By P Gosselin on 27. November 2021
The energy source that Germany moves to shut down, rescued the country from widespread blackouts in 2021.
Blackout News reports that more of Germany’s power is being produced by coal and nuclear fuels. In 2021, due to unfavorable weather conditions, wind and solar energy production plummeted in 2021 compared to 2020. “Germany’s power mix is getting dirtier.”
The figures were compiled by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Energiebilanzen (Working Group for Energy Budgets) and based on the first 9 months of the year. Compared to 2020, the first nine months of 2021 saw a 3.3% increase in primary energy consumption – mainly due to economic reco0very.
20% more coal power in first 9 months of 2021
But what surprised experts, Blackout News reports, were the sources of the energy: “Here, the largest increase in absolute terms can be seen in the coal-fired power plants that emit the most CO2. Hard coal consumption alone was 20 per cent higher in the first three quarters of the current year than in the previous year. Electricity and heat generation from hard coal increased by 28 percent.”
Lack of wind and sun, despite added capacity
According to Blackout News: “The working group attributes the high additional consumption of coal for energy generation compared to the same period last year to the unfavorable weather conditions for renewable energies. Wind power and solar plants delivered significantly less electricity compared to the same period last year despite higher installation capacity.”
The 2021 results further highlight the unreliability of green energies such as wind and sun as a source of stable energy, and remind that Germany’s plan to shut down its remaining coal and nuclear power plants will be far more difficult than the government appears to believe.
Renewables’s output plummet 16.1%
“In relation to total energy consumption, the share of renewables has decreased by a total of 16.1 percent compared to the previous year,” writes Blackout News. “Electricity generation by wind power plants fell sharply, by 18 percent for onshore plants and 14 percent for offshore plants.”
Solar energy fared even worse, producing only half as much as the year earlier.
To compensate for the missing wind and solar energies, both coal and nuclear plants had to take up the slack. Yet, these are the two conventional energy sources that the government aims to take offline completely by 2038 (nuclear by 2024!). A number a energy experts warn that this is a recipe for power grid disaster – especially as the German government moves to get more electric cars on the road.
Looming blackouts
Blackout News warns: “But if the government sticks to its plan to shut down the coal-fired power plants as planned, it is only a matter of time before the supply collapses. Therefore, prepare yourself in good time for a prolonged power blackout.”
The trees say thank you.
Eventualy will run out of trees, so it’s coal or move a wheelbarrow of euros from your bank into the fire place to keep house warm.
trees are a renewable resource
To thrive they need a rich supply of the gas of life.
And require 100 years to replenish what is harvested annually for energy production
Depends on the type of tree. Some can be re-harvested in 20 to 30 years.
Not when comparing the time to grow and the time it takes to burn them.
If they’ve got enough CO2 to suck on. Thankfully, CO2 levels are continuing to rise.
Yes, the planet is greening, despite anthropogenic phobia for profit.
We can burn them faster than nature can grow them.
yeah, at 0.2W/sq m average energy density, 1/1000th of solar power
They can be except when climate changers try and replace coal and gas by burning trees-
Boris Johnson’s tree planting strategy ‘in flames’, as UK spends six times more on wood burning power station (yahoo.com)
Arithmetic is not a strong point with the weather catastrophists. Stupid is as stupid does.
Banknotes have switched over to plastic, so are also verboten as a fuel source! No shortage of hot air at the EU parliament though.
Germany expexts to end coal use in 20 years? It’s use percentage is already down to only 24%
Why isn’t that mentioned? Are you attempting to deceive us?
More electricity is being generated by gas but that puts Germany into being addicted to Russian gas. I don’t think that is a good position to be in
Biden’s boys blocked the pipeline – just try selling US LNG at 4 times the price to the new government. LNG is not a heroin addiction – that’s what the fossil Greenies say.
My SUV is not a junkie, thank you, even if it is a jalopy.
The only pipelines that Biden’s boys blocked have been here in the US.
Just advising you that relying on Russia is a stupid thing to do, is not blocking.
20 years? EIGHT years and a few weeks according to the latest diktat. It is a gruesome thing to say as it would amount to a death wish at 61, but part of me really doesn’t want to witness the results…..
Go green, release the carbon.
I don’t get it. No matter how many solar panels I add to my rooftop array, I’m still not getting more output at night. Maybe if I just add a few more panels….
The challenge for Physics is to validate the standard climate model by measuring the dark sunlight as it falls on to the night-time surface.
Ah… so I need to add some Night Vision panels to the array.
Sure. all that back radiation from CO2 will give you a nice steady flicker of the needle
No, you need to get an array of really bright lights to shine on them at night so you can see the electricity being generated.
No joke, look what CERN is looking for :
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-physicists-neutrinos-large-hadron-collider.html
read down to :
¨Since 2019, he and his colleagues have been getting ready to conduct an experiment with FASER instruments to investigate dark matter at the LHC. They’re hoping to detect dark photons, which would give researchers a first glimpse into how dark matter interacts with normal atoms and the other matter in the universe through non gravitational forces.¨
Now just image what Greens would do with dark PV’s – 24×7 power.Wow!
Dark Energy falling on Dark Matter.
Relying on unreliables is risking a return to the Dark Ages.
Will Ireland, again, keep a light of civilisation flickering?
Auto
if you hook them up to a diesel generator you will get electricity 24/7.
Doh! Silly me. Of course. Diesel powered solar panels. Why didn’t the solar panel salesman offer to sell me some of those?
This is exactly what the Spanish did a few years back.
They were selling solar power at night to the electricity companies
Don Quixote rides again!
The griffter is deploying his pedal powered searchlight to the Rhineland to help the Volk from their RE darkness! Pedaling both day and night, he only pauses for the occasional meal of schnitzel and strudel with a glass of Gewürztraminer!
griff is my hero………….. so long as griff keeps pedaling.
griff, the selfless madly pedaling-to-nowhere HERO!
Let’s all give griff a nice round of applause, shall we?
(griff? Next time I’m around and you need a break from all that peddling, just say the word and a couple of 1.5l Gatorades are on me. Glad to do that for my madly pedaling hero.)
At night! You have to turn the panels upside down…
🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣
Night… panels… upside down…. got it!
[Face Palm] But of course! Sometimes, I just have ‘Stupid’ written all over my face.
Shall we clue in the Greenies or just leave them in the dark?
😜
There you go – no down-welling radiation from the CO2 GHG.
Oh wait – have the panels an IR filter, or are they simply ignoring ?
aim the new ones at the street lights
New street lights everywhere here are LED’s.
