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When the wind industry and its worshippers start chanting their mantras about the ‘wonders’ of wind, it isn’t long before they start preaching about the examples purportedly set by the Europeans; and, in particular, the Nordic nations.
That the wind power fraud was driven by Denmark’s struggling turbine maker, Vestas probably has a fair bit to do with the worshippers’ fanatic-cult-like veneration of Scandinavia.
But, hold the phone?
It seems that economics works in precisely the same fashion in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, as just about everywhere else (save Cuba and North Korea, say?).
When you’re trying to sell a ‘product’ with no commercial value, the ‘business’ – for want of a better word – can only be about what you can extract from gullible/compliant governments (and unwitting power consumers), in the form of massive and endless subsidies.
In Australia, the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers have spent much of the last three years wailing like banshees about dreaded “uncertainty” surrounding the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target – all Tony Abbott’s fault, of course.
However, no matter how hard they try to avoid it, it seems that “dreaded uncertainty” is ubiquitous; and nothing to do with Tony Abbott, at all. Unless he’s been terrorising Scandinavia’s wind industry on the sly?
Investors – quite rightly nervous about the willingness of governments continuing to throw an endless and massive stream of subsidies at these things – stopped throwing money at European wind farms years ago.
Now, the Nordics are watching a complete collapse in wind power investment; with wind industry pundits wailing about … yep, that’s right: “UNCERTAINTY” – as the cause.
Wind Farm Investment Plunges With Power Prices in Nordic Region
Bloomberg News
Anna Hirtenstein and Rachel Morison
4 September 2015
Investors are pulling back from wind farms in Nordic nations as the lowest electricity prices in 12 years cut the profitability of new projects.
No wind farms were commissioned in Sweden in the second quarter, compared to 50 megawatts in the same period a year earlier, according to the nation’s wind association. Investment in utility-scale Nordic wind assets fell 76 percent to $1.2 billion in the three years through 2014, according to data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
“The low purchase price for power is worrying,” Thomas Wrangdahl, first vice-president and head of lending at the Nordic Investment Bank, said in a telephone interview. “We are seeing less investments in new power production in the market, particularly in the wind industry, and we believe that it’s linked to the low prices.”
The Nordic region has the lowest electricity prices in Europe and some of the highest reliance on renewables. The next-quarter contract, a benchmark, slumped 33 percent in the past year, according to data from Nasdaq Commodities exchange in Oslo. Prices dropped to the lowest for at least 12 years in June as wet weather boosted hydropower reserves.
The Nordics were early adopters of renewable technologies, creating the biggest wind turbine maker, Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems A/S. Lower power prices are undermining those efforts, with Denmark considering a U-turn on its ambitious green energy targets and Finland preparing to cut incentives for wind. Norway’s government-owned Statkraft AS canceled investments in some of Scandinavia’s biggest wind projects in June, citing reduced profitability.
Investment Pause
This year could be a “pause in investment,” according to Niclas Andersson Boberg, a director of M&A at EY in Stockholm. “The number of projects that are good enough to be finalized are fewer.”
The cost of wind power needs to rise to 60 euros ($66.70) a megawatt-hour from about 50 euros a megawatt-hour now to get more projects built, he said.
The drop in investor appetite may become a barrier to reaching goals for reducing greenhouse gases. Part of the problem is uncertainty around how governments will regulate and support the industry beyond 2020, according to Charlotte Unger, chief executive officer of Sweden’s wind-industry trade group Svensk Vindenergi.
Energy Exports
“If the politicians wait too long to decide on a support scheme after 2020 and on measures to improve the current system, this could affect the willingness to invest and hence also the target,” she said. “This will also make it more difficult for Sweden to export clean energy.”
Industry consultant, Nena AS, projected in June that electricity production in the Nordic region will outpace domestic demand by as much as 7 percent by 2020. The Nordic and Baltic states are exporting its surplus elsewhere in Europe as transmission links double capacity to more than 10 gigawatts by 2020, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The declining investor interest in building new wind farms can also be linked to sliding prices in the green power certificate market set up by Sweden and Norway, according to Jonas Rooze, head of European power analysis at New Energy Finance.
“The Swedish and Norwegian wind industry has been hit by a double whammy, as electricity prices are low and prices in the shared green certificate scheme have also been dropping due to oversupply,” Rooze said. “Too much wind has been built.”
Returns for Nordic onshore wind projects are as little as 5 percent, down from 8 percent around 2013, said Paul Stormoen, managing director of Stockholm-based renewable-energy developer OX2 Group AB.
“I know of projects stuck in limbo right now over uncertainty in the green certificate market in the medium to long term,” he said.
Bloomberg News
Talk in the piece above about “low power prices” has nothing to do with what retail customers pay. No, the moaning is about spot prices; that plummet when the wind blows; and which rocket when it doesn’t:
Of course, wind power outfits don’t get to ‘participate’ in the market when it peaks, and are left to curse the fickle nature of the Wind Gods:
Wind Power Ponzi Scheme Running Out of Puff
As a result of the subsidies and guaranteed feed-in-tariffs gouged by wind power outfits, German and Scandinavian power consumers pay the highest retail power prices in the world:
‘Green’ Power Myths Busted: Wind ‘Powered’ Danes & Germans Pay Europe’s Highest Power Prices By Far
As to that dreaded economic lurgy, “uncertainty” – not to worry, wind worshippers. There is at least one certainty. Without massive and endless subsidies this is an industry that goes nowhere.
