Germany’s plan to transform its energy system to one reliant on renewable power as it phases out nuclear energy could cost up to €1 trillion, German energy and environment minister Peter Altmaier has publicly admitted. Feed-in tariffs supporting renewable energy could account for over two-thirds of the cost.
Germany will be a wonderful place on those windless nights when all the Eco Greenie windmills and solar panels produce no, nada, zilch electricity.
Good time to go steal wood from public lands for their home heating stoves.
Fred, there is no wood left in Germany. It’s all chopped down long ago. I think there is a small remnant of the Black Forest left as a novelty and tourist attraction. That is why so many Germans come to Canada an marvel at our wilderness.
When folks will not have the money to buy the energy they need to refrigerate and cook food, to keep warm in winter … to run their vehicles to get to work, to perhaps watch their TVs and run their computers …. what does anyone think will happen?
Fred, there is no wood left in Germany. It’s all chopped down long ago. I think there is a small remnant of the Black Forest left as a novelty and tourist attraction. That is why so many Germans come to Canada an marvel at our wilderness.
When folks will not have the money to buy the energy they need to refrigerate and cook food, to keep warm in winter … to run their vehicles to get to work, to perhaps watch their TVs and run their computers …. what does anyone think will happen?
The Energiewende is going to do what two world wars couldn’t: permanently knock Germany from atop the European economy.
Auf wiedersehen, uber alles in der welt.
Interesting. Would Hitler rely on renewables? If he would, the world would not need to fight WWII. We would just need to wait till they freeze over and their economy collapsed.
Actually, when an existing government fails through it policies to provide the basic necessities to the people, someone will start a populist movement to replace said governement, and find other groups to blame for their predicament. Usually that’s followed by imprisonment of those groups, wars with neighbours to take the resources that are needed. I guess that’s what the Euro experiment is all about. Make sure no country has any resources left worth taking via a war. Peace through (lack of) Strength.
So we’re going to go from a reliable source of energy that pays for itself at nominal rates.
TO
An unreliable source that requires massive subsidies to be in the same ballpark of the rates above, or no subsidies and is much more expensive.
That’s gonna work well! I would say, “poor SOB’s” except frankly I hope they ALL get it good and hard and repeatedly so that they remember NEXT time someone tries something that dumb.
Maybe Green Energy is just a newer, more devious method to increase Germany’s ultra-low birth rate. Poverty caused by unaffordable heat and electricity…nothing to do but spend the evenings huddled in front of a warm fireplace. Or, it some evil psychological experiment to see how far governments can punish their citizens before they revolt.
Jezzzz, now I see why my family left Germany many years ago.
These people are fools.
They finally bring both East & West back together, only to destory both.
One trillion for “renewables”‘, $600 billion of which is PAYOLA. Getting the government they deserve, good and hard.
You wonder what it’s going to take for people to finally get that central planning and control is a bad idea. 100 million dead from Communism, still no clue.
The green Nazis running Germany are going to bring to Europe another war. Just wait for the grid to collapse and just like the thirties when Germans had to bring wheelbarrows full of cash to buy bread, there will be an opening for another Fuhrer to take charge and lead them in the fight against nasty capitalist bankers who are stealing all the lebensraum.
Funny thing is here in BC I have seriously considered putting in a wood fired boiler. After the idiotic Clark Liberals in BC changed to a two tier pricing structure for electricity to buy votes my electricity bills have gone through the the roof. No natural gas where we are. So I am basically subsidizing at huge expense their vote buying lunacy, which is one reason why they won’t get my vote.
And if I do burn wood it will create far more pollution than what would be generated to create the equivalent amount of electrical energy. But that is the lunacy of the idiotic policies of the current BC government, and of governments in general including in Germany.
If anyone has good recommendations on wood fired boilers please let me know. House has radiant floor heating throughout using hot water.
… and that still won’t get them reliable base power, especially at night.
I look forward to their inevitable failure, as a lesson to the rest of the world.
OfayCat said: Fred, there is no wood left in Germany. It’s all chopped down long ago
Nonsense. Check a satellite map of Germany.
Germany has forests – just Euro-style managed/groomed ones, and not (obviously) in the big cities.
Even East Germany has forests, in the places the State wouldn’t let people live as a buffer zone.
Now, someone in Hamburg can’t go chop down a tree, not so much…
But a Bavarian might have a good chance, if he wasn’t in a big city.
One trillion euros!
Two problems reveal themselves:
I had always doubted average Germans really are the gullible fools as history has painted them.
My bad.
Burning freshly felled wood creates lots of air pollution and the potential to eventually burn
down the space being heated and killing those in it.
I expect in an effort to outdo France as the most absurd place on earth, they’ll build coal fire generators to back up the wind/solar failures.
Like TJ, I’m a BC’er who’s shocked by the sudden rise in hydro electricity rates. And B.C. Hydro makes it nearly impossible to talk with a human being… just layer upon layer of ‘press 3 for…’
On the upside, I’m on 5 acres of V. Island property with our Regional District not YET implementing tree cutting restrictions. I’m about to have three huge (150′) fir and hemlock taken down which should give me at least four cords of good wood.
