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does not have the guts to start an overdue and fundamental debate about the usefulness of a 12-year-old, now totally outdated, “launch aid” called EEG, it now threatens to over-steer, with the green energy transition ending up in a crash.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
Typo, first line of article, rearrange:
“Germany escaped only just ”
[Thanks – but it is a direct quote of the original article, strange phraseology and all ~jove, mod]
ChE says:
May 12, 2012 at 9:28 am
An earthquake happens in Japan. All the nuke plants shut down in Germany. Now they need to buy more gas from Russia.
Huh?
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Its worse than that. Germany is now forced to import gigawats of electricity from France, and French electrical power is – you’ve guessed it – 95% nuclear.
Double, Huh??
Apparently, nuclear power is perfectly ok as long as you look the other way and pretend it is not nulcear power. That’s Green logic for you.
The UK is only a few years behind
“Queen’s Speech 2012: energy laws will send bills soaring”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9255001/Queens-Speech-2012-energy-laws-will-send-bills-soaring.html
“The new laws revealed in the Queen’s Speech will bring in a raft of costly subsidies to help energy companies pay for “green” electricity. British households will have to cover the cost of the subsidies through their energy bills over the next 20 years.”
I sure hope our dunderhead politicians down here read this piece, especially the Lawrence Solomon article in the National Post. Texas still has generation capacity problems, but nowhere near like what is described as happening in Germany. I am grateful for $0.10 Kw/h, I want it to stay that way.
James Sexton says: May 13, 2012 at 12:24 am RE: Control of power grids.
Agreed. When you study alternating current theory, you learn of an idealised form where the sinusoidal sariation of current, I and voltage, E, are in phase so that the power, W, which is the product of the former two, EI, is maximised. Then for transmission lines introduce ‘quadrature’ so that the (usual) three phases are neatly spaced in time for both voltage and current. The point is that there are already nearly 10 variables that need to be kept under control to gain maximum transmission efficiency even in this very simplified description. There are transmission losses in any case via the resistance of the cable.
The compact fluorescent lamp or CFL, is a known offender for throwing voltage and current out of synch. When one adds all of the inputs and returns into an actual system, it becomes quite difficult to optimise, which is the valid point that James is making. In olden times, lines were meant to convey power outwards from a central facility. With interlocked grids and erratic devices like windmills feeding in with time-variant intensity and sometimes phase, losses increase.
These are classroom concepts for electrical engineers, but they are often unknown or unstated by those who simply bleat that wind power has to be good because it does not make much CO2. There’s more than CO2 in the equation.
David, UK says:
May 12, 2012 at 1:57 pm
“Whoa! I’m still hoping we can learn from Germany’s mistakes!”
DirkH says:
May 12, 2012 at 2:30 pm
Ample opportunity.
Step 1: Don’t join the Euro. But you knew that already, didn’t you?
Absolutely – it comes from having a long history of being dominators (for better and worse) rather than dominated. A common currency goes hand-in-hand with a common government. There’s no way a Brit could stomach that.
I don’t mean this unkindly, but Germans seem way too happy to be manipulated by politicians into self destruction. It’s like you don’t actually want liberty. Having said that, I have a good German friend who grew up in the old GDR, and she’s very libertarian because she’s experienced socialism and can smell it coming. Right now both you guys and we in the UK could really use our own Ron Pauls – the more I read about this guy, the more I think he’s the free West’s best hope.
James Sexton says:
May 13, 2012 at 12:24 am
James, you are entirely right. The grid has a hierarchical structure designed to send power from central stations into the top layer high voltage transmission lines and from there down to the smaller, lower voltage subgrids. Power is NOT send up from a villages grid to the next layer up the hierarchy. Rather, as the villages grid gets saturated with solar power, the upper level grid layer can send less power down into the smaller grid. This works until the small grid is oversaturated by its own PV production, at which point it fails. This happens frequently in villages with many PV installations but doesn’t affect the higher levels; the small grids just blackout. So when you’re in a village, and people around you mount more and more PV panels, you know it’s going to get instable. When a single wind turbine appears next to your village, woe betide. That one’s a whopper for your tiny grid.
What destabilizes the national grid is the larger swarms of wind turbines, the wind parks, which are always grouped around an existing power plant with access to the high level layers. Only this power is sent around. For instance a 300 MW gas plant 10 km south of Braunschweig is surrounded by about 40 or 50 big wind turbines. Similar groupings exist around other 300 MW class power plants. I live in a flat part of the country with a few hills, from such a hill, looking around the country, when you know where the power plants are, you see the wind parks exactly at the same places. The need to be – these are the only access points to feed power INTO the high level grid layer.
