European Power Plants Face Widespread Bankruptcies
Germany’s economics minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) wants to levy penalty payments onto coal plants if they produce CO2 emissions above a certain threshold. Against this plan intense resistance is growing in Germany: Within the Christian Democrat, within industry and – for especially dangerous for Gabriel – within the trade unions. The Christian Democrats (CDU) in particular are taking on Gabriel’s climate levy. And Merkel is allowing her party colleagues to assail him. Armin Laschet, the vice chairman of the Federal CDU, is accusing Gabriel of breaking the coalition agreement. –Jochen Gaugele , Martin Greive , Claudia Kade, Die Welt, 25 May 2015
The transition to renewable power generation is accelerating closures of coal and gas-fired power generation plants at a quicker rate than expected. According to UBS, policymakers may have to take measures to prevent widespread bankruptcies in the European electricity market. That’s the conclusions drawn by investment bank UBS, who have produced a report on the subject. According to their data, some 70 GW of coal and gas-fired power generation shut-downs have occurred in the last five years, and the pace is increasing, according to the analysis. –Diarmaid Williams, Power Engineering International, 11 May 2015
The world’s richest nations are unlikely to reach a deal to phase out subsidies for coal exports at talks in June, reducing the chances of a new global climate change agreement at a U.N. conference in Paris, officials and campaigners say. One European Union official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the EU hoped to “nudge forwards” the debate, but that within the EU, Germany was an obstacle, while Japan was the main opponent in the OECD as a whole. –Barbara Lewis and Susanna Twidale, Reuters, 27 May 2015
To many western environmentalists, who are determined to see a binding global deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the UN climate change conference in Paris later this year, India’s rising coal use is anathema. However, across a broad range of Delhi politicians and policymakers there is near unanimity. There is, they say, simply no possibility that at this stage in its development India will agree to any form of emissions cap, let alone a cut. — David Rose, The Guardian, 27 May 2015
The idea that India can set targets in Paris is completely ridiculous and unrealistic. It will not happen. This is a difficult concept for eco-fundamentalists, and I say this as a guy who is considered in India to be very green. Copenhagen failed because of climate evangelism. I was sitting for days with Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Angela Merkel, Barack Obama and Sarkozy. It was absolutely bizarre. It failed because of an excess of evangelical zeal, of which Brown was the chief proponent. Even with the most aggressive strategy on nuclear, wind, hydro and solar, coal will still provide 55% of electricity consumption by 2030, which means coal consumption will be 2.5 or three times higher than at present. –Jairam Ramesh, India’s former environment minister, The Guardian, 27 May 2015
Belgium’s Zaventem international airport suffered a power cut triggered by a power surge yesterday which led to closure of the entire Belgian airspace:
http://news.yahoo.com/belgian-airports-standstill-air-traffic-failure-092103852.html
Apparently the initiating power surge was so strong that it disabled the backup diesel generators which were supposed to protect against power cuts but in this case were unable to prevent total power loss from the Belgocontrol air traffic control centre.
It’s intriguing to speculate whether wind power played any role in this. Belgium, where I live, is naively green and people I speak to see no problem, for instance, in replacing the country’s nuclear power station with windmills.
From this article it is clear that Zaventem airport were not without warning that such a power cut could threaten the airport’s operation:
http://www.brusselsairport.be/en/mediaroom/news/52180/
I didn’t notice the supposed crisis exaggeratedly used in the title in the article. Who’s in crisis? Is somebody on a crash cart or in intensive care?
I know, I didn’t notice the world burning up, or continents sinking into the sea, or weather being any more volatile or unpredictable then it has been for centuries. I mean you are right there is absolutely no global warming “crisis”.
Alx
Yes, of course you “didn’t notice the world burning up, or continents sinking into the sea, or weather being any more volatile or unpredictable then it has been for centuries” because none of those things – not one of them – is happening or has happened in the last 100 years.
Richard
It is all George Bushes fault! (Sarc)
In politics the truth is what the public believes. What is unfortunate is that the results diverge from optimum if the facts don’t support the narrative. Never the less through this lense the successful attack on science all make sense and the suboptimum results preordained.
Making informed decisions with the best results is the goal. Knowing that the decisions will lead to problems is actually an opportunity. Napoleon said something like ‘when your opponent is making an error, Dont interrupt him.’ If one combines these two thoughts with the Japanese saying that “if you can see three days into the future you will be rich for three thousand years. You will get my drift.
You knew that the negative results were inevitable so what precisely did you do to take advantage of your knowledge? Probably like me nothing….and so exactly what defines stupid?
A model capable of forecasting the duration of the impending Green Apocalypse will bring great riches to economic survivors.
