Billions burned in German solar debacle

21/06/2013 12:59 am \ 25 Comments \ by Richard Treadgold

Just last year the German solar power industry was predicting good times.

A year ago, as this impressive growth forecast out to 2029 shows, the German solar thermal power industry was predicting good times. Today, it’s nearly dead. The German solar industry association Bundesverband Solarwirtschaft (BSW Solar) officially presented its Roadmap for Solar Heat at Intersolar Europe in June 2012. The roadmap describes scenarios for developing solar thermal power in Germany and shows the policies needed to implement them. While the roadmap’s outlook was criticised for sounding too optimistic, one of the authors, Matthias Reitzenstein, emphasised that the paper was not meant to be a prediction of what would happen but rather a guide about what needed to be done.
Not only wasn’t it a prediction, wasn’t it a short-lived prediction!

Large German companies such as Siemens and Bosch are abandoning the solar industry. Their strategies resulted in debacles – their investments in solar power companies cost them billions. Compared to what investors have lost as a result of their investments in solar stocks, however, these sums are almost negligible amounts. The former stars at the stock exchange, SolarWorld and Q-Cells, have destroyed tens of billions of capital. –Thiemo Heeg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 June 2013

via latest newsletter from the Global Warming Policy Foundation – h/t Benny Peiser at the GWPF.

The following is adapted from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Posted in: General \ Tagged: Germany, Green economy, Solar power

I’m a tree — why not feed me?

29/12/2012 6:59 pm \ 45 Comments \ by Richard Treadgold

Old oak tree.

Open letter to environmentalists from A. Tree

Dear Greenies,

You love trees – you’re even called tree-huggers. Yet I’m a tree, and you don’t love me. You won’t even feed me!

One of my indispensable foods is carbon dioxide. But you’ve demonised it by fabricating the story that it’s the most important “greenhouse” gas. You pretend that one of the world’s rarest gases, a mere 0.00039 of the atmosphere, will overheat the climate. You never mention that water vapour, up to 4% of the atmosphere (10,000 times more plentiful than CO2), is also the most powerful greenhouse gas of all, with each molecule having about 26 times more warming effect than carbon dioxide.

To support your corrupt fib about CO2, you’ve started referring to this tasteless, odourless, invisible, non-toxic, life-giving plant food as a pollutant. So you try to restrict my diet.

Imbeciles! Continue Reading →

Posted in: General \ Tagged: Coal, Environment, Germany, Japan earthquake, Power generation

EU: strengthen energy, not useless climate targets

06/10/2012 8:37 am \ 1 Comment \ by Richard Treadgold

from The Global Warming Policy Foundation

Financial Times Deutschland, 5 October 2012

The EU Energy Commissioner opposes a tightening of the EU’s climate targets. Instead, energy policy should focus more closely on the needs of European industry. In Berlin, Günther Oettinger made jokes about the green “do-gooders” in his own party.

Günther Oettinger fears the decline of Europe if energy prices continue to rise and competitiveness deteriorates further compared to the United States and other parts of the world. He wants to convince his colleagues in the European Commission to introduce an industrial policy objective instead of new climate targets. At a meeting of the European Christian Democrats (EPP) in Berlin last night, Oettinger said the share that manufacturing contributes to the GDP of the economies of the EU should increase from currently 18 percent to 20 percent. Within the European Commission, he is fighting for a corresponding definition.

His appearance before a few dozen party members in Berlin’s Adlon Hotel was a day of reckoning with the EU’s energy and climate policies. Energy policy had long been climate policy, he said, but in the future it must be industrial policy. Continue Reading →

Posted in: General \ Tagged: Climate policy, Energy policy, Europe, Germany, GWPF

Light bulb tests shame greenies

06/12/2010 9:37 pm \ 11 Comments \ by Richard Treadgold

Consumer groups want end to EU bulb ban

Compact fluorescent light bulb. Big in the environment for a year or two, but now it appears to be a big mistake in the environment. Mercury vapour, of all things, perhaps the most demonised of environmental hazards; after asbestos. Forcing a dangerous product on consumers before adequate testing – what were you thinking, Greenpeace? You should hang your organisational head in shame.