STOP THESE THINGS 
What wind Believers are trying to avoid by refusing to admit they are wrong is admission they are wrong.
BTW, a burning windmill distributes its flaming debris for many miles downwind. A nightmare to combat or control.
I am sick and tired of both my fellow-liberals and their opponents equating the need to avoid catastrophic climate change with the folly of recent-solar-origin “renewable energy”.
The fissile nuclide class of materials that is fundamental to a sustainable nuclear energy technology is renewable, and anybody can learn that, just by reading Wikipedia on the subjects of Fat Man and the Trinity test. The history of US breeder reactors is also enlightening, as is Frontline’s interview with Charles Till on the Integral Fast Reactor.
I am a hard core liberal, and if I were the Pope of Liberalism I would excommunicate for anathema any self-supposed liberal who holds to the dogma that civilian nuclear power is inseparable from the Evil of Nuclear Weapons.
Besides, it’s pointless anyway. Russia and China are already working on breeder reactors as fast as they can get their engineers to do it.
As for Islamic terrorism, it gets encouragement and funding from the demand for Middle Eastern petroleum.
I live in Alberta Canada and the south western corner of the province has hundreds if not a thousand of these turbines which more than half the time arent moving. Why? Because there is no wind. Wind power contributes less than 5% to the provincial power grid. This alternative form of energy likely kills more bird populations than the tailing ponds of Ft MacMurray’s Tarsands. We recently, the people of Alberta, with sincere stupidity and knee jerk reaction, elected a provincial government (NDP -New Democratic Party) (which is the furthest thing from a democratic government) and it intends to ban coal fire electrical generation and switch to other alternatives one of them being wind power generation. I can only imagine seeing a wind turbine placed in every square mile of Alberta to satisfy the green movement and yet like cutting off ones nose to spite the face create a wind turbine blighted landscape.
What Alberta should do, to replace coal burning, is build nuclear. The US NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) compilation for 2012 of emissions per MWh of electricity reveals that by far the biggest contributor of “clean” energy was nuclear.
This is particularly the case with California, where the San Onofre reactors were shut down, in a violent over-reaction to a scare about a “radioactive water” leak of about a pint a minute from the high pressure reactor coolant circuit to the similar power driving circuit. Air quality in California abruptly worsened.
There had been no danger to anybody. The culprit was an extremely short-lived, and therefore remarkably radioactive-per-nanogram isotope of nitrogen, which having a half life of less than 8 seconds, would be undetectable from every drop of water that had registered a few billions of becquerels at the detectors, and spent 4 minutes (>30 half lives) travelling since then. The tenth power of 2 is 1024, so the 30th exceeds a billion.
The radioactive nitrogen-16 did not come from the nuclear fuel, it is weakly generated from the oxygen-16 of the water by the neutrons that the water “moderates” to make them more easily captured by the small proportion of fissile nuclei in the fuel
If you want to see the real cost of wind energy just look up
Neodymium mines in Mongolia China.
Neodymium mining is dirty, and of course the”Chinese ‘People’s Republic” is like the biggest and most ruthless global capitalist conglomerate ever.
But the worst damage being done, it seems to me, is EITHER
the conspicuous industrialization of huge stretches of wild and semi-wild land for tiny energy benefits,
OR
its capacity to make the problem it’s supposed to be solving seem; like the delusion that wind turbines are.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
If Greens love nature, why aren’t they more concerned about carpeting unspoilt, pristine landscapes and fragile ecosystems with industrial wind turbines?
And why aren’t the ‘compassionate’ Left, who push the wind scam, thanks to brilliantly crafted ‘global warming’ alarmist campaigns, more concerned about the massive wealth transfer from poor and middle class consumers and taxpayers to those nasty “1%” billionaires and corporations who are raking in still more billions?
And then the bubble bursts and the wind-scam reality is exposed…
“When you’re trying to sell a ‘product’ with no commercial value, the ‘business’ – for want of a better word – can only be about what you can extract from gullible/compliant governments (and unwitting power consumers), in the form of massive and endless subsidies.”
The one thing the greens like is the dollar factor, and to hell with everything else. The greens are one of the biggest destroyers of planet earth, as they do not care about the health of the people that live on planet earth. If they did, they would not have anything to do with these useless fans.
I have to insist that there are actual good people who know that the biosphere is in danger from the fact that thousands of years of carbon dioxide reduction in the atmosphere, during the Caboniferous period, has been reversed in the past two centuries.
They have deluded themselves in fear and possibly shame about nuclear weapons, that everything nuclear is evil.
So they are easily romantically deluded about the benefits from the Sun. The problem of course is, that the huge “bounty” of energy that we get from the sun in an hour, has to be got rid of in the same amount of time, or we get hotter.
I think it was Warren Buffet who said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
The tide is on its way our now for the windustry 🙂
Reblogged this on Mbafn's Blog and commented:
Choice magazine might have to include this industry in the “Shonky Awards” for next year…Or maybe the RBA might start a new “Ponzi Scheme” Award….
In to the crapper they go. Ka’flush!
Reblogged this on pattikellar and commented:
Despite what is happening with wind all over the world, Ontario just keeps building these monstrosities. Ridiculous. Some might say we were misled because we voted a majority Liberal government. I say the old adage, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. If the Liberal government gets in again in Ontario, like my Dad used to say, ‘give me the rope, I’ll hang myself’.