I just wonder at the emission and absorption spectra are for LED’s and PV cells?
Americans can built their PC street cred by sending Germans their old flashlights!
I’d take part, but all my flashlights have been converted to rechargeable LED headlamps; and the only one I have left is the UV one that I use for hunting tomato hornworms in my garden summer nights! The little buggers were so terrified that nary a one showed up this year, so I never had to utilize the needle nose pliers and skinning knive I was packing!
Fortunately, those two are still handy lest any climate conmen show up at my door, pushing their snake oil!
I presume that it is a long-wave UV light?
Clyde,
I tried to get the adjustable one, that emits frequencies from gamma rays up to visible light, but there was some problem with the permit!
AM, I’m serious. I want to know whether the worms fluoresce under 365nm or 254nm, or both.
While I’m here, have you found any scorpions while looking for your worms?
I’m interested in hearing about this worm-finding technology, too.
Doubling down is the standard marxist method.
As soon a plan does not work it will be executed with even more zealotry.
And the more destructive it is the longer and harder they will try (vaccines anyone?)
and the more easy and working solution exist(hqc,iverctimin),the more they ll be demonised.
Once you realize how many windmills and solar panels you need in a windstill night to run a 50watts ( no pun intended)you instantly become a climate denier.
“Doubling down is the standard marxist method.”
It’s standard for any liar.
It’s amazing how many people cannot grasp this and then extrapolate it to wind power.
Try shining a torch on them. Granted, it means you’re sat on your roof all night freezing your nuts off, but you’ll have that fuzzy feeling inside knowing that you’re saving the planet from complete destruction.
Oh, that made me lol, Andrew. Great visual… numbnuts, but feeling oh so self-righteous. Not feeling anything else, like fingers or toes, but feeling self-righteous.
You have to point them the other way at night.
We just need to find a way to move the sun from the day side to the night side.
The sun isn’t needed during the day, it’s already bright. /sarc
You have to use Lunar Panels at night.
Checking Amazon right now, Robert…………
hmmmmm…. Seems that Amazon smile is turned frowny-frowny upside down. Well, that, or the delivery person tossed the box on the porch upside-down.
*sigh* No hits on Lunar Panels. Wrong search term, maybe?
Maybe you should try to power some lights with diesel generators to get some juice out of your panels at night. It worked in Spain some 10 years ago. ;-p
How do intelligent people look reality in the face and go ahead and drive faster down a dead-end street? That’s a great picture of the open-pit coal mine, and, if that is actually high-grade coal, several of the seams look amenable to underground mining. Maybe we should try to sell coal as “naturally stored solar energy”?
Reading the word “high-grade”, only the word “stupidity” comes to my mind looking at these guys promoting the energy transition.
When your paycheck depends upon asserting the impossible, like Alice’s Red Queen, any idiocy becomes the order of the day. The international environmental industry has been living off the notion of logical incoherency for decades.
Tell them that it’s a a new form of carbon based batteries.
Without the polluting zinc.
Ron,
You hit the nail on the head when you said “intelligent people.” We have to learn to distinguish between highly educated stupid people and intelligent ones! Stupid people, whether highly educated or not, tend to cause dangerous and damaging outcomes! When things are bad, or just getting worse, then stupid people must be in charge!
Just look at the difference between the last two US administrations! The previous one had record rates of employment among women and minorities, low energy prices, and blue-collar jobs moving back into the country! The current one has messed up the supply chain, worsened inflation with out of control spending, and is now trying to force the whole country to take poorly tested and ineffective drugs! But hey, no mean tweets!
Fortunately, the cat is finally out of the bag now that we have discovered that “omicron” is an anagram for “moronic!” Also, an enterprising reporter has uncovered that Chairman Bai Den loves his ice cream and frozen drinks because he never has to worry about brain freeze!
“Maybe we should try to sell coal as “naturally stored solar energy”?”
A lot of preppers are using coal. They are filling up their in-ground swimming pools with coal and then covering it over with soil. For a rainy day. A swimming pool’s worth of coal would last a family a long time.
Slaves in China. Environmental blight. Wars without borders. Catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform. Selective-child or one-child, delegated for social progress, medical progress, and climate mitigation.. Diversity, inequity, and exclusion. Redistributive change and lowered expectations. The profits are green and renewable, and their foreign partners are pleased with their performance. Take a knee, beg, good girl, boy, whatever. I wonder how many times this social model has been repeated throughout human existence. Oh, well. All’s fair in lust and abortion.
Quite so. Consider the international green industry. It doesn’t even pretend to lobby in China or Russia. So the real question is for whom do the international pond scum really work for?
n.n.,
Diversion, iniquity (or inequity) and exclusion! That’s brilliant! I hope you don’t mind if I edit it a little and steal it!
I’ve been pondering the “DEI” that is a core part of critically racist theory; wondering how to poke some holes in it’s armor. I think this might be just the can opener I was looking for!
To be honest I really want Germany, Britian, and Australia to lead the way. Perhaps, just perhaps, what happens to them will open enough eyes up here in the US.
Living in the UK, I do not want the UK to be the first into mass blackouts.
However, I am realist enough that it will take at least one country to lead into the ‘Great Blackout’. With its smaller population and warmer weather, perhaps Australia should lead the way?
No one wants to play martyr for the USA, except of course Ukraine.
Your hatred of all things British and America has finally rotted your last brain cell.
Ribbit, Ribbit.
Do I hear a frog croaking?
I anticipated that there would be at least one person who wouldn’t appreciate the remark. However, I’m a little perplexed as to why Mark got two up-votes and I got 3 down-votes. Did you vote three times bonbon?
I think Ukraine is on its own as long as Biden is in control.
Where’s those European nations? This Russian aggression is taking place in your backyard.
You know, dictators don’t stop pushing the envelope. If you give them a little, they want some more, and more and more. They may want some of what you have.
It looks like Ukraine should have kept its nukes. Instead, they trusted the West. Now look at them.
Ah yes, another reader of that great tome, “Over The Cliff”; written, of course, by Hugo First!
The US was first with the Texas experience.
With tedious predictability, Texas turned into a pie fight with competing claims about whether wind was the root cause, or whether it was gas. To my knowledge, no general lessons were learned.
Forbes March 4,2021
…power output by fuel in Texas between January 18th and February 17th. Not only did coal and gas power hold up better than wind, which fell by over 90%, but gas turbine generators increased output by a massive 450%, nearly making up for the shortfall in wind. But this proved to be not enough to cover surging power demand brought on by the Arctic blast. It takes chutzpah to assert that because gas, coal and nuclear power did not operate at 100% of expected potential, they “failed” even though wind failed by nearly 100%.