Energy suppliers only need to “hibernate” for awhile.
I do quite a bit of business with a German company and they often complain how increased energy costs are hurting their business. Germany’s “green” movement has caused them to have one of the highest energy costs in the EU, which is creating HUGE problems for them.
Cheap, abundant and RELIABLE energy is such an integral part of any economy and when energy costs skyrocket and become unreliable, there are many direct and indirect negative consequences; many unforeseen.
Often such negative consequences are unintended and become multiplied as: unemployment rates increase, corporate profits are squeezed, production is stopped due to brownouts/blackouts, bank reserves decrease, entitlement payments increase, taxes increase to cover increased government expenditures, interest rates increase, trade deficits increase, competitiveness decreases, etc.
CAGW’s demise can’t happen soon enough… People’s lives, livelihoods and living standards are being destroyed for absolutely NO reason whatsoever…
How long with this CAGW destruction continue?
Given that the EU commission is increasingly determining the policies , including those of energy , of the individual nations , the post of EU Commissioner of Energy and his/her abilities must be of significance.
The relevant person at present, I think, is a German , Gunter Oettinger , a lawyer and economist by training . It is not encouraging to read this in his Wiki profile :
“In a leaked diplomatic cable from the United States Embassy entitled “Lame Duck German Governor Kicked Upstairs as New Energy Commissioner in Brussels,” U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission in Germany, Greg Delawie notes: “Chancellor Angela Merkel nominated Baden-Wuerttemberg (BW) Minister President Guenther Oettinger as EU Energy Commissioner primarily to remove an unloved lame duck from an important CDU bastion”. Delawie’s cable further states: “Oettinger is noted for a lackluster public speaking-style, and some commentators have asserted that Merkel, who has often stood out at EU meetings, wanted to appoint a German Commissioner who would not outshine her!” ”
Europe needs someone with better credentials , and preferably an industrial or engineering background, in this essential role, surely?
I will put my neck on the block and raise my hands.
I see in 15 years steam cars/Stirling prime mover with 20,000 mile range on one charge.
Most house holds with their own 30kwatt heating and hot water unit, recharge for £50 every six month.
I believe that we are now on the cusp of an energy freedom.
I put my money where my mouth will be £1,000 if not.
Well if you have to bet, a better way is to invest your money instead. Imagine if you had predicted the cell phone revolution, or internet and had invested accordingly.
A word of caution energy is free, getting it into a system or state where it is usable is not.
Yes and I missed plastic double glazing too.
But I did not allude to free energy.
But more available energy.
Highly unlikely. Fun to dream, though.
Twobob commented :
“I see in 15 years steam cars/Stirling prime mover with 20,000 mile range on one charge.
Most house holds with their own 30kwatt heating and hot water unit, recharge for £50 every six month.
I believe that we are now on the cusp of an energy freedom.”
Except there won’t be any industry to build them nor will anyone be able to afford them since everyone will be out of work. Sanity requires technological improvements precede what they are replacing.
Zero must be looking at Germany thinking, “there, with the grace of I, goes us”.
Spain is another case in point. Below are summarized highlights from this article.
http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/05/01/Solar-Dreams/
In 2004 Spain offered generous subsidies for solar electricity. It guaranteed 25-year-long profitable returns of 20% for solar entrepreneurs. Unsurprisingly 25 years of guaranteed profits did spur a lot of solar development, investment and growth. Factories making silicon wafers and/or assembling modules and solar installations popped up like wild weeds across the nation.
But then reality interfered with glassy eyed solar dreams. The guaranteed easy money encouraged poor practices such installations of poor quality, design and locations. The demand for solar components became so huge that importing solar components took over and local manufacturing fizzled. The hammer was when the debt-heavy government realized it could no longer afford extravagant profit guarantees and rolled back subsidies. Soon after came laid off workers and 44,000 of the nation’s 57,900 installations on the verge of bankruptcy. And of course it disrupted their most reliable source of electricity; fossil fuel and nuclear could not do well in a market where your competitors were guaranteed 20% profit regardless of market conditions or their performance.
In the end analysis showed the 57,900 installations in Spain solar offered 2.4 to 1 better return than biofuels. Which sounds good until you consider oil provides 30 to 1 return.
I traveled by train from north to south one year and subsequently from west to east in Germany in a later year in summer time quite recently
On both trips i saw windmills in vast arrays spanning the landscape and disappearing into the distance.
On both occasions the distinguishing feature was the listless still giant arms of all the mills.
