Pursuant to my earlier story today about the article in Spiegel, Bjørn Lomborg writes on his Facebook page:
Real German electricity prices for households have increased 61% since 2000. One quarter of household costs now stems directly from renewable energy. Also, the increase is *not* because of increasing production costs (which have actually slightly declined since 1978).
The increase is due to dramatically increasing taxes, most noticeably from the Renewable Energy Act (EEG). In 2013 the EEG will increase 50% to 6.28 euro-cent (5.28 cents plus 19% VAT).
In June 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel famously promised to keep EEG prices stable, but this promise has now clearly been broken. The German household will pay 24% of its electricity bill to renewables.
Perhaps this is why more people are stealing wood from German forests (http://bit.ly/VMllfs) and likely why up to 800,000 people can’t pay their electricity bills (http://bit.ly/XcK7nv). Some estimates show costs could escalate to €300 billion by 2030 (http://bit.ly/Qab1Hr).
Notice, that industry still pays much less and about the same as it paid in 1978.
Data from OECD (prices http://bit.ly/10IXX5J, with 2012 estimated from first two quarters from IEA, and adjusted with German Consumer Price Index (MEI), http://bit.ly/UkWaj7)
Real German electricity prices for households have increased 61% since 2000. One quarter of household costs now stems directly from renewable energy.
===========================================================
Maybe this is why Germans are now burning so much wood for home heat, as Donna Laframboise observes.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Hey they are rich and can afford it.
The US pays for their defense and foots the bill for their medical care so that disposable income needs to be spent somehow.
The children are suffering, but it is “for the children.”
I am sure Barbara Boxer and Obama agree 61% is not enough.
As Green party members will probably feature strongly on the list of Germans who benefit from FITs from solar panels, I don’t expect the ruling coalition will be in any hurry to change things.
They voted for it, let them enjoy it now they’ve got it.
The real kicker here isn’t residential costs, although those are significant. The biggest user of electricity is always heavy industry. When industry costs go up, their products become less competitive with those from other nations which have much cheaper energy costs. (like China) This translates into a deteriorating balance of trade and higher unemployment, right at the time that their economy is *supposed* to be recovering. And since the German economy depends *heavily* on exports, this is how the “Green Dream” can slowly but surely sink an entire economy.
They are putting their money where their mouth has been. And they’re not liking it at all, considering recent concerns from their industry, which says they’re being unable to pay the power bill. Just wait – stay green, and die shivering in the night.
Soon stealing wood isn’t going to help either because beginning next year, if I’m not mistaken, German environmental authorities are going to impose strict regulations to limit heating by burning wood (in order to cut back on aerosol emissions). Once a a year a chimney sweeper comes around and inspects your chimney to make sure you’re not polluting too much. DirkH probably can tell you much more about this.
German news media must be as corrupt as American ones. Isn’t Merkel due for re-election in the near future?
If recent articles here on carbon soot are correct, this just goes to show that the ‘law of unintended consequences’ will always make fools of the busybodies of this world.
We’re heading in the same direction here in the UK and will end up just as impoverished, if our current politicians have their way. Pensioners can barely afford to heat their homes as it is.
Obama said electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket and this proves him right. Problem is, this increase is just the beginning–wait until everything is converted over to renewables. As such, it will be difficult to turn the current decline in world GDP around:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/01/focus-world-gdp
Here in the UK our energy prices are sky high. I have taken advantage of an offer from Scottish Power to freeze my gas and electricity prices until January 2015 because of this idiotic policy of our current/last governments of subsidising renewable energy. It is not only domestic energy that is expensive; petrol, diesel and air fares are heavily taxed too.
We are getting clobbered by lies and mis-information, with the whole hearted support of our governments who rake in extra tax. Most people in Germany and here don’t know that these are EU targets and they must be adhered to.
Hopefully in 2015 David Cameron will take us out of the EU; whether taxes and subsidies will fall though is a different matter!
Anthony-I am working on a translation from German of Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society work to try to gain a political vision for Post-Berlin Wall Europe and the West generally. Stanford Press published the translation in 1994 so they thought it mattered. In it Beck lays out the political vision that lays out CAGW to a T. Even though at the time global warming was just speculation as book acknowledges.
Anyway in the theory of a new society being laid out, Beck says that ecology will now play the role in generating the destabilizing crisis of the Late Capitalism period that Marx had attributed to Capitalism itself. Which is certainly a good reason for all the hype and modelling whatever the facts.
And also why these Ecological views became so entrenched in Germany so long ago. Beck is in turn citing other Germans whose essays probably have not independently been translated into English.