The thing missed in the discussion of the Texas rolling blackouts were the rolling blackouts taking place in surrounding grids like the Southwest Power Pool.
The Southwest Power Pool was having rolling blackouts itself, but unlike Texas, the States included in the SPP did not have major problems with their fossil fuel generation. They, like Texas, were plagued by low-wind conditions which caused the windmills to fail, and this is what caused their rolling blackouts.
Oklahoma had something like 125 windmills operating when the arctic cold front arrived in Feb. 2021, and within about a day, only 22 of them were operating. Initially, they froze, and then were becalmed by the arctic high-pressure system’s effects. And this happened all across the SPP and even up into Canada.
So the arctic cold front had everything from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico more or less becalmed at one time.
Adding more windmills in this situation would not help a thing. No matter how many you had, they would not work if the wind isn’t blowing. In those cases, you have to have something to substitute for the electricity the windmills were suppose to generate.
Using windmills in your grid means you are paying double what is necessary to pay for a certain amount of electricity.
Germany is a perfect example of how to smear monuments of human stupidity across the countryside, double the cost of electricity, destabilize the grid and do nothing for the environment or the economy except make them worse. Thank you Germany, surely no one else will be dumb enough to repeat the same mistake. Well no one with a brain. Biden/Harris/Schumer/Pelosi consider it an ideal business model.
Quite so, Dennis. One observes that Germany has a history of bad collective decision-making.
This isn’t even your grandparents Germany. The “new” Berlin airport has been decades late in opening, Billions of Euros in cost overruns, and it still doesn’t work. It can take over an hour to get your arriving luggage, and the water isn’t safe to drink. If the current German government had been in control 80 years ago, the war would have been over in 6 months.
Hell, it isn’t even the Germany I knew with a total of about 4 years there including a 3 year tour at Flint kassern in Bad Tolz during the 1980s. But then again, my own country isn’t what it used to be either!
Australia?
We have already stated we will still be burning and exporting coal in 2050 which made us the world pariah at COP26.
NordStream 2 should have been running for 2 months! Even the Greens say Biden’s sanctions are beyond reason.
So blame Biden increasing coal burning.
Meanwhile snowed in….
Oh wait – Ukraine’s Zelensky claims they succeeded in blocking it. but hey, that’s Biden’s and son’s very own Zelenski!
Double ticket there.
Wow where is that photo from? Relatively thin interbedded coal seams dipping at what about 45 deg., surprised that could be economic. I guess that explains the small equipment
It’s a pic of an open lignite mine. Low grade coal and very dirty, but easy to get at.
Location?
I THINK its Gurzweiler
Thanks Leo, I guess you mean Garzweiler. Unless this is a picture from the edge of the region or small independent operation I don’t think so. RWE’s Garzweiler operation is a totally different scale producing about 30 Mta using about 6 gigantic bucketwheel excavators that would eat that equipment for a snack
You have to work with what you have got.
Griff will be here soon to tell us how it’s all a lie and the only reason Germany is using coal is that their super-efficient wind power is too good and Germany has exported the excess power to Russia & China to help them become Green too
“Wind power and solar plants delivered significantly less electricity compared to the same period last year despite higher installation capacity.”
A pertinent quote for griff’s headstone, perhaps..
Not too soon, I hope.
Griff is always welcome here, if only for the comedic joy he brings to posts
One should let sleeping trolls lie!
I don’t think he’s lying, I think he doesn’t have the full data. Only the data authorised by Farcebook and Twatter (Where’s the tin foil hat emoji when you need it) 😉
In a year when renewables were at the low end of natural variability (you wouldn’t expect that pattern to be repeated in many let alone most years) they still got 40% renewable electricity in their first quarter (down from 52%). 46% in first half: 10% down on 2020.
You’re saying so called renewables are unreliable, mate
We agree!
Welcome to the real world 🙂
Define renewables? I always thought you were a wind and solar disciple. How did they perform?
Renewables have to be renewed often.
Without FF backup, just one year of reduced production will lead to human privation. I’m an electrical engineer with power system planning experience. I assure you you are full of shit.
but renewable shit. 💩
(or is that more correctly “recycled shit”?)
Even if it has a strong smell, it provides “comedic relief.”
Except fossil fuelled and nuclear power doesn’t have to worry about variability like the windmills and rainbow catchers do.
What’s the point of putting up with such unreliability?
Wait, I thought you claimed there was no such thing as natural variability. All changes are caused by CO2.
If there is such thing as natural variability, then you are going to have to build enough wind power to provide enough power, even during these prolonged down periods. That means that during normal times half of the windmills won’t be needed.
That’s going to drive up already intolerable costs, even higher.
You are arguing that extremes only happen infrequently? If that were the case, we shouldn’t have concerns about heat waves or high temperature records being broken.
The more you listen to alarmists, the more you realize that their ideology is internally inconsistent. Just one example; If one insists on a high ECS then one must agree that the models don’t reflect past temperatures and precipitation.
Alarmist thinking is a finely balanced combination of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and George Orwell. How else could you believe CO2 is such a miraculous molecule?
Even if it only happens once, if it happens during the winter, 10’s of thousands will die.
Except of course Griff has never been anywhere near Germany so knows slightly less than F-A about the country.
I think you should take a good look at German power systems: when they say they are ditching coal they don’t intend to replace it via gas.
Remember that they have extensive solar which delivers in summer and extensive wind which delivers in winter. too often I see comment here which only takes account of one or the other.
And of course Germany does not depend only on national power: Europe is linked and buys power on the day ahead market based on efficient forecasting of continent wide renewable availability.
dial back on the rhetoric eh? Just look at what the Germans say will happen.
Griff, mate, what does Germany rely on when the wind isn’t blowing and the the sun isn’t shining?
Please don’t say the wind blows somewhere all the time – we know that, it just needs to blow in the right place at the right time i.e. it’s unreliable
BTW, the Germans can say what will happen as often as they like, it’s what does happen that matters
Griff, mate, what does Germany rely on when the wind isn’t blowing and the the sun isn’t shining?
Griff will never answer this question.
I know
I ask him questions all the time in the vain hope it will make him think
A paid lobbyist of the international environmentalist industry isn’t paid to think.
