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Power and gas prices in Germany more than doubled in just two months, with year-ahead electricity at a blazing 570 Euro per megawatt-hour. Two years ago, it was 40 euros. It’s summer but electric heaters sales are already up 1000 percent and online searches for Firewood are running hot. In the UK — householders are facing bills in the order of £5000 a year — (like $10,000, after tax) people are described as being in “pre-panic mode” already. Some are starting to turn off freezers, giving up toast and showering every second day. Shops and Pubs are closing, consumer confidence is at an all time record low, the most depressed in the last 48 years consumer confidence has been measured for.
European Power Smashes Records as Energy Crisis Intensifies
by Todd Gillespie, Bloomberg
This week’s prices are “unbelievable,” analysts at Energi Danmark wrote in a note. “The rally on the gas and coal market and the very high spot prices we see this week have given the already elevated market further momentum.”
German year-ahead power, a benchmark for Europe, is on a nine-day rising streak. The contract rose 6.1% to a record […]
Normally in a prewar situation a country might be increasing industrial production
h/t Rafe Champion
Russia has cut gas supply again, arguing over the German paperwork, after Canada dithered on sending the last turbine back, and Poland reneged on some dividends. Everyone is playing poker with energy, even if some of them didn’t count their cards before they started — and gas is predictably, hitting new record prices. But even before the ante was upped in the latest round, 15% of German industry were already cutting production. Many others are planning to or were considering moving. People are starting to wonder if this might be a permanent loss for the famous German industrial power.
In other news, rather frantic landlords in Germany want to be able to legally restrict temperatures of their tenants units. Someone has got to pay that gas bill, and just asking tenants to take shorter showers doesn’t seem to be working.
Now they tell us:
“Gas is now not only part of Russia’s foreign policy, but possibly also part of the Russian war strategy,” said [Klaus Müller, the president of Germany’s Federal Network Agency, Bundesnetzagentur]
If only someone saw that coming, like say, in […]
This sounds ominous.
Deutsche Bank says Germans should use less gas any which way they can. Their new report suggests they use more hard coal and lignite for power stations, wood for home heating, and use oil in industry. That’s sparked a debate on the merits of using wood. (Nobody say the word “nuclear”.)
Germany drawing up plans to heat homes with WOOD this winter as gas crisis erupts
The Express
WOOD could be used to heat German homes this winter as the country grapples with a gas crisis.
Opinion is divided over the merits of using wood as a fuel with some saying doing so increases CO2 emissions and would unleash a logging boom, trashing biodiversity. Others argue wood is a renewable source of energy and expanding its use could prompt landowners to plant more trees, resulting in more carbon storage.
The Deutsche Bank analysis adds both savings and substitution have already led to a drop in German gas consumption by more than 14 percent year on year in the first five months of this year, largely driven by a mild winter.
Desperate: The European Commission suggests countries pay companies to […]
Germany is getting more medieval by the minute
In the latest news the Cities and Municipalities Association is urging local officials to plan for public halls to be used as emergency “warm up spaces” when winter comes. With families needing to find an extra €3,800 to pay the energy bills many people won’t be able to afford electricity or gas.
Welcome to the renewables future where lights are dimmer, there’s no hot water at schools and public swimming pools are closed, but town halls are open so people can survive the night.
Renewables supply nearly half of German power demand in first half 2022.
Germany’s Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and the Federal Association of Energy and Water Management (BDEW) said on Monday that renewables had covered around 49% of gross domestic electricity consumption over the period.
The claim of “half” is still inflated. If we remove hydroelectricity and biomass, in the last six months all forms of wind and solar power have produced 35% of the electricity (on a random come-and-go basis).
Meanwhile in related news Germany has some of the most expensive electricity in the world at 35c/KWh (USD).
Germany Plans ‘Warm […]
It’s summer and yet some parts of Germany are already dimming lights and reducing the temperature, restricting shower times or even closing swimming pools. Meanwhile in the UK, energy prices are up four fold compared to a couple of years ago. Both nations are bringing back coal power, which is unthinkable enough on its own (in a 2021 climate-religion kind of way) yet even that isn’t enough. Winter is coming…
Germany dims the lights to cope with Russia gas supply crunch Financial Times, 8 July 2022
Germany is rationing hot water, dimming its street lights and shutting down swimming pools as the impact of its energy crunch begins to spread from industry to offices, leisure centres and homes.
A huge increase in gas prices triggered by Russia’s move last month to sharply reduce supplies to Germany has plunged Europe’s biggest economy into its worst energy crisis since the oil price shock of 1973.
Gas importers and utilities are fighting for survival while consumer bills are going through the roof, with some warning of rising friction.
