Reposted from The No Tricks Zone
By P Gosselin on 16. September 2020
You would think that with all the added wind and solar energy in Germany, along with all the conventional power plants on standby, all totaling up to huge unneeded capacity, there would be no need to import any power at all. Well, think again.
The German epochtimes.de here reports that German imports of electricity in fact: “rose by 43.3 percent to 25.7 billion kilowatt hours in the first half of 2020 compared with the first half of 2019.”
The epochtimes.de explains further:
One reason for this was the declining share of domestic feed-in from base-load-capable, mostly conventionally operated power plants, which mainly use coal, nuclear energy and natural gas. As a result, electricity was imported to cover the demand for electricity, especially when there was no wind or darkness. The main import country for electricity was France with 8.7 billion kilowatt hours.
Overall, however, more electricity was still exported from Germany.”
What the article does not mention, however, is the reason for the rise in export from Germany. On windy and sunshine-plenty days, Germany produces more electricity than needed, and so is forced to dump the excess power into neighboring foreign markets – often at negative prices. The negative prices, in combination with the mandatory feed-in tariffs and excess production capacity, all means higher costs for consumers.
Little wonder that at close to 35 US cents per kwh, Germany’s electricity prices are among the highest in the world.
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Australia has nothing on Canada. We have the most “woke” government in a history, headed by the man-child Justin Trudeau, under the sway of the “enlightened” Gerald Butts, a former head of the WWF. Despite the pandemic shuttering millions of jobs, he forged ahead with raising the Carbon Tax (called the Federal Fuel Tax on my natural gas bill) from CAD10.00 to CAD20.00 per ton of CO on April 1 of this year, and rising every year until its CAD50.00 per ton. For reference, I live in Alberta, where winters last 7 months of the year, and temps regularly drop to -27 degrees C. That’s right, the coldest country in the world, and they tax our heating fuel. Globalist puppets at the helm, and of course guided by their conscience and “superior” virtue. There will come a reckoning, and these misguided souls will need to repay their foolishness big time.
“temps regularly drop to -27 degrees C”
True statement, but -27 C is more like the average night time temperature from mid Dec to mid Feb when skies are clear, and colder further north in Fort Mac. More like -40 overnight regularly under a dome of high pressure (in Celsius or Fahrenheit) and usually every winter it hits -40 many successive nights and that is just normal. I had a propane truck back in the 90’s, and the propane totally froze up around -42 or so. Then the starter went after I switched back to gasoline, and was changing the starter under the truck when it officially hit -44 at the airport south of town. So cold, the copper battery wire to the starter snapped in half trying to hook it back up. With a wind, then it feels really, really cold and just minutes to live if not having been prepared. To charge a carbon tax for the necessity of keeping your family warm, and tell you to use less nat gas to stay warm is criminal. Did I ever tell you how much I dread winter?
That why I move to Arizona, Most of my life was spent in Northern Minnesota and North Dakota, I have lived through -50 F (-45 C) and 72 hours where is never got above -22 F (- 30 C0, nope I will take 116 F (46.6 C) over that any day of the week.
One should never be so flippantly dismissive of solar energy. I am lucky (or smart) enough to live in British Columbia, where we have abundant benefit from solar power. The sun evaporates the water, sets up weather patterns that moves it over to and drops it as rain and snow on high mountains. We built batteries (called ‘reservoirs’ here) to store the energy to be used when (and where, considering that the legislature uses quite a bit) the sun don’t shine or the rain don’t fall. All it requires is some gravel and limestone, no mining of rare earths by the little children in Congo.
As an added perk–our spillways don’t crumble when used!
BC has such magnificently elevated perched water that a turbine the size of a domestic washing machine will produce 100MW of electric power. Sadly not many places on earth can match that.
Certainly agreed–and I realize that tectonics plus Climate Change–the coming and going of the Pleistocene–made it that way.
That said, I think man’s future is in nuclear energy as the entire universe (as we presently understand it) consists of nothing but the stuff manifested in many forms. Just think, some 200 billion nuclear fusion/fission reactors make up the Milky Way, with one so close that you can hold your hand up and feel the heat from it–at 93 million miles away.
Every now and again my mind boggles at just how powerful that reactor is. And that is only a small star!
Yes that works well, trying to collect it with solar panel is a fools errand. I cannot make solar pay for me in Arizona, how it suppose to work anywhere else.
Please note that unless Germany stopped paying for their Green New Deal by taxation on some but not all consumers, what they are doing is 100%, cristal clear, plainly illegal. It’s the most blatant illegality there is!
