidies! Calls Green Promises “A Fairy Tale””

  1. patrick healy

    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.

    1. Eric Gisin
  2. sod

    Just to add some context: German daily “Bild” is a tabloid paper and definitely right wing.

    The average raeder of “Bild” hates the “Energiewende”.

  3. DirkH

    …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.

    1. sod

      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/

      ———————

      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 🙂

  4. Mervyn

    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.

  5. Gregory Brittain

    “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.

  6. Nick Tedesco

    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.

    1. DirkH

      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.

  7. John Peter

    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.

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