Skybird
08-12-22, 07:40 AM
Even populist propaganda channels loyal to the regime, such as ARD and ZDF, are beginning to realize how unworldly and narrow-minded the regime's great energy policy is. The following longer, smugly written text summarizes a TV documentary and appeared in two chapters.
I do not link the web pages by Google Translator, because DeepL provides incomparably better translations than Google, but unfortunately does not allow web page linking as Google does.
Why I post this very long text (yes, I noticed that it is long...)? First, because a few people mght be interested to leanr about Germany'S craziness and its why's and how's. And second, a feeling of helplessness on my side. Germany is being manouvered into a capital catstrophe, not just a small nouisance or a temporary crisis, but into economical obliteration. A war could not do more material damage than this ideological dogma being realised. It could spell the end for Germany as a mayor economic power and the stability of its social and communal structures. This is not just day-to-day political discussion for fun and social gathering, this is is serious conjouring of devastating national and continental desaster, because the fall of Germany will take major parts of Europe down, too. And I say the winter in two years from now on will become much worse than the coming winter right now.
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One must also be able to praise sometimes: A ZDF documentary exposes leading protagonists of the energy turnaround in an almost ingenious way: You simply let them talk and then ask informed questions. A suitable occasion for a meticulous analysis of the energy transition disaster in two parts.
Are our power-holding "elites" destroying Germany out of stupidity or on purpose, not least with the "energy turnaround"? Don't the green "experts" understand the consequences of their activism? Can they really believe that an industrialized nation with well over 80 million people living in a confined space can be supplied completely "climate-neutral" with wind and solar energy, preferably as early as 2030?
The current energy crisis, triggered by the war in Ukraine and Western determination to go almost immediately without Russian energy, has only exacerbated the problem, not caused it. If wind and solar would in principle soon suffice, it could hardly matter from where fossil fuels are obtained. Russian gas as a supposed climate wild card was actually clear proof from the outset of the technical unsuitability and absurdity of Germany's special path, which no one has followed to date - while we are made to believe that we are a global role model. If France and Poland, for example, copied our nonsense, we would not be able to make ends meet with their nuclear and coal-fired power. We are not role models, but hypocritical parasites.
Wind and solar power are not enough, regardless of all the jubilant reports about how much wind power can already be generated - because it is generated extremely unevenly: sometimes 30 gigawatts are fed into the grid, but time and again there is not enough for 5 or even only 3 GW throughout Germany. Electricity demand currently fluctuates between about 40 and 70 GW during the course of the day (Federal Network Agency); the annual average is just under 65 GW (gross, with transmission losses, etc.). Wind contributed an average of just under 13 GW to this in 2021 (distributed over 8,760 hours annually); solar power another good 5 GW (Fraunhofer Institute).
The figures show drastically: the danger of a blackout, a dramatic undersupply of vital electricity, is becoming more and more real as reliable fossil-based power plants are demonized, taken off the grid and destroyed. This can no longer be wiped off the table as a "conspiracy theory" - and a small miracle has occurred: State television from Mainz has taken up the issue and sent out a detailed, lavishly produced documentary on it, with voices from both camps: energy transition enthusiasts and cautionary skeptics of the wind mania.
A political piston seizure is imminent
The main actors on the eco side: the top "expert" on all media fronts, Professor Claudia Kemfert, and Dr. Patrick Graichen, the State Secretary in Habeck's office who is officially responsible for the radical energy turnaround. What both give from itself, is not to be surpassed at Stummdreistigkeit. Both are not stupid, mind you, they know the problems quite well, but declare these quasi ex cathedra in political-activist purpose optimism for insignificant, try to fob off the audience with excuses, not-at-all-half-truths and propaganda slogans. With visible nervousness: the "energy turnaround" is becoming more and more noticeably painful, produces massive social friction losses, suddenly no longer runs almost like clockwork. A political piston seizure is looming: loss of control over the public debate, a super-GAU for the green string-pullers (and that, ironically, precisely because they still don't want to allow nuclear power).
There the whole misery of our "elites" becomes visible: intellectuals and academics who use their talent for abstraction and theorizing to create a fantasy world for themselves, which they try to impose on the country by sheer power and force. This collides with reality, with physics and economics, but that doesn't bother them: they have their principles, their all-superior goals of saving the world, their ideology, which has been declared state doctrine by the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. We simply have to go through with it!
