German Right Demands Climate Policy Shift

Cost in cents per kilowatt/hour

Take a look at this recently published article: https://stopthesethings.com/2017/06/06/greens-founder-calls-germanys-renewables-policy-an-economic-social-and-ecological-disaster/

The weakness of green energy is that, given today’s technology, green generation methods cannot produce their like replacements.

The graph plots the relationship between installed capacity and the price of electricity and perfectly reasonably shows the relationship to be the more you have, the more you pay. It doesn’t aim to show the previous costs, but be our guest.
The important point is that the cluster of countries at the lower left use more traditional means to keep their citizens from dying of hypothermia in winter – mostly coal and don’t charge them a fortune since many of those nations are still emerging from a dictatorship of the kind the climate alarmist community would lik to impose on them again and they can’t afford another bout of collective insanity.
I’d love to see a graph of the actual gap between installed capacity and actual delivered power by country. That probably would be a real eye-roller.

These two points are not outliers.
Remove them, run the regression analysis and you will get a straight line with the same slope and same R squared value.
It is a lovely graph and perfectly legitimate. No /s here.

below is the way I try and sum it all up:
During that time, the world had spent trillions of dollars to subsidize solar and wind power and batteries, yet their combined usage never exceeded 1% of the worlds energy needs. Solar, wind, and batteries have been around for about 80 years, progressing all the time. But, do you really think solar and wind are a viable energy source if they can’t compete by now, even with huge government subsidies? It is also a double whammy because they are wasting wealth (as explained in the next paragraph) and reducing something good, C02 plant food.
You will read articles and reports of low priced solar and wind energy. These reports are not honest and are not adding in all costs of solar and wind when compared to fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydroelectric. Yes, the sun is free and wind is free, but the cost of manufacturing solar and wind plants, the process of changing the sun and wind into energy, the limited time the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, all the problems solar and wind cause to the grid, and many other reasons, a few mentioned below, make solar and wind very expensive, especially when you take into account government subsidies at all levels costing taxpayers. Solar and wind are not concentrated and are weak energy sources. Only about 15% of the solar and wind energy is turned into electrical energy (loss of efficiency and it isn’t sunny or windy 100% of the time), and sometimes solar and wind do not produce energy for days at a time. Solar and wind only produce when available, not when needed. But we need electricity 100% of the time. When they are making comparisons to fossil fuels, often numbers are used as if solar and wind are running 100% of the time without back up, which doesn’t happen. Either expensive batteries are needed, and / or more reliable energy sources (like fossil fuels) are needed as a backup. An extremely wasteful endeavor. In other words, for every extra solar and wind farm, an extra fossil fuel generation plant, and a battery plant needs to be built as back up, most of the time. Ie; two or three plants required verses just one, when you start with solar and wind. With solar and wind, it is not easy to forecast the exact wind speed and gusts, and cloud cover every moment of every day, causing unpredictable erratic interruptions that can destabilize and can crash the grid, requiring all other sources to compensate and synchronize for the complications. Almost always left off of the comparison is the extra cost to build transmission lines that need to be wider and sturdier. It is very expensive to start and stop fossil fuel backup plants to cover for these erratic interruptions. You will often see fossil fuel costs compared using the expensive stop and start prices, because many governments now are requiring solar and wind to have first priority. A huge hidden subsidy for solar and wind, because it forces higher costs on the fossil fuel backups. Most of the world is not windy enough. Or the wind gusts too much and puts surge strain stress on the equipment. Or it is too cloudy or not sunny enough during certain seasons of the year. Solar and wind may work optimally a few hours a day, and sometimes not for days at a time. Solar and wind don’t work below freezing. Solar loses efficiency as it gets hot. Solar and wind farms lose efficiency each and every year. But comparisons are made to fossil fuels when solar and wind are working full time, at optimal levels, optimal locations, optimal conditions, and the plant is new. Fossil fuels plants work optimal almost all the time in almost all locations and in almost all conditions and for many years. Solar and wind farms take up a huge land foot print for how little energy they actually produce, but land prices are not taken into account when comparing to fossil fuel plants. For example, to power Singapore without fossil backup, you would need an area tiled with solar panels 13 times the size of Singapore. Fossil fuel plants only take up a very small footprint. You can build solar and wind plants in the deserts where land is affordable, but then you have the extra costs of long and extra sturdier transmission lines, loss in power over the longer transmission lines, extra costs of workers needing to drive long distances to work, and windblown sand damage, haze, humidity, and heat which reduces optimal energy production, extra maintenance costs to