Whatever you may think about Griff, I don’t think he’s paid to come here. If he was, he’d be able to provide links to his claims
I think he’s just swept up in the climate of doom caper and has lost the capability for independent thought
Of course, if Griff were to provide links to data that back up his claims, I’d be more inclined to listen to him
Heck, I’d even go for a pint with him if he fancied a chat about all this
Griff is a politician; he’s thick skinned and lies easily
Most politicians are better at lying.
I was just watching a YouTube movie made by a Russian machinist. He remarked that the collective he belongs to shuts down power at 9PM, although it is sometimes possible to get an extension to 11PM. When the power shut down unexpectedly early, it resulted in breaking an expensive, special carbide tool bit. That is something unimaginable in the US! However, it sounds like maybe the Germans should get used to such restrictions.
It isn’t just an inconvenience to have unreliable power, it can have economic and health consequences.
Here’s the plan recently released by the newly formed German coalition: (full of contradiction, but like you say, it’s talk, not what will happen).
Coal phase-out 2030, natural gas as a bridge
This should be filed under: ‘believing as many as six impossible things before breakfast’. 🙂
Exactly … not to mention a plan for the a safe and efficient method of lifting oneself by the shoe strings.
It sounds like the equivalent of Germany’s Dunkirk.
So that’s really an electricity tax designed to prop up market prices and increase the subsidy paid to renewables.
Actually it imports a lot of Scandinavian and French and Swiss nuclear and hydro.
Sadly there isn’t enough to replace the 20GW (or whatever it is) of coal and nuclear that they are going to shut down.
Griff, history holds that German politicians have form when it comes to saying things will happen, which actually don’t.
So Europe is linked. Do you think the French will prioritise your needs over their own
“Just look at what the Germans say will happen.” Best ironic laugh I’ve had in a long time. What today’s politicians say has nothing to do with what will be delivered when the nut-cutting starts. In other words: “Your mouth is writing checks your ass can’t cover.”
And where will all this backup green power come from when the EU divests itself of FF generation?
griff seems to believe that if it’s written in a press release, then it has already happened.
Well, if it is written in a press release, it becomes a social contract that must be fulfilled! /sarc
Brilliant! I think I’ll use that.
Thank you. Be my guest!
What are politicians best known for?
Does Pinocchio’s nose factor into the answer?
Passing out taxpayer funded free stuff in order to get re-elected?
Burning old trousers to generate electricity?
(or is that too subtle)
Can you explain away how Germany’s power bills sky-rocketed when they embraced unreliables?
I thought unicorn’s breath harvesters and rainbow catchers were supposed to be cheaper than fossil/nuclear?
I’m no anti-German, I go there most years for my summer holiday, But I couldn’t resist commenting on griff’s statement: ‘Just look at what the Germans say will happen’. That’s what Chamberlain did, the silly fool. (Just a joke, griff. But does he have a sense of humour?)
I think you really do a disservice to Chamberlain. He bought the UK a year to get armament production into top gear. And if he had believed it he would have stopped armament production.
Of course he didn’t believe it. His job was to negotiate the best concession from Hitler that he could.
So when Hitler broke it he would have the moral high ground in declaring war.
Griff really doesn’t care how much it costs other people.
Two ineffective power systems, each large enough to handle the entire load, each used only half the time.
Then you have to provide enough wind and solar so that there is enough power even during these natural low power periods where the wind is missing for 6 months at a time.
The end result is that you have to build 8 to 10 times as much power sources as are needed, just so that it’s available all the time. (And that assumes magical batteries suddenly become available)
You miss the point that the delivery is unreliable, even when the installations are “extensive!” What’s more, you are making the case that the duty cycles are essentially 50%, which means a poor return on capital and investment of natural resources. That capital could be used to fund energy sources with near 100% duty cycle, and the natural resources could be applied to other projects with more reliability and larger duty cycle.
I think you should take a good hard look at your right to comment about Germany.
You have been 100% wrong about France also.
Creep back to your little draughty hovel in England before trying to comment about countries you know F-A about!
Did you do geography or physics in school?
Better go back and learn a bit!
Just look at what the Germans say will happen.
I did just such a look, sort of at random. Here’s what one German said would happen:
“I intend to set up a thousand-year Reich and anyone who supports me in this battle is a fellow-fighter for a unique spiritual—I would say divine—creation…Rudolf Hess, my assistant of many years standing, would tell you: If we have such a leader, God is with us.”
How did that turn out?
I have learnt to totally ignore what Germans say will happen, and measure what is happening and what actually does happen.
Please. Don’t conjure him up ….
Too late!
Sorry, I thought you had to say his name 3 times 😉
There’s something a bit Fringe about this.
“One of the most important aspects of the new government will be to decide on the expansion of energy production coming from offshore wind farms, wind from onshore plants and from solar,” Scholz told Bloomberg Television in an interview. “And we will have to increase investments into the grid.” – Olaf Scholz
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-13/scholz-says-new-government-will-make-renewable-energy-push
In Fringe as I recall there was a manifesto:
Zerstörung durch technologischen Fortschritt (ZDF) – Destruction Through Technological Progress
https://www.scribd.com/doc/95705209/ZFT-Destruction-Through-Technological-ProgressProgress
The document explains how scientific and technological progress will lead to the destruction of our universe.
The obsession with wind and solar fits the bill. It isn’t doing us any good.
Scholz was finance minister, obviously in-sync with Marc Carney of FLOP26 fame where he promised ruthless, relentles, focused NetZero and a stash of $150 TRILLION, yet only delivered Sharma’s tears.
Watch what happens next….
It’s worse than you thought
“Ottmar Edenhofer, Director of the Potsam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), has received high-ranking congratulations from the federal and state governments on his 60th birthday. From Berlin, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel, Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, the State Secretary of the Federal Environment Ministry Jochen Flasbarth and others wrote to him. From Brandenburg, Ottmar Edenhofer received congratulations from Minister President Dietmar Woidke, Science Minister Manja Schüle, as well as from numerous other companions in science and politics.
https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/birthday-wishes-to-ottmar-edenhofer
And as we all know, Ottmar let the cat out of the bag a long time ago when he said: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy any more.”
He’s a popular guy
And Director Emeritus Schellnhuber, CBE, was Merkel’s science advisor for the Great Transformation. Edenhofer is also the Chief Economist.
Bring towels and a bucket – a tsunami of tears to follow Sharma’s sobs!
Speaking to a relative in Germany yesterday he was telling me it has been grey and miserable for weeks where he is living.
Should have checked Kachelmanwetter – all Blue above and Grey below – that’s 1500m of course.
Stinknormaler Novemberwetter.