There is no turning back for these people. They are trapped in their intellectually self-sufficient circles, committed to "groupthink" and their network friends, and renegades are not treated squeamishly. The political hegemony of the Greens is fundamentally dependent on the climate narrative. Without Kilma delusion, the whole great "transformation" of the Western industrial nations would be in tatters, political control over everything and everyone would be gone. Maintaining that, by any means necessary, is politically, economically and psychologically existential for these "elites."
You can see it in their faces, the energy professor and the top official who would be "energy end minister" in other countries with larger cabinets; their faces are tense and pinched. You've already noticed it during the filming: This ZDF reporter suddenly comes up with genuinely critical questions, not just as a cue, puts his finger in the wound. They try it with "talking points", with language regulations and crisp "wording", but only embarrassing propaganda comes out of it.
Worked up as a competence actor
So far, they have always gotten away with it splendidly, with supposedly scientific findings, "everything has been calculated". Professor Kemfert is counting on this here too, on her title and her prominence thanks to talk shows: familiarity induces credibility. With her single-minded media orientation, she has worked her way up as an authority figure, marketing her face as a projection screen for professorial authority. Isn't it also gratifying how she translates her great professional expertise into simple language for the lay public? No doubts there, no unanswered questions, everything will be fine. But mixed in with her put-upon aplomb is pique ... good grief, how clearly does she have to say it. What a truculent lout, this media type.
The governess doesn't like to see her authority challenged. Especially since she has played along professionally: for television, she has strode down the street toward her workplace, has allowed herself to be teasingly photographed by the camera through a bookcase, with an extremely large amount of expertise in colorful folders. "Righteous indignation" (in vulgar German: beleidigte Leberwurst) is the impetus, the main psychological motive of these people's public actions: they are morally superior, fighting for the world of tomorrow, and then come these retarded guys who just don't want to see it and put up obstacles everywhere.
Impatient indignation is also written on the face of State Secretary Graichen. What is this all about, he wants to scream out. Are you still in your right mind, you TV idiot? These people in the energy supply industry always want so-and-so many safety reserves, just so that electricity is always guaranteed to come out of the socket. That's not the way it works. We need a different - watch out, here it comes intellectually thick - "mindset" (10:58 with a pretentiously relaxed tone of voice). People, change your brain! Your thinking! Now other strings are pulled up in the green Germany! Something stupid like Stuttgart 21, for years on important projects rummäkeln and stop everything, so it can be of course nothing with the transformation (22:15 - so goes arrogant big-headed).
This is truly breathtaking. The green-maoist father of the state Kretschmann in Stuttgart would probably never have come into office without the S21 protests, Greens have for decades dragged every allegedly endangered beetle through all instances, in order to push back projects worth billions - but now here is "governed through" according to the Chinese model, basta. Dozens of new gas-fired power plants to secure the grid, which then very often come to a costly standstill, unsecured energy imports from all over the world - money plays no role, nor does credibility. (To this still another green top power is given opportunity to disgrace itself high-frequency idling: 12:15).
Hollow chatter as an overall concept
Unusual words on Achgut.com, but it is appropriate: Thank you, dear ZDF. This is great cinema. You have given the energy transition duo infernale Kemfert/Graichen a big stage, and they have both talked their heads off. So far, only almost chancellor Annalena has managed to do that so beautifully, but in the end she didn't have to know it all that well, she was allowed to rely on her group of green experts and on the fact that the electricity is stored in the grid and that everything is possible. After all, she was just the happy face of the movement and the personified good intention.
But now it's clear: The "experts" are also just frothers and steam talkers. The "arguments" of Kemfert and Graichen are so thin, so transparent, full of holes and ridiculous. Perhaps they know better, but for the sake of the essentially correct political cause, they believe they have to keep the audience happy with tactically useful narratives. Or maybe they are so obdurate and have come to believe their own propaganda that they can't get out of without endangering their existence - a crisis they are much less able to risk than a little power outage here and there.
ZDF informs: Until now, power plants have generated electricity exactly when and in the amount needed; supply follows demand (9:16). Wind and solar only work the other way around: consumers wait until there is electricity again. So what? We make the grid "flexible" and "digital" - the professor expresses this with a conviction as if such juggling with jargon vocabulary could solve the problem, and then she also accompanies her rhetorical phrases with "we experts call it that" (7:11). Embarrassing cluelessness, concealed with professorial presumption - which is immediately exposed by ZDF: No, she has to admit, we don't have the magic grid of tomorrow in the real energy industry by a long shot, but we just have to do it now. (7:32)
The harsh reality is: the extreme variability of wind power (and similarly solar) would have to be balanced by storing excess power on "good days" for cloudier periods. Most importantly, gigantic amounts of energy would have to be captured in the summer to be drawn from reserve in the winter, when buildings need to be heated and lit almost all day, but at the same time the sun hardly shines and often enough the wind weakens. Such a "dark lull" can last for days and even - as ZDF warns - longer than a week.
