Those chickens are coming home to roost…
THE WIND DIED ALONG WITH THE GOVERNMENT COALITION
And the cold weather came in just as it did. Part of the reason the government fractured? Ruinous green energy policies which exploded the price of electricity thanks to transitioning to unreliable renewables.
…The Greens are woke on steroids. Some years ago, their parliamentarians even floated the idea of legalizing pedophilia and incest. They have not met a progressive idea they do not like. Hence, they enjoy the support of garden variety radicals at universities and the youth vote.
The Greens support anything from deindustrialization and de-carbonization to transgenderism and abortion on demand. They embrace the inefficient pipe dream of “clean” energy — solar and wind in particular. On the other hand, they of course hate nuclear power that could save shivering Germans from Europe’s frigidity and high energy costs.
Full article plus links HERE from Hot Air.
Dayum… Spot price of electricity 800 Euro/MWh??? And twelve days of ZERO wind power production? Not good, to put it mildly, much less not even close to affordable!
I know we’ve had a number of conversations about Germany vs. California and the idiocy surrounding dumping Nuke plants, but Germany doesn’t have any backup for natural gas after the issues with Gazprom and the pipeline (which the greenies also want to get rid of). Although it is supposedly being cut, the average daily natural gas supplies to Europe in July reached their highest this year, up 5.7% compared with a year ago and 12% higher than in June. Basically, Germany is hoping the US will bail them out with LNG exports.
According to reports, it would take between 9 months and 2-3 years to restart any of the German nuclear plants, HERE from Radiant Energy Group.
Now what coach???
Even if they form a new government, what are their options to get power back in a timely fashion? And will it be affordable/clear the environmental hurdles of the EU?
The greens, founded by Soviet agents, have always been Green on the outside, Red on the inside. That’s why they’re called “watermelons”. “Environmentalism” has always been a tactic to advance the socialist cause.
Germany “could” go back to coal plants if they mothballed them properly. Not sure what condition their coal plants are in or how long it would take to fire them up. Of course German coal is “brown” coal, i.e. lignite, the dirtiest burning coal known to man. On the other, hand the current crisis (pun intended) gives the watermelons what they always want, total control of energy and thus the economy. Comrade Stalin would be proud.
We use brown and black coal. Thanks to modern filter technology the emissions are not that bad.
The problem is: the green fascists made it that the nuclear power plants are disassembled asap. They are not mothballed. Same goes for new coal power plants – just a few weeks ago on of the most modern coal plants worldwide was closed. An the replacement is only PLANNED. What shall the replacement use? Hydrogen.
You see: LNG is also just a placeholder for the green fascists. The ultimate replacement is to be hydrogen.
As of now no industrial power hydrogen plant is operational or even in construction (smaller test plants don’t count). There are a handful planned – but the government wants to install 55 of them until 2030 (iirc). And not just any hydrogen plants but plants that can be first used with LNG until the complete switch to hydrogen in 2035!
Now.. we do not produce hydrogen on an industrial scale. Because we also do not have such installations. Also we do not have the massive excess energy available to produce hydrogen year round because we disabled nuclear energy. So we want to import hydrogen. But we do not have international pipelines so we want to use (diesel-) ships from Africa, where hydrogen is to be produced with excess solar power, to ship a gas that need enormous amounts of energy to transport around the whole continent to be unloaded at our sea ports. But we do not have the installations to unload and store the hydrogen. And neither do we have the pipelines to transport it inland.
And the companies that planned to do all this? They declared bankruptcy before they even started working or international partners pulled out. In case of the above mentioned coal plant the company that was to build the LNG/hydrogen replacement declared bankruptcy TWO DAYS LATER.
So yeah. It is even worse than you know.
Coal, the answer is right under their feet. EU and even the UK have plenty of it and modern coal fired plants are provably far more efficient and less polluting than any that were build 1890’s through 1990’s
The problem is not lack of fuels but of excess stupidity.
After escaping Kalifornia for Texas in 2015, shopping for power was like coming up for air. In 2023 we renewed with Reliant at 8.9 cents/kWh (not including delivery and tax) locked in for 5 years.
We moved from Cali-f’n-ornia to Occupied Oregon (rural county east of the Cascades) in ’03. At that time, hydropower was readily available and fairly cheap. Now, thanks to the green weenies, the downstream tribes and lots of lawfare/politicing, we were first booted out of the Bonneville power supply, then we lost 100MWe of hydropower on the Klamath River.
The replacement (for values) is 36MWe of solar, which makes perfect sense if you have neither math skills nor brains.
Current electric price is 16 cents per kilowatt hour, and that includes the costs to remove the dams on the Klamath. Pac Power could have put in fish ladders, but Warren (spit) Buffett didn’t want to pay.
All- Thanks and interesting point(s) about coal. I didn’t know they burned Lignite!
It’s worse than you might think. We have an old coal-powered power station which was converted to burn wood pellets as a “better” alternative to coal. Guess where the pellets come from?
British Columbia.
Trees are cut, processed and transported to the UK so that we can burn them. And any suggestion that the trees being cut are old growth would be scurrilous.
It’s enough to make one weep…
nbc- Oh, I wasn’t aware of that! Dang…
Guess which country has 25% of the world’s uranium reserves, and 14% of the world’s coal reserves – much of it anthracite…… yet has a law against nuclear power generation and is shutting down coal generation as fast as it can.
It’s not just our location that is “downunder”.