“The situation is more than dramatic,” said Axel Gedaschko, head of the federation of German […]
Leonhard Lenz
Suddenly the warning lights flashing in Germany. The message is to go easy on the gas, but ultimately even if the national storage tanks were completely full, the largest economy in the EU would only have ten weeks of gas without supplies from Russia. It’s summer and they’ve already hit stage 2 of the 3 stage emergency plan.
It was all totally avoidable. A wholly Green-made crisis. They could have gone nuclear, kept using coal, and explored for more gas and then they could have laughed at GazProm. Instead talk of rationing has already started, and the event horizon now includes the possibility of mass industrial shutdowns and recession.
Germany has been so suddenly crippled it’s almost as if an enemy force had infiltrated the activist soul and culture of the nation and duped it with a magic spell.
As long ago as 2014 a former NATO Secretary General was warning that Russia was funding the anti-frakking mobs. It later came out Russia was also sending money through shell companies to Green protestors in Eastern Europe, and in the US too. Putin could hardly have believed how easy it was to turn young schmucks against […]
Amazing how fast the Sacred Cows get pushed aside. Until a few months ago, Germany had been planning to close its last nuclear plants and gas production had been falling for 20 years. But the Russians are cutting back the gas feed and even the German Greens understand what will happen by winter if they don’t have enough energy. Though on twitter, a lot of commentators are wondering why they don’t reopen the nuclear plants they just closed first and why they still plan to shut the last three later this year?
It was never about CO2 was it?
Germany to fire up coal plants as Russia turns down the gas
DW
As Russia reduces its supply of natural gas, Economy Minister Robert Habeck has said Germany must curb its usage. Otherwise, things “could get tight in winter,” he said. Germany must limit its use of gas for electricity production and prioritize the filling of storage facilities to compensate for a drop in supply from Russia, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said Sunday.
In a move that goes against the principles of his environmentally-friendly Green Party, the country will also have to increase the […]
Coal is dead, an old relic, but Germany is burning a lot more coal
If the world cools and gets cloudier will renewables stall as margins become even less appealing? Will wandering jet streams interrupt reliable trade winds as the intersection of hot and cold air generates more clouds over solar panels?
German Wind Power Consumption Plummets 20% In First Half 2021… Coal Power Consumption Jumps 38%!
Pierre Gosselin
What would we do without coal?
The first half of 2021 saw a massive 20% drop in wind power consumption in Germany…while “coal power saw a renaissance.”
The reason for the steep drop, according to the findings, was due to unfavorable weather conditions.
The Germans ran out of wind both on and off shore. People stopped investing because the subsidies ran out and the populace insisted on not having the giant industrial plants in their backyard. Then the winds slowed (why didn’t their climate models see that coming?) Europe talked itself out of building gas plants in order to stop global warming, then got an extra cold winter, and they also run out of gas. So what was left was good old reliable […]
Thousands were asleep at the wheel, occupied with busywork, and an endless trail of minor crises. Each little step was worse than the one before, inexorably, but only a little worse. Like a field of corn that we never see growing — but one day it is over our head.
There is no time when everyone realizes together and lifts in mass protest. Instead, little moments tip the balance, one person at a time. And once awake, good people don’t want to be troublemakers. They are afraid to stand out.
Its all so human while it becomes something so horribly inhumane.
The form of the nation stays the same but the spirit changes to become something people would never have accepted even five years earlier. Like perhaps the idea that people who committed, at most, a minor misdemeanor, a trespass, could be kept without charges in solitary confinement for months on end.
We are a gregarious species. It is hardwired. Our great strength is also our greatest vulnerability…
So many wait for someone else to speak up.
Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45. They interviewed 10 Germans who talked […]
God’s joke on governments that try to control the climate with their electricity grid:
Europe talks itself out of building gas plants in order to stop global warming, then after an extra cold winter, they also run out of gas, and now they have to go back to burning coal.
Spooked investors weren’t funding many gas plants now that the glorious renewable era was here and policy makers were all wearing their Hydrogen badges, and waving their carbon capture wands. In the last year all the geniuses of the European Investment Bank, the IEA, the European Commission were saying “gas is over” and it would be a stranded asset.
One month ago, Nina Chestney was predicting a gas supply crunch:
Gas faces existential crisis in climate wary Europe
May 14, 2021, , Reuters
Europe faces the prospect of higher electricity bills and a supply crunch, as utilities struggle to finance new gas-fired power plants unless they meet tougher emissions criteria imposed by banks pressured to stop financing fossil-fuel projects.
…Gas projects worth some 30 billion euros were cancelled, delayed or indefinitely postponed last year as they struggled to find funding.
The […]
How to wreck a democracy: Let judges decide complex national policies based on who sues first. What could possibly go wrong?