That being said, they try to alleviate the instabilities by making the inverters of solar panels switch off automatically when the grid frequency rises (which is the signal for overload); but this can lead to more dynamic problems – when all the small PV installations fall off the small village grid exactly at the same time, you get a sudden flip from near-overload to a lack of power…
Of course the end vision is the Smart Grid with smart meters everywhere and some distributed intelligence like the Internet’s capability to route around failures and built-in redundancy, but people oppose any power line being built, so good luck with that…
Here in California we have had the pleasure of rolling blackouts. Back under Governor Grey (out) Davis. We had a recall election and dumped him. Power has been stable since ( as they tossed out the rules his side imposed).
During that time I bought 2 generators. A 4 kW job for cheap that ran big things like the washer and dryer with big starter motor load. A 1 kW Honda that is just fine for all the lights and entertainment center and fridge. Quiet as can be and very economical.
Since then I’ve sold the big one to a friend as we didn’t need it any more…
Then they passed our version of Kyoto.
To the person who said it will cause companies to leave: To Late. Large chunks already left. Computer data centers in particular (where I used to get many contracts) and various kinds of fab and manufacture. During the rolling blackout days, they packed up and left. Car manufacturing too. And a host of others.
I had just bought a battery box and 1 kW inverter and was about to assemble it to stabilize my power when we got a new governor and stable electricity. The parts are still in the garage.
On my last electric bill, I noticed the marginal rate was “20 something” cents / kw-Hr. As they sell me natural gas for about $1 / gallon of gas equivalent; I can make my own electricity with a natural gas generator for about 15 cents / kW-hr.
Now perhaps someone can explain to me what rational world has it cheaper to make your own using retail fuel and retail machinery, vs baseload coal and nukes, but I don’t care. On my to-do list is to get the battery box and inverter bolted together and in place, just waiting for the batteries, and be ready to flip all the lighting, entertainment, and fridge onto it. (The major energy suck of the electric stove / oven and the washer / dryer can stay unbuffered. I have a nice gas bbq, camp stove et. al and wash only needs be done once a week, so ‘whenever’). My bill reports my average consumption is less than a kW run rate. So the battery box / inverter will run all that stuff even through a grid outage. If I need to, I can fire up the generator (to charge batteries or for added uses like the electric lawn mower…)
IFF we end up at that point, I’ll likely add a natural gas driven generator and just start making my own power across the board as a cogeneration setup. It will pay me about a nickel / kW-hr anyway…. and the gas supply is stable, too.
Honda makes a nice residential unit:
http://www.honda.com/newsandviews/article.aspx?id=200704033944
presently only sold in the East, but I have friends 😉
I liked the world better when I didn’t have to be my own power company…
FWIW, this is my ‘minimal emergency power kit’
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/minimalist-emergency-power/
The bulb and cord with the small car adapter live in my backpack. The 300 W inverter says in the car. Assembled during the days of Grey(out) Davis. Handy when visiting friends and the power went out. Can charge a few laptops, cellphones, provide light, run a radio or small TV. Dirt cheap ( about $40 ) and as long as your car runs to recharge the car battery, you have power. Weeks for this kit.
But then again, it doesn’t snow here, so heat is a question of preference, not survival…
I just wish someone would drive off the cliff first, and in spectacular fashion, so the rest of us didn’t have to…
James Sexton says:
May 13, 2012 at 12:24 am
@__Jim
So, I went back and re-read what I had wrote, because I do allow that sometimes what I stated isn’t all that clear. I find that not to be the case here. I’ll replicate the pertinent part of my comment.
Their solar panels wreak havoc on a grid system. This is something many people don’t readily understand. Grids have a specific design depending not only on how much is coming on the grid, but also where.
A properly maintained grid to ensure quality of service must have strategically placed equipment on the grid such as capacitors, regulators, and re-closures (switches) and the like. Wire size is a huge consideration. When you have an indeterminable amount of energy coming onto the grid from indeterminable places, your grid is at a horrible risk. Add this variable influx of the solar to the wind and you’ve got a very unstable grid.
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How all this square wave power affects available fault currents is also a concern I have. That is where it all starts as far as protection within an end use facility especially if you are located at the end of a transmission line where there happens to be solar connected. There are a lot of very smart people working on making this stuff work but………
WTF says:
May 13, 2012 at 6:03 am
“How all this square wave power affects available fault currents is also a concern I have.”
