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Germany Joins Countries Retreating from Expensive Green Energy Revolution

July 14, 2013 by Paul Crowe

You don't need conventional power plants, all you need are few wind turbines.

With green energy, all you need are a couple of wind turbines here and there.

Despite assurances from wind and solar advocates, the switch to “green energy” isn’t going so well. Germany, a country that signed on for a big push to replace all of their nuclear plants with sunshine and wind and included the all too common mandates and subsidies for renewable energy and who refused to use natural gas from fracking, is watching prices rise and companies fail. German solar is in disarray, Siemens has decided to get out of the solar business after losing $1 billion in the last two years and two other big German firms, Conenergy and Gehrlicher Solar, went belly up last week. Bosch has also pulled back from solar energy.

Big wind, big problems

Wind isn’t faring any better. Germany is building a massive offshore wind project that has encountered numerous technical problems driving up costs. When the Dutch company doing the work looked to be running out of funds to complete the work, Germany added to their renewable energy surcharge on electric bills making customers chip in. The Economist reports:

… there remains a danger that, even if no further technical hitches arise, the enormous project will end up being a white elephant. Investors have gone cool on building windmills in German waters because of their costs and doubts over future electricity rates. A study, commissioned from an independent consultant by TenneT, reckons that less than 6GW of the planned 14GW of turbines are likely to be built by 2023. If so, laments VZBV, a consumer body, Germans will end up paying heavily for a lot of useless transmission gear out at sea.

If you like expensive electricity, you’ll love green energy

So as cheap natural gas is providing less expensive electricity elsewhere and nuclear power provides a solid base load capacity, Germany rejected both. The result is expensive and unreliable “green energy” that has to be backed up with something, and it may very well be coal. So customers are unhappy with rising electric rates and businesses are paying far more for electricity than their foreign competition, sort of a lose-lose proposition.

Germany is now set to cut many of its green programs as the cost and impracticality become obvious to everyone. In Spain, in the USA and now Germany, it’s funny how that scenario seems to repeat itself everywhere while the green advocates continue to act as though nothing is wrong. They haven’t yet realized, replacing things that work with things that sound good, rarely ends well.

Filed Under: Wind Energy Tagged With: losing money, wind energy retreat, wind welfare

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Unfortunately

The less you know about wind energy,
the more you'll like it.

Why wind developers never understand …

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

~ Upton Sinclair

Don’t know – Don’t care

Is willful ignorance necessary
to promote wind energy?

No, but it helps.

Climate Change

Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong. … Also, if the process of computing the consequences is indefinite, then with a little skill any experimental results can be made to look like the expected consequences.

~ Richard Feynman, 1964

It’s not on-demand, it’s no-demand

Wind energy is "no-demand" electricity. If the wind isn't blowing and you demand electricity, the answer is no.

Wind – expensive, inefficient, unreliable



December 1923 Popular Science cover dreaming about generating electricity from windmills, and though the dream never dies, the dream doesn't work, didn't then, doesn't now and without huge government giveaways of your money, no wind farms would get built anywhere. The government forces utilities to buy wind power so payments to landowners are simply wind welfare.


Wind energy runs on tax credits

"I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate, for example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."
~ Warren Buffett - from interview with Fortune magazine

Wind investments and high cost green energy

“I’m in the wind business … I’ve lost my ass in the business. ... Hey, we can get on everything green. We can get on everything renewable. Then the cost of power will go up ten times."
~ T. Boone Pickens - on Morning Joe on MSNBC

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