The cost of wind power is beginning to bite in Germany. Two articles in Der Spiegel and in Financial Times Deutschland puncturing the virtuous bubble that surrounds wind power in Germany:
Grid Instability Has Industry Scrambling for Solutions
Sudden fluctuations in Germany’s power grid are causing major damage to a number of industrial companies. While many of them have responded by getting their own power generators and regulators to help minimize the risks, they warn that companies might be forced to leave if the government doesn’t deal with the issues fast. …….
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At other industrial companies, executives at the highest levels are also thinking about freeing themselves from Germany’s electricity grid to cushion the consequences of the country’s transition to renewable energy.
Likewise, as more and more companies with sensitive control systems are securing production through batteries and generators, the companies that manufacture them are benefiting. “You can hardly find a company that isn’t worrying about its power supply,” said Joachim Pfeiffer, a parliamentarian and economic policy spokesman for the governing center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Behind this worry stands the transition to renewable energy laid out by Chancellor Angela Merkel last year in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Though the transition has been sluggish so far, Merkel set the ambitious goals of boosting renewable energy to 35 percent of total power consumption by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 while phasing out all of Germany’s nuclear power reactors by 2022.
The problem is that wind and solar farms just don’t deliver the same amount of continuous electricity compared with nuclear and gas-fired power plants. To match traditional energy sources, grid operators must be able to exactly predict how strong the wind will blow or the sun will shine.
and in the Financial Times Deutschland (via P. Gosselin of No Tricks Zone):
Wind Energy: The Dirty Secret of the Energy Transformation.
….. Von Buttlar in the Financial Times begins his piece:
“Slowly it is beginning to dawn: The energy transformation is not only stalling, but it is also is exposing the well-hidden secret that it has long been a huge redistribution program from the bottom up.”
He writes that it’s about large landowners and farmers parking Ferraris between their tractors, or a famous law firm investing an 8-digit sum in a solar park with the state guaranteeing a handsome profit. It’s about a Bavarian farmer with hundreds of solar panels on his barn’s roof laughing his way to the bank: “That’s 20,000 euros per month.”
The German socialist and green parties used to be about protecting the little guy, making sure that their money and assets don’t get transferred from the bottom to the top. Today, however, they’re making sure that it does get transferred to the top! It just happens many Greens and socialist honchos are at the top reaping the benefits of political sellout.
Slowly but surely, it is all coming out. Von Buttlar writes:
“… a few days ago the Consumer Protection Agency complained about high electricity costs: In 2007 every household paid on average 35 euros for alternative energies. Beginning in 2013, when the share in the costs rises from 3.5 cents to 5 cents, that number will jump to 185 euros.”
Von Buttlar reminds us that many Germans still accept this and view it as a “good cause” – a position he calls naive.
“We should at least be honest – these are times when armies of corporate representatives and “advisers” from Enercon, Repower, or the numerous obscure solar companies are invading the countryside. It is not about a lofty objective or a good cause. That’s the story that gets told at town meetings. No, it’s about money. More precisely said: it’s about lots of money for a very few – money that is being divided up between plant operators, investors, leasing companies and manufacturers. 16.4 billion euros was the energy feed-in allocation in 2011. In the coming year it is going to be 20 billion.” ..
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Tags: cost of wind power, Der Spiegel, Financial Times Deutschland, Germany, wind power
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