But there are plenty of storage facilities, Kemfert insists, it is just a "myth" that there is a lack of them! We have memories "still and nöcher", one hears them still thinking "...you stupid backwoodsmen" [36:00]. That is "science" 2022 in Germany: We have memory for current still and nöcher. Here one can be ashamed of oneself as one would not have to be for the most rustic reality soap on redneck television: Not only is the wording incredibly imprecise and linguistically oblique, it is also a propaganda lie.
However, state energy investor Patrick Graichen is also relying on it on Habeck's behalf: 15 million electric cars will be on the road by 2030, and all the electricity that goes into them! And then the solar system owners with own large accumulator in the house! That comes even everything quasi as by itself, "automatically", the policy must only access it, and in addition is worked government-officially still on a trend-setting "total system" (39:38). In "overall systems" the Greens are world leaders, below that they do not. They think big and globally, and with the right mindset. Then the energy turnaround will also work, you just have to want it.
Like Habeck's friend Graichen, these guys all think and talk in the "elitist" circles between politics, ministries, "scientific" institutes, opportunistic companies and NGO environment, pushing the green ball to each other, as well as in shameless, almost limitless amounts of positions and tax money - also for the "enlightenment" of the stupid rest of the population. This man is officially the number 1 politico-network functionary cadre whipping through the "energy turnaround," and clearly didn't get there by accident: He represents the whole bunch prototypically, in attitude and aspiration, way of thinking and speaking.
Just real numbers
Graichen is a master of political power games, but he is still a stranger to technical facts: in 2021, not even 14 percent of the 2.6 million new vehicles registered in Germany (Federal Motor Transport Authority) were genuine electric cars, i.e. with thick batteries, not just some hybrid gimmick with a ridiculously small electric range, making an additional 350,000 or so (so that the total number of vehicles on the road at the end of the year was 618,460).
Assuming that this rises to 2 million new battery-only cars per year by 2030, and exponentially so, as is usual in real life, then 15 million is unattainable, because this would require an average (!) of almost 2 million per year over 8 years. In addition, quite a few of the vehicles purchased by then will have long since disappeared from the road again, for example because of deteriorating batteries, or will simply have been sold abroad by fleet operators.
Even the 15 million suggested cars with large storage capacities are pure fiction (vulgo: lie). They would also not be financed by the population on a broad basis (there are not so many highly paid green lobbyists, institute directors or wind turbine investors), because e.g. a fully electric BMW starts today at about 60,000 euros, still a third more expensive than a comparable combustion engine, which is to be pushed out of the market as far as possible (also by harassing fuel taxation).
Draining the battery for the whole world
Realistically, in 2030, there will be a maximum of 8 million pure battery cars in the user's garage, with a range of about 500 km... but not really in winter, when the dark doldrums threaten. The battery then freezes and gets bitchy, plus the car has to be heated up with the valuable electricity, the BMW driver is hardly freezing his butt off for Mr. Graichen in an 80,000 euro sleigh. The capacity of the batteries is 100 kWh, in a purely electric VW or Renault rather lower, let's say generously on average of all vehicles at 80 kWh. And that times 15 - cough, maybe 8 - million!
Insanity! But: Is the car even connected to the grid in the dark? Is the owner willing to have the battery sucked dry for the whole world and stay at home for the next 3 or 5 days? Can he tell "the grid": ok, take some out, but leave me 300 km of range? Are the car, the "wallbox" and the power technology of the private house at all designed for "the grid" to help itself to the battery car, depending on the mood of the day? And what state of charge does the car actually have after a long day, when it suddenly becomes dark, windless and difficult?
Admittedly, these are all just such stupid detailed questions, wrong "mindset"! Let's just say, it will be fine. It has to! So let's assume that you can branch off 30 kWh each from 8 million passenger cars, more or less voluntarily as far as the owners are concerned. That adds up to 240 gigawatt hours of energy. (Million means thousand times thousand, so you get from kilo to mega and then to giga). Sounds like a lot! Great! Problem solved! Ms. Kemfert is right: In 2030, as if by magic, we will have storage reserves galore.
