The Associated Press, USA Today, The Guardian, and other media outlets delivered a coordinated – and false – message yesterday with a spate of stories claiming climate change is responsible for extremely heavy rains in Hawaii this past week. Instead, objective Hawaii rainfall data provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) prove exactly the opposite is the cast – extreme rain events in Hawaii are becoming less frequent and severe as the Earth modestly warms. Global warming – or climate change – may not make all Hawaii extreme rain events disappear, but global warming is making them less likely to occur.

According to the lead paragraph in the Associated Press article, “Heavy rains are part of the winter rainy season in Hawaii. But the downpours triggering flooding that destroyed homes and bridges and set off mass evacuations on two islands this week are also an example of the more intense rainstorms officials and climate scientists say are occurring more frequently as the planet warms.”

The AP article then stoked alarm about the consequences of the heavy rain:

“The onslaught destroyed and heavily damaged two Maui bridges, along with at least six homes in Haiku.

“The rain filled a 138-year-old reservoir once used to irrigate sugar plantation fields that has recently been kept empty as its owners prepare to dismantle it this summer.

“So much water accumulated it started overflowing from the 57-foot high structure at one point Monday, and county officials ordered people downstream to evacuate amid fears the earthen dam could breach. Ultimately, the reservoir didn’t fail, and water levels dropped as the rain let up.”

Next, the AP article quoted – without qualification, critical inquiry, or citation to factual climate data – an activist government official:

“This is really an example of climate change in the present day,” Suzanne Case, head of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, which regulates the dam, said in a statement. “We have a flood emergency because of the heavy rain bomb. And we’re seeing these more and more across the island chain — more frequent and more extreme events.”

Knowing that most, if not all, alarmist climate change assertions reported in the media are somewhere between misleading and outright false, Climate Realism decided to do the fact-checking that the Associated Press declined to do.

NOAA produces state-specific climate summaries for each of the 50 states. NOAA reports temperature and precipitation historical data in five-year periods for each state. According to data presented in NOAA’s State Climate Summaries: Hawaii, as shown in the NOAA chart below, Hawaii experienced a below-average number of extreme rain events during each of the four most recent five-year periods. Indeed, during the most recent five-year period, Hawaii had the fewest number of extreme rainfall events in recorded history. Also, the last time Hawaii had a five-year period with an above-average number of extreme rainfall events was more than 25 years ago, during the early 1990s.

According to the NOAA summary describing the above chart: “the number of extreme precipitation events has been below average in recent years.”

So, clearly, objectively, factually, and confirmed by NOAA data and commentary, Hawaii is experiencing fewer extreme rainfall events as the Earth continues its modest warming. Nevertheless, whether out of ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation, the Associated Press, USA Today, The Guardian, Hawaii news media, and other media outlets are telling Hawaiians, Americans, and the rest of the world that climate change caused this week’s extremely heavy Hawaii rains and is making such heavy rainfall events more frequent in recent years.

That is simply, and provably, a lie.

The post Hawaii Experiencing Fewer Extreme Rain Events, Despite Media Alarm appeared first on Climate Realism.

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By James Taylor -March 12, 2021

Hawaii Experiencing Fewer Extreme Rain Events, Despite Media Alarm

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Guest essay by Jim Steele

Last week the Guardian proclaimed Butterfly Numbers Plummeting in US West as Climate Crisis Takes Toll. Numerous media outlets flooded the internet with similar versions in response to the research article Fewer Butterflies Seen by Community Scientists Across the Warming and Drying Landscapes of The American West  by lead author Dr. Matt Forister.  For the factors examined, their research found climate change had the greatest statistical effect associated with changing butterfly populations. Warmer summer temperatures however had a positive effect, while warmer autumn temperatures had a negative effect. Of course, in an age where chicken little catastrophes sell, only warming fall temperatures and butterfly extinctions could promote a profitable climate crisis. Worse, the public was misled to assume “all” western butterflies were declining.

For example, a  University of Arizona press release (home of Forister’s co-author) stated, “Western butterfly populations are declining at an estimated rate of 1.6% per year,….The report looks at more than 450 butterfly species.” However, the researchers only stated their databases “encompassed more than 450 species”. In reality their analyses addressed just 289 species of which only 182 or 40% of the 450 species exhibited declining populations. Another 107 species were stable or increasing, and 161 lacked sufficient data for analysis.