I wondered at the installed capital cost embedded in this vast display and also wondered how many hours did they actually turn sufficiently to drive turbines to produce power and at what unit cost
the hidden problem with turbines is the problem with premature failure due to intermittent operation. machines last much longer when they run at constant speed. stop and go driving is much harder on a car than constant highway miles. the same with turbines. a machine that will run 100 thousand hours between failures in constant operation may do only 10 thousand hours in intermittent operation.
Our new UK Government turned off the fuel tax accumulator, the price fell and inflation dropped down to a big fat zero percent. Coincidence is not causation, but if you wanted low inflation then cutting the tax on everything sounds like a good place to start. We will be sold down the Suwannee at Paris but we have a referendum coming where we can vote hundreds of MEP’s out of a job. #RevengeIsSweet
Coal is causing the largest migration in human history. By far the largest migration. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of people are migrating in China, with hundreds of millions more set to migrate in India.
This migration is not a result of Climate Change. It is the cause of Climate Change, the result of Industrialization and wealth creation. These people are migrating out of poverty and into wealth. Climate Change is the result of industrialization, that lifts people out of poverty.
The UN in its misguided zeal to end Climate Change would end this migration to industrialization, this migration to wealth, condemning hundreds of millions to continued poverty.
The UN has cause and effect backwards. The IPCC says that Climate Change causes poverty. But this is not the case. Poverty is causing Climate Change, as people seek to end poverty they have changed the Climate. The UN policies seek to end Climate Change by keeping the poor in poverty.
ferdberple commented:
“This migration is not a result of Climate Change. It is the cause of Climate Change, the result of Industrialization and wealth creation. These people are migrating out of poverty and into wealth. Climate Change is the result of industrialization, that lifts people out of poverty.”
This is the stated goal of the UN and the ‘Climate Change’ meme….wealth redistribution. It will lift millions of people out of poverty with other people’s assets and put billions of them into poverty to make everyone equal.
Mr. Photon you can freely comment on anything you like including the Jews. But the post is about Germany not the Jews. Don’t let that stop you dear boy. What was in my comment that insulted your politically correct sensibility?
You do realize your post was after Max’s…..
I comment as an American of mostly German descent, who has a feeling of warm kinship with the German people.
Germany today is a nation still sick with war-guilt from the acknowledged atrocities of the Nazi era. And Germans, I believe, feel within themselves national characteristics that contributed to the rise of Nazism and the horrors that resulted. Germans, like the Confucian cultures of the Orient, have a deep, perhaps instinctive respect for and willingness to submit to authority. They also have some claim to a fair tendency to genius (witness the many scientific and philosophic contributions of Germans). And they have a tendency toward a kind of passionate religiosity that is not specific to any particular religion.
So Germany is rich soil for certain extremes. The 30-year War of the late middle ages is a good example. Germans of two different religious strains of Christianity (and surely Christianity, if any religion, should have been a “religion of peace”, given the teachings of Jesus) fought a brutal war over their beliefs that is right up there with the horrors of ISIS and the Shia extremists in the Middle East.
Nazism spoke to the same part of the German national character that Christian religious extremism did in the Middle Ages. And as they themselves suffered horribly from Nazi “solutions” and wars, the German people are filled with a simultaneously with a regretful collective sense of guilt and an inchoate fear that somehow they might do it all over again.
Mix the guilt in with modern science and technology and splash it onto a canvas soaked in post-Christian Nihilism and you could get a nation ready for, even relishing, the prospect of self-destruction as a kind of zealous penance. With the false intellectual veneer of Post Normal Scientism, Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is a perfect vehicle for the German psyche of today. Germany is destroying itself by embracing and acting upon, with religious zeal, false “scientific” narratives about both nuclear energy and carbon-based energy—-and feeling good about it.
After all, the Germans are doing this “for the good of humanity” and to “save the Earth”. As in the past, Germans will take themselves far down a romantic course of self-destruction before they come to their senses. My best hope is that it will be very cold in Europe the next few years, and doubts will creep in and help the Germans escape this strange delusion.
You are absolutely right! About 15% are strong believers, another 20% lukewarmers in this pseudoreligious earth-saving nonsense and feel themselves to be “Bettermen” in the neglect of reason and national interests.(Huh, the N-word!—national—Don’t use it! Only Nazis do!)
Paradoxically these “Prophets of CAGW ” control the media in a way, that reminds of the “Völkischer Beobachter”, but now in a sort of voluntarily “Gleichschaltung” (means:forced identical reporting/covering)!
Opponents and sceptics are “Deniers” in a way quite like “Holocaust Deniers”, absolutely right wing at least!
But the main things are the unbelievably high subsidies as well as the priority feed for renewables!