Hooray, another 4 hours of electricity!
(Enter small-minded, old-fashioned engineer...) 240 GWh - if Germany needs about 60 GW on average, that's enough for ... calculator ... can't be ... really? ... FOUR hours, that is, from getting up late on a dull, windless winter day until lunch. For the microwave lunch it was still enough, then the network jumps to zero state, but certainly super "smart", and ZDF watch you can then only on the iPad, as long as the battery holds and the mobile network still runs on diesel emergency power.
But wait! We still have all those thick batteries in the houses, where the owners stuff the solar power from the roof into the battery during the day in order to be independent of the grid for 24 hours. Mr. Graichen is also building these into his overall green system, which is now being worked on feverishly. According to Graichen, we only need to think and act like Tesla (22:32). (Voice from the post-off: Hahaha. A windbag like that wouldn't last a full work week in Elon Musk's environment).
A "Powerwall" from Tesla (quasi the Porsche among home electricity storage systems) has 13.5 kWh storage capacity - unfortunately only a fraction of what an all-electric BMW can swallow, and even in 2030 there will probably be far fewer people with a "Powerwall" than with such a passenger car. 13 kWh is enough to get through the night in summer and even through a dark rainy day if need be. But in winter, the fun quickly comes to an end and the house is predominantly dependent on the grid for months. Apart from that: How does one get the idea that homeowners would have such storage units installed for thousands and thousands of euros in order to then leave the valuable electricity to the general public?
Interim conclusion: What the professorial still-and-holes expert and the federal energy turnaround state secretary activist on ZDF offer as a solution - storage-supported bridging of days-long green power doldrums: that is at most as helpful as a sticking plaster when one has been run over by the smoothly silent approaching electric car.
With the rough calculations in part 1 of this article, the whole stupid "Energiewende" propaganda chatter of the rulers and their activist front has already been sufficiently debunked, it remains the same: Germany cannot be powered by wind power, supplemented by solar power during the day, because both fluctuate much too strongly in the course of the year, while the power demand remains fairly constant all in all. Even if wind and solar on bad days are not only around 5 GW, but after massive expansion (naively hypothetical) even three times that, we would still have 15 GW, not even a quarter (!) of what Germany needs on average, throughout the year - today already.
Another -zig gigawatts simply can't come from storage facilities, even with childishly optimistic assumptions based on electric car batteries and throttled industry, that wouldn't even be enough for half a day. Now, however, the electricity demand is supposed to increase even more massively, politically desired: Habeck's Secretary of State for Energy Graichen also has to admit this in the ZDF interview, and he does so - annoyed by insubordinately probing questions - gesticulating awkwardly and in a rather bitchy tone of voice. Half more electricity demand - never mind, let's just do it! [17:13]
The green guiding idea (or vision) is to cover all energy needs with electricity, not only for mobility, but also for heating buildings: gas heating is no longer possible, so we replace it with heat pumps. This is typically overall systematically green: switching electricity generation completely to unreliable and at the same time driving up the demand for electricity as quickly as possible, i.e. always letting demand run well ahead of the available "green" electricity supply. Yes, this is counter-intuitive, but the Greens find themselves ambitious and all the more exemplary for it.
Electricity storage in the Annalena network
Such a heat pump is - surprise! - is needed primarily in winter and must, as if by magic, turn even minus-degree outside air into 30-degree heating water. This is technically possible, but it costs a lot of electricity. Unfortunately, the colder it gets, the less efficient it becomes, so smart engineers say: If it's really cold outside, we'll just heat directly with electricity, without a pump. The appliances will then draw five or more kilowatts from the grid.
If Germany were to continuously add 300,000 homes a year, most of them heated with heat pumps, then in ten years millions of additional units would generate heat from electricity in this way, which would mean that tens of gigawatts more electricity would be needed on cold days - while at the same time periods of darkness threaten the grid, especially in winter. Unfortunately, you can't pull the heat out of the apartments and convert it back into electricity, otherwise that would also be a nice contribution to the overall green system. Where are inventors when you need them?
Back to the electricity storage units, which are just waiting to be used in the Annalena grid for "peak smoothing" and miraculously bridging days of dark lulls. Of course, the energy users are really proud of their super idea, which has been propagated since the beginning of Merkel's electric mobility euphoria, because it was clear even to the dumbest that wind power cannot be generated in a plannable and reliable way. The storage capacities of cars come just in time, what a wonderful - watch out, another magic word - "synergy"!