In Europe, we have “free and fair trade” which means that you don’t get to pay your producers to lower their prices and take over foreign markets; you can’t (with exceptions) hide the giveaway with a tax that applies to just some corporations in a discretionary way, to help some friends. You can’t have small consumers that pay a full price, with taxes, and large consumers that pay a “market” “price”, with no taxes, when the taxes make up the difference between the “PRICE” and the producing COST.
Germany has been allowed to ignore the MOST FUNDAMENTAL EUROPEAN LAW since the beginning of their green thing. Nobody talks about it!
Car manufacturing in Europe is moving to places like Slovakia. Cheaper labour, land, electricity, etc.
Electricity in Slovakia: nuke 54%, thermal 20%, hydro 17%, biomass 6%, solar & wind 2%.
Slovakians ain’t dumb. They know what works…
[Jaguar Land Rover opened a €1.4 billion plant there in 2018]
I worked for Honda in Swindon in the UK in the mid-90’s and even then there was over-capacity in the industry EU-wide. Many makers, like Honda and Nissan, are only in the UK because of tax breaks.
And because UK was in the EU.
All those car makers will be moving into the EU due to additional customs checks, delays, paperwork and very likely tariffs.
Incidentally Honda had a large solar power array – I wonder what happens to it now they are closing the Swindon plant?
Landfill.
The Great Wall of the EU is longer and higher than the one in China. It was designed to keep out imports while continuing the NATO half effort for show.
And with the ending of EU Tariffs against Japan, Honda is saying sayonara.
I read that MAN is looking to move more production to Austria (Steyr) and wonder if Energiewende is perhaps a factor?
Is Austria less crazy than Germany?
Austria closed its last coal plant this year…
and 25 % of electricity in Austria is still produced with fossil fuels, namely gas.Austria has a share of 60.2 % of hydroelectric power, 1 % photovoltaics and the rest comes from wind turbines and biogas plants.
Where is griff?
Look down.
‘Overall, however, more electricity was still exported from Germany.’
That’s the point.
Germany intends that its wind and solar should be exported when it is high – and its neighbors expect that and plan to buy the electricity.
There is an European day ahead spot market based on this…
I’ll get back on the rise in imports later. I see a percentage quoted, but how much is that in real terms? Over what periods and from what source?
Generally in the last decade Germany has maintained a positive export balance and a positive balance with all countries except France.
(interlude for day’s first coffee)
The problem is, Germany’s neighbors aren’t buying the extra electricity. Germany is paying them to take it.
OK – so here are German electricity imports/exports 2019. You need to hover your cursor over each stream to get detailed figures (and the Swedish stream is mislabelled Twh)
Only with France does Germany have a net deficit -and Germany still exported far more than it imported.
https://www.energy-charts.de/exchange.htm
There isn’t enough information in that link to tell where the electricity came from – except France. Which is interesting…
You will note that with the virus French electricity demand fell and with a largely nuclear generation, the French had to dump that power somewhere… Germany imports nuclear power from France when the French need to dump excess nuclear generation at low prices
There was still a net export balance in favour of Germany:
‘Electricity imports increased by 43.3 percent to 25.7 billion kilowatt hours in the first half of 2020 compared to the first half of 2019… the amount of electricity exported fell by 11.6 percent to 33.6 billion kilowatt hours in the first half of 2020 compared to the first half of 2019.’
And I note:
‘In the first half of 2020, more than half of the electricity produced in Germany was from renewable energies. Exactly 128.4 billion kilowatt hours, or 51.8 percent
the amount of electricity fed in from conventional energy sources fell by 22.6 percent. At -37.8 percent, coal-fired power in particular was significantly lower than in the same period last year.’
The assertion it was for periods of cold and dark because there wasn’t baseload has no backing in facts provided. Since Germany imports power when it is cheap from adjoining countries, we can for example estimate if Germany had more wind, perhaps Denmark did too and exported it. Until the 2020 export figures appear from BDEW we can’t reliably say more. But it is likely Germany imports when power is cheap, not when there’s some supposed baseload shortfall.
I remind all German electricity bills are lower than US ones and that much of the cost is tax unrelated to renewables. And that the renewable component is due to historic subsidy, not current.
(I am still looking for more energy poverty data to compare Germany with USA)
“I remind all German electricity bills are lower than US ones and that much of the cost is tax unrelated to renewables.”
Really? I find that hard to believe. I”m paying about 11 cents per Kwh in West Virginia. Germans are paying less than that? Or do you mean that Germans use less electricity per month, though at a higher price?