It’s expected that during any given decade various populations of a butterfly species will randomly increase in one area but decrease in another, but with no overall declines as recently reported for USA insects. So correctly, Forister et al. asked if a species’ population trend was restricted to a local area or widespread. To answer that they examined 3 independent datasets. The North American Butterfly Association (NABA) supplied their once‑a‑year butterfly counts, typically held around July 4^th, of which only 72 different sites had the required 10+ years of data (average was 21 years) with which to determine a species’ abundance trend.  A second data set came from Dr. Art Shapiro’s northern California bi-weekly surveys but covered only 10 sites from the San Francisco Bay area to the Sierra Nevada crest at Donner Pass. A third database used iNaturalist’s citizen science data that only provided flashy optics suggesting  widespread coverage. Although iNaturalist is a great application that easily connects laypeople with experts for accurate identifications and determines the presence of a species in a given locale, it doesn’t provide trustworthy trend data.

To argue for widespread declines, a species had to be declining in at least two of their three datasets. Comparing trends in the NABA & Shapiro datasets, only 104 species exhibited declines in both. In other words, only 23% of the ballyhooed 450 species showed a possible widespread decline. However, when interviewed by the Washington Post for the article Butterflies Are Vanishing Out West. Scientists Say Climate Change is to Blame,  Forister contrarily stated, “The influence of climate change is driving those declines, which makes sense because they’re so widespread”

Despite the real number of examined species, National Geographic still trumpeted 450 Butterfly Species Rapidly Declining Due to Warmer Autumns In The Western U.S. while shamefully ignoring the positive summer warming. Indeed Forister had reported, “locations that have been warming in the fall months have seen fewer butterflies over time”, adding an unsupported hypothesis that “fall warming likely induces physiological stress on active and diapausing stages, reduces host plant vigor, or extends activity periods for natural enemies.” But most butterfly species are no longer flying or laying eggs or feeding during the autumn. Instead, they have snuggled into relative safety from environmental changes to overwinter until the next flush of new springtime vegetation.

The larvae (caterpillars) of some declining species feed on grasses (i.e. Eufala Skipper and Sachem skipper), or herbs (i.e. Cabbage White or Sara Orange-Tip). But most grasses and herbs are dead or dormant by the end of summer. Other larvae of declining species feed on the young leaves or needles produced by trees in the spring (like Propertius duskywing or Western pine elfin). Autumn warmth has no effect on the “vigor” of dead or dormant food plants. Autumn temperatures are simply not critically important. Natural enemies like parasitic wasps typically evolved similar sensitivities to the same environmental cues as their caterpillar hosts and insect eating birds begin migrating south in August. Claiming global warming somehow selectively hurts butterflies but helps their enemies is a totally unsupported claim hurled far too often by those fabricating a climate crisis.

Disturbingly, Forister et al. simultaneously downplayed known benefits of summer warming, suggesting it only increased ‘butterfly visibility’ stating, “warming in the summer influences adult activity times directly and hence increases the probability of detection”. But to power their flight, butterflies sunbathe to raise their body temperature above ambient air temperature. Increased activity is needed for mating and finding host plants. Greater summer warmth also enables faster larval growth, which in some species enables an increased number of generations each year enabling larger summer populations (i.e. Monarchs). In other species like Edith’s checkerspot the caterpillars seek hotter surfaces to grow fast enough each summer and reach a required size allowing overwinter survival. Warmer summers benefit many species in many ways.

To my knowledge not one media outlet reported the summer benefits or the most telling conclusion of Forister et al. “Although our analyses point to warming fall temperatures as an important factor in insect declines, we acknowledge the multifaceted nature of the problem and how muchremains to be understood about climate change interacting with habitat loss anddegradation.”

If Forister et al. were truly trying to decipher the causes for observed butterfly declines, they should have at least adhered to the most basic scientific principle of controlling for known confounding factors. To blame climate change, confounding effects must be removed. But they were not. Thus, declining trends could be completely caused by insecticides and land use. And Forister was well aware of such important factors.