Which is it, driving or buffering?
Not only can you then drive with nice clean solar power generated on your own roof instead of nasty diesel (although the house is connected to the grid, of course, and the solar power could and, in the sense of the "energy transition," should actually serve to make the nearest fossil-fuel power plant superfluous). No, one has then at the same time buffer batteries to keep the grid stable! Ingenious!
Energy supply engineers shake their heads at so much naïve delusion of feasibility beyond technical constraints in power plants and grids, but not only that: Rather, the synergy thinkers also ignore two crucial facts. First: You can use a battery car for driving, you can also use it as a grid buffer. But unfortunately not both at the same time! Either the owner can be mobile thanks to battery power, or he has to stay at home in favor of buffer use. It is to be wished urgently that this wonderful synergy effect is massively communicated by the Federal Government, in order to "take the population along" and to inspire for the large idea. Surely this will greatly encourage the willingness to buy immoderately expensive cars with fewer benefits.
Secondly, and even worse, the demand for electricity in general has been massively increased - as if that would simplify the "energy transition". 15 million electric cars (as announced for 2030 by Habeck's energy campaigner Dr. Graichen)... If each of these cars is driven only 40 km per day (which results in statistically appropriate mileage over the year), then realistically about 8 kWh of electricity must be produced for each of these cars for recharging. Times 15 million results in 120 GWh; generously distributed perfectly over 12 hours overnight, this means an additional capacity on the power plant side of 10 GW (where today perhaps only 40 GW are needed at night).
10 GW cannot be reliably provided around the year by wind power even at three times today's installed capacity, and then not a hallway light has been flicked on, not a liter of hot shower water produced, not a designer espresso machine rattling while dozens of electric cars in the neighborhood are all eagerly hooked up to the grid. (And speaking of nights in winter, there's no solar power either).
Electric cars as green power-saving hogs.
Theoretically, super many battery cars could very occasionally feed some reserve into the grid; if 3 million cars were really available for this, at "smart" "wallboxes" whose owners were sufficiently willing to sacrifice, and there were also to be "only" 12 GW flowing grid-wide, then each vehicle would have to deliver a constant 4 kilowatts in real time over many hours, which a normal socket would not be able to cope with at all. But in order to theoretically have access to such an option, the power demand for the whole year has been increased by a similar order of magnitude beforehand!
So the clever "battery cars as grid buffers" idea solves at best a problem that the many additional Teslas and i-BMWs that are being forced into the market in a politically frantic manner are causing themselves: Without the e-mobiles, one would not be able to retrieve the electricity from the batteries, but one would also need correspondingly less from the outset and would much more often not even have a deficit that one would need storage reserves to compensate for. Compensating for gaps in the capriciously unstable green electricity by creating more electricity consumers: you really have to roll off the tongue how completely stupid this kind of political self-delusion is.
Speaking of eating and animals with plug-in noses: You could also tell people in poor countries with food shortages to keep pigs, which you can slaughter and eat if necessary, if food is really scarce and nothing more is available for a week. Only that the pigs must be fed of course the whole year over and thus the food in the country becomes only more scarce. (If one made the same with horses, however, one could even ride on it besides!)
Energy turnaround in a dilemma
A contribution to the "energy turnaround" is the Kemfert/Graichen-Noch-und-nöcher concept only, if it is in reality a matter of simply shutting down all the private cars depending on the wind mood (which cannot be done so easily with diesel vehicles). Or, technical feasibility naively assumed, one gets in his exuberant professorial totally cleanly calculated fantasy from 8 million battery cars 8 kilowatts each, then one can supply with 64 GW all of Germany, but that is then again only a few hours, even if the duped owners have their 60,000 euro cars afterwards with net zero range in the garage, and then there are still several days of dark lull left. Does Prof. Kemfert perhaps have to send her scientifically spotless "flexible digital network" through peer review again?
From the point of view of the ZDF journalist, her still-and-quite storage paradise is also rather a Potemkin village, and he too seems somewhat puzzled as to why one wants to increase the power demand so massively so quickly with electric cars and heat pumps, when the secure green power supply cannot even function at today's demand level. (Of course, he doesn't really elaborate on the fact that this would make the gaps much more frequent and probable than if one did without the increase in demand. It's only 40 minutes of airtime, after all).
