If anyone thinks Germany’s move to renewable energies has been a success, you may want to take a few minutes and read what center-left news weekly Der Spiegel has just written.
Overall Germany’s energy revolution has made the country’s energy unaffordable, unreliable and has ruined its own idyllic landscape, and ravaged rainforests abroad as well.
Spiegel focusses on the costs in its article titled: Cost explosion with electricity, oil, gas: energy poverty in Germany is increasing drastically. The online flagship news weekly writes:
Rising energy costs are becoming a problem for more and more citizens in Germany. Just from 2008 to 20111 the share of energy-poor households in the Federal Republic jumped from 13.8 to 17 percent.”
Energy poverty is defined by the number of households that must pay more than 10% of their net income on energy. All told 6.9 million German households (every 6th household) finds itself in energy poverty, Spiegel writes.
Much of the rapid increase in energy prices is owing to Germany’s growth in expensive wind and solar energy. Ironically, despite more than 20% of Germany’s energy now being supplied by renewables, CO2 emissions have been rising just the same.
Spiegel calls the energy poverty rate “alarming”. However, when it comes to finding the cause for the runaway increase, the German Greens are blaming all the misery on the rising costs of oil and gas, and even hint that just more expensive, unreliable green energy is all that’s needed to get the costs back in line.
Natural gas in Germany costs three times more than it does in USA. The Greens are also demanding that the government pass legislation that would lead to residential units being renovated and better insulated. But critics say such a measure likely would make the situation even worse because landlords would benefit from the subsidies and pass the renovation costs to low income tenants.
The more the greens try to fix the mess, the more they screw it up.
I make no bones about the fact that I am determined to stamp out the travesty of physics which is promulgated on warmist and luke warm climate blogs. This comment appears on several of them.
Roy Spencer still cannot prove with any valid physics his crazy postulate that there would be isothermal conditions in Earth’s troposphere in the absence of water vapour and radiating gases. The greenhouse conjecture depends totally upon this garbage “fissics” that would violate the entropy conditions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. All the models depend totally on this weird idea which is never observed anywhere on any planet or moon, not even on Uranus where the base of the nominal troposphere is hotter than Earth.
Roy only needs to look at the data for the Uranus troposphere to realise that thermal gradients (aka “lapse rates”) evolve spontaneously at the molecular level. Radiating gases reduce the gradient (and thus cool the surface) due to inter-molecular radiation. They help energy escape faster up the troposphere and eventually to space. Radiation that strikes any warmer surface is just pseudo scattered.
There is no need for advection (upward rising gases) or any direct solar radiation or a surface: the lapse rate just forms autonomously as gravity acts on molecules in free flight between collisions.
That is why the (badly named) “lapse rate” on Earth, Venus, Uranus, the outer crust of Earth, the core of the Moon – everywhere – evolves spontaneously in solids, liquids and gases. That is why radiative forcing is not what is the primary determinant of any planet’s atmospheric or surface temperature – gravity is – gravity traps energy.
Water vapour reduces the insulation effect – just consider the problem with moist air in double glazed windows. Moist regions are cooler than dry regions – I have proved that with real world temperature records.
You’ll find the study in my book “Why it’s not carbon dioxide after all” available late April from Amazon etc. and from which I quote …
“The world will one day look back upon a small slice of history that began in the 1980’s and sadly have to conclude that never in the name of science have so many people been so seriously misled by so few for so long. Never have so many careers, so much time and so much money been spent in the pursuit of such a misguided and ineffective goal to reduce human emissions of carbon dioxide, a harmless gas which comprises about one molecule in every two and a half thousand other molecules in the atmosphere of our planet, Earth.”
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[…] Full story […]
Pierre, do I remember correctly that the rental market in Germany is very large?
So, at a rough guess, what proportion of their after-tax income might a low income family be paying in rent and fuel costs?
Low paying full time jobs would get you 1000 EUR net. Cheap 3 room flats in one of the smaller cities might be 300 EUR without heating. I would guess you would pay about 100 EUR for heating and 60 EUR for electricity. All per month.
So, 46% in this example.
1000 EUR net is an entry level wage for simple factory work in the solar panel sector. (They pay notoriously little. Car part makers pay far better.)
Other example: Social security or Hartz IV for long term unemployed gives you 350 EUR cash, pays the rent and the heating; you gotta pay the electricity, 60 EUR in my example, from the 350 EUR cash you got (with which you would also pay food etc)
Dirk, Thank you.
It should be noted that global warmism is pushed by the super-wealthy who have enough to eat and can afford this. “Saving the planet” is their hobby, but they want to force everyone to participate.
Personally, I would rather they collect stamps instead of pushing eco-drivel that will cost tens of millions of people their lives (the way the needless ban on DDT did).