REPLY: Looking forward to seeing that. – Anthony
And here in the UK we’re copying them
http://www.thegwpf.org/green-lobby-promotes-renewable-energy-carbon-tax-tackle-fuel-poverty/
“Green Lobby Promotes Renewable Energy & Carbon Tax To Tackle Fuel Poverty”
What a load of garbage Europeans have been sold. Is it any wonder so many European countries are having financial trouble. Here in the good old USA our president in his eminent wisdom wants to follow the European example.
Last Year, there were 600000 people, who no longer could pay their electrity bills. it was some days ago in the newspapers here in Germany that many people steal wood in the forests to heat their homes. What a shame.
The FIT cross subsidy is 20 bn EUR a year (about 26 bn USD).
Or 250 EUR/yr per capita extra cost caused by renewables.
A third of electricity goes to private households, a third to public sector / Infrastructure , a third to industry / commerce.
So every German pays about 80 EUR / yr via his electricity bill, 80 EUR via taxes and 80 EUR via increased prices. (On average. Parents pay for their kids.)
This way, the real cost is well disguised.
German media never show this simple calculation and never mention the yearly cross subsidy sum (which grows at the moment by 4 bn EUR a year).
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/tree-theft-on-the-rise-in-germany-as-heating-costs-increase-a-878013.html
Germany’s Renters Association estimates the heating costs will go up 22 percent this winter alone. A side effect is an increasing number of people turning to wood-burning stoves for warmth. Germans bought 400,000 such stoves in 2011, the German magazine FOCUS reported this week. It marks the continuation of a trend: The number of Germans buying heating devices that burn wood and coal has grown steadily since 2005, according to consumer research company GfK Group.
As for Industry paying the same as in 1978, here’s a graphic:
http://www.energieagentur.nrw.de/infografik/grafik.asp?RubrikID=3166
Notice that before 2000 industry electricity prices went down quite a lot; and are rising since 2000, the FIT was introduced in 1999. Yes, they are in real terms back to 1978 levels BUT they HAVE been affected by the introduction of the FIT.
These days larger companies can get an exemption when they can show that they compete internationally. So that dampens it, but AFAIK only for large companies, not your mom-and-dad print shop. Most German companies are “Mittelstand”, small companies of which most don’t compete internationally so they have to pay the FIT cross subsidy.
Fuel poverty, lowered living standards, destruction of forests, and increased pollution from soot and consequent negative health effects are but small prices to pay for “saving the planet”. I mean, where are Lomborg’s priorities? /sarc
Rhoda R says:
January 23, 2013 at 10:00 am
“German news media must be as corrupt as American ones. Isn’t Merkel due for re-election in the near future?”
A lot of German journalists / publishers go to the Bilderberg meetings; like your media people are members of the CFR.
Not to report but to get their orders.
“Notice, that industry still pays much less and about the same as it paid in 1978.”
That’s part of german economic strength, actually. Should industry pay the same price as households, they’d need to increase their product prices which would make german households to pay for that electricity anyway, just the other way around. Plus they’d become less competitive on international scale.
So which is better, to have expensive electricity and cheap products, or slightly less expensive electricity, expensive products, and bankrupt industry?
… cheap electricity and products, of course. Except that doesn’t go well with “renewables”.
*sigh* Seriously? How were those comments worth deleting? I was just requesting the links remove the annoying click through facebook redirectors, and that the broken HTML be fixed. And I pasted a regex for cleaning up all the facebook links at once. Admittedly commenting on the format rather than the substance, but still.
Here’s the regex, once again:
%s@ur momisugly<a href=”http://www.facebook.com[^>]*>\([^<]*bit.ly[^<]*\)</a>@ur momisugly<a href=”\1″>\1</a>@ur momisugly
Oh, and in some browsers the broken HTML means the story only partially displays.
[Reply: Don’t think W.P. support reg. expressions. Edited broken bits by hand to fix. Not all Mods can edit articles, BTW. I think it’s fixed now. -ModE]
In Greece (December, 2011):
Rise in Use of Firewood to Heat Homes Causing Deforestation
http://greece.greekreporter.com/2011/12/23/rise-in-use-of-firewood-to-heat-homes-causing-deforestation/
@Bill Parsons – if you want to see what the effect of energy prices out of reach of the average person accomplishes, look at Haiti versus Dominican Republic. Satellite pictures are enough.
@Dirkh – Our media saves money on travel – they just go to white house press briefings for their marching orders.
the bureaucacy and utility companies cannot be blamed as they are “only following orders”