German climate change law violates rights, court rules
BBC
Germany’s climate change laws are insufficient and violate fundamental freedoms by putting the burden of curbing CO2 emissions on the young, its highest court has ruled.
It says the law fails to give enough detail on cutting CO2 emissions after current targets end in 2030. “The provisions irreversibly offload major emission reduction burdens on to periods after 2030,” it found.
Like the EU legislation, Germany’s domestic climate change law provides for a 55% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030.
But the German Constitutional Court said on Thursday that current measures “violate the freedoms of the complainants, some of whom are still very young” because they delay too much of the action needed to reach the Paris targets until after 2030.
Since when did young people have right to be protected from climate change?
It’s time for other young people to sue the court, and the government. Germany’s climate change laws are wildly expensive and pointless, and will have no measurable […]
Emden, Germany by Gritte
The supreme auditors of Germany warned about the costs of Green energy a few years ago, but now they are paying attention to energy security too, and with sudden alarm they’ve announced that Green energy poses “an existential threat” to Germany.
It’s something dumb bloggers have been saying for years. But this is good news that German bureaucratic numerical masters are on to it.
Pierre Gosselin of NoTricksZone, calls it “explosive”:
So explosive is the German Government Audit report that Die Welt and the government auditors see the Energiewende as a “danger for all of Germany”.
Daniel Wetzel at German national daily Die Welt reports on the latest German Federal Court of Auditors’ warning: “If things continue like this, Germany as a business location is in danger. The costs are out of control – and there is a growing threat of an electricity shortfall.”
The Bundesrechnungshof in Germany or Federal Audit Office sounds rather awesome — legislators can’t tell it what to do, and its exact position in the layers of power is disputed, which only makes it sound more significant.*
The Federal Audit Office sees the […]
Surprising no one: lumpy expensive electricity does not make for a High Tech Paradise
It’s another example of how more green jobs means less real ones. A German High Tech Chip maker driven to Singapore by renewable energy prices
Emden, Germany by Gritte
To understand the scale of just how green Germany is, ponder that it has the third largest wind power fleet in the world, with around 30,000 turbines. In 2020, wind power generated more than a quarter of German electricity and solar power another 10%. Despite all that *free* energy Germans pay some of the highest electricity prices in the world at 38c/KWh. Whereas Singaporeans use natural gas and pay 18c/KWh. Germans are famous for their high tech engineering, but now they can’t afford to manufacture it at home. Siltronic is moving, and along with that presumably goes some of the intellectual property, brains, and security that comes with having that production locally.
h/t GWPF Chipmakers lament high taxes and levies on electricity in Germany 9.5 out of 10 based on 62 ratings […]
Angela Merkel, last week. Source: Kremlin
Now she gets it — fifty years after school:
DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) – The world needs an open dialogue about climate change to heal the gap between sceptics and believers since time is running out to cut the emissions that drive global warming, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday.
This may seem important after three decades of skeptics being called deniers, and being shut out of every debate, decision and research grant. But it has all the hallmarks of relevance-deprivation-syndrome. The US people elected a skeptic, and he and Saint Greta have stolen her limelight:
The first two days of the annual Davos gathering were dominated by the back-and-forth between the 73-year-old former businessman Trump and 17-year-old campaigner Greta Thunberg, with corporate leaders caught in the middle, concerned that as well as words, there was a need for concrete decisions.
Statements like this provide cover for the reality which is rampant social ostracism, exclusion, coercion and bullying. But it’s soothing theatre for the Davos crowd who would love to be seen to be diplomatic. They are clapping their own generous image.
She drew applause from the […]
The mob tried to shut down these dangerous speakers… but they didn’t win.. though they had to find another venue with only days to go.
The program for the 13th Annual Conference
Friday James Taylor then Benny Pieser, the Dr Helmut Alt,
After lunch, Peter Ridd, Dr. Michael Schnell, Dr Nicola Scaffetta, Dr Susan Crockford, Myron Ebell.
Saturday: Prof. em. Dr. Christian Schlüchter, Prof. Dr. Nicola Scafetta, Prof. Dr. Henrik Svensmark, Prof. Dr. Nir Shaviv
After lunch, Dipl.-Ing. Michael Limburg, Dr. Sebastian Lüning, Prof. Dr. Horst Lüdecke, Dr. Lutz Niemann, Dr. rer. nat. Götz Ruprecht, Günter Ederer, Wolfgang Müller
I know they have good translators working non-stop. Some of this is in German, much is in English.
