Just a few days ago, the IPCC WG III report claimed that CO2 emissions could be curbed with little pain involved. Well, go tell it to the more than 300,000 Germans who have had their power shut off in a single year because they no longer can afford skyrocketing electric bills. And these people live in a rich country!
And imagine what expensive power means for poor, developing countries. In such countries it’s nothing short of widespread catastrophe and grinding misery.
The online site of German news television station NTV writes of a threatening energy poverty taking hold in Europe and that”more and more people are unable to pay for the electricity that they consume. More than 300,000 German citizens are going to have their power shut off each year.”
Hat tip: DirkH
NTV cites a report from German nation daily Die Welt, which writes German power companies turned off the power for 321,539 people because of non-payment in 2012, up from 312,500 people in 2011.
The reason for the high prices? NTV writes:
A reason for the increased number of power shutoffs is the rash expansion of renewable energies, which lead to higher energy prices.”
Two years ago NoTricksZone reported on an article also from Die Welt who claimed that 600,000 households were getting their power cut off. The figures on power service cutoffs vary broadly. Whichever figure is correct, the scale of the social disaster is immense no matter how you look at it.
It’s time to make energy affordable and attractive for every socioeconomic level, and not a luxury good for the upper classes.
Also read: max-planck-institute-economist-energiewende-bordering-on-suicide-unimaginably-expensive-folly/
O/T You cursed skeptics, what have you done? Der Spiegel’s melting, melting!
-13% ad revenue year on year; for March even -20%!
http://meedia.de/2014/04/16/brutto-anzeigenumsaetze-spiegel-rutscht-tief-ins-minus/
Ding Dong, der Spiegel’s dead… (soon)
Looking at your (very much appreciated) reports from the outside, it appears that either a number of journalists & editors have suddenly woken up, or that there is a behind the scenes push to make “Green electricity” less acceptable.
Tie that in with a government now in favour of building coal fired power stations and their worry about natural gas supplies from the east, I tend toward the latter.
After all if you need a stable and cheap supply to please the voters and maintain employment, how are you going to get it from the sun and the wind?
How about Germany restarting its nuclear power stations? It was stupid for Merkel to fall for the hyped-up fear mongering campaign following the tsunami-induced Fukushima disaster and decide to power down all of Germany’s safe nuclear reactors. Or was it a ruse to utilise Germany’s vast coal resources?
Look at France…..
Merkel has less faith in German engineers than the French have of their engineers? Once Germans were proud of their engineering achievements such as cars (Rudolph Diesel, Nikolaus Otto, Gottlib Daimler), roads, rail, production of chemicals and building materials, electric generators (Werner von Siemens) etc
Then German people re-elected Merkel. The EU and the Greens wish for a totalitarian regime (which wants to send ordinary people back into poverty and ruled by an elite) and Merkel supports them. Is that what Germans want?
“Then German people re-elected Merkel. ”
The alternative to Merkel’s CDU is here always a Green-SPD coalition, which would have been even worse for the German infrastructure.
Basically, Linke-Greens-SPD-CDU-CSU-FDP are all pro-EU, anti-nuclear Bloc parties today.
The “conservative” part of this Bloc is anti-nuclear for populist reasons. By sacrificing the nukes they can politically neutralize the Greens and get the vote of the frightened chickens.
I imagine developments to the East are concentrating a few political and bureaucratic minds on security of energy supply…
In my opinion the German renewables FIT was always designed to channel a significant amount of money from the populous – without calling it a tax – into the creation of a “homegrown” energy supply for the eventuality of a blockade or economic blackmail like during the 1973 oil crisis. Biofuels play the crucial role here; not solar and wind; as biofuel infrastructure can be used to run the army and provide emergency relief for the population. Huge Biodiesel and ethanol refineries have been built. This also solved the problem of overproduction and provides a use for ever increasing agricultural productivity. And politically, it helped to mobilize the environmentalist-pacifist vote – via the CO2AGW lie – to support the imperial project. Political alchemy.
The article states: “Two years ago NoTricksZone reported on an article also from Die Welt who claimed that 600,000 households were getting their power cut off. The figures on power service cutoffs vary broadly. Whichever figure is correct, the scale of the social disaster is immense no matter how you look at it.”
It would be a good thing to have better than such widely varying statistics on an issue of such importance. The power companies most certainly keep track of the number of services that have been disconnected. Why does not someone poll all of the service providers and ask them for the correct numbers?
Walter has a good idea but I’ll bet it is not that easy nor straightforward. For example, is the reason for termination known? If a person could pay but moves without paying – how is this counted? If a poor person is cut is there a public or private source of funds to get service returned quickly? If one family has power cut multiple times in a year (say 4), is that counted as 1 cut or 4? If the family is of 2 adults and 3 children – is that one cut or 5? If that family is cut 4 times is that counted as 1, 4, or 20?
A proper report should answer these sorts of questions.
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What about our USA with cheaper power? After the Bush recession in 2009:
“…Despite the increase in LIHEAP funding, utility shutoffs affected about 5 percent more households in 2009 than in 2008, a total of about 4.3 million….”
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/12/util-d23.html
Germany has one quarter the US population, but their power shut-off rate is only about a quarter that of our USA.
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