Italians south of the alps have a word for that.
I have just been in both places within 2 weeks, flew in and drove back.
Driving back from cold freezing foggy Germany, following a severe storm & gales, with a brief interlude of cool damp but clear in Switzerland, was replaced the next evening by exactly the same thick fog from north of Torino to Piacenza.
I got back exhausted.
I hope you got the antidote – real Alps dinners!
Up there they know how to deal with this! Wonderful food.
There’s a phrase I heard in Cortina for such weather – still looking for it…
20% more? That number will rapidly climb since windmills and solar panels can’t sustain their own operation much less actually provide power for real world uses.
Meanwhile : Wind power risks becoming too cheap, says top turbine maker
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/wind-power-risks-becoming-too-cheap-says-top-turbine-maker-2021-11-24/
Siemens Chief Executive Andreas Nauen told Reuters.
What is a brand new government to make of this?
Why then is the price per kwh so high in Germany?
Greens cannot count. Perhaps Andreas can’t either.
Sure he can count – the Siemens bottom line.
And as most engineers have not a clue about energy spot-pricing, the EU policy driving prices through the roof, I wonder who cannot count?
Maybe you never heard of the Ranch at the Crooked E, ENRON of Houston Tx?
This energy spot-price scam blew up in 2001, and not the Ranch at the Crooked EU does exactly that right now.
As Russia said long term contracts are and were the way to deal with this financial scam.
Bonobo, you know very well what brought Enron down and it wasn’t the existence of the spot market. Stop lying.
Enron brought Enron down – and Arthur Anderson, who did the books took the hit, moved to PWC. I wonder who is doing the EU spot-price energy books?
Of course Enron’s fake energy echange floor, was, well Enron.
And your fake comments are coming from St Petersburg fake news factory.
If you like Russia so much why don’t you move there and enjoy it, instead of plugging pro-kremlin crap constantly on here!
Some of us live there and are getting mighty p….ssed off with your crap.
What a howler. Some of ¨us¨ who?
Suck it up – this pipeline will go live, and Ukraine can beg at D.C. for a bailout. Will they get it?
The article explains that manufacturers can’t meet the price aspirations of wind farm investors who bid too aggressively on projects assuming that prices for wind turbines were always going to fall. Now they’ll have to rise, because raw material costs are shooting up.
Hee, hee, hee. A crony capitalist that depends on government wind subsidies is complaining about competition cutting into his margins. And lying about wind being cheaper than FFs! He is boldly saying that he wants government to award contracts based on shoring up his profit margins, not least cost. That certainly makes sense to electricity rate-payers.
He is saying that business unit is going under. Guess what Siemens always does with such units?
Maybe the next invention will be “lunar” panels to capture the energy coming from moonlight (-:
And the article doesn’t even mention the imported nuclear and fossil power. It’s worse than even they thought!
Germany actually exports huge amounts of power… including to France. There is some evidence it runs coal plant just to be able to export/sell the power…
Only with France does it have a negative balance (and not much of one), mainly because you can’t turn down nuclear reactors, so French power gets sold off cheap at times of low demand.
Desperation is a bad advisor.
Oh yes. And ignorance of facts is as well.
griff isn’t correct, but here are the numbers:
Import: 7.2 TWh
Export : 15.5 TWh
Of course: in comparison with earlier years (strangely enough, except for 2020) it’s not very much of net export:
On fait ce que l’on peut, n’est-ce pas, Mijnheer Zuiderwijk?
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Source:
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/presseinformationen/2021/Stromerzeugung_2021_Halbjahr_1b.pdf
Germany must be making a lot of money out of it
Hilariously, the Germans actually pay their neighbours to accept their excess electricity!
Does anybody have the figures for Germany’s average price per kWh of exports vs imports? What are the financial implications of exports to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland?
And… is it by accident that you nicely omit to speak about French nuclear electricity prices, when they produce far too much of it due to the fact that you can’t shutdown a nuclear plant like a gas plant, or windmills?
Regardless what you write about: energy, temperatures, sea levels, etc: Your view of what you are writing about is mostly biased or one-sided, or both.
Why would anyone want to shut down baseload generation?
Bindidon, the topic is the German electric system. If you want, you can address the French electric system.
Given current market regulations (except in extreme conditions) windmills cannot be “shut down” in response to varying electric supply/demand conditions. You seem unable or unwilling to understand the many electric system operation and economic distortions caused by wind and solar.
Since I have an education and experience in electric power systems’ operations and economics, I value my opinion above yours and the other keyboard cowboys.
About your “temperatures, sea levels, etc.,” I normally reflect the actual science as presented by the UN IPCC (not the political summaries nor MSM and NGO hysteria). I reject the use of UN IPCC CliSciFi models because, in the aggregate, they model past surface and atmospheric temperatures that vary from observations by about 60% to 100%. I am also biased against obvious CliSciFi lies and distortions.
In the U.S. it is obvious that climate policy is driven by politics rather than science and economics. If you bother to read and understand the periodic National Climate Assessments (NCA) you will realize they are propaganda exercises to bolster existing government polices rather than to inform policymaking. Their taxpayer-paid lies about current climatic conditions are obvious and sickening. And the two climate models they have used are among the worst for exaggerated warming and rainfall deviations.
Throughout the world (especially the U.S.) climate science is funded by central governments. Monies from governments shape the “science” produced by academic institutions and government laboratories. If the proposed studies do not conform to existing governmental policies, they will not be funded. So, yeah, I’m biased.
Technically (and it is a technical world), Griff, you can’t “…produce far too much of it …” Excess generation will destroy the system. That is why Germany has to export excess wind to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. That screws with those countries’ electric system and Germany must pay for that.
With baseload nuclear, France has limited ability to take excess German wind (pun intended) in real time.
” With baseload nuclear, France has limited ability to take excess German wind (pun intended) in real time. ”
Pure guessing à la Dave Fair.
You seem to look not only at France and Germany, but also at nuclear plants from the wrong side of the telescope.
Baseload has by definition nothing to do with covering the demand in times of highest consumption.
France hat 58 nuclear plants, but they are never all active at a time, and Germany has often enough exported electricity to France either at the cold peak of harsh winters or at the peak of hot summers.
The latter are even worse, because then many plants must be slowed down: the rivers out of which they pump the water used for cooling are then at a dangerously low level.
“The latter are even worse, because then many plants must be slowed down: the rivers out of which they pump the water used for cooling are then at a dangerously low level.”