EIKE – European Climate and Energy Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f-fmtLcB1I
9.5 out of 10 based on 46 ratings […]
The West is weak to the point of collapse. A major hotel chain has canceled a 200 person conference mere days beforehand because 20 activists yelled at them. Where are the police? These people are a public nuisance. EIKE has hosted regular scientific conferences for 12 years without incident, they are regular clients, the conference is worth thousands, but a small group of shouty people overrules a long working relationship instantly?
Thomas, D Williams, Breitbart: NH Group cancels Climate Conference
The hotel group cited “security” concerns for its cancellation of the event after activists from the “Anti-Capitalist Climate Society,” whose motto is “system change, not climate change,” staged a protest of the conference including the formation of a flash mob in the hotel lobby, causing a disturbance and distributing flyers to hotel guests.
“The safety and well-being of our guests and staff is always our top priority,” hotel management declared in its cancellation letter. “Due to the polarizing effect of the EIKE association we could not guarantee this security for our hotel guests or for the participants of the event. For this reason, our responsibility as hosts requires you to cancel this booking.”
I spoke at […]
Compare the outrage: Germany abandons carbon target, but stays in Paris agreement. US abandons Paris, but makes actual “carbon” cuts. One of these nations is a global pariah.
BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s would-be coalition partners have agreed to drop plans to lower carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, sources familiar with negotiations said on Monday —
And this is a problem, how?
— a potential embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Oh.? Well, it’s only dates and numbers anyway:
Instead, they would aim to hit the 40 percent target in the early 2020s, the sources said, adding that both parties are still sticking to their goal of achieving a 55 percent cut in emissions by 2030.
Which is more important, paper promises you don’t keep, or lower outputs of “planet destroying gas”? Nevermind about CO2.
Source: Washington Times
US Outshines other countries in CO2 emission reduction.
In other unrelated news: Wind energy is taking over the world, highly competitve and in Germany — collapsing.
The German wind market is “threatening to implode”:
In the past year alone, more than 2,000 employees in this sector […]
From Pierre Gosselin at No Tricks Zone:
Germany needs 80GW of electricity. It has 40GW of installed solar PV.
See the graph: The red line is what the country used, and the orange bumps are the solar contribution.
Clearly, solar power will take over the world.
…
In December, Germany got ten hours of sunlight. That’s not a daily figure, that’s the whole month. So in summer on a sunny day, solar PV can make half the electricity the nation needs for lunch. In winter, almost nothing. From fifty percent, to five percent.
Imagine what kind of havoc this kind of energy flux can do. Not one piece of baseload capital equipment can be retired, despite the fact that half of it is randomly unprofitable depending on cloud cover. Solar PV eats away the low cost competitive advantage. Capital sits there unused, spinning on standby, while wages, interest, and other costs keep accruing. So hapless baseload suppliers charge more for the hours that they do run, making electricity more expensive.
They just need batteries with three months supply. It will be fine once Germany turns the state of Thuringia into a redox unit.
Read about it: Dark Days […]
Welcome to the world of baby-economics where people think a “negative” price is a sign of success. In Simpletown people are cheering. But in the real world a price signal that’s negative tells us that someone is selling something so awful they have to pay someone to take it away. It’s a burden that must be got rid of, like trash.
Germany set to pay customers for electricity usage as renewable energy generation creates huge power surplus — The Independent
Electrons cannot be created nor destroyed. If you make them, you have to deal with them. Negative pricing is a bad thing, a sign of “junk electricity” — a burden. It’s utter nonsense in a free market.
From the outset, I’m skeptical that anyone is actually paying someone to take electricity. If wind farms were coughing up dollars (euro) to “customers” surely they would just disconnect their spinning thingo from the grid? Who wants to be a shareholder in a company that forgets to lock the turbine, or press the “off” switch, and has to pay customers to take its electronic trash? The truth (whatever it is) will turn out to be some variation of an unfree market. Probably […]
….
Pierre Gosselin reports that environmental experts, professors, and some green leaders in Germany are fed up at the deforestation, the fraud and the futility. They are protesting at the waste of money in the name of ecology as trees and birds get destroyed, electricity prices skyrocket, but nothing gets achieved for the climate. One has put together a book titled: “Sacrificed Landscapes – How the Energiewende Is Destroying our Landscapes.”
They might mistakenly think there is a man-made crisis in the climate but they are honest players, and they realize that real environmental causes are being used as a guise for a planned economy and self serving corruption:
Now that Germany’s Energiewende has been in full swing for a number of years, many leading environmentalists are in a state of shock as huge areas of the country are being deforested and landscapes disfigured to make way for hundreds of wind turbines.
Environmentalist Georg Etscheit is a regular contributor at Germany’s leading climate alarmism site, Klimaretter, and he as well, has had enough. Etscheit will be releasing a book in early November.
Wind farms dominate the landscape in Germany. From the promotional […]
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