From Dr. Benny Peiser at The GWPF
Network Agency Calls For Suspension Of Emission Laws For Old Coal Plants
Last winter, on several occasions, Germany escaped only just large-scale power outages. Next winter the risk of large blackouts is even greater. The culprit for the looming crisis is the single most important instrument of German energy policy: the “Renewable Energy Law.” The economic cost of a wide-scale blackout are measured in billions of Euros per day. The most important test of energy policy is now the stability of power – so far only the cost of the green energy transition has been focused upon. Because the federal government does not have the guts to start an overdue and fundamental debate about the usefulness of a 12-year-old, now totally outdated, “launch aid” called EEG, it now threatens to over-steer, with the green energy transition ending up in a crash. Fasten your seat belts. –Daniel Wetzel, Die Welt, 10 May 2012
Old coal power plants need to stay in operation or Germany’s power grid faces collapse. That is the warning of Germany’s national grid agency. Because the danger of blackouts is growing as a result of the shut-down of six nuclear power plants last year, the Federal Network Agency is proposing to suspend legal emission limits for plants. Old power stations, which are due to be shut down due to their high environmental impact, should continue to operate. “Closures of more conventional power plants are currently not feasible in Germany,” it says literally in the grid agency’s report: “Given the present and future tense situation, it is necessary to suspend closures due to the emissions reduction law.” –D. Wetzel und D. Siems, Die Welt, 10 May 2012
The German Bundesnetzagentur (Federal Network Agency) issued a press release warning that the national power grid is in serious trouble and that something needs to be done urgently. Germany’s once impeccably stable world-class power grid has been transformed and is today just one step away from being a developing-world laughing stock. This has all been accomplished in just a few short years – thanks to the country’s reckless and uncontrolled rush to renewable energies, wind and sun, all spurred on by a blind environmental movement and hysteria with respect to nuclear power. –P Gosslin, NoTricksZone, 11 May 2012
Winfried Kretschmann (Green Party), the prime minister of the state of Baden Wuerttemberg, is urging Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) to encourage the construction of new gas-fired power plants. Especially in southern Germany energy security is at risk, according to Kretschmann. –Nikolai Fichtner,Financial Times Deutschland, 3 May 2012,
Global-warming-related catastrophes are increasingly hitting vulnerable populations around the world, with one species in particular danger: the electricity ratepayer. Denmark, an early adopter of the global-warming mania, now requires its households to pay the developed world’s highest power prices — about 40¢ a kilowatt hour, or three to four times what North Americans pay today. Germany, whose powerhouse economy gave green developers a blank cheque, is a close second, followed by other politically correct nations such as Belgium, the headquarters of the EU, and distressed nations such as Spain. The result is chaos to the economic well-being of the EU nations. Even in rock-solid Germany, up to 15% of the populace is now believed to be in “fuel poverty.” Some 600,000 low-income Germans are now being cut off by their power companies annually, a number expected to increase as a never-ending stream of global-warming projects in the pipeline wallops customers. In the U.K., which has laboured under the most politically correct climate leadership in the world, some 12 million people are already in fuel poverty, 900,000 of them in wind-infested Scotland alone, and the U.K. has now entered a double-dip recession. –Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, 12 May 2012
You’re getting awfully close to just throwing a ‘word salad’ together to support a case; please step lightly and understand what you are penning …
(i.e., do not conflate power factor correction (cap banks) due to motor/inductive loads, protective switching (reclosers: think auto resettable breakers) used to protect individual distribution lines and voltage regulators (auto-step tap transformer and tap changers) used to compensate for a voltage drops for their specific intended purposes)
.
I can envision the headlines now:
“Global warming disrupts solar power supply.’
Almost makes you wish for the introduction of ‘smart meters’ – so that the idiots that SUPPORT these policies can be the first to be deprived of the power it’s supposed to produce.