In a 2010 paper co-authored with Dr. Shapiro he found, “most severe reductions at the lowest elevations, where habitat destruction is greatest.” In a 2014 paper Forister concluded  “Patterns of land use contributed to declines in species richness, but the net effect of a changing climate on butterfly richness was more difficult to discern.” In his 2016 paper he modelled negative effects of neonicotinoid insecticides. Listed as Forister’s 37th most declining species, the media highlighted the recent 99% decline of western Monarch butterflies. Yet the Monarch’s big killers are also land use change and herbicides, not climate change.

In the 1970s scientists discovered virtually all monarchs breeding east of the Rocky Mountains migrate to extremely small patches of high mountain forests in central Mexico. When that critical wintering habitat was logged, it opened the forest canopies removing its insulating effects. In January 2002, a storm brought cold rains followed by clear skies. Without the clouds’ greenhouse effect, or an insulating forest canopy, temperatures plummeted to 23°F (- 4°C). Millions of damp butterflies froze in place. Many millions more fell creating an eerie carpet of dead and dying butterflies several inches deep. Distraught researchers calculated 500 million butterflies died that winter, wiping out 80% of the entire eastern population. Similar cold events happened in 2004, 2010 and 2016.

In contrast, monarchs breeding west of the Rockies winter along the California coast to Baja where the ocean moderates temperatures and prevents freezing. Nonetheless those wintering populations also plummeted by 81% by 2014. Interestingly, tagging studies and genetics suggest California and Mexican wintering populations intermingle. Although it’s not clear if one wintering population contributes to the other, their abundance has fluctuated very similarly. In addition, a 1991 statewide study implicated land use as 38 overwintering sites in California were destroyed.

Herbicides severely reduced the monarch’s food plants, milkweeds. Adapted to colonizing open disturbed landscapes, milkweed species began invading the fertilized ground between rows of crops. As 1900s monarch populations boomed, farmers’ crops suffered. Milkweed competition reduced harvests of wheat and sorghum by 20% and most states declared milkweed a noxious weed. Attempts to eradicate milkweed by tilling only stimulated underground roots promoting more milkweed. The 1970s discovery that the herbicide glyphosate (i.e. Roundup) killed the whole plant, turned the tide against milkweed. When genetically modified herbicide‑resistant soybean and corn crops were developed in 1996, herbicide use dramatically increased, furthering the milkweeds rapid decline. That loss of milkweed now hinders monarch recovery. For monarch lovers, our best safeguard is planting more milkweed in our gardens. Likewise, we can plant butterfly friendly gardens for all species. On the bright side of climate change, warming could allow an added monarch generation.

---

Jim Steele is Director emeritus of San Francisco State’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism and a member of the CO2 Coalition

The post Media Wrong About Butterfly Science and Climate Fearmongering appeared first on Climate Realism.

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By Anthony Watts -March 12, 2021

Media Wrong About Butterfly Science and Climate Fearmongering

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A Google News search today for the term “climate change” turns up an Environment Journal article which claims climate change could increase incidences of malaria. This is wrong. Copious research indicates climate change is unlikely to exacerbate the spread of malaria or other insect borne diseases.

In the Environment Journal article, titled “Climate change could increase the spread of malaria,” the authors write:

Climate change could impact malaria transmission in Africa …. [R]esearchers at the Barcelona Institute of Global Health (ISGlobal) used mathematical modelling to analyse the association between malaria cases, regional climate (local temperatures and rainfall) and global climate (in particular the effect of El Niño and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation on the Pacific Ocean) in Oromia, a densely populated highland area in Ethiopia. [They] found that the variation in malaria cases shows a strong correlation with changes in regional temperatures.

Correlation does not prove causation.

The researchers involved ignored the fact that even with its modest regional temperature decline during the global warming hiatus, the average daily temperature in Ethiopia during its coldest two months, July and August, remained well above the temperature mosquitos require to breed and flourish. Indeed, July and August are also Ethiopia’s rainiest months, which favors mosquito reproduction by creating more stagnant pools in which to lay their eggs.

In addition, as detailed in Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the vast body of scientific literature refutes the Environment Journal’s claim that climate change is likely to exacerbate the spread of mosquito borne diseases.

