Germany’s Wind Power ‘Dream’ Becomes a Living Nightmare

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The wind industry, its parasites and spruikers, around the globe, hail Germany as THE wind power ‘Super Model’. Trouble is, in Germany – as elsewhere – the ‘gloss’ has well-and-truly worn off – and the ‘Model’ is looking more than just a little worse for wear.

The Germans went into wind power harder and faster than anyone else – and the cost of doing so is catching up with a vengeance. The subsidies have been colossal, the impacts on the electricity market chaotic and – contrary to the environmental purpose of the policy – CO2 emissions are rising fast: if “saving” the planet is – as we are repeatedly told – all about reducing man-made emissions of an odourless, colourless, naturally occurring trace gas, essential for all life on earth – then German energy/environmental policy has manifestly failed (see our post here).

Some 800,000 German homes have been disconnected from the grid – victims of what is euphemistically called “fuel poverty”. In response, Germans have picked up their axes and have headed to their forests in order to improve their sense of energy security – although foresters apparently take the view that this self-help measure is nothing more than blatant timber theft (see our post here).

German manufacturers – and other energy intensive industries – faced with escalating power bills are packing up and heading to the USA – where power prices are 1/3 of Germany’s (see our posts here and here and here). And the “green” dream of creating thousands of jobs in the wind industry has turned out to be just that: a dream (see our post here).

In response to mounting health complaints, German Medicos have called for an outright halt to wind farm construction, in order to protect their fellow citizens; and to stave off medical malpractice suits:

German Medicos Demand Moratorium on New Wind Farms

Now, apart from unnecessary wind farm harm, Germans are fast waking up to the unassailable fact that wind power is not only insanely expensive, it’s utterly meaningless as a power source.

Here’s a couple of recent pieces from Deutschland, that detail the scale of the disaster and the German’s brewing hostility to it.

The Madness Of Germany’s Energy Socialism
GWPF
Wolfram Weimer, Handelblatt
1 May 15

Germany’s energy revolution is getting more and more absurd. After nuclear power and gas, coal power is about to be phased out. The madness is reaching new proportions.

Thirty years ago, he would have certainly been honored as “Master Architect of Socialism” or “Chief Activist of Socialist Labour” – east of the Elbe. Sigmar Gabriel is doing everything possible to re-establish a comprehensive planned economy in Germany: the green energy transition pushes the gates to energy-socialism far open.

His latest coup: the German coal mining industry should be subjected to a national climate change regime and should submit to bureaucratic CO2-tonnes planning and arbitrary special levies. The German economy, the coal-states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Brandenburg, and the unions are up in arms. Verdi boss Frank Bsirske sees up to 100,000 jobs at risk and calls for mass demonstrations. The unfortunate RWE CEO Peter Terium warns desperately: “The levy would mean the immediate end for much of lignite mines and coal-fired plants.” And the Christian Democrat’s Armin Laschet warns:” With its special tax on coal the Minister of Economy purges the last subsidy-free, economic and import-independent domestic energy source from the German electricity market.”

In fact, the new coal plan is just another step in the great socialist power master plan that Sigmar Gabriel is rolling out all over Germany. Already a whole republic of Green electricity councils establishes determined plan-prices, solar and wind comrades produce arbitrary amounts of power, the population pays compulsory levies, supply and demand are suspended and party politics determine plan fulfillment figures. In this eco-socialism, everybody who produces electricity from renewable sources receives a nationally defined “energy feed-in tariff” (the very word sounds like it comes from East Berlin) according to plan specifications. This has as much to do with free market prices for electricity as Stasi boss Erich Mielke had to do with the freedom to travel – nothing.

What was once launched as a – well-intentioned – green energy revolution has now mutated into a giant VEB [i.e. East German state company]. In Gabriel’s system electricity production is no longer determined by demand – as is usual in a market economy. It is not demand that determines supply – but the subsidy billions. Produced is only what wind and solar power and feed-in tariffs expensively allow, not what the public and the economy need – cheap energy. In Gabriel’s national energy system there is an ideological distinction between “good” (green) and “evil” (traditional) energy. Therefore, even profitable and clean gas power plants are switched off – as just happened to Europe’s most modern gas-fired power plant in Irsching. Instead, new subsidy-fed projects are connected to the grid without the necessary network capacity and without the necessary storage technology. For these intermittent power plants, coal power plants have to be kept running as backups, which in turn emit a lot more CO2, which now are also extra-taxed. It all feels like socialist self-perpetuating: this energy revolution cannot be stopped.