Some Nuclear plants are routinely shut down over the summer period for maintenance and the two main reasons are, the overall demand for electricity is lower, and the strict rules concerning the return of slightly warmed water back into the river when flow is reduced over the summer.
What are you referring to when you say “dangerously low level”?, the Nuclear power stations in France have incredibly high safety standards. Things are not left to chance. There’s no danger.
There are people whose job it is to actually keep an eye on such situations.
Anyway, shutting down a power plant significantly reduces water needs, this is only necessary on a few plants over short periods, and the majority of sites that use sea water don’t need to do this.
You didn’t understand even a bit of what I wrote.
Await the next summer if it’s plain hot, take a few weeks for holiday in France, visit the plants, and ask the people about what I wrote.
Then you will… understand.
Bindidon, does Germany have the ability to reliably ramp up wind or solar generation to meet France’s peak loads as they occur in real time? If not, France cannot rely on nor plan for Germany’s providing peaking services. While some German energy could likely be available during France’s peak periods, rational people would not depend upon it for load following.
You misunderstand electric power system operations, Bindidon. During low load periods with baseload nuclear plants operating (even if not at full capacity) France has limited ability to take randomly available unreliable wind and solar energy from Germany. As German energy supplies randomly vary France must use FF generation to adjust. That makes the FF plants operate inefficiently and raises energy costs.
What Germany is offering to France is normally referred to a “economy energy.” That is energy that does not have guaranteed delivery schedules and is therefore priced much lower; it is offered on a “as available” basis. Since wind and solar generated electricity costs much more that FF and nuclear, German electric ratepayers and taxpayers are subsidizing France’s energy consumers as well as the unreliables crony capitalists.
What Germany is doing to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland is much more insidious: dumping large amounts of unplanned electricity generation that overloads their electric generation and transmission systems. There are consequences for doing that. They include charging Germany for related costs and, ultimately, severing transmission ties to Germany during particularly damaging energy excursions. Abruptly severing ties during heavy German unreliables generation would necessarily overload Germany’s electrical grid, leading to blackouts.
No matter what politicians, activists, NGOs and the media tell you, Bindidon, solar and wind are not economically nor scientifically solutions for the world’s energy needs. According to the scientific work referenced by the UN IPCC anticipated additional CO2 will not lead to climate disasters nor economic ruin.
” What Germany is offering to France is normally referred to a “economy energy.” That is energy that does not have guaranteed delivery schedules and is therefore priced much lower; it is offered on a “as available” basis. ”
Ridiculous.
Price per MWh in 2020
I recall that in 2019, it was the other way ’round: export was cheaper than import.
Comme toujours: you are and keep a specialist in guessing and polemic about things you do not know anything about.
I could comment the rest above that statement, but… it’s too boring.
From the official German website for SMARD: “Wholesale electricity prices continue to climb – Electricity generation and electricity trading in August 2021” report: “The wholesale price in Germany averaged €82.70/MWh, [August, 2021] …”
Bindidon, your:
“Price per MWh in 2020
… doesn’t look so good anymore. It is essentially the average spot price for economy energy.
While not the whole story, when wind and solar are blasting subsidized and uncontrolled generation in Germany they export some. Likewise, when surrounding countries have excesses from their subsidized and unreliable sources, they export to Germany. EU nations trade the cheapest energy available amongst themselves at any given time, as available and limited by intertie capabilities.
Also from SMARD: “The day-ahead wholesale price [Germany] did not break the €100/MWh barrier last August [2020] and was negative for 4 hours. This August it was negative in nearly three times as many hours (11) but was above €100/MWh in 178 hours. This resulted in a relatively higher average [above August, 2020] for the 744 hours of trading in August 2021.” This is one of the fun distortions related to relying on subsidized and uncontrollable energy sources.
Need I go on about the other fun distortions related to uncontrollable generation’s impact on electric system operations, Bindidon?
Bindidon did a fair effort to distort reality … some might call it deceit.
Sometime they export, sometimes they import.
griff is trying to pretend that because on average they have a little bit of excess power, this means that they never have to import.
BTW, the few times when Germany has excess power is the same time when most of their neighbors also have excess power. Resulting in Germany having to pay others to accept their “exports”.
They pay a small amount to export their “excess” power during high RE generation, then pay a large amount to import it back during low RE generation. What a business plan, eh?
The good old “buy high and sell low” and make it up on volume.
Griff is talking out of his Ass again.
He has never been in France, and is talking clueless bollox about Germany and energy exports.
Germany could well be burning a lot of coal at the moment. It is exporting over 10 GW to France, according to Gridwatch Templar.
And that is because France currently has a lot of nuclear capacity (about 18GW) shutdown for maintenance. Even the UK has been exporting 2GW to France, which has had the highest prices in Europe.
…mainly because you can’t turn down nuclear reactors…
Actually, you can turn them down…and up. It’s just a matter of cost effectiveness. Nuclear plants cost a lot to build, so it is stupid to have them run at anything other than as baseload supplies. But load-following nuclear plants have become the norm. The current European Utilities Requirement is for nuclear plants to be able to cycle between 50 and 100% of rated output on a daily basis, with the ability to change at a rate of 3-5% of rated power per minute. The requirements were put in place specifically to deal with the addition of intermittent “renewable” sources to the grid.
If only they could save that excess for the hours, days, or months when it’s needed. They can’t, and so their prices are much higher than they would be if their grid didn’t have any wind or solar.
I have read this paper found on the web site of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Energiebilanzen:
https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/index.php?article_id=29&fileName=ageb_pressedienst_05_2021.pdf
Sounds absolutely correct wrt wind power ‘plummeting’.
Here is from the renowned German institution Fraunhofer a stat which tells different things, namely about the sum of the renewables:
And December isn’t in the stat in yet.
We will see when the first blackouts appear.
They’re getting MORE than they did in 2019… when they had no blackouts… so…???
The availability of FF backup, Griff. It will be an interesting experiment in Germany relying on electricity from wind, solar and imports and Russian gas. What could possibly go wrong?
NordStream 2 on hold because of Biden sanctions, and EU ineptitude, that’s what.
Approval of NordStream 2 operations is the least of the energy supply problems. No FF backup to wind and solar and Russia jacking up the gas price and/or cutting off supplies in response to a political fit are the real concerns
It is the MOST of the energy problems – Russia did not play finance – the EU Enron wannabee, the Ranch at the Crooked EU, did it.
It is incredible how the ENRON scam at Houston Tx in 2001 is here defended!
Nordstream 2 is on hold because it’s being used as a means to blackmail the EU,-
1/ for getting the Lukashenko fraudulent election recognised.
