Merkel's government decided to shut down the country's eight oldest reactors immediately and speed up the phase-out of the remaining reactors. Nuclear power's share of the German energy market has since declined from 23 percent to about 17 percent, with renewable energies shooting up from 20 percent to a quarter.Now, however, complaints are growing about the rise in costs of electricity, particularly for lower-income families.
Germans already pay some of Europe's highest electricity prices, averaging about 24 euro cents (31 US cents) per kilowatt hour compared with about 13 euro cents in France or 14 euro cents in Britain, according to EU figures.
h/t Dan
Guess the party.
Do not worry, they will find some way to subsidize the poor by shifting the costs to the middle income users and businesses. After all, they have money.
calgary enmax...$0.1131470/kwh
"Guess the party." Actually, she's from the Christian Democrats, the more conservative of the two largest parties in Germany. (Which shows you how far to the left their politics as a whole skew...)
On a related note I see that NTREE has released their final report that advocates for a low carbon economy and carbon pricing.
"The future is low carbon," the body's final report said. "Economies the world over are making the transition." The report said Canada stands to gain from such a shift and should accept that it's coming."...After consulting with 150 experts and studying available data, the round table concluded that failure to act will cost the country dearly."
Why should we accept that this is inevitable or that it is wise to pursue a low carbon economy? In the real world the low carbon future is failing wherever it is tried - Spain, UK, Ontario, Germany- high cost, unreliable, blackouts imminent without near 100% conventional power backups. Why on earth would any country want to follow those counties down that path?
The future is carbon + uranium. I've been investing in that future for a while now.
If I'm wrong I'll freeze in the dark anyhow, so it's a pretty safe bet.
Such phobia of a trace atmospheric gas that accounts for .038% of the atmosphere!
She needed only to cut the subsidies and the nuclear plants would fold on their own.
I recently came back from Germany and and saw many windmills throughout the country side. A local engineering firm told me that a large majority of them are not connected into the grid as the transmission lines have not been installed and are posing a big logistical headache. So a lot of them are doing just that, just spinning in circles killing birds.
meanwhile their electricity costs are going up.
Ontario isn't a country of course. I occasionally wish it was another country because the news is supersaturated with what is happening is SW Ontario.. *Boring*
In fact, it even feels like a foreign country since my only contact with any place east of Manitoba is waiting for connecting flights at Pearson airport. Nonetheless it is merely a province. My mistake.
There are two opposing forces in Germany when it comes to green energy and this chapter is far from closed. Look back a few years and you can see how the green movement has taken a beating on these shores. The IPCC discredited, Warming debunked and carbon taxes coming under pressure to be exposed for the scam they are. Gore and Suzuki slowly crawling back into the sewer they came from and our own Prime Minister sticking a fork into the last climate conference. We are slowly turning back onto the road to sanity but brainwashing is so difficult to reverse it will take more than a few years. The whole green movement was/is seen as a cash cow for government squandering and insider profit and the "deniers" are slowly regaining the upper hand. Germany is no different even though the green movement wields far more power over there. Much like Ontario the Germans are taking a beating financially and the grumbling is getting louder. Articles like this are making a difference and another cold winter should turn down the hysteria of the gullible fools that saw "An inconvenient truth" as fact rather than fiction.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/06/germany-in-skeptical-turmoil-on-both-climate-and-windfarms/#more-56069
Cut LAS's green strings and he'll collapse all on his own. Fact is, the nuclear plants were subsidizing the wind mills. The Germans try to keep rates down in some states by blending low cost nuclear in with high cost wind for a single electricity rate. Now that's disappearing with the closure of nearly half Germany's nuclear plants. The renewables don't have anywhere to hide any more.
I think thats its funny how Germans still think that they are the master race.It took millions of men to convince them otherwise in the second world war,but this time they are doing it to themselves with no help from North America.Merkel asked PM Harper for help but he said no thanks,not this time.
las,O your the guy that thinks oil is subsidized and therefor wind and solar should be.I want to ask you this,how do you get royalties from wind and the sun? Alberta and Sask live on royalties.Tell us that secret and you will have credence.
Some people should do their homework before commenting on subsidies.
Still, some forms of energy gave the economy a lot more bang for the buck, as the following chart shows:
Power Source
2010 U.S. Power Consumption
(million bbl. oil equivalent)
Subsidy Cost per Energy Equivalent Barrel of Oil Consumed
Coal 3,439 $0.39
Oil and gas 10,012 $0.28
Nuclear 1,394 $1.79
Biomass / biofuels 381 $20.37
Geothermal 35 $7.80
Hydro 414 $0.52
Solar 18 $63.00
Wind 153 $32.59
Logic seems to indicate that Solar, Wind and Biomass are a fools game for any country that has debts of more than 16 trillion.
Buy a wood or coal burning stove, with a back up generator. The future for power is for only the civil service & very very rich.
Fact is, the nuclear plants were subsidizing the wind mills
You don't know what a fact is.
low cost nuclear does not exist as I have demonstrated many times here only to get the same BS lines from you people. Nuclear is every bit the subsidy parasite that green energy is, your irrational love affair with nuclear notwithstanding.
las,O your the guy that thinks oil is subsidized
F*&cking liar.
I bet you renewables didn't increase to 25% from 20%; I bet after closing down the old nuke plants, output dropped by around 5% making renewables appear to go up.
Humankind had a low carbon economy for millions of years and then the wheel was invented, followed by many inventions that made life easier than just clubbing mammoths for food.
Now some want to go back to living in caves and clubbing mammoths. Oh wait, that will not longer be allowed, the Vancouver Human Society says so.
Folks, it is all a part of the anti-human agenda.
Germany should cut a deal with Israel for some of the massive natural gas to be found off of Israel's coast.
Mind you Western Canada is willing to bid on supplies of LNG the we can ship out of Churchill during the season. They can store some of it until winter.
Anything we can ship and sell will be at a higher price than the saturated domestic market will pay.
Dealing with these other two sources would allow them to get a better bargain w/ Russia, the likely source of their current natural gas supplies.
LAS: "You don't know..." blah, blah, blah.
Just as I thought; you,ve got nothing.
Andy, lower nuclear production in Germany is being met mostly by increased coal burn. Germany has a further 23 coal plants under construction or planned.
@ peterj at October 18, 2012 8:40 PM
Should US military expenditures to secure SLOCs for its trading partners be seen as a subsidy for their oil usage?
@ Rizwan at October 19, 2012 10:44 AM
I believe all subsidies pertain to the drilling and exploration end. Rather complicated question as everything the military does is subsidized by the taxpayers. If they feel the need to have secure oil reserves for their trading partners I'm sure they have a logical reason and it's in their best interest. So ,I guess the answer would be yes.