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.
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Maybe this is why Germans are now burning so much wood for home heat, as Donna Laframboise observes.
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@roger Knights:
Add California to the list of Third World Wannabe states too. Or electricity double what it as a couple of years back, now headed for a triple, with a 5x on the future rate schedule Real Soon Now.
I’ve figured out it is cheaper to use gasoline in a Colman stove to heat my house.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/coleman-lantern-heat-cheaper/
But don’t know cost of gasoline / white gas / kerosene in Germany. (Coleman makes a kerosene lantern too. Yes, you could just use a kerosene heater, but this way you get ‘free light’ too! 😉
Alternatively, I can just leave my ‘whole house furnace’ running. It is on relatively cheap natural gas. Big waste to heat the whole house though. Oh well, might as well burn 5 times as much natural gas and not bother ‘conserving’ by using local electric heat in the bedroom…
BTW, I’ve got the parts to make a ‘poor man’s rocket stove’ (the cooking kind) on my patio. Cheaper to cook outdoors over a fire now too… “Progress” ?…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/beer-cans-will-save-the-world/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/camping-at-home-is-cheaper/
In essence, it is now considerably cheaper to use camping equipment in the yard for cooking than to use my All Electric Kitchen… (On the to do list: Install gas stove). And, as propane is even cheaper than gasoline, it is cheaper to use propane gas lanterns for combined heat and light in winter… Welcome to the 1800s. Next stop, 1640 !
It would be interesting to do the same thing for other energies. In the UK a few years ago under Gordon Brown household gas prices went up 6% in one year. Not because of “renewables” , FITs or anything similar but simply because they can get away with it. IIRC (privately owned) British Gas recorded a £5bn profit that year at just about the time they _raised_ prices.
There were mutterings about a windfall tax but finally they were allowed to keep thier ill-gotten gains since they agreed to give consumers “free advice” on how to save energy.
Real German electricity prices for households have increased 61% since 2000. One quarter of household costs now stems directly from renewable energy.
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Can’t imagine what an unreal German would look like.
But more seriously it appears that despite the fuss and bother here about wind and solar being expensive this constitutes evidence that they are not. Note the graph of production costs over time.
So the tax has gone up. This isolated piece of information is not much use without knowing how total taxes are trending. Or total household costs are trending.
Or understanding taxes might have to go up to cover loans to keep the EU afloat because Americans refuse to understand that mortgages have to be paid back.
LazyTeenager says:
January 24, 2013 at 4:21 am
And you can thank our ignorant government officials in the US who would rather joust at global warming windmills than realize giving mortgages to unqualified people is political fraud (buying votes for favors).
And they’d rather spend us over the economic cliff of disaster, which will happen in the next 5 years as sure as the sun comes up in the morning. (Adjusting the debt ceiling upward will do nothing except make our splat at the bottom that much bigger.)
I hope you’re all preparing for what’s coming.
@LazyTeenager says:
January 24, 2013 at 4:21 am
“But more seriously it appears that despite the fuss and bother here about wind and solar being expensive this constitutes evidence that they are not. Note the graph of production costs over time.”
What graph is that? Can’t find it on this page.. Link?
For all UK readers here, try writng to the Scotsman on this. It might have a relatively small Scottish readership but it has not kow-towed to the global watming theme. Indeed, it is one of the few UK newspapers that reported on 28gate. More publicity there might save us from the Salmond scurge…. Though I doubt it
@RockyRoad: You wrote: “Geologists believe the past is the key to the future. So applying that principle to your open-ended question, history has shown that economies collapse when the country has a debt to GDP ratio ranging from 90 to 100%. Greece is a more recent example.”
++++
Hey wait a minute: Our debt to GDP ratio is 106% now. we owe 16.5Trillion and GDP is 15.5Trillion. That’s 106.5%. Right???