2/ because conditions (rightly) have been put in place for who manages it, instead of some faceless – non transparent corrupt offshore money laundering entity, or swiss based crime syndicate like Gunvor (who even corrupted the swiss justice system).
All geopolitical crap – NordStream 2 on hold has cost german taxpayers a fortune they never asked for – just some Blinken nutters.
With this kind of Mafia protection racket pioneered by Don Pompeo of the Henry Jackson Society, who needs cops?
” NordStream 2 on hold because of Biden sanctions… ”
Are you kidding us a bit, bonbon?
The first guy who made incredible pressure on the Nordstream 2 hold was… Trump.
Right – the Trump Admin and the Biden Admin right now. Elect who ye want and get the same ol’ same ol’, or haven’t ye noticed?
anti yankee crap manufactured by Simonyan and the Putin crook, who runs the troll factory in SPB.
Hey Bonbon the Putin troll, ever tried living in Russia?
You would survive about 5 mins.
“Right – the Trump Admin and the Biden Admin right now. Elect who ye want and get the same ol’ same ol’, or haven’t ye noticed?”
Really? US energy independence under one and US energy dependence under the other is the “same-ol’ same-ol’? I’ll leave it to the reader to attach the correct name to each.
By the way:
‘Germany plans to ease the pressure on consumers from rising energy bills, by cutting the surcharge which helps fund renewable energy in the country.
This will be reduced by 43 per cent next year, industry and government sources told Reuters on Thursday.’
Germany to slash renewable power fees to ease burden of higher energy bills | Euronews
Ha, ha, ha. They are shifting the cost of their insanity from the obvious consumer bills for energy to hidden general taxation. Politics is a bitch but people aren’t stupid.
griff seems to have bought into the propaganda.
Well, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. And you can’t fix stupid.
More than half of the adult population have IQs less than 100. Lincoln observed that it is possible to fool all of the people some of the time. That seems to be what the climate zealots and paid trolls are trying to accomplish.
Nice political sidestep now the gullible german public won’t be able to directly attribute the rising cost of power 🙂
If I remember correctly, on many, many occasions you have sworn that the taxes on German energy bills were not subsidies for renewables. Looks to me like you were either lying or know absolutely nothing about anything you say. Maybe both.
Yes and in the same breath he tried to claim fossil company write offs were a subsidy even when he was told repeated every company even renewable ones did that.
Germany plans to save consumers by reducing how much they have to pay to subsidize wind and solar.
And griff takes this as a victory form wind and solar.
Wait, I’ve heard on “good authority” that RE power is cheaper than FF power. So why would there be any need for subsidies?
It’s called the “shell game”
But they continue to subsidize unreliables, just out of hidden general taxation.
Well, no. The subisdy comes from forcing market prices higher via sharply higher carbon taxes.
“Blackout News reports that more of Germany’s power is being produced by coal and nuclear fuels. In 2021, due to unfavorable weather conditions, wind and solar energy production plummeted in 2021 compared to 2020. “Germany’s power mix is getting dirtier.””
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Allow me to introduce you to the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance Griff…
“In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information. Relevant items of information include a person’s actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things.[1] According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent.[1][2] The discomfort is triggered by the person’s belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
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Pay particular attention to the last sentence in the second quote above Griff. I am not a psychologist, but I will make an attempt at this anyway…
The conflict creating the cognitive dissonance for you here Griff is the failure of German wind and solar that has driven up the demand for and cost of the traditional energy sources. Your attempt to deal with the dissonance is simply to report that the German govt is going to lower the renewables tax on the German people’s energy bills.
You would appear to be attempting the resolve a dissonance conflict here rather than back away from your undying faith in wind and solar. You will notice that addressing the lowering of the tax does not deal with the source of the problem Griff.
I have a book you can add to your reading list…..
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1835405.When_Prophecy_Fails
Although the book was written back in the 1950’s, it is still worth a read today.
just kicking the can down the road
By the way….
Price comparison website Verivox calculated that retail prices for power providers on average have increased by about 25 percent by October 2021 compared to one year before.
That’s worth of the order of 8¢/kWh, which rather puts the reduction of the renewables levy from 6.5¢/kWh to 3.72¢/kWh in the shade. Moreover, moves by the new German government to ensure that there is a floor price of €60/MWh for EUA carbon tax will only serve to push prices higher, as will the switch to becoming a net importer with the closure of nuclear capacity next year. In effect, green policy is diriving prices so much higher that it would be embarrassing to keep topping up market prices with such a lavish subsidy: since renewables account for just under half of generation it is worth just over double the quoted value per MWh of renewables consumed by households.
It is very difficult to convince irrational people that they are irrational.
One of the characteristics of a mentally ill person is that they are absolutely certain of their sanity. A sane person will at least occasionally question their sanity.
There is a bit more to psychology – see the Tavistock Institute.
But because this figure is based on averaging renewable output over the first 9 months of 2021, what it probably means is there were longer periods when renewables were producing basically nothing. And with winter coming, meaning fewer hours of weaker sunlight, it is likely that the final three months of 2021 will see even lower renewable output.
Just don’t expect to read about it in the MSM.
The problem for Germany is now a looming shortage of dispatchable capacity becuase they’re shutting all nuclear capacity next year, and a shortage of gas in storage that they control. Storage isn’t full, but worse, Gazprom managed to lease a big chunk of it, and they have been filling their storage with gas shipped from Russia which they control. That means that the free market storage excludes what they control – and limits also how fast storage can be drawn down, because the right of drawdown depends on the stock you have in store. German law gives priority to household customers for gas to keep warm. That means industrial customers may get forced to shut down, and supply to power stations may also be restricted.
Despite the sharply higher EUA carbon tax (recently breaching €70/tonne CO2, adding a similar amount to the cost of lignite and coal generation per MWh, and around €25/MWh to gas generation cost) coal and lignite remain clearly the cheapest sources of supply. But the tax drives up market prices, and is a backdoor renewables subsidy – as well as revenue earner for the government.
¨Was schert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern?“ – The Adenauer Maxime should not be forgotten by those wondering….
When you really need renewables, they fail to deliver. California and Texas already experienced this, but California keeps moving toward a complete collapse of their grid. It will be interesting to see what happens in Deutschland this winter.
