Imagine if the government forced supermarkets to buy bread from plain white bread bakeries, ordered them to pay these bakeries a fixed price that’s 5 times higher than normal for 20 years, and forced them to buy up all the white bread these bakeries could produce, whether needed or not.
And imagine if the government also forced the supermarkets to buy bread that was never baked to begin with! All of this of course justified by bogus science claiming plain white bread is healthy and whole grain bread is a killer.
You can imagine the consequences.
Well, that’s exactly what Germany is doing with electricity. It requires power utilities to buy up “green” electricity from every producer at exorbitant rates, and to do so for 20 years. And if the grid gets overloaded on windy days, the wind-farm operator is told to stop producing, but still gets paid by the power utilities.
Unfortunately, Germany’s green politicians here were too dim-witted to foresee the obvious consequences. Now reality has since caught up. The German electricity market is on the verge of collapse. The scale of the EEG Renewable Energy Feed-in Act is of unprecedented stupidity, a folly that will certainly go down in German history textbooks.
The backpedaling away from solar subsidies in Germany is now happening so fast that it’s making people’s heads spin. Call it the reverse energy supply transition – one from fantasy back to reality.
Germany pulls the emergency brake on solar energy
Today a growing number of German officials, who were once huge proponents of renewable energies and the EEG Feed-In Act, are now realizing that solar energy in gray and rainy Germany is a folly after all. Electricity rates in Germany are skyrocketing and the risks of uncontrolled energy supply interruptions are mounting. Officials are now screaming for a drastic scale-back of solar subsidies. Economics Minister Philip Rösler is now calling for an end to the fixed and guaranteed (for 20 years) renewable energy feed-in rates paid to green producers.
Even Germany’s super green Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen has seemingly woken up and now plans to drastically scale back new installations of solar systems in Germany, according to CO2 Handel here. In the new plan, subsidies will be scaled back on a monthly basis and accelerated. Subsidies for solar systems under the new plan would end by 2017.
Energy intensive industries are bolting, or are planning to do so
Power utilities have been finding it increasingly difficult to juggle the constantly and widely varying energy sources of wind and solar power, and are warning that power outages and grid collapses are just a question of time.
The mandatory feed-in of the vastly more expensive solar energy has caused electricity rates to surge and have been driving energy-intensive industries out of Germany. Solar energy was until recently seen as a way of filling in as a power supply in place of the shut down nuclear reactors, and rescuing the climate from coal plants. Now the focus of politics has reversed and shifted to rescuing the economy.
Recent surveys have shown that companies are becoming increasingly wary of conducting operations in Germany due to what they view as a potentially unreliable energy supply. The European Institute for Climate and Energy EIKE) here reports that:
One fifth of every industrial company has moved activities to foreign countries, or plans to do so, because of the uncertain energy and raw material supply. This is the result of a survey conducted by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce (DIHK), in which 1520 companies participated. DIHK-President Hans Heinrich Driftmann finds this alarming: Here, fears that Germany is losing its appeal for foreign investors in the wake of it’s energy supply transformation.”
No wonder Environment Minister Röttgen plans to take drastic measures in curbing solar energy. Germany’s industrial economy is eroding rapidly. Prof. Dr. Dieter Ameling, a former steel industry leader and spokesman, recently said the (green) energy supply transition in Germany meant the downfall of energy intensive industry in Germany.
Unfortunately greens don’t understand that transferring clean, high-standard German industry to foreign, low-standard countries means more CO2 emissions and pollution, and not less. And they certainly do not understand even the most basic laws of economics. Germany’s Renewable Energy Feed-In Act is proof.
Kook greens in Canada think solar power is for free!
Finally here’s hippie David Suzuki (3 min. mark) saying “It’s free, man, it’s free!”
With idiots like that advising governments, we’re not surprised everything is going bankrupt.
Somehow, a resource-poor country thought that by producing its electricity in a way 10 times more expensive than with imported resources is the way to self-sufficiency… The free market loves to eat such fools alive.
Just so: Don’t go into the woods, there is a fierce beast out there waiting to eat you alive. Those who failed to heed the wise counsel of the frail fairy godmother have fallen prey to its sweet lies. You can spot it by listening for its heartbeat – it has none, and therefore tries to appeal to your fallible reason; it reads books good people have never been told about and claims to know something about mathematics and economics. Deep down, it hungers for the soul it never can have – that’s what it feeds on; the more innocent the better. Grimm’s fairy tales redux, doled out as education by the media to the German children from 3 to 93.
Traditional demonizing stereotypes can be applied ad libitum for flavor.
“In the new plan, subsidies will be scaled back on a monthly basis and accelerated.”
Ruling German Conservative party rejects annually planned economy; embraces economy planned on a monthly base. And just LOVES the EU with its 5-year plans. (When you google for them, use “EU 5 year objectives” – they renamed the plans from plans to objectives to pretend they’re not making 5 year plans.)
I agree with everything revealed in the article. There is one technical glitch. Everywhere Germany is cited I think it means to say California, or am I being premature?
California is the preferred destination for Germans who emigrate to California, and I think the largest contingent of legal immigrants in California… go figure.
When a German tells me he ponders emigration to the US I ask him which state he wants to go to. They all answer “California”; I reply by saying “But then you can just as well stay here.” It never fails to leave them puzzled.
Photovoltaics ‘work’ by one-way, one-time molecular erosion with direct current flowing away from the solar panel and nothing returning. The maximum service life of a solar panel is 20 years and at that point, it is JUNK. During that service life you must constantly clean the panel of snow, sleet, dust and damage from wind debris, but you NEVER recover the initial energy of production invest in this junk technology. This is explained in “Green Prince of Darkness”.
The fundamental problem is that governments have been addicted to ‘deficeit spending’ by monopolist owned central banks, who fully intend on bankrupting all society and foreclosing on everything. This is explained in “Fractional Reserve Banking Begat Faux Reality”. There are many real conspiracies and they are all related to the banking Ponzi scheme. Find and share TRUTH !
[…] subsidies, and guess what? Share prices for solar power companies are collapsing. As one knowledgeable observer of the scene put […]
[…] lavish solar subsidies, and guess what? Share prices for solar power companies are collapsing. As one knowledgeable blogger on the scene put […]
[…] main source for these subsidies have been feed-in tariffs (FiT). One blogger vividly described FiT: Imagine if the government forced supermarkets to buy bread from plain white bread bakeries, […]
[…] concerning Germany’s massive subsidy program for solar energy: Imagine if the government forced supermarkets to buy bread from plain white bread bakeries, […]
[…] The main source for these subsidies have been feed-in tariffs (FiT). One blogger vividly described FiT: […]
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