But green "total system" (patent Dr. Graichen) clearly means: we want everything, and we want it now, unabashedly even when the individual components are obviously in conflict: Electricity only without fossil power plants, which is already hardly achievable, and at the same time, increase the demand with caracho. In this way, the energy users are continuing to heat up their central dilemma, in which they are already sweating uncomfortably, just before the boiling point: Either they simply shut down the evil fossil-fuel power plants based on coal anyway. This makes a blackout more and more likely, and even well-behaved state media are getting on the government's case. Or, of necessity, the coal-fired power plants are left running, so that the goal (to make electricity generation CO2-free) becomes ever more remote.
More CO2 through green political art
But it gets much dumber - where the ZDF documentary leaves off with its warning of blackout, it's just getting started! Because all the fine progress that green-red-yellow-black wants to force on the climate front, for example also by further "traffic shift" from the evil car to the great railroad, 1 million funny charging columns at every corner, overhead lines for trucks on highways (!), heat pumps instead of proven efficient gas heating: It all costs a heck of a lot of money. Once you've spent that, even purely consumptively puffing away on "9-euro tickets," it's gone for now and missing where it could be invested in expanding green power generation, grids or storage technology.
All the screwing around on the demand side to convert energy consumption to electricity is therefore doubly fun: coal-fired power plants have to run longer and longer and more and more of them to cover the wantonly increased demand in the first place; and at the same time the money is missing that could be used much more urgently and with much greater efficiency for the conversion of the power supply. (Sensibly with nuclear power plants, of course).
But now the real climax of the madness: The additional power consumers, if they are not shut down in the dark, will still be supplied many years from now almost always by coal-fired power plants, which - as Greta's FFF fanatics demand - actually should have been blown up the day before yesterday. It almost doesn't matter if you could theoretically get by on 30 or 60 days a year with wind and solar alone. If 90 percent of the time the additional demand for car batteries and heat pumps can only be met by "extended" fossil fuel power generation, then the supposed benefit to the world's climate is only zero at best, more likely negative.
Green "total systems" are a huge rotten spell
The all-electric BMW consumes about 20 kWh per 100 km, according to official measurements. If only 80 percent of the electricity comes from what may even be a modern coal-fired power plant, that's easily 130 to 150 grams of CO2 per km. A comparable conventional BMW with a diesel burner is easily below that! In addition, you don't need huge batteries for the latter, whose production in China has produced so much CO2 that a diesel could be driven for years with them. (One of the quite clever climate "enlightener" activists claims in the ZDF impudently [19:32], from the primary energy in the fuel 75 percent are lost with cars by exhaust; the efficiency of a modern turbo diesel lies in truth with 45 percent!)
The energy turnaround enthusiasts (also of the industry, who want to sell the stuff) suggest in all seriousness to buy the electricity "guaranteed CO2-free" from the supplier, or they juggle with the "electricity mix". But that's also just sleight of hand for people to whom math has always been a mystery. In truth, higher total electricity consumption by society at any given time in the coming years means that the CO2-neutral portion of the electricity mix will be less than it could be if, for example, we stayed with diesel cars and gas heating. Which is arithmetically identical to realizing that you (almost always) need additional fossil fuel power generators to meet the additional demand.
The green "total systems" of Kemfert and Graichen are a huge rotten magic, dangerous jugglery. Germany's energy security is being shamelessly put at risk; money is being mercilessly squandered that we have long since run out of, and especially like to do so inefficiently in the wrong place - and then, in truth, even more CO2 will be produced than necessary, if only a little engineering common sense were applied. Thus, this energy turnaround is already at its well-deserved and self-inflicted end, provoked out of sheer wantonness.
Energy turnaround, won to death
The shrill activists on the street and the smart networkers at taxpayer expense have been so successful in "politically pressuring", getting such ambitious goals chiseled into granite by law and in court, that it can never, ever be realized. Even if wind and solar power could be expanded quickly enough to generate sufficient electricity over the year: It just doesn't match demand, fluctuates far too massively. Without storage in lavish, hardly imaginable scales, over long periods of months, the community then cannot be kept alive, and with that is also meant human survival. [27:42 - Horror of a Blackout in the Capital]
Not only are car batteries not a sufficient solution, even if the naive fantasies of this kind would not encounter any technical implementation problems or resistance from the owners. Batteries cannot be the solution on the whole, on a global scale. It would not be possible to procure so many raw materials worldwide to provide the necessary storage capacities. The only way would be with chemical energy storage, i.e. hydrogen, methane, synthetic ethanol and similar substances, but then there would be such massive losses between green electricity and storage fuel that the whole house of cards would collapse.