Why can’t we just…
No Joke : look what CERN is checking :
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-physicists-neutrinos-large-hadron-collider.html
read down to :
¨Since 2019, he and his colleagues have been getting ready to conduct an experiment with FASER instruments to investigate dark matter at the LHC. They’re hoping to detect dark photons, which would give researchers a first glimpse into how dark matter interacts with normal atoms and the other matter in the universe through nongravitational forces.
It amazes me that people do not ‘get’ what “Intermittent power source” really means. Read it as unreliable and I think it helps people to get the gist.
There are going to be good years and bad years for both solar and wind – hence it is unreliable. I certainly do not want to be sitting in a cold dark house in the dead of winter because some technocrat is making a lot of money building wind turbines – but the governments seem to just line up for this treatment of their citizens.
” It amazes me that people do not ‘get’ what “Intermittent power source” really means. ”
And conversely, it amazes me a lot more that people do not get that other people might very well perfectly know what “Intermittent power source” really means.
Can you really think that the Germans don’t know what they do?
Since 2006, renewable energies as source for electricity production were permanently put asleep by both the former political coalition and the electricity providers, who even refused to start building the high voltage connections between the mostly producing north and the mostly consuming south of the country.
This blocking finally found an end in 2020, as Merkel understood it would be time for a change of the leading paradigms in electricity production, and the new government will continue exactly that way.
*
By the way, instead of writing condescending sentences about Germany, you might rather hope that the Texas government has learned from the recent events with the gas connections, and manages to solve this problem, instead of uselessly blaming the wind power in Texas for having been the source of the disaster.
On the other hand, those (such as yourself) say they know what intermittent power source means, but then write such nonsense that it proves they don’t.
Do the politicians know how to run a power grid? Obviously not, otherwise they wouldn’t force intermittent power onto the grid while shutting down the reliable power sources.
” … but then write such nonsense that it proves they don’t. ”
What about explaining precisely where I wrote ‘such nonsense’, instead of writing your usual, ridiculous polemic?
If there are people who never understood what is a power grid, then the Texans.
We in Europe are permanently interconnected, like US minus… Texas.
How else could there be such info?
The inevitable next step on the path to net zero? Electricity rationing, lifestyle cutbacks.
Load management (in all of its various forms) is rationing. Remotely controlling your appliances and vehicle charging times, paying industries to shut down or reduce operations, brownouts and rotating blackouts & etc. are all different forms of rationing. Increasing the price of energy is rationing.
I believe North Korea’s top university has an entire school devoted to implementing that philosophy. It is completely black from space … except for Kim Jong-un’s
palace… residence.It will be good for our souls. We can appreciate what it is like to live in a Third World country. /sarc
I’ve been practising. Had 35 hours of power cut until late morning today. Eyeballing the numbers, I think about 5% of demand was subject to power cuts yesterday in the UK as a result of storm damage to power lines.
Same here in NE Wales though only out for 20 hours. Damn cold though!
I thought Germany decided to to close their nuclear power plants because the Fukushima nuclear plant was damaged by a tsunami. They thought tsunamis could do the same to their nukes. 🙄
Right – the tsunami would run up the Danube to Isar 2, any moment now.
As long as they don’t keep the backup generators in the basement in non-water tight rooms, there should be no problem with tsunamis in central Germany.
Or in Japan!
” They thought tsunamis could do the same to their nukes. ”
I rather would think you think they thought.
For people with a brain, it should be clear that a tsunami can hardly be a problem in Germany, with the exception of the North and Baltic Seas.
The decision to shutdown the nuclear plants was taken by Social-democrats and Greenies under Schröder between 2002 and 2005, but was immediately suspended by the Christ-democrats under Merkel, long before Japan suffered under the stupidity and the arrogance of the nuclear industry.
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The major reason for the shutdown was the lack of a valuable place for the final disposal of all waste accumulated by the 19 plants until then, plus that generated by their dismantling.
Germany has 80 million people on 350,000 km², something completely different from the USA, a country with lots of desert areas.
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The same mix of stupidity and arrogance still lives well in France, one needs only to look at the EPR plant under endless construction in Flamanville:
https://www.google.com/maps/search/flamanville+epr/@49.5354775,-1.9065359,5116m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en
See the nice episodes in the Atlantic in 1858 and 1755.
They’re lucky to have coal for backup. Watch as they decommission more of their coal fired plants to reach a stated goal of none. The Greens never get anything right, never listen to reason, and always either blame someone else for failures or just ignore them.
“To Be Phased Out”
Didn’t COP26 write to down that coal needs to be “phased down”?
Down or out…. it makes a huge difference
So by diverting capital from oil and gas to renewables we get increased coal production, which has about twice the carbon emissions as you would get from a gas power stations. But hey, at least the Greenies had good intentions! Incidentally, these folks don’t learn, right now they’re trying to block a big gas development in the North Sea. Do they really want us to burn more coal!?
Thinking ahead has never been a strong point with leftists.
You really aren’t good informed about Germoney, are you?
All that hasn’t anything to do with the Greenies who were all the time in the political opposition.
The elctricity providers, Chancelor Merkel and her CDU/CSU background together with the Social-democrats and the liberals in the FDP: alltogether were during the last decade not at all willing to give up the shit ‘Braunkohle’ aka lignite, the worst fossile fuel imaginable after oil sands.
And… what now concerns real coal (‘Steinkohle’ in German): the electricity producers themselves have shutdown several gas plants because burning coal – coming from the US and Australia, he he) was a lot cheaper!
Now, through the CO2 tax, much higher for coal than for gas, the plants resumed work in 2020 and 2021.
The Greenies are now in the government, and through their pressure, coal burning shutdown is for 2030 instead of 2038.
For 2030, 750 TWh / year are planned, with 80 % renews, including huge mass electricity storage devices.
For the moment, there are problems with gas, rien de nouveau à l’Ouest!
But Putin needs money, and his hope to replace Europe by China is ‘plummeting’.
Germany without coal and nuclear will be gefücked
Are these greenish brown jobs in the pit or brownish green jobs or transitional green brown jobs?
Meanwhile in Oz the AEMC faced with the aircons going out one hot summer tries to level the playing field and the usual suspects aint happy-
‘Kill the viability’: big batteries to lose out from electricity grid rule change (msn.com)
All these battery installs are doing at present, apart from squandering precious light weight lithium battery resources for the EV revolution and hold that thought, is creaming off the top with FCAS. Ostensibly to try and fix the problem their unreliables created in the first place but the AEMC has the task of keeping an eye on the big picture. Namely 24/7/365 power to meet demand stoopids.
A wise witch once told me: “Be careful what you wish for”. And the German populace is getting what they wished/asked for. It’s sad.