From Germany comes confirmation of the danger of compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Official tests show the new compact fluorescent lamps to be dangerous if broken.

The energy saving bulbs show mercury levels 20 times higher than regulations allow in the air surrounding them for up to five hours after they are broken, according to tests released on Thursday by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA).

“If the industry can’t manage to offer safe bulbs, then the incandescent bulbs must remain on the market until autumn of 2011,” said Gerd Billen, the leader of the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZVB).

His group encouraged the federal government to push for a suspension of the ban in Brussels until there was a safe and practical alternative.

“It can’t be that the state bans a safe product and replaces it with a dangerous one,” Billen said. read more…

They’re expensive, slow to deliver the promised illumination, can make a buzzing noise and frequently fail well before the claimed seven to 20-year lifetime. Which ruins their claims of saving anything.

No effect on climate

Concerns have been expressed before that they’re unsafe, but now we have confirmation from nothing less than a German environmental organisation.

Why were we persuaded to use them? Because they save energy. So what, you ask? Less energy use means less global warming – did you know that?

It will have no effect on the climate, but that really is the only reason to put these expensive, dangerous light bulbs into our homes.

I hope our politicians get some sense into their heads and don’t ban the incandescent versions until we have adequate LED replacements or make the fluorescent ones truly, honestly safe.

Is that too much to ask?

Posted in: General \ Tagged: Environment, General, Germany, Light bulbs

Nick Smith: heed German dilemma

04/12/2010 1:48 pm \ 33 Comments \ by Guest author

A giant wind turbine in northern Germany — one of the world’s largest. However, the bigger they are, the more power generation you must replace when the wind fails to turn them. This is caused not only by a lack of wind: the strongest winds are useless. Because the turbines are destroyed operating in winds over about 45–80 mph (70–130 kph), the brakes go on or the blades furl themselves automatically. Free energy? There’s no such thing. These megoliths are expensive to build and maintain and they are ruinous when idle. But their Achilles heel is, without doubt, their inability to supply a community of any importance (is yours important?) without power cuts. They need backup generation available at a moment’s notice 24 hours a day, every day of the year, for when the wind fails to blow or blows too hard. Expensive is hardly an adequate word for this! You pay for two power stations but get the electricity from only one. Nandor Tanczos, pot-smoking ex-Green MP, said insensitively last Monday that the “real destruction” from coal mining is “the deaths it causes outside the mines” (though he provides no evidence for us to believe it). What is the Green Party’s answer to the incompetence of wind power to prevent those deaths?

This account is the more arresting for being written by a man clearly well-informed about and sensitive towards environmental considerations. If even he is questioning the wisdom — financial and environmental — of wind turbines, we should take notice. It is also instructive that this is the experience of the largest and strongest economy in Europe; if they cannot solve the problems even with their enormous resources in both research and manufacturing, then New Zealand cannot. You’ll read below how German consumers are grossly overcharged for the generation AND DISTRIBUTION of electricity — surely the only financial reason these behemoths can survive. If you want energy now, don’t rely on wind generation. I’ve said before that the only sensible use for wind power is for digging a big hole you don’t need yet.
– Richard Treadgold

A new dark age for Germany?

published at CFACT Europe December 1, 2010 – h/t Roger Dewhurst

by Edgar L. Gaertner

Offshore wind power projects pave the way to frequent blackouts

This is an adopted article.

Thousands of bureaucrats are preparing for another cushy climate confab in Cancun — while U.S. Senators Bignaman, Brownback and Reid are contemplating how to ram renewable energy standards through a lame-duck session of Congress. If they’re wise, American voters and congressmen will pay extra careful attention to the awful dilemma of German climate and energy policy, as exemplified by recent events, and make sure their country doesn’t make the same “green” mistakes Germany did. Continue Reading →

Posted in: Uncategorized \ Tagged: Energy, Energy supply, Environment, Germany, Wind turbines

Tag Archives: Germany