In the end, more resources are invested in the production of wind turbines and all the other extremely capital-intensive large-scale technology (huge factories!) than the amount of useful energy that can be obtained at the end of an insanely complicated, unaffordable process chain - because the "harvest factor" (energetic "return on investment"), especially in the case of solar panels, is puny from the outset, the "storage factories" would only be used to capacity in a fluctuating manner, and massive conversion losses occur several times over. The Swiss Jean Tinguely has designed insane tinkering machines as art fantasy, funny and stimulating; the climate fanatics strive for a gigantic material battle, a "regenerative" giant machine, which only just keeps itself running - not funny, only vain folly.
Economic suicide and ecological damage
That's not all: Making industry in Germany impossible by expensive, unreliable energy is not only economic suicide, but even aggravates ecological damage worldwide - but that doesn't bother "globally thinking" German Greens in their local actions. That's what you get when you think "politically" and think engineers are idiots, as a clearly articulated practitioner tells the ZDF reporter [16:39]. Further highlights of the enlightenment: The global corporation BASF dares to say clearly into the TV camera that core statements of the energy transition faction are completely unreal nonsense [20:29]. The president of the Federal Court of Auditors (!) bluntly and emphatically calls for reason and consumer protection [13:42].
Professor Kemfert and Mr. Graichen, the super-state activist, are slowly getting an inkling that the stupid reality is destroying their beautiful political life's work. The stubborn insistence on primitive incantations of the TV-famous "energy economist", as well as the defiant know-it-all-ness of the political manager, who only has left to impute character deficits to skeptical engineers and political opponents... these arrogant types are dumbfounded that they suddenly get headwind from such an official side. But declaring the Mainzelmännchen ("Gu'nahmd!") to be right-wing populist conspiracy theorists won't work.
A few people at state television were pretty brave to corner the high priests of the energy transition like that! If the mainstream-liberal ZDF teaches its pensioner audience for three quarters of an hour with dramatic background music that the blackout is really threatening and the critics are experts who are to be taken seriously, then we are already a big step further. The documentary vividly shows how absurdly naïve and mendacious the "leading", politically authoritative energy campaigners in Germany are and how stupid they take the public for.
Saving the world by reducing prosperity
At the end, however, the ZDF documentary takes a surprising turn. Someone who sees the technical problems, who is not naively running to our doom, explains to us that we must nevertheless save the world by foregoing consumption, prosperity and security [42:28]. The ZDF sees "devastating consequences for Germany" coming, because the "energy turnaround" obviously cannot work, and proves this factually correct with clear numbers, facts, contexts. To conclude, a professor in a knitted sweater demonstratively climbs off his bicycle and says that the end of our "lifestyle" is necessary to save the world.
Whether the population is properly prepared for this in its "mindset"? Do we have to say goodbye to an "affluent society", to "materialism"? This has always been and still is the goal of the green misanthropes, and the "energy turnaround" leads exactly there. That is the real explanation of the puzzling politics, which seemingly stupidly plunges an industrial society into ruin. Without energy, no industry, no prosperity. That is not a risk to be taken recklessly, but that is the real goal of these troops. This is the "Great Transformation" (aka "great reset") that Angela Merkel, Uschi "Wanderlein" (as the British call our top woman in Brussels) and many more have been raving about for years.
What exactly did the ZDF reporter have in mind with this conclusion? Where he wants to go politically? Was it tactical camouflage or his own conviction? It doesn't matter. He convincingly warned of the blackout, practically declared the energy turnaround a failure, and then truthfully put into the picture what the vain do-gooders are actually about. That would be worthy of a Grimme Award [a German TV award, like German Emmy, Skybird].
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https://www.achgut.com/artikel/pfauen_der_energiewende_vom_zdf_gerupft
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/lebensluegen_der_energiewender_vom_zdf_zerrupft
I do not link the web pages by Google Translator, because DeepL provides incomparably better translations than Google, but unfortunately does not allow web page linking as Google does.