Paul Penrose says:
May 12, 2012 at 10:40 am
In Germany we have the choice between
Pirate Party (pro renewable energy)
Die Linke (ex c0mmunists) (pro renewable energy)
Greens (ex c0mmunists) (pro renewable energy)
SPD (socialists) (pro renewable energy)
CDU (RINO’s) (pro renewable energy)
FDP (classic liberals) (pro renewable energy as long as it doesn’t cost so much. People hate them.)
I think I’ll take a day off during the next federal election.
What we have here is an opportunity to make a point. Shut ’em all down. See what the consequences are.
I wish the UK and Germany and a few other countries hadnt rushed so fast to go green. I hope they can fix the problems. I hope other countries can learn from their mistakes.
John W Garrett quotes Putin;
“But I cannot understand what fuel you will take for heating. You do not want gas, you do not develop the nuclear power industry, so you will heat with firewood?” Putin then noted, “You will have to go to Siberia to buy the firewood there,”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sad, isn’t it, that speaking the truth about environmental and economic issues on the world stage has fallen to Russia and China? Little surprise I suppose, they are interested in expanding their power base and world influence, something they can only do by expanding their economies.
The (soon to be not) free world seems more interested in self loathing.
In the U.K., which has laboured under the most politically correct climate leadership in the world…
Is that right? I thought mainland Europe (in particular Germany) was worse than us? Blimey.
An energy grid that is even occasionally unstable means many businesses have no choice but to move. As someone who works in microelectronics manufacturing I can tell you that a power interruption of less than a second makes almost all work in progress scrap. Since the lead time on some chips is as much as 2 months this means missed orders.
While a company may be able to endure the higher cost of renewables and even the loss of product resulting from outages they simply cannot endure losing customers due to late shipments.
David, UK says:
May 12, 2012 at 12:48 pm
I’m tracking UK as well as German news. Germany has even less debate of the reason all that stuff is done than the UK, and waaaayyyyy more anti-nuclear hysteria.
If you read my “Civilzation’s Wrecking Ball” comment above, I hope you check out the Tombstone link. It points to another weapon that will be added (beyond cap & trade) to the leftists’ arsenal against industrial civilization.
I wasn’t even really sure that the legend of Tombstone was an actual place, but it’s kind of ironic, you have Tombstone symbolizing raw and rough freedom and the American frontier spirit… cowed or rolled over by the federal pencil-pushing bureaucrats and econuts.
So, what Tombstone shows is that not only would cap & trade directly cause deindustrialization, but the leftists if they could would simply mandate deindustrialization wherever they can. Would wheelbarrows be “too mechanized?”
http://www.allamericanblogger.com/21262/dc-tells-tombstone-az-they-can-repair-water-system-as-long-as-they-use-horses-and-hand-tools/
I believe that Die Welt is incorrect in their staement that a blackout in Germany would cost billions of Euros a day. A sustained blackout in Germany the only major creditworthy nation in the Eurozone, would eliminate the Euro. Most of the zone is dependent on German credit through the various European stablitiy funds and the European Central Bank. Without the high earnings of German export industries, the Euro is an interesting historical footnote. I have some old Deutsch Marks in my socks drawer. I expect they will be back again.
Peter Miller says:
May 12, 2012 at 8:52 am
The UK is committed to a policy of rapid expansion of expensive electricity from renewables, which will inevitably lead to rolling brown outs and black outs. However, this is still 5-6 years away, Germany was just quicker off the mark in embracing insane and unsustainable energy policies.
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I wonder if governments have paused to consider the possible social consequences of imposing black-outs upon certain sections of the population.
If they imagine that everyone is going to sit peaceably at home, playing Scrabble by candlelight while waiting patiently for the lights to come back on, methinks they’re in for a rude awakening.
d says:
May 12, 2012 at 12:35 pm
I wish the UK and Germany and a few other countries hadnt rushed so fast to go green. I hope they can fix the problems. I hope other countries can learn from their mistakes.