constantly keep blades, turbines and panels clean and repaired after sand, tornedo, hail storms, and bird droppings. Large solar and wind farms cause despoiling to landscapes, kills plants, trees, grass, and kill birds and wild life by the thousands which is left off cost comparisons to fossil fuels. A large portion of the cost of solar and wind farms is up front, expecting to get a return in many years down the road, but it rarely works out that way, and often new and improved technologies are discovered. The upfront expenditures, end up being a waste and obsolete, but still paid for by taxpayers. The energy consumed to design, manufacture, install, maintain, administer, build and fortify renewables power plants, usually exceed the total energy they produce during their entire lifetime (without tax and rate payer assistance). Solar and wind are not very “green” or are not “renewable” from the perspective that they use large quantities of rare elements and millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, and fiberglass, and many toxic chemicals, some nasty stuff, that are not biodegradable – that use large amounts of fossil fuels to mine, purify, and construct. And when solar farms and wind mills become obsolete and are thus decommissioned, you can’t recycle a good portion of the components. Thus, you are left with some nasty toxic none biodegradable externalities never included in cost comparisons for solar and wind. The propaganda calls these power sources “green” and “renewable?” Often the C02 produced in manufacturing the solar and wind farms is more than the C02 “saved” during the lifetime of the “renewable” plant. If solar cells where increased just 100 times in the US, it would bankrupt the government. Germany tried to go mostly with solar and wind, and thus their electric prices skyrocketed 3 to 4 times as expensive to get to just 11.1% usage. On top of that, German tax payers were burdened with huge subsidy bills. South Australia did the same thing and there has been five black outs in the last six months alone, as well as skyrocketing electricity prices. And this is on top of huge subsidies to solar and wind farms, paid for by the tax payers as well as the rate payers. And we, in California, are talking about 50% solar and wind usage for the future? What do you think our electricity prices and government subsidies will need to be? The propaganda is constantly telling us that solar, wind, and batteries are almost affordable enough, that silicon prices are dropping fast and a breakthrough in batteries are almost here. But they don’t tell you that most other components are going up in price because the price of the rare elements are increasing. If silicon dropped to free, solar still would not be close to competitive. Granted silicon lasts a long time, but most of the other components degrade very fast, especially open to the elements, unlike fossil fuels and nuclear and hydro-electric that have double the useful life, and maybe triple or quadruple then most batteries (usually left off cost comparisons) and are not nearly as exposed to the elements. Almost all vendors in the supply chain for solar and wind, from the beginning to the end of the manufacturing process, get tax credits, exemptions, rebates, subsidies, cheap guaranteed low or no interest rate loans, and government grants to the manufactures. Thus, solar and wind appear way less expensive than they really are because each supplier can charge way below market prices because they are being subsidized in so many ways. Where fossil fuels have the extra costs of burdensome regulations, tariffs, fines, taxes, and litigation costs by organizations like the Sierra Club. If there was an even playing field, solar and wind wouldn’t even be close to competitive. If you look at direct subsidies, fossil fuels get only about $0.02 per megawatt hour of subsidies (almost nothing), versus $25 per megawatt hour for wind & $129 per megawatt hour for solar. Over 1,000 to 5,000 times as much direct subsidy for wind and solar than for fossil fuel energy sources per megawatt hour of power produced, when you combine everything. In other words, if you got rid of government’s meddling, solar and wind wouldn’t even be closely competitive 99.9% of the time. Without tax p
ayer held and government force, solar and wind would just be used in niche applications. Home and business roof top solar are even worse when it comes to total net efficiency without government, tax payer, and non-solar utility user’s subsidies. Taxpayer subsidies shift the costs from consumers to taxpayers. When taxpayers subsidize the build out of solar and wind power plants, they are destroying wealth. Nuclear and hydro electric energy do not give off C02, but the green movement tries to ban and get rid of them? If manmade CO2 emissions were a real threat, nuclear power and hydro would be the only viable option. But most in the green movement want to ban them also. Solution: let energy sources compete on a fair / even playing field that doesn’t cost the tax payers or rate payers. Too many solar and wind companies are filling for bankruptcy because the economics don’t work, Coal, nuclear, and gas companies are filing for bankruptcy because the regulations don’t work. Viable industries are being bankrupted to promote non-viable industries – the regulation state at its worst. Solar and wind are wealth destroying technologies. Through history, man has constantly progressed to more dense energy sources. Now this climate change movement is trying to push us backwards to less dense energy sources that don’t work as well. Most people don’t realize that newer modern fossil fuel plants give off almost no real pollutants, just C02, unlike years ago.
sorry this was so long.
[there’s this FANTASTIC NEW INVENTION ….it’s called a PARAGRAPH. Try it sometime. -mod]