In 2019, the monthly electricity bill for an average German household consisting of three people with a combined annual consumption of 3,500 kWh was 88.7 euros, the BDEW says.
sorry to say, but that is a stupid lie. I checked may bill from 2019 und it says:
1.543 kWh used, payed 636,00 Euros, REFUND 87,11. Net costs 548,89m Euros.
Since March 2020 I have to pay 47,00 Euros in advance per month and I’m a single houshold.
PV solar cannot power the grid.
Wind turbines cannot pride 50Hz energy.
Off course they can Brian.
The turbines are set up to take account of grid frequency (I summarise)
But they can only do that is there is sufficient dispatchable energy
Seems griff has figured out how to copy data…, but totally ignorant at understanding how electricity grids work.
Brian is totally correct, PV cannot power a grid, because there would be no grid for at least half the day
And wind energy DOES NOT provide 50Hz electricity, it relies totally on having a steady 50Hz grid system to synchronise to. Without that, wind would be totally useless as grid supply.
They need power from the grid to bring them to synchronised speed.
griff’s government handout says it can, therefore it does.
A quick check: in Germany the Greens hold 67 of the 709 seats in the Bundestag parliament, approx 9%. Merkel’s CDU only have 246 seats, nowhere near a majority, so they have to make nice nice with the Greens or someone else to get any legislation through the house. And get this, the Marxoid Left Party, originally from the old East Germany of Stasi fame, have 69 seats. Caught between the Marxists and the Greens, no wonder the place is going backwards.
today there is an article in the weekly magazine ‘SPIEGEL’ with the headline: “Germans pay almost the highest electricity prices worldwide”.
The average cost per kWh is USD 0.38. I live in the north of Germany and pay 0,41 USD per kWh and consume about 1550 kWh per year as a single household. I don’t have air conditioning but I really don’t need it. Heating is done with gas.
And the stupidest of all arguments is always gladly used like it griff straight does. Nobody in the world manufactures products or supplies services to the production costs and without including the due taxes and profit in the price.
By the way the paper/website from which this article comes has no credibility -it is an offshoot of the Falun gong organisation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times
Griff,
Do you get paid by the ChiComs for your propaganda work or are you doing it pro bono?
Considering the depth and quality, it has to be the latter! Right?
I’m just interested.
as to depth and quality, this whole article is based on a free news sheet from a dubious Chinese religious/political group, with no sources quoted and no basis for believing it is accurate.
do you think abusing me as some ‘communist’ contributes to debate on climate issues? to getting to the truth?
Griff,
Why do you continue to ignore the data and the facts on the ground? Germany’s push for expensive Unreliable wind and solar will destabilize the European grid and lead to numerous deaths from energy poverty when a serious cold spell hits this winter!
In the meantime they are clear cutting areas of forest to use for another one of their anti-environmental GangGreen hoaxes: the wood chip powered electric plant! You may believe that the harvesting and processing of trees for this latest scam produces no CO2, but I’m fairly confident most intelligent observers would disagree! It’d be far better to preserve those trees so the German people have something they can afford to heat their homes in winter; but you don’t seem to care about people, another sign of being a Communist!
The griff collective does not ignore facts, just any facts that don’t go along with what they are paid to promote.
I hope, you don’t believe to have a higher credibility with your comments and “insides” ?
😀
A detailed account of German electricity costs…
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-power
Please note this up to date information: The average power price for households and small businesses in Germany stood at 30.43 cents per kilowatt hour (ct/kWh) in 2019
And: In 2019, the monthly electricity bill for an average German household consisting of three people with a combined annual consumption of 3,500 kWh was 88.7 euros, the BDEW says.
that should inform any discussion of costs…
German officials:
Ve vant your electricity. Ver ist your electricity? Schnellstens!
Now Germany is caving in under the Navalny fallout, offering (begging?) the US a LNG terminal and $1 billion to save NordSteam 4-times cheaper Russian LNG pipeline.
That will for sure be passed on to consumers.
I am sure the Greens will oppose that offering too.
NeoCons and Greens sure make strange bedfellows!
Meanwhile in the Arctic the French are investing in gas……
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-international-lenders-back-9-080925404.html
Gotta love communism! Lol. Germany never learned anything from the past two world wars they caused. So I say – leave them alone and let them implode by over-taxing their people. Eventually…they’ll get tired of no heat in winter or A/C in summer. Think they’d read the news about California power problems. They should shutter their existing back up plants, if they have faith in their own renewable power.