You’re too kind to the environmentalists. Banning fossil fuels would cost billions of lives, not tens of millions.
This is their ultimate aim.
It would be interesting to see a plot of how the percent of German households in fuel poverty has shifted over the past 25 or so years in 5 year increments. Was it static for much of the time or perhaps going down during times of rapid economic growth? When did the uptick (dare I say “hockey stick”) start?
Thank you,
RayG
They’re only now starting to use the term energy poverty. The Brits have been using the term for decades. So, there are no past observations. Before the Energiewende it wasn’t much of a topic; only car fuel prices got talked about since oil price shock of 1973
And another thing: The current FIT regime for renewable energy got legislated into existence by the Red-Green govt in 1999; the same govt that in 2003 reduced long term unemployed benefits to the current level. Before 2003 the unemployed were generally better off; another reason why heating fuel + elec cost never were much of an issue before that govt.
“When did the uptick (dare I say “hockey stick”) start? ”
It is especially visible in private consumer electricity tariffs which are now about 26 Eurocents/kWh. They nearly doubled in a decade.
The hockey stick started synchronously with the Red green renewable energy law – 1999/2000
inflation adjusted:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Strompreise_PrivatHH_2012_Index1998.PNG
nominal:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Strompreis_PrivatHH_2012.PNG
The Red-Green government in 1999 also introduced the “Stromsteuer”, also called “Eco-Tax” during its introduction. It’s an added levy per kWh and also has been growing since its inception. As far as I remember it was introduced by the left with the explicit goal of reducing consumption by making energy more expensive.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromsteuer
Re the Green party, which has most of the responsibility for the price hikes; here is a German writeup that details how *EVERY* far left group entered the Green party in the early 80ies, fought against each other, until those who are still the leadership of the Green party remained. The author is a far leftist himself; the website a far leftist (Antigerman) mag in Berlin; jungle world, a splitoff of Junge Welt (Junge Welt was not far left enough for the splitters)
http://jungle-world.com/artikel/2013/46/48810.html
notably, author is now a delegate for the Pirate Party in Schlesweig Holstein. So they’re currently infestating that party (which was obvious from recent events; just another confirmation)
There is an on-going EU investigation into the cross subsidy given to german industry from the domestic market. While I’m certain that they will be careful not to upset the german government it is going to be difficult to hide the truth.
We could speculate ad infinitum about the consequences of a guilty verdict but it’s is probably going to be a long wait for the truth.
“Spiegel calls the energy poverty rate “alarming”. However, when it comes to finding the cause for the runaway increase, the German Greens are blaming all the misery on the rising costs of oil and gas, and even hint that just more expensive, unreliable green energy is all that’s needed to get the costs back in line.”
One should also note that the words “Erneuerbare” (renewable) or Energiewende do not appear in the Spiegel article once. It seems that “green energy” shall be kept out of the discussion of rising energy poverty.
Everybody knows that ecology taxes and subsidies for green energies are driving the prices into the stratosphere, but are afraid to say it.
I’ve always thought the Germans were very practical with a work ethic and plenty of common sense so it came as no surprise that they became so successful. However, I had to chance my mind when they became infatuated with the ‘renewables and green energy’ policies. The policies devised by the EU with a complicit Germany and UK were so outrageously impracticable and expensive and such a financial burden on industry and the ordinary citizen that one had to conclude insanity was the cause. Closing down perfectly good power stations, destroying thousands of acres of forest to burn wood pellets, erectly thousands of useless wind turbines is not the sensible way to generate electricity. People have become acolytes of a false religion with no shortage of fanatical believers.
Perhaps at last there is hope and sanity is being restored and all this energy foolishness was but a temporary but expensive aberration.
Germany truly is a great country that has accomplished so much in the last five decades. But what I cannot understand is why a country, that has been through so much pain in the past, would today want to impose unnecessary pain on its people and economy in the belief it can make a difference to the climate at a time China and India are marching along the road to progress, emitting enormous amounts of CO2 in the process.
Even if CO2 were a real problem, then such a problem could only be resolved by the whole world taking action together.
What is unacceptable is that all we ever hear about atmospheric CO2 are the presumed negative consequences. Yet the alarmists never evaluate, or even acknowledge, the manifold real and measurable benefits of having more atmospheric CO2. Consequently, numerous important and positive impacts of having more atmospheric CO2 remain under-appreciated and largely ignored.
The one sided view of CO2, taken by the IPCC and its supporters, has produced a distorted view of CO2 that only leads to irrational thinking and flawed policy decision making in the belief there is a bogey man under the bed where there is none.
Mervyn
27. Februar 2014 at 04:32 | Permalink | Reply
“Germany truly is a great country that has accomplished so much in the last five decades.”
Well we did manage to not get destroyed. That’s gotta count for something.
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