All modern solar inverters produce perfect sine waves. They have digital signal processors and IGBT’s for power switches, pulse width modulated with 15 kHz or more; smoothed with inductivities.
Even the tiny cheap 100W emergency inverter I stashed away in my car (exactly like E. M. Smith) produces trapezoid wave voltage – and I wouldn’t feed that into the grid but use it to create my own “insular grid”.
I happened to buy some Tuborg (iconic Danish brand) beer yesterday and was really surprised to see that it was brewed in Turkey…wonder if this has something to do with it:
“…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…”
Dirk, I’ve seen lots of IGBTs blow up real good. Now granted that is on VFDs where by design there is a lot of frequency modulation to control speed and not used for constant output to syncronize with a grid.
The way things are going in the EU we will soon be seeing Germans taking wheelbarrows loaded with the Euro to buy their bread. We all know how that turned out the last time. Uber alles EU! The thousand year state of the EU is headed for a short and loud end.
David, UK says:
May 12, 2012 at 12:48 pm
“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.”
The Germans will straighten [their] problems out quickly. The rest of the EU, not so much.
I remember the gas lines in1973-1974 brought about by the combination of an Arab embargo and US government price controls.
Environmental regulations made impossible any refinery construction in the Northeast.
In 1973-74. Federal regulations had required supplying Northeast customers with oil and natural gas at regulated prices. Also,Northeast politicians had suggested that Texans should have conserved energy during this out-of-state energy giveaway.
As a result the phrase, and bumper sticker , “Let the bastards freeze in the dark ” became popular. It deserves to become popular again.
Some posts above muse that perhaps failing power supplies will help people learn their lesson.
No, the eco-fascists know exactly what they are doing. The goal is to eliminate all sources of power that are not “renewable” and it is well understood that the result will be much less power. The ideal is to have communities of humans sequestered from the world in small pre-industrial enclaves.
This will of course, require a dramatic reduction in the world’s population. This is point 5 of the Deep Ecology manifesto:
5) The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
While we sometimes laugh at the foolishness of AGW, do not loose sight of one important fact. This is a serious and deadly game they are playing.
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Its worse than that. Germany is now forced to import gigawats of electricity from France, and French electrical power is – you’ve guessed it – 95% nuclear.
Actually it is 82.5% nuclear on average. Hollande has promised the greens that he will close anything from 1 nucliare centrale to 18 NC. If he chooses the 18 then Europe and the UK will have rolling blackouts or reduced power. If he chooses the one then it’s likely the green comunists will demand more. One will only cause minor problems in eastern France in deep winter but that would be a major problem for the germans because that take power from the east which will no longer be available.
Sean says:
May 13, 2012 at 9:06 am
The way things are going in the EU we will soon be seeing Germans taking wheelbarrows loaded with the Euro to buy their bread. We all know how that turned out the last time. Uber alles EU! The thousand year state of the EU is headed for a short and loud end.
You are probably right but the germans have two major issues.
1 They are keeping the EU afloat on their own but even their industries are heading into another recession. They need the euro because the Dmark would be too expensive for their exports to sell as well as they do right now.
2 They are the only country in the EU that was given the right to exit without penalty. All other EU members have no right of exit but they can be cut adrift by the rest. Eg The Greeks.
The german sheeples are already showing signs of revolt but as a commenter mentioned earlier they do not have the choice of electing a party which does not support AGW and renewables. However, politicians being the slimy little creatures that they are will soon find the right bandwagon if the sheeples can find the intellect to tell them which it is.
In general, I trust the german people to find the right answer. However, the brits couldn’t find their own backsides without being shown. There is no hope for them i’m afraid. They have shown already that when push comes to shove they will vote for the other party no matter what their policies. See recent elections.
Alan D McIntire says:
May 13, 2012 at 12:47 pm
I remember the gas lines in 1973-1974 brought about by the combination of an Arab embargo and US government price controls…..
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The 1973- 1974 Oil “Shortage” was a bit of creative pressuring. I know a trucker, who hauled gasoline during that time period. The refinery he hauled for was stuffed to the gills and was having trouble trying to find places to put it. Other truckers I talked to verified this. The Oil companies wanted a price increase and the Oil “Shortage” was how they got it. Looking into the politics of ARAMCO shows just how murky the whole situation is. Alternate ARAMCO info.
As we can see from CAGW the surface appearance according to the Mass Media is no where near the truth.
In reply to Gail Combs: President Reagan ended all price controls, as a result, no gas lines.
Areas with shortages will bid up the price, areas with relative surpluses will bid down the price.