And screw the ‘enviroweenies’ – it’ll improve my view, warm my house and I’ll just grow some more trees. As for air quality, I’m on an island with three thousand miles of ocean on one side and thirty miles of water on the other, so I’m not feeling particularly guilty. If the envirofascists aren’t going to allow us to use our natural resources of water, oil and gas then they’ll just have to accept us opting for ‘independent’ power sources. Darned if I’m going to freeze in the dark to make them feel morally superior.
“…When the mercury falls, the theft of wood in the country’s woodlands goes up as people turn to cheaper ways to heat their homes.”
There’s a way to stop that. If you give everybody a government house, they can start tearing up floorboards, etc. to fuel the stove.
Germany may end up broke …. but they will still be the top dawg in the Eurozone.
I say let them invade Fwance …. and keep it this time.
‘.nothing to do but spend the evenings huddled in front of a warm fireplace. Or, it some evil psychological experiment to see how far governments can punish their citizens before they revolt.’
Posted by: LC Bennett on February 21, 2013 2:18 PM | Reply
My guess is the latter, LC Bennett – the east Germans got some hard lessons in suffering from the Soviet Union, they know all about graft, cow towing for (temporary) special privilages and suffering for nothing.
“Those who do not learn from History are bound to repeat it”
If anyone has good recommendations on wood fired boilers please let me know. House has radiant floor heating throughout using hot water.
Wood fired boilers are expensive and unless they’re running full out to charge about 500 gallons of thermal storage water they will clog up with creosote. If you want to heat with wood consider a Pacific Energy Summit model woodstove made in Duncan BC. You could attach a copper coil to the back of the stove and pump heat into the slab to distribute heat the rest of the house. Another option is a high efficiency condensing LPG boiler, which would likely still be cheaper than electricity.
This ought to drive the greenies around the bend!
“New Coal Technology Harnesses Energy Without Burning, Nears Pilot-Scale Development
COLUMBUS, Ohio—A new form of clean coal technology reached an important milestone recently, with the successful operation of a research-scale combustion system at Ohio State University. The technology is now ready for testing at a larger scale.
For 203 continuous hours, the Ohio State combustion unit produced heat from coal while capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the reaction.”
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/looping203.htm
Energy01 – but there is just as much CO2 – sequestering CO2, in my opinion, is silly.
I’ve never been sure why the Merkel government went down this road in the first place, but if it was a political maneuver to outflank the Social Democrats, the Greens, etc., the numbers strategy outlined in this article is certainly scary — but not in the way the post means. Rather, the numbers are scarily small, IMO, and certain to be easily characterized as a half-measure (if Germans are lucky; might even be characterized as a quarter-measure, or less) by the leftist opposition.
Germany had nominal GDP of 3.37 trillion USD in 2012. So, if you take the timeline mentioned (late 2030s — say, 25 years), the cost, in terms of GDP is as follows:
Average annual % GDP growth assumption/Implied cost (% of GDP over the period):
0/1.45
1/1.27
2/1.11
That ain’t good. And that’s not even netting out the implied naturally-occurring cost of replacement generation as the nuclear plants are retired (as some of them would have been anyway).
Sounds quite a lot like the Ernie Eves solution in Ontario in 2002 — cancel electricity-sector restructuring, focus in on why local distribution charges are different from community to community, and have Energy Minister John Baird drive around in a car powered by stinking used deep-fryer oil. That worked well for the Tories, didn’t it — they still haven’t recovered from that tater (french fry, whatever).
While commenter cgh and I have a disagreement about the political-economic implications of Mike Harris’s purported plans (never actually followed-through upon) on electricity-sector restructuring, you won’t find a better explanation anywhere than cgh’s technical analysis of a couple of weeks back on the danger of green energy to the stability of both the electricity system and the economy. And for a country like Germany, whose per capita GDP (despite all those little faux-Mercedes wagons I see everywhere) lags Canada’s by 18% and Australia’s by 41%, I would have thought that building up the economy over the long haul on sound fundamentals would have been the far stronger conservative case.
Ironic the in the rush to save the planet from non existing problems we have swallowed enough “green” medicine to make us sick, and if we continue on this path it will destroy us. Every democratic country (Except France which is run by idiots) can thank the Agenda 21 driven greenies for much of their grief. Trillions of dollars spent on useless, inefficient technology to help cool a planet that isn’t heating and to hold up a sky that isn’t falling. The IPCC,Gore,Suzuki etc. brainwashing has worked well. The only one to come out of this a winner is the house of despots and asylum inmates known as the UN. The free world has definitely reached a tipping point, and it has nothing to do with climate.
Bingo! Peterj, well said.
It is all right out in the open for everyone to see – yet people refuse to acknowledge the obvious. My little brother used to tell a goofy joke when he thought someone was being willfully stupid:
‘I can see”! said the blind man, as he took off his blindfold.
“I’ve never been sure why the Merkel government went down this road in the first place”
They made this decision right after the nuclear ‘disaster’ in Japan.