Environmental Destruction

The eco-guaranteed prices already lead to all sorts of classic features of a planned economy all of which are well known from the Soviet bloc economies: unprofitable excess capacity, for example. Meanwhile, 1.4 million photovoltaic panels have been installed in the rather shady Germany.

No other country in the world has built up such a tremendous and wholly unprofitable contingent. With around 25,000 wind turbines as well as thousands of biogas plants we are world leader. Like in the five-year plans of the socialist German Democratic Republic, quotas, objectives, and targets are prescribed by central ministries.

The new eco-planned economy devours vast billions in subsidies, not less than 22 billion euros total EEG feed-in tariff per year – and yet electricity from renewable sources, even after more than ten years of continuous subsidies, is more expensive than that from coal, oil, nuclear energy and gas. Rather than terminate the subsidy socialism, however, a parasitic mix of funding application experts, investors, plant manufacturers and subsidy distributers continues to drive the industry forward.

They have created an eco-industrial complex, which performs perfect lobbying in Berlin, but which also ruins the country with windmills and fleeces it with collective money, because on top of that the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (Credit Bank for Rebuilding) grants the green lobby subsidised loans to ensure that the planned economy is also financially rounded.

The wrong-headed system is so expensive that only a very rich country like Germany can afford this large-scale experiment. Around 100 billion euros have already been burnt by this subsidy socialism. Currently the green energy levy costs 56 million euros every day. The expanding eco-socialism has turned energy providers to state combines of the Federal Grid Agency. Because this agency determines which prices may be charged for electricity transmission, it allows subsidies and authorised returns on investments. Because the industrial electricity prices are the second highest in Europe, energy-intensive businesses are gradually saying good-bye to Gabriel’s energy-socialism.

The fact that the colossal construction of wind turbines and solar installations also causes dramatic landscape blight is the sad irony of this green story. A journey through Gabriel-Germany is now like a green tunnel of horror, a roller-coaster ride through vast tracts of destroyed nature, a subsidy-grave filled with turbines and panels.

That’s why – rather than chasing coal off the market too – the green command and control economy needs to be reformed fundamentally. It has set in motion the biggest rip-off subsidy of recent history and has damaged the environment, it burdens the economy and forces all consumers to suffer from rising electricity prices. The worst distortions of the market have to be balanced by more and more new regulations. In this way, one government intervention justifies the next. Germany’s ‘real existing socialism’ has been history since 1989, thank God. The energy-existing Gabriel-socialism, however, is on the rise.
Translation Phillip Mueller
Wirtschaftswoche, 24 April 2015

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Part of what’s got Germans up in arms is what the wind industry has done to their beloved towns and country-side (for a pictorial taste of the aesthetic destruction – see this article).

And the Germans are not taking what the wind industry has dished up, lying down: they’re getting angrier and more organised by the day.

Germany’s Anti-Wind Energy Elements Morph Into A Massive Network Of Protest Groups… Call Wind Energy “A Lie”
NoTricksZone
4 June 2015

Resistance to the junk green energy is growing in Germany.

Last month a print edition of Germany’s Braunschweiger Nachrichten featured a commentary by the head of a German wind protest organization, Dr. Thomas Carl Stiller. The title: “Madness With Wind Turbines”

Hat-tip K.E. Puls, European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE).

In the commentary Stiller says that Germany’s once highly ballyhooed Energiewende (transition to renewable energies) “cannot and will not function“, and what was once only a few single protesters voicing opposition to wind parks, is now an entire nationwide umbrella organization of protest groups against the “subsidy-robbing empire” of wind energy industry.

Stiller describes a technology whose produced energy cannot be stored and which depends on random, unpredictable winds. The technology is so inefficient that builders are now forced to erect 800-foot tall monster size machines in a desperate effort to extract real power. He also writes that “wind energy has done nothing to combat climate change”.

“Despite increased wind energy installation, CO2 emissions in Germany have risen. […] Climate protection and reliable power supply by wind turbines installed on the land is thus a lie.”

Stiller also writes that the maximum output of a wind turbine “is far below its rated capacity” and that the German citizenry is paying 20 billion euros annually for a “misconception“. To illustrate the folly of wind energy, Stiller writes that Germans are paying 20 billion euros a year for a commodity that gets sold on the power exchange for only around 2 billion euros.

What’s encouraging is that Stiller writes:

“German citizens are waking up to this insanity”. He comments that “wind energy would not be able to supply the country even if the entire country were covered with wind turbines”.

Stiller also calls for more research for the health impacts that wind turbines are having and that the energy source has got to be for the good of the public and not profit a few opportunists. He adds:

“Us organized citizens are demanding independent feasibility studies and calling for more transparency during the planning process and that man and nature be put back in the focus.”

NoTricksZone

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