Under Presidents Nixon and Carter we got gas lines as a result of set prices,- areas with shortages couldn’t bit up prices- so we got mal-distribution.
Meanwhile, here in Maryland, our democrat governor, Martin O’Malley, and his minions in the democrat controlled State Senate and House of Delegates, are pushing Maryland towards more green energy. They could care less about the negative consequences. Thankfully, we do have connections to the national grid, so although our electricity costs will sky rocket, at least those who can afford it will have electricity. I feel sorry for the poor in Maryland, even though they are the idiots who keep the democrats in power.
Jay Davis
Sean says:
May 13, 2012 at 9:06 am
“The way things are going in the EU we will soon be seeing Germans taking wheelbarrows loaded with the Euro to buy their bread. We all know how that turned out the last time. Uber alles EU! The thousand year state of the EU is headed for a short and loud end.”
Highly unlikely. One of the preconditions that made WW II possible was a youth bulge. In those years, German cities expanded rapidly. You need millions of unemployed young people you can radicalize. The Germans are too old and don’t procreate.
Len May 12, 2012 at 5:28 pm :
So sorry you do not like our 2002 article – was our predictive record too accurate for your delicate nature?
Is this 2009 post on CO2 and life “good enough” for you?
Your comments are simply rude and ignorant.
_________________
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/30/co2-temperatures-and-ice-ages/#comment-79426
(Plant) Food for Thought (apologies – written too late at night)
Background:
http://www.planetnatural.com/site/xdpy/kb/implementing-co2.html
1. “As CO2 is a critical component of growth, plants in environments with inadequate CO2 levels – below 200 ppm – will cease to grow or produce.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_Earth's_atmosphere
2. “The longest ice core record comes from East Antarctica, where ice has been sampled to an age of 800 kyr BP (Before Present). During this time, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has varied by volume between 180 – 210 ppm during ice ages, increasing to 280 – 300 ppm during warmer interglacials…
… On longer timescales, various proxy measurements have been used to attempt to determine atmospheric carbon dioxide levels millions of years in the past. These include boron and carbon isotope ratios in certain types of marine sediments, and the number of stomata observed on fossil plant leaves. While these measurements give much less precise estimates of carbon dioxide concentration than ice cores, there is evidence for very high CO2 volume concentrations between 200 and 150 myr BP of over 3,000 ppm and between 600 and 400 myr BP of over 6,000 ppm.”
Questions and meanderings:
According to para.1 above:
During Ice ages, does almost all plant life die out as a result of some combination of lower temperatures and CO2 levels that fell below 200ppm (para. 2 above)? If not, why not?
Does this (possible) loss of plant life have anything to do with rebounding of atmospheric CO2 levels as the world exits the Ice Age (in combination with other factors such as ocean exsolution)? Could this contribute to the observed asymmetry?
When all life on Earth comes to an end, will it be because CO2 permanently falls below 200ppm as it is permanently sequestered in carbonate rocks, hydrocarbons, coals, etc.?
Since life on Earth is likely to end due to a lack of CO2, should we be paying energy companies to burn fossil fuels to increase atmospheric CO2, instead of fining them due to the false belief that they cause global warming?
Could T.S. Eliot have been thinking about CO2 starvation when he wrote:
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Regards, Allan 🙂
P.S.
A possible explanation is that ice core CO2 is directionally correct but low in absolute terms due to CO2 diffusion.
Leaf stomata data shows much higher CO2 values – up to 60ppm higher for peaks and 30-40 ppm on average.
See Fig. 2 at http://www.pnas.org/content/99/19/12011.full.pdf
Allan MacRae says:
May 13, 2012 at 8:21 pm
Plant food for thought….
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The very low levels of CO2 in the ice cores vs plant need for CO2 is why I am inclined to believe Jaworowski and Segalstad.
If you want a real scare the low levels of CO2 combined with the Milanchovitch cycles are a heck of a lot scarier. (Cold water sucks up CO2) The overall temperatures for the Holecene show we are in an overall cooling trend and the geologic record shows that plants and other sequestering mechanisms are gradually using up all the available CO2 in the atmosphere.
As you said a world ending on a whimper.
Gail Combs says: May 13, 2012 at 8:56 pm
Jaworowski (2004 US Senate)
http://www.john-daly.com/zjiceco2.htm
Jaworowski, Z., T.V. Segalstad, and N. Ono (1992)
http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf
Thank you Gail – the Siple Curve is just more data fabrication, isn’t it.
God – everywhere you look in climate science you find another great steaming pile of BS.