Studies from Africa, to England and Wales, to North and South America, to Thailand and beyond refute any link between climate change and the spread of malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and other vector-borne diseases. For example, a 2010 study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature reports, “[The study’s authors] compared historical and contemporary maps of the range and incidence of malaria and found endemic/stable malaria is likely to have covered 58% of the world’s land surface around 1900 but only 30% by 2007.” Clearly, malaria has become less prevalent and deadly as the climate has warmed.

The authors rebut potential assertions that there would be even further reductions in malaria but for global warming. The authors write, ‘widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent.’

Vector-borne disease expert Paul Reiter, a member of the World Health Organization’s Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control, has written extensively on the transmission of vector-borne diseases. Reiter concludes any links between such diseases and climate change are not supported by evidence.

A dated but well-rounded view of this topic can be found in his paper from 2001:

Climate Change and Mosquito-Borne Disease

by Paul Reiter — Dengue Branch, Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases, National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, San Juan, Puerto Rico

The paper begins with this:

“The earth’s climate has always been in a state of change. For nearly three centuries it has been in a warming phase. This was preceded by a cold period, the Little Ice Age, which was itself preceded by a warmer phase known as the Medieval Warm Period, or Little Climatic Optimum. Such changes are entirely natural, but there is evidence that in recent years a portion of the current warming may be attributable to human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. The potential impact of this global warming on human health is a major subject of debate.”

and ends with this:

“Final Comment

The natural history of mosquito-borne diseases is complex, and the interplay of climate, ecology, vector biology, and many other factors defies simplistic analysis. The recent resurgence of many of these diseases is a major cause for concern, but it is facile to attribute this resurgence to climate change. The principal determinants are politics, economics, and human activities. A creative and organized application of resources is urgently required to control these diseases regardless of future climate change.”

For another example, in a 2008 article in the Malaria Journal, Reiter writes,

“Simplistic reasoning on the future prevalence of malaria is ill-founded; malaria is not limited by climate in most temperate regions, nor in the tropics, and in nearly all cases, ‘new’ malaria at high altitudes is well below the maximum altitudinal limits for transmission.”

Reiter adds, “future changes in climate may alter the prevalence and incidence of the disease, but obsessive emphasis on ‘global warming’ as a dominant parameter is indefensible; the principal determinants are linked to ecological and societal change, politics and economics.”

Temperatures are just one factor that can limit the range of malaria bearing mosquitos. Sadly, the Environment Journal ignored evidence showing, across its historic endemic range—which includes Ethiopia—as global average temperatures have increased modestly, incidences of malaria have declined, while varying from year to year as they always have.

The post Environment Journal Wrong About Climate Change Increasing Malaria appeared first on Climate Realism.

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By H. Sterling Burnett -March 12, 2021

Environment Journal Wrong About Climate Change Increasing Malaria

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Call it the Grim New Deal. Everyone must dance to the EU’s climate-obsessive tune – they wish – or pay trade penalties. But opposition is already mounting.
– – –
Europe’s Green Deal and its planned carbon border tax are in serious trouble as the Biden administration raises concerns about its potentially disastrous fallout on international trade and relations, says The GWPF.

According to the European Commission the EU’s Green Deal and its 2050 Net Zero target are threatening the very survival of Europe’s industries unless a carbon border tax is enforced upon countries that are not adopting the same expensive Net Zero policies.

It’s a matter of survival of our industry. So if others will not move in the same direction, we will have to protect the European Union against distortion of competition and against the risk of carbon leakage,” European Commission executive vice-president Frans Timmermans warned in January.

On Wednesday, the European Parliament endorsed the creation of a carbon border tax that is planned to protect EU companies against cheaper imports from countries with weaker climate policies.

However, it would appear that the Biden administration is getting cold feet about the protectionist agenda and its potentially devastating impact of world trade, throwing a spanner in the EU’s plans.

John Kerry, Joe Biden’s climate envoy, has warned the EU that a carbon border tax should be a “last resort,” telling the Financial Times that he was “concerned” about Brussels’ forthcoming plans.

Continued here.

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March 13, 2021 at 05:51AM

During the Texas blackout corporate media outlets couldn’t publish their fictional stories fast enough. “Wind and solar were not the problem!” declared the New York Times, USA Today, ABC News, the Associated Press, NPR, and countless others. The media outlets that shamelessly shill for a renewable energy nirvana can always be counted on to misinform.

