Germany energy woes, reports in 2013-2014

See these 13 reports.

(1) From Wall Street Journal, Oct. 16, 2013:

Last week the CEOs of Europe's 10 largest utilities finally cried uncle and called for a halt to wind and solar subsidies. Short of that, they want subsidies of their own. They want to be paid, in essence, not to produce power.

The root cause of all this is the Continent's so-called feed-in tariffs for renewable energy, which began in Germany in 1990. A feed-in tariff is a form of mandate that gives solar and wind installations a guaranteed price, usually well above the market price, and ensures that any energy they produce gets priority on the electrical grid. When solar and wind plants are producing, their energy must be taken first, ahead of other kinds of power.

By requiring utilities to take this power—and requiring consumers to pay for it—Germany has increased renewables to 25% of its overall capacity. Berlin wants to push that to 35% in 2020 and 80% by 2050. Not every country in Europe has been as ambitious as Germany, but the European Union's renewables target across the entire Continent is also 20% by 2020.

(2) From Hockeyschtick, January 25, 2014:

Ten reasons why intermittent wind & solar power are a problem, not a solution noted that

"Both wind turbines and solar PV use rare earth minerals, mostly from China, in their manufacture. Mining and processing these rare earths generates a tremendous amount of “hazardous and radioactive byproducts.”

If we were to try to increase wind and solar by a factor of 10 (so that they together amount to 12% of world energy supply, instead of 1.2%) we would need huge amounts of rare earth minerals and other polluting minerals, such as gallium arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, used in making thin-film photovoltaics..."

(3) From WSJ, June 11, 2014:

Wind? Merely to keep pace with the global growth in electricity demand would require the installation of about 280,000 megawatts of new wind-energy capacity every year. According to several academic studies, the areal power density of wind energy—that is, the amount of power that can be derived from a given amount of land—is about one watt per square meter. This means that installing the requisite additional wind capacity would require covering about 280,000 square kilometers (108,000 square miles of land)—an area nearly the size of Italy—with wind turbines, every year. (For comparison, the areal power density of nuclear power is more than 50 watts per square meter. The productivity of oil and gas wells vary, but even marginal wells have power densities of about 27 watts per square meter.)

(4) From Reuters, June 24, 2014:

According to the new draft, industry producing its own electricity in new renewable or combined heat-power plants will pay 30 percent of the current 6.24 cents per kilowatt hour surcharge in 2015, rising to 35 percent in 2016 and 40 percent from 2016.

"It would be a massive own goal in terms of industrial policy if politicians were to put a surcharge on own power production used by many sectors for decades," German industry lobby BDI chief Markus Kerber said in a statement.

Subsidised renewable energy, led by wind and solar power, have sparked a political debate in Germany over high prices for consumers, who pay mandatory charges for green energy.

(5) From The Telegraph, Sept. 02, 2014:

Germany's flagship green energy policy is in tatters, according to a new report by the consultancy firm McKinsey which says many of its goals are "no longer realistic".

But the McKinsey report says Germany is so far behind its key commitment to cut CO2 emissions that it is no longer realistically achievable…

A major factor in the failure to achieve targeted cuts has been Germany's increased use of "dirty" brown coal, or lignite, to make up the shortfall in power generation caused by its decision to phase out all its nuclear power stations by 2022.

The aim is replace nuclear energy with renewable sources, such as solar and wind power, but they have not yet been able to plug the gap, and the McKinsey report says that while solar energy is on track, the country is behind schedule in developing wind power.

(6) From NTZ, 24 September 2014, EIKE: German Power Grid More Vulnerable Than Ever…”On The Brink Of Widespread Blackouts”!

"As a result, today’s German power grid has become a precarious balancing act, and keeping it from collapsing under the load of wild fluctuations has become a real challenge. At the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) here, Dr. Klaus Peter Krause writes a piece titled: Always on the brink of a widespread blackouts, where he writes how and why Germany’s power grid has become extremely vulnerable:

Already 3500 emergency grid interventions per year – According to the TAB report of 2011: More than a couple days of blackout would be a national catastrophe – Germany sacrifices its uniquely reliable power supply for the ‘transition to renewable energy’.”