Whoa! I’m still hoping we can learn from Germany’s mistakes!
David, UK says:
May 12, 2012 at 1:57 pm
“Whoa! I’m still hoping we can learn from Germany’s mistakes!”
Ample opportunity.
Step 1: Don’t join the Euro. But you knew that already, didn’t you?
Posted on Pierre Gosselin’s website at
http://notrickszone.com/2012/05/11/germanys-federal-network-agency-power-grid-on-the-brink-thanks-to-renewable-energies/
Hi Pierre,
The German energy crisis is not a surprise. We predicted this outcome a decade ago for those countries that adopted all the inanities of the Kyoto Protocol – see our point 8 below.
8. The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.
Our eight-point summary* includes a number of predictions that have all materialized in those countries in Western Europe that have adopted the full measure of global warming mania. My country, Canada, was foolish enough to sign the Kyoto Protocol, but then wise enough to ignore it.
To date, our predictive record is infinitely better than that of the IPCC. But then, none of the IPCC’s scary predictions have materialized.
Our successful predictions were neither difficult nor high-risk – rather our points were logical and obvious to anyone with a strong technical background, who was not infatuated with global warming mania.
Since we wrote our 2002 article, contrary to IPCC predictions, there has been NO net global warming, and probably some moderate cooling. This very-scary global warming crisis is so reliable – it never fails to underperform.
The predictive record of the global warming movement and the IPCC is near-perfect, but in the negative – to date, it has been 100% incorrect – completely false.
How does the global warming movement retain any credibility, when they deserve none?
P.S. I predicted global cooling by 2020-2030 in an article published in 2002. It may happen sooner – maybe even about now. Bundle up!
________________________
* Summary:
http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
Kyoto has many fatal flaws, any one of which should cause this treaty to be scrapped.
1. Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.
2. Kyoto focuses primarily on reducing CO2, a relatively harmless gas, and does nothing to control real air pollution like NOx, SO2, and particulates, or serious pollutants in water and soil.
3. Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity.
4. Kyoto will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and damage the Canadian economy – the U.S., Canada’s biggest trading partner, will not ratify Kyoto, and developing countries are exempt.
5. Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment – it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution.
6. Kyoto’s CO2 credit trading scheme punishes the most energy efficient countries and rewards the most wasteful. Due to the strange rules of Kyoto, Canada will pay the former Soviet Union billions of dollars per year for CO2 credits.
7. Kyoto will be ineffective – even assuming the overstated pro-Kyoto science is correct, Kyoto will reduce projected warming insignificantly, and it would take as many as 40 such treaties to stop alleged global warming.
8. The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.
E.On Netz, the largest wind power generator in the world, in their report “Wind Power 2005” describes the problems.
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/eonwindreport2005.pdf
One of the greatest disadvantages of wind power is the need for almost 100% conventional backup. E.On Netz says the “substitution capacity” in Germany was 8% in 2003, and will drop to 4% by 2020. See Figure 7 in the E.On report.
In concrete terms, this means that in 2020,
with a forecast wind power capacity of over
48,000MW (Source: dena grid study), 2,000MW of
traditional power production can be replaced by
these wind farms.
Another big problem with wind power is that power varies as the cube of the wind speed – this causes sharp peaks and valleys in the power output from wind farms, so extreme that it can cause the entire grid to crash – try that in winter – remember the 1998 Ontario-Quebec ice storm? Many people died as a direct resutl of this huge power failure.
A near-miss occurred in German during Christmas week of 2004 – see Fig. 6 in the E.on report.
The feed-in capacity can change frequently
within a few hours. This is shown in FIGURE 6,
which reproduces the course of wind power feedin
during the Christmas week from 20 to 26
December 2004.
