Germany's Energy Poverty: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good

Germany's agressive and reckless expansion of wind and solar power has come with a hefty pricetag for consumers, and the costs often fall disproportionately on the poor. Government advisors are calling for a completely new start.

If you want to do something big, you have to start small. That's something German Environment Minister Peter Altmaier knows all too well. The politician, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has put together a manual of practical tips on how everyone can make small, everyday contributions to the shift away from nuclear power and toward green energy. The so-called Energiewende, or energy revolution, is Chancellor Angela Merkel's project of the century.

"Join in and start today," Altmaier writes in the introduction. He then turns to such everyday activities as baking and cooking. "Avoid preheating and utilize residual heat," Altmaier advises. TV viewers can also save a lot of electricity, albeit at the expense of picture quality. "For instance, you can reduce brightness and contrast," his booklet suggests.

Altmaier and others are on a mission to help people save money on their electricity bills, because they're about to receive some bad news. The government predicts that the renewable energy surcharge added to every consumer's electricity bill will increase from 5.3 cents today to between 6.2 and 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour -- a 20-percent price hike.

German consumers already pay the highest electricity prices in Europe. But because the government is failing to get the costs of its new energy policy under control, rising prices are already on the horizon. Electricity is becoming a luxury good in Germany, and one of the country's most important future-oriented projects is acutely at risk.

After the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan two and a half years ago, Merkel quickly decided to begin phasing out...

"a heat pump in the Chicago area seems insufficient for those really cold Chicago winter days"

An air-to-air heat pump isn't just "insufficient" on cold winter days, it will usually produce ZERO heat. In order to produce heat, the heat pump evaporator temperature must always be lower than air temperature. When the evaporator temperature is at the "dew Point" ("frost point" when below freezing), it simply clogs up with frost and produces no heat at all. This is almost all the time on cold, humid days.

You can’t blame the movie for being right. Westinghouse and GE insisted on using technology that is capable of melting down, when far safer technologies such as pebble bed and molten salt were and are still available. Then Jimmah Carter decided to stockpile partially used fuel instead of reprocessing and voila, a radioactive cluster***.

Nuclear power is a corrupt idiocracy that has in effect destroyed itself by lobbying for the least safe, most illogical approach.

There is nothing I would like to see more than a nuclear driven economy, but with the low-information President and Washington palm greasing machine it just ain’t gonna happen.

“Even industries like data centers are extremely rate dependent.”

You didn’t get the point. Electricity for comercial use is cheap in Germany. Consumer prices for energy are going thru the roof only. It’s quite complicated, but i’ll try to explain:

The large investments for green energy have to get paid by someone. So the state subsidizes these investments. Therefore large investments cause large subsidies. The problem in the case of germany are the subsidies. But in the end it’s a no brainer to understand why this model won’t work.

1) The whole european network is intermeshed and all countries in europe have free trade.

2) German grid operators have to prefer green energy by law in their networks and have to buy it at a high fixed rate. To make investments in green energy attractive. The grid operators get the difference in between the energy stock price and the fixed rate refunded by a government operated fond/pool. Due the volatile character of green energy, this forces conventional energy producers to lower their production on demand.

2) Operators of conventional power plants are forced by law to keep their capacities for network stability. That means that huge power plants are forced into a standby role. To reduce the costs of spare capacities, conventional power plants flood the EU market outside Germany on the energy spot market with their capacities when not needed. This largely reduces the stock price on energy in entire europe.

3) The government pool/fond is filled by a tax on energy called “Energieumlage”. Commercial energy consumers are largely exempted from this tax. So only “private” consumers have to pay this tax.

The more green energy is produced in germany, the lower the price on energy stockmarket in europe gets. This lower stock price raises the gap between the fixed rate for green producers and causes a higher energy tax.

The results:
Higher energy prices for german “private” consumers. Lower energy prices for business and all over Europe ! The german taxpayer now subsidizes also his french neighbors electricity bill.

This is why either the TEA Party takes over the GOP or the GOP dies and a new party rises. There are issue after issue that the GOP can capitalize on, but they don’t.

We should be skimming a significant portion of the urban vote, but it goes nearly all Democrat.

I wonder if the Clintons’ are still using the FBI files of long ago or if the NSA, like the IRS and the entire government apparatus, is simply an extension of the DNC.

Who knows what information they hold. The Obama Administration was aware from the beginning that they were radicals with a radically anti-American agenda. They came expecting a revolution and the GOP came expecting business as usual.

We need smart street fighting politicians who get it and will go to the mat with it. Not Lifers in loafers.

This cycle it’s been Rand and Cruz on the national level with a host of solid GOP governors and statehouses leading the charge at the state and local level.

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