(7) From WSJ,Sept. 25, 2014,

"Berlin's "energy revolution" is going great—if you own a coal mine. The German shift to renewable power sources that started in 2000 has brought the green share of German electricity up to around 25%. But the rest of the energy mix has become more heavily concentrated on coal, which now accounts for some 45% of power generation and growing. Embarrassingly for such an eco-conscious country, Germany is on track to miss its carbon emissions reduction goal by 2020.

Greens profess horror at this result, but no one who knows anything about economics will be surprised. It's the result of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Energiewende, or energy revolution, a drive to thwart market forces and especially price signals, that might otherwise allocate energy resources. Now the market is striking back.

Take the so-called feed-in tariff, which requires distributors to buy electricity from green generators at fixed prices before buying power from other sources. Greens tout the measure because it has encouraged renewable generation to the point that Germany now sometimes experiences electricity gluts if the weather is particularly sunny or windy.

Yet by diverting demand to renewables, the tariff deprives traditional generators of revenue and makes it harder for them to forecast demand for thermal power plants that require millions of euros of investment and years to build. No wonder utilities favor cheaper coal plants to pick up the

slack whenever renewables don't deliver as promised."

(8) From EurActiv, Oct. 22, 2014:

German companies are concerned about the extra burden they fear will come with a new, higher climate protection target for 2030.

Utz Tillmann, a spokesman for the Energy Intensive Industries of Germany (EID) - which includes chemicals, steelmaking, cement and others - said he supported an ambitious agreement at the Paris UN climate summit in December next year.

But these goals should include strong and comparable commitments for both industrialised and newly industrialised countries, he stressed.

(9) From NYT, Oct 24, 2014:

BASF executives say that German and European Union policies toward industry, particularly when it comes to energy, are forcing big companies to look elsewhere as they seek to expand.

Energy is perhaps BASF’s biggest cost. Tremendous amounts of electricity are required to produce chemical raw materials like ethylene, propylene and butadiene for a range of products like plastics, pharmaceuticals and rubber. And oil or natural gas are the basic feedstocks from which these chemicals are produced.

Especially in Germany, energy prices have jumped as a result of the government’s big push for renewable energy sources...

(10) From No Tricks Zone (NTZ), Nov.11, 2014:

Gabriel, who is also head of Germany’s SPD socialist party and has strong ties to trade unions, also told the GP protesters:

Afterwards I’ll be at the Estrel-Hotel to meet with the Union Councils of Vattenfall, who are fighting to keep their jobs in brown coal. My suggestion is: See if you dare to show up over there.”

At the end Gabriel again requested the activists to “stop simplifying everything … if we continue on this course, where we keeping pushing illusions and in the end wind up with high electricity rates, that is the only way of getting the energy transformation to fail.

(11) From NTZ, Nov. 16, 2014:

Spiegel reports:

The only German plant that produces battery cells for electric cars will be closed. The company Li-Tec in the German state of Saxony will produce batteries only for one more year. Daimler Manager Harald Kroger told Spiegel that the current production numbers make it far too expensive to produce the batteries.”

Daimler was banking on higher production numbers, which are necessary for producing economically. But the quantities never materialized. Kroger told Spiegel that the company realized that “an automaker does have to produce the batteries itself.

(12) From NTZ, December 9, 2014

DIE ZEIT, an influential publication among Germany’s green centre-left, writes, “Germany will not even come close to reaching its climate target despite the massive investment in wind and solar energies....

It’s a blunder with ugly consequences. The Energiewende, as it is now set up, is not making the air cleaner, but dirtier.

(13) From the NYT, December 24, 2014

Dozens of protest groups have sprung up over the past year along the 500-mile path of the project, SuedLink, one of four high-voltage direct current lines that are to carry wind-generated power from north to south.

The lines are described as essential to the success of the country’s pivot away from nuclear and coal power and toward mostly renewable energy. But nearly a year into the plans, the SuedLink project has set off an outbreak of not-in-my-backyard syndrome that threatens to disrupt a linchpin of Germany’s commitment to a lower-carbon future.