Germany’s wind power transition has hit the wall: rural Germans are sick and tired of the noise, ruined landscapes and communities; and Germans of all persuasions are fed up with Europe’s highest power prices, which continue to rocket as a consequence of its so-called ‘renewable energy transition’ aka the ‘Energiewende’.
Thanks to massive subsidies and mandated targets, over 30,000 of these things have been speared into every last corner of Deutschland. But, as the team from Jo Nova explain below, the backlash against industrial wind power has brought the German wind industry to a shuddering halt.
Wind power “headed for disaster” in Germany
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
1 July 2021
Is this the future of wind all over the world?
The salad days of wind power in Germany are over. Bad news is rolling in from several directions. Twenty years of hope-n-subsidies has run aground. Profits are grinding down, and hardly any new towers are being erected. People are fighting back against the noise, the views, and the bird chopping. Conservationists might like the idea of wind, as long as it’s in someone else’s forest. Suddenly groups that oppose wind towers are gaining traction, and the red tape and legal battles have grown wings and settled on new developments like a bat plague.
New turbines are now supposed to be two kilometers from any home, and there just isn’t enough spare land to build them on. German wind farms are running out of Germany.
If only they were profitable and provided an essential service, they might still have friends.
Wind energy in crisis as expansion stalls in Germany
Alex Reichmuth; Nebelspalter, via GWPF
Lengthy planning and approval procedures stand in the way of the expansion of wind energy. There is too little designated space for possible locations and too many lawsuits against projects. The resistance to the construction of wind turbines is enormous in many places. Countless nature conservationist groups and citizens’ groups see the landscape impaired, health threatened or rare birds in danger and are fighting with all possible means against new wind turbines. Frequently, political leaders of municipalities and states are against easing the elimination of wind power locations.
To make matters worse for the future of wind energy is the fact that many wind farms are threatened by shutdown. The German Renewable Energy Act which has been in force since 2000 guarantees wind turbine operators secure subsidies for twenty years. For thousands of wind projects this deadline will expire in the next few years. Without subsidies they are no longer profitable. By 2025, there is a risk of 15,000 MW of wind projects being lost which corresponds to over a quarter of Germany’s onshore wind power.
One Minister of Energy and Environment is talking of an industry in freefall:
“We are heading for a disaster,” said Lies to the “Handelsblatt”…
“If the federal government does not pull the rip cord, Germany faces a gigantic dismantling of wind energy with all the consequences for eliminating it.
The wind lobby want to build in forests. Apparently in order to save the wilderness from climate change we have to accost it acoustically. We know infrasound can cause humans to get nosebleeds, dizziness, rashes and headaches — what does it do to badgers and wildcats?
After we finish the human experiments perhaps we’ll start the animal ones?
The government of the state of Hesse is planning to declare two percent of the state’s area to be wind priority areas. That would have serious consequences for the last undisturbed forests and the countryside, according to the Hessian Association of Nature Conservation Initiative. Above all, the construction of wind turbines in the extensive Palatinate Forest means “another break of taboos by the red-green-yellow coalition in favor of the wind power industry”.
Germany has 30,000 wind turbines, but this spring they made a third less electricity than they did a year ago. There was less wind this year. Imagine if a third of expected coal production just broke?
Business Daily ‘Handelsblatt’ Reports Germany Gripped By Electricity Price Shock…”Driven By CO2 Price”
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
29 June 2021
Germany’s flagship online business daily “Handelsblatt” here reports on the country’s “electricity price shock” as the cost of electricity “is climbing ever higher “.
“Energy policymakers are sounding the alarm,” reports the Handelsblatt.
In the late 1990s, German electricity prices were falling before the country passed the EEG green energy feed-in act in 2000. Since then, prices that German industry pays have almost tripled:
Industriestrompreise* (inklusive Stromsteuer) in Deutschland in den Jahren 1998 bis 2017 (in Euro-Cent pro Kilowattstunde)
Electricity prices for German industry on average have climbed nearly 200% since green energies were mandated. Source: BDEW
For private consumers, the prices are about double that paid by industry. So high electricity prices have risen, that now experts are warning of dire consequences.
Driven by CO2 price
“On the futures market of the EEX energy exchange, a megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity to be delivered next year costs just under 70 euros,” according to the Handelsblatt. “In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, a MWh cost 35 euros. The price is driven by the equally steep rise in the CO2 price. A trend reversal is therefore not in sight.”
Experts warn that the prices have become especially painful, particularly for medium sized companies.
Electricity price inflation
Handelsblatt uses the company Coatinc, a galvanizing plant, as an example. Previously the Bochum-based company had been paying around 40 euros per MWh for electricity but expects it will have to “get used to paying” up to 200 euros per MWh – once all taxes and surcharges are added in.
“The German Association of the Energy Industry (BDEW) also expects industrial electricity prices, including all levies, to average 191 euros per MWh this year,” says the Handelsblatt.
Gundolf Schweppe, head of Energy Sales at Uniper, describes the current trend as a “dramatic rise” and says there’s “a great deal of uncertainty” among his customers.
More than 75% tax and surcharges
Handelblatt reports, that the price increases ultimately will have to be borne by the German consumers, who already are paying among the highest rates in the world. More than three quarters of the price paid by German consumers is made up by various taxes, fees and climate-related surcharges.
Experts tell the Handelsblatt: “The price curve is pointing really steeply upwards” and that this steep upward trend “is likely to be sustainable” and that “electricity prices will remain at a high level.”
Add the skyrocketing electricity prices to the surging prices for gas, petroleum, chemicals, metals, polymers and wood and you have all the ingredients for painful inflation to take hold.
via STOP THESE THINGS
July 19, 2021
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