The Germans were probably afraid a tsunami would cause a nuclear disaster, in Germany.
Really.
FROM article: “Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transition, was introduced after the country’s government decided to phase out nuclear power in reaction to the accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011.”
We live in an age where politicians do real world things with real expensive economic consequences as a reaction to irrational fears to make irrational people feel temporarily safer and more comfortable.
And to think that this is the German conservative party that has done this…
Nothing shocks me anymore.
Nothing.
I certainly agree with you that Fukushima was the very convenient cover story, but the decision time-line doesn’t lend itself to the interpretation that Fukushima was the real motivation.
The tsunami hit on March 11, 2011 and the German government announced the temporary closure of the eight reactors on March 15, 2011 and the new energy plan on May 30, 2011. As we know, governments are organizations that operate at horse-and-buggy speed: a four-day turn-around on a decision in the parellel universe of government would be the equivalent of Warp Factor 9, and a 75-day turn-around on a decision would be the equivalent of Warp Factor 7. And since the ability of matter to travel faster than the speed of light has not yet been definitively determined, I`m going to stick with this here idea that Warp speed is still something on Star Trek, and that the decisions involved must have been in the works for a long-time and must have been motivated by considerations other than Fukushima (the extent of which disaster was certainly not known before March 15, 2011, probably not before May 30, 2011, and maybe still not known).
I completely get your point about the perfidy of the German people when it comes to their politics.
David, you are right about Fukushima being only the casus belli. Germany is the centre of what has been a long and well-established antinuclear campaign in Europe going back about four decades. It came out of the “Ban the Bomb” movement in the 1960s. It was believed then and still is today that there is a direct connection between commercial nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
It is stronger in Germany than the rest of Europe, but all European countries are strongly infected, and all Green political parties in Europe are all driven in large part by their antinuclear beliefs.
1. Switzerland holds frequent national referenda on nuclear phaseout even though it has the best operating reactors in the world.
2. Sweden voted for nuclear phaseout in 1980.
3. Belgium’s Red-Green government imposed a phaseout in 2005.
4. France’s Superphenix fast breeder reactor was attacked by rockets while under construction in 1978.
5. Italy shut down all five of its reactors in 1987 in a needless reaction to Chernobyl.
6. Greens turn out in tens of thousands to block nuclear waste rail shipments (this is for the processing and storage of nuclear used fuel).
7. All European countries except Britain and France have nuclear moratoria in place.
These are only a few tiny samples of a host of antinuclear posturing within Europe over the past four decades. Antinuclearism is strongly entrenched within a large part of the popular psyche in Europe, largely driven by the Cold War confrontation, and these attitudes will not change any time soon.
The conservative political party in Europe which does not kowtow to this strong popular sentiment is a political party which stays in perpetual opposition and never in government.
As you well know, I am for a stable load-duration curve (I do believe that base-load, as well as marginal generation could well have been achieved by coal — you would well know that I am strictly opposed to green energy, although not at all in any way to nuclear power, so long as we don’t get stuck with any more of them there DRCs for another forty years, at current rates of pay-down).
It all pretty much comes down to management — independent of political interference, which you’ve pretty much conclusively made the case for. Say, how interested would the Society’s pension fund be in picking up OPG, or whatever elements it chooses? I’d be interested in knowing about the nuclear assets: would you be happy if they were in your pension fund (and I’m seriously not being disrespectful or sarcastic in any way)?
I’m bugging my wife about whether owning all the hospitals in Ontario (on a design-build-maintenance) basis would be of interest to HOOPP?
Comments and criticisms, please…
David, I think the record is pretty clear here. The Power Workers Union and the Society both took equity positions in Bruce Power (about 2 1/2% each). So the unions are pretty clear that they’re putting their money where their mouths are.
And if that was my pension fund, I’d be happy with it too. Nuclear plants are cash machines; just look at the financial productivity of the plants in the US, particularly those which are fully or largely amortized. And now that Bruce has all eight running? Money, money, money. And all at less than 7 cents/kWh all in with PRIVATE not public capital invested.
But then these are two very unusual unions. Virtually every member has a post-graduate degree, particularly in the Society. Remember this all started a number of years back when British Energy was forced by the UK government to sell its 80% stake in Bruce Power. The unions proposed to buy out the plant completely from BP using their pension funds before the big three (Cameco, TCPL and Borealis) came in with their offer.
As to 40-year paybacks, remember that the funds collected by the government to pay down the old Ontario Hydro’s debt are in fact being used for rate stabilization (read: buffering customers from the full effect of rate increases by increasing the outstanding debt). It was McGuinty’s government which put this little piece of financial trickery in place during his first term.
Quite apart from your elegant response, please understand (and I’m certain you do) that I was in no way insinuating that anyone would not put their money where his or her mouth is — given the opportunity, I’m sure that the great majority of Ontario’s public-sector employees, past and present, would do exactly that, particularly in light of uncertainty around the future of their pension and retirement benefits.
And, candidly, there is only one way to do that, come May or June…