No, not no to drugs. Just say no to energy. Electricity was yesterday.
No nuclear energy, no coal energy. Not much sun either for solar energy. There’s lots of wind in Germany, though. Hot air mostly but still.
Germany is first major economy to phase out coal and nuclear – German lawmakers have finalized the country’s long-awaited phase-out of coal as an energy source, backing a plan that environmental groups say isn’t ambitious enough and free marketeers criticize as a waste of taxpayers’ money.
Bills approved by both houses of parliament Friday envision shutting down the last coal-fired power plant by 2038 and spending some 40 billion euros ($45 billion) to help affected regions cope with the transition.
The plan is part of Germany’s ‘energy transition’ – an effort to wean Europe’s biggest economy off planet-warming fossil fuels and generate all of the country’s considerable energy needs from renewable sources. Achieving that goal is made harder than in comparable countries such as France and Britain because of Germany’s existing commitment to also phase out nuclear power by the end of 2022.
Sometimes relationships just don’t make sense anymore.
People and renewable forms of energy grow apart and become, you know, different people. Then it’s time to move on. It’s tragic, I know. It’s heartbreaking. But that’s the way the German wind turbine crumbles.
German campaigners fall out of love with wind power – Growing opposition and lack of land spark collapse in construction of new turbines.
Der Ausbau der Windenergie ist ins Stocken geraten. Droht der Branche das gleiche Schicksal wie der Solarindustrie?
But we need yours anyway, OK? Your nuclear and coal burning energy…
Merkel’s Government Looks Abroad to Keep Germany’s Lights On – Germany will rely heavily on neighboring nations in Europe to avert blackouts as it weans itself off coal over the next two decades, a senior government official said.
Europe’s biggest consumer of electricity is working to shut power plants fueled by both coal and nuclear energy that account for half of the nation’s generation capacity. Thomas Bareiss, a deputy economy and energy minister, acknowledged that retiring all those plants poses a challenge that may leave Germany reliant on imported electricity.
“It means thinking ahead and acting in concert in an already active cross-border market.”
That means performance art. And in one of the stupidist performances seen to date in Berlin, Greenpeace activists painted the streets around the Siegessäule (Victory Column) yellow. Greenpeace went yellow, in other words.
They stole this idea from the ancient Egyptions, I believe, as they also worshipped the sun (it kind of looks like the sun, see?). The yellow paint, I think, representing, uh, sunlight or something and thus symbolizing, well, how the hell am I supposed to know what this symbolizes? Wait, I’ve got it now. It symbolizes just how awful coal-firng power plants can be for sun-worshiping Greenpeace Germans (yellow or not) and the rest of humanity for that matter and that they need to be shut down immediately or something. Big medicine, folks. Why didn’t somebody think of doing this before?
Die Berliner Polizei ermittelt gegen Aktivisten der Umweltorganisation Greenpeace – zum einen wegen gefährlichen Eingriffs in den Straßenverkehr, zum anderen wegen eines Verstoßes gegen das Versammlungsgesetz. Greenpeace hatte am Dienstagmorgen um 7.30 Uhr auf dem Großen Stern in Tiergarten gelbe Farbe ausgekippt, insgesamt 3500 Liter.
Huh? I don’t get it, either. It’s kind of like Angela Merkel’s popularity ratings. How could she still be in office after that refugee number of hers? Yet her popularity ratings are still very high. It makes no sense.
So even though… The cost of the Energiewende is largely borne by German consumers, who pay a surcharge of around €20 ($23.61) on their energy bills. German households pay more for their electricity than in any other European country except for Denmark, where power costs €0.308 per kilowatt hour to Germany’s €0.298.
However, as the latest survey – conducted by Kantar Emnid on the AEE’s behalf – shows, enthusiasm for renewables is increasing if anything. “The survey results show the breadth of the societal consensus supporting the Energiewende in Germany,” said AEE deputy managing director Nils Boenigk.
The AEE’s survey that 95 percent saw the expansion of renewables as important or extremely important. That’s up from 93% in a similar survey last year.
95 Prozent der Deutschen für Ausbau von Ökostromanlagen.
That’s why big solar companies like Germany’s Solarworld are going broke right now. That’s so they can regroup or something for when the future finally does come around, I guess.
Or maybe it’s some international anti-renewable energy conspiracy. That’s always good to get folks hot and bothered. The endless subsidies were sabotaged or something, see? Or maybe, just maybe, solar power is a losing business proposition proposed down our throats from those enlightened ones above (pun intended). Hard to say for sure.
Ask the “Sun King” over at Solarworld (it’s good to be the Sun King): “Due to the ongoing price erosion and the development of the business, the company no longer has a positive going concern prognosis, is therefore over-indebted and thus obliged to file for insolvency proceedings.”
Or per week. Per month? Anyway, they’re helping as best as they can.
Google’s Project Sunroof, which estimates whether homes get enough sunlight to switch over to solar power, is launching in Germany today. It’s the first time Sunroof has expanded outside the US, where it finally reached all 50 states earlier this year after launching in 2015.
Wer überlegt, auf einem Hausdach eine Solaranlage zu installieren, wüsste gerne, wie hoch die damit erzielten Einnahmen sein können. Auf einer von Google und E.ON eingerichteten Seite lassen sich die nun vorab abschätzen.
In a desperate attempt to save Germany’s failing renewable energy revolution, a group of depraved German scientists has devised a fake sun to keep German solar power plants running at night (one of the depraved scientists can be seen below).
The “Synlight” artificial sun, soon to be placed in low geocentric orbit above the country, uses lots and lots and lots of xenon short-arc lamps that generate 4,000 times the wattage of the average light bulb and will be switched on during varying intervals between 19:00 in the evening and 04:00 in the early morning hours, hopefully allowing German solar energy plants to finally produce enough energy to operate small radios and kitchen appliances simultaneously (but too many at once). Provided it isn’t too cloudy outside, of course. Which it practically always is here. But still.
“In four hours the system uses about as much electricity as a four-person household in a year.”
And green power must be short for greenback power, right? Only they have to pay in euros here in Germany.
You’re never going to believe this: Energy prices will be rising dramatically again next year in Germany (same procedureas everyyear). It has something to do with this little thing they call the “eco-power levy” here (levy sounds better than tax). It’s going up another 8.3 percent. But it’s for the Energiewende so that’s a good thing, or something. Hey. It’s not easy being the world’s leader in renewable energy but somebody has to do it. And you still don’t mind paying for it… And you still don’t mind paying for it… And you still…
While going in the wrong direction. With lots of wind in its face.
At one point this month renewable energy sources briefly supplied close to 90 percent of the power on Germany’s electric grid. But that doesn’t mean the world’s fourth-largest economy is close to being run on zero-carbon electricity. In fact, Germany is giving the rest of the world a lesson in just how much can go wrong when you try to reduce carbon emissions solely by installing lots of wind and solar.
After years of declines, Germany’s carbon emissions rose slightly in 2015, largely because the country produces more electricity than it needs. That’s happening because even if there are times when renewables can supply nearly all of the electricity on the grid, the variability of those sources forces Germany to keep other power plants running. And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal.
Observing Hermann 