Whilst wind power feed-in at 9.15am on
Christmas Eve reached its maximum for the year
at 6,024MW, it fell to below 2,000MW within only
10 hours, a difference of over 4,000MW. This corresponds
to the capacity of 8 x 500MW coal fired
power station blocks. On Boxing Day, wind power
feed-in in the E.ON grid fell to below 40MW.
Handling such significant differences in feed-in
levels poses a major challenge to grid operators.
Germans are insane, they always were. They may seem to be accurate & rational people at the surface, but deep down there lurks a dark emotional snarl. Fracking was just banned the other day, they are disbanding all their nuclear power plants and coal fired ones are also scheduled to be shut down.
The net result is that they will be entirely dependent on Russian gas and to a lesser extent on French nuclear generated electricity.
Or they are simply going for a late self-inflicted implementation of the grave Morgenthau Plan. If so, it is granted that the rest of Europe will go down the drain with them, as it has already happened several times in recent history.
Berényi Péter says:
May 12, 2012 at 2:46 pm
“Germans are insane, they always were. They may seem to be accurate & rational people at the surface, but deep down there lurks a dark emotional snarl.”
I’m living there and I dispute the notion that they appear rational at the surface. You’re projecting.
neill says: “Something really, really bad is going to have to happen first. The Warmists are blind to the disaster they are building toward. Let’s pray that when it happens it doesn’t take the global economy down with it. Thing is, when an energy infrastructure is allowed to downgrade to this point, reversing course when it happens could take some time — which there may not be a lot of.”
In the mind of Socialists, the remedy for failed Socialism is always more Socialism. And so it will be with the German and UK energy sectors. The lunatics are in full charge of the asylum.
I also read Pierre’s blog to track what is going on in Germany. I wish no ill on the German people, but I have been morbidly watching, expecting a collapse of their grid. I hope we will be able to learn from their example before it is too late for us.
There’s nothing like a few blackouts to prompt a quick change in government.
realtime grid data
Collapsing New People.
ferd berple says: May 12, 2012 at 10:01
Here in BC the local power company (BC Hydro) makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year as a result of the problems the US has in turning power on and off on the grid.
—- —- —-
Because of the previous Gordon Campbell, head of B.C.s’ provincial government (Liberal), “Green” stupidity, whereupon climate change was supposedly causing less rain and snow in B.C., we are not benefiting as well as you think.
From the Vancouver Sun:
“After a bumper year for precipitation in the Pacific Northwest, BC Hydro stations around British Columbia are sitting idle while independent power producers run flat out.
There’s so much water available for hydroelectric power that a Washington-Oregon utility, which runs full-time to protect salmon and trout, is paying other utilities to take electricity off its hands.
That means bargain-priced import electricity is available to BC Hydro from the Bonneville Power Authority, but it’s a bittersweet opportunity.
It’s difficult for BC Hydro to tap into the cheap power because of contractual obligations to purchase power from about 75 independent power producers (IPPs). Hydro is forced to buy from IPP operators, including big industrial ones such as Rio Tinto Alcan and Teck Resources, even as its own generation stations wait on standby. For example, at Peace Canyon generating station downstream of W.A.C. Bennett Dam on the Peace River, the primary source of hydroelectricity for all of B.C., the turbines are sitting idle for the first time in a decade.”
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Hydro+awash+private+power/6605915/story.html#ixzz1uhLrvH00
So B.C. ratepayers are paying more for electricity than we otherwise would be if it wasn’t for the useless climate change policies.
Models are approximations of reality and in fact it is often a very poor approximation of the complexities of reality. However, there are people living in ivory towers or in a disneyland like world that to them the model is just as good as reality if it is not better than reality. They start to believe, they could continue their lifestyle without any manufacturing industry. They could send all the manufacturing and heavy industries to developing countries, out of sight and out of mind. They could continue to flourish trading on bonds and derivatives, or from mark ups and advertisement selling the goods manufactured elsewhere. Somehow there is a need for a “COME ON MOMENT” to bring back societies into the harsh world of reality.