The media proclaimed that wind and solar weren’t the problem because these unreliable sources aren’t expected to produce much power during winter months in the first place. That’s a small truth wrapped in a big fat lie. From February 8 to the 16^th electricity output from wind was down 93 percent. On the two most critical days of the freeze, the 15^th and 16^th, wind power was almost non-existent. However, it is true this pitiful performance was not a major factor in the outages. That bit of truth created a window for deception.

According to our corporate media, the blackouts were caused by failures in natural gas, coal, and nuclear generation. Again, a tiny truth wrapped in a whopper of a lie. Yes, there were frozen pipes and a number of other glitches. However, the frozen pipe problem was largely caused by Ercot, the company that runs the grid. As Ercot cut power to protect the grid from damage, it cut off electricity to natural gas production and processing units. With no power to pressurize the pipes, they froze. This was a management failure, not a problem with natural gas-fired power. In spite of Ercot’s mismanagement of the system, natural gas delivered 450 percent more power from the 8^th to the 16^th. Yes, 450 percent more. And, this happened even as natural gas providers were delivering a record amount of gas to residents for home heating.

I could go on and on about grid mismanagement before and during the crisis. For example, Ercot allowed some coal and natural gas generators to go offline for maintenance even as weather forecasters were warning about the historic dimension of the big freeze. But talking about these issues distracts us from the giant problems that have been building up in Texas for more than 15 years.

What wind and solar advocates in the mainstream press ignore (or probably don’t even know) is that the electric grid demands a high level of consistency. It operates within a narrow margin at 60 hertz. If power is even .5 percent above or below 60 Hz the grid begins to fail. Wind and solar are wildly erratic. The large swings in power output test grid operators ability to maintain this small operating space. Dealing with the inconsistent nature of wind and solar is a manageable problem when they provide a small percentage of the power supply. But Texas has increased its wind generation from 2.9 percent in 2007 to 25 percent today. Solar went from next to nothing to 2.38 percent. That’s an enormous amount of unreliability for a grid that demands precision.

The only way to manage this problem is to maintain a large reserve margin of power that can be called upon at a moment’s notice. When electricity from wind and solar drop quickly as they regularly do, reserve power from natural gas fills the gap. A healthy reserve margin is 15 percent. But with wind claiming such a large percentage of generation in Texas, a larger margin (i.e. 25 percent) would be prudent. The reserve margin in Texas is only about 7.5 percent.

Setting mismanagement aside, this is the key problem with the Texas grid. There’s too much erratic wind and solar and not nearly enough reliable baseload power from coal, nuclear, and natural gas. The reserve margin should be at least doubled and probably tripled to accommodate unreliable wind and solar that are already part of the system. Understanding this reality takes some research and deeper thinking, but our corporate media are either not interested or are incapable of learning about the technical aspects of how the electrical grid functions.

True journalism is hard to find these days. What could be more important to the function of our modern world than electricity? And yet, corporate media are more interested in telling small truths wrapped in giant lies. The consequences be damned.

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By Mark Mathis |March 13th, 2021

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March 13, 2021 at 02:49AM

Study provides new details on the fate of spilled oil in the marine environment, effectiveness of chemical dispersants

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI ROSENSTIEL SCHOOL OF MARINE & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE

Research News

MIAMI–A new study lead by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science demonstrates that under realistic environmental conditions oil drifting in the ocean after the DWH oil spill photooxidized into persistent compounds within hours to days, instead over long periods of time as was thought during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. This is the first model results to support the new paradigm of photooxidation that emerged from laboratory research.

After an oil spill, oil droplets on the ocean surface can be transformed by a weathering process known as photooxidation, which results in the degradation of crude oil from exposure to light and oxygen into new by-products over time. Tar, a by-product of this weathering process, can remain in coastal areas for decades after a spill. Despite the significant consequences of this weathering pathway, photooxidation was not taken into account in oil spill models or the oil budget calculations during the Deepwater Horizon spill.

The UM Rosenstiel School research team developed the first oil-spill model algorithm that tracks the dose of solar radiation oil droplets receive as they rise from the deep sea and are transported at the ocean surface. The authors found that the weathering of oil droplets by solar light occurred within hours to days, and that roughly 75 percent of the photooxidation during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred on the same areas where chemical dispersants were sprayed from aircraft. Photooxidized oil is known to reduce the effectiveness of aerial dispersants.