Thus making many people “eco-profiteers”!(though windmills are absolutely not “eco”) Even this reminds me of some conditions 80 years ago, betrayed and cowed the most, and a lot seduced by greed and ideology!
I have to congratulate Mr. Steiner for the sudden grasp of the English language after his previous comment.
That said, ……I sure as hell ain’t going there.
Nearly all mainstream media in Germany are strongly influenced/controlled by green leftist who “believe” in CAGW and their answer to this “challenge” is “Klimaschutz” (Climate Protection).
If one argues, that Germanys influence on global CO2 concentration is ~ 0,00006%, (global CO2: 0,04%, 5% anthropogen,~3% german part) no one will listen!
Nowhere in the mainstream media, paper or TV, people are told the fact, that “Klimaschutz” therefore is just nonsense! Besides,most laymen do not understand, that without buffer and storage, electricity from windmills is useless wriggle-current! And, last not least, the german minister for energy,economy and industry,S.Gabriel, a former teacher for history and german language,who has to deal with the problems, gave this statement in an interwiev with “Stern” magazine some years ago:
“…. nuclear plants produce electricity an not heat! ” (when asked about using combined heat and power).
Any Questions left?
“If one argues, that Germanys influence on global CO2 concentration is ~ 0,00006%, (global CO2: 0,04%, 5% anthropogen,~3% german part) no one will listen!”
True. Reason is the difference of concepts in classic Anglo-American “responsibility ethics” and german Kantian “Gesinnungsethik” or “Intention Ethics”. The latter having been invented to give the Prussian soldier an “ideal” he can fight for, as the problem of the day was that armies frequently disbanded having been overcome by “imagination” (i.e. they were able to picture their own personal demise on the battlefield) – so Kant / Hegel as Prussian functionnaires had to fight the war against IMAGINATION to instill Prussian discipline on the battlefield.
This still existing tool is these days being used by the German red-green leaders to push through their local Agenda 21 (dissolving nations, esp Germany in this case, to make it part of the EU-wide and later worldwide socialist technocracy).
This disciplinary philosophical tool is Germany’s strength as well as its weakness: It has enabled the rulers to mobilize the strength of Germany for various purposes (for instance, Bismarck’s industrialization efforts from 1870 to end of 19th century), but it also blinds the victims – it robs them of their IMAGINATION (which it was designed to do). A kind of Hobbesian Leviathan, so it is up to the individual to step out of this mass.
+1
Interesting analysis.
“The best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it” (and enforce it in a uniform manner)
Maybe the only way to completely get rid of bad policy is to accept it and let the outcome shine through the PR lies.
Thank you, Germany, for accepting/embracing and implementing the bad policy; I hope people in my neck of the world will learn from your example.
The green morons in Germany really believe, they would lead by example!
Though this be madness,
yet there is method in’t!
It is interesting to see that Germany, always considered to be greener than green, is now revealing itself to have an ever growing number of high profile citizens prepared to speak out against the Merkel green agenda.
They know the future of Germany is at stake and they have come to realise that the flawed global warming agenda has been a mechanism by which the arrogant, ambitious and unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism has taken over and is eroding democracy, freedom, the market economy and prosperity in Germany.
It seems that Germany’s big corporations are now at a crossroad. If the green agenda continues unabated, they must decide whether to remain in Germany, only to suffer the consequences, or relocate to other jurisdictions that are industry and business friendly allowing future growth potential.
When all Europeans wake up to reality, and see cost of CO2 emission reductions on the scale the politicians have decided for them, they will ask: How many degrees centigrade will the Globe cool or not warm, as a result of this?
They will ask: Has the US commited to the same degree of reductions, has China, has India, has Japan, has Russia? No. So Europeans cannot hope that total CO2 emissions Globally will decline as a result of their sacrifice.
Then they will start to investigate if CO2 really can be called a greenhouse gas. The latest data show that more CO2 does NOT cause a warming of the globe. Looking at the records from 1870 until 2015, there really is no pattern showing that when CO2 increases, temperature goes up. It can rise, it can fall, and it can, as seen the last 18+ years, remain in stasis.
Europeans will discover that the persons and institutions that have been set to record and document CO2 versus temperature have done so, for a very great part through cheating. They have falsified the temperature record and distorted it to fit an erronous idea, through homogenization, changing past recorded temperatures, and omitting data from weather stations that do not show warming.
When You have to pay for something, You will quickly start to ask what Your money goes to. So when push comes to show, Europe also, as the rest of the world, reject the stupid idea that we can cause catastrophic climate change by emitting a little CO2 to the air.
And hopefully that will be the end of the pseudo science of CO2 warming.