“Understanding the timing and location of this weathering process is highly consequential. said Claire Paris, a UM Rosenstiel School faculty and senior author of the study. “It helps directing efforts and resources on fresh oil while avoiding stressing the environment with chemical dispersants on oil that cannot be dispersed.”

“Photooxidized compounds like tar persist longer in the environment, so modeling the likelihood of photooxidation is critically important not only for guiding first response decisions during an oil spill and restoration efforts afterwards, but it also needs to be taken into account on risk assessments before exploration activities” added Ana Carolina Vaz, assistant scientist at UM’s Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies and lead author of the study.

###

The study, titled “A Coupled Lagrangian-Earth System Model for Predicting Oil Photooxidation,” was published online on Feb 19, 2021 in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. The authors of the paper include: Ana Carolina Vaz, Claire Beatrix Paris and Robin Faillettaz.

The study was supported by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI): C-IMAGE III (Center for the Integrated Modeling and Analysis of the Gulf Ecosystem) and RECOVER 2 (Relationship of Effects of Cardiac Outcomes in ?sh for Validation of Ecological Risk).

From EurekAlert!

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March 13, 2021 at 12:33AM

In another ‘proof is in the pudding moment’, wind and solar obsessed Germans are now paying record prices for electricity. German households suffer the highest prices in Europe. And, over the last 20 years, the prices paid by German industry have almost tripled.

Faced with the choice between going broke or going elsewhere, Germany’s world-renowned high-tech businesses are opting for the latter course.  Despite all that ‘free’ energy Germans pay some of the highest electricity prices in the world at 38c/KWh. Whereas Singaporeans use natural gas and pay 18c/KWh. Needless to say, it’s Singapore that’s becoming the landing pad for German high-tech businesses hoping to survive.

NoTicks Zone has more on the inevitable consequences of our so-called ‘inevitable transition’.

Germans Spent “More Than Ever Before”…Consumer Electricity Costs Reach Record High In 2020
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
3 March 2021

German online public broadcasting site ntv here reports how German consumers last year spent “around 37.8 billion euros in 2020 – more than ever before.”

Citing calculations from the shopping portal Check24, the total amount paid was about 900 million euros more than in 2019.

One reason was the high consumption due to home office use. But the primary reason was because of the rising cost of green electricity.

The last time private consumption was about the same as in 2020 was in 2016. But in 2020 the electricity costs increased by a total of three billion euros.

“The average price per kilowatt hour rose from 27 cents to around 30 cents during this period,” ntv reports. “The rise in electricity costs is not only due to more frequent use of the home office during the Corona crisis. The levies and taxes included in the electricity price have risen particularly sharply in recent years.”

German consumer electricity prices are the highest in Europe. Source: Eurostat.

75% of the price are taxes, levies and surcharges 
Among the levies charged are the German EEG renewable energy feed-in surcharges, which have pushed German consumer electricity prices to around 30 euro-cents per kilowatt-hour.

According to figures from the Federal Network Agency, levies and taxes accounted for more than three quarters of private household electricity bills in 2020. According to the EU statistics office Eurostat, Germany has the highest electricity prices for household customers.

Efforts to curtail prices have failed
So painful have electricity prices become, that now the German government is contemplating changing the system of subsidizing green electricity, and Economics Minister Peter Altmaier says “it is necessary to completely abolish the levy paid by consumers,” reports ntv.

“By abolishing the EEG levy, the German government could relieve German households of around 9.7 billion euros,” says Lasse Schmid, Managing Director Energy at Check24.

Experts expect costs to climb further. “If electricity consumption remains more or less constant in 2021, this record will be surpassed again in 2021,” suspects Schmid.

German prices for industry triple
Meanwhile electricity prices for German industry have nearly tripled since 2000. According to Statista here, prices for electricity used by industry have risen from about 6 euro-cents per kilowatt-hour in 2000 to about 18 cents per kilowatt-hour today.

Also the supply of German electricity has become more unsteady as power grid operators regularly have to intervene in their struggle to keep the grid from fluctuating out of control due to the weather-dependent wind and solar energies.
No Tricks Zone

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March 13, 2021 at 12:31AM