Why I post this very long text (yes, I noticed that it is long...)? First, because a few people mght be interested to leanr about Germany'S craziness and its why's and how's. And second, a feeling of helplessness on my side. Germany is being manouvered into a capital catstrophe, not just a small nouisance or a temporary crisis, but into economical obliteration. A war could not do more material damage than this ideological dogma being realised. It could spell the end for Germany as a mayor economic power and the stability of its social and communal structures. This is not just day-to-day political discussion for fun and social gathering, this is is serious conjouring of devastating national and continental desaster, because the fall of Germany will take major parts of Europe down, too. And I say the winter in two years from now on will become much worse than the coming winter right now.
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One must also be able to praise sometimes: A ZDF documentary exposes leading protagonists of the energy turnaround in an almost ingenious way: You simply let them talk and then ask informed questions. A suitable occasion for a meticulous analysis of the energy transition disaster in two parts.
Are our power-holding "elites" destroying Germany out of stupidity or on purpose, not least with the "energy turnaround"? Don't the green "experts" understand the consequences of their activism? Can they really believe that an industrialized nation with well over 80 million people living in a confined space can be supplied completely "climate-neutral" with wind and solar energy, preferably as early as 2030?
The current energy crisis, triggered by the war in Ukraine and Western determination to go almost immediately without Russian energy, has only exacerbated the problem, not caused it. If wind and solar would in principle soon suffice, it could hardly matter from where fossil fuels are obtained. Russian gas as a supposed climate wild card was actually clear proof from the outset of the technical unsuitability and absurdity of Germany's special path, which no one has followed to date - while we are made to believe that we are a global role model. If France and Poland, for example, copied our nonsense, we would not be able to make ends meet with their nuclear and coal-fired power. We are not role models, but hypocritical parasites.
Wind and solar power are not enough, regardless of all the jubilant reports about how much wind power can already be generated - because it is generated extremely unevenly: sometimes 30 gigawatts are fed into the grid, but time and again there is not enough for 5 or even only 3 GW throughout Germany. Electricity demand currently fluctuates between about 40 and 70 GW during the course of the day (Federal Network Agency); the annual average is just under 65 GW (gross, with transmission losses, etc.). Wind contributed an average of just under 13 GW to this in 2021 (distributed over 8,760 hours annually); solar power another good 5 GW (Fraunhofer Institute).
The figures show drastically: the danger of a blackout, a dramatic undersupply of vital electricity, is becoming more and more real as reliable fossil-based power plants are demonized, taken off the grid and destroyed. This can no longer be wiped off the table as a "conspiracy theory" - and a small miracle has occurred: State television from Mainz has taken up the issue and sent out a detailed, lavishly produced documentary on it, with voices from both camps: energy transition enthusiasts and cautionary skeptics of the wind mania.
A political piston seizure is imminent
The main actors on the eco side: the top "expert" on all media fronts, Professor Claudia Kemfert, and Dr. Patrick Graichen, the State Secretary in Habeck's office who is officially responsible for the radical energy turnaround. What both give from itself, is not to be surpassed at Stummdreistigkeit. Both are not stupid, mind you, they know the problems quite well, but declare these quasi ex cathedra in political-activist purpose optimism for insignificant, try to fob off the audience with excuses, not-at-all-half-truths and propaganda slogans. With visible nervousness: the "energy turnaround" is becoming more and more noticeably painful, produces massive social friction losses, suddenly no longer runs almost like clockwork. A political piston seizure is looming: loss of control over the public debate, a super-GAU for the green string-pullers (and that, ironically, precisely because they still don't want to allow nuclear power).
There the whole misery of our "elites" becomes visible: intellectuals and academics who use their talent for abstraction and theorizing to create a fantasy world for themselves, which they try to impose on the country by sheer power and force. This collides with reality, with physics and economics, but that doesn't bother them: they have their principles, their all-superior goals of saving the world, their ideology, which has been declared state doctrine by the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. We simply have to go through with it!
There is no turning back for these people. They are trapped in their intellectually self-sufficient circles, committed to "groupthink" and their network friends, and renegades are not treated squeamishly. The political hegemony of the Greens is fundamentally dependent on the climate narrative. Without Kilma delusion, the whole great "transformation" of the Western industrial nations would be in tatters, political control over everything and everyone would be gone. Maintaining that, by any means necessary, is politically, economically and psychologically existential for these "elites."
You can see it in their faces, the energy professor and the top official who would be "energy end minister" in other countries with larger cabinets; their faces are tense and pinched. You've already noticed it during the filming: This ZDF reporter suddenly comes up with genuinely critical questions, not just as a cue, puts his finger in the wound. They try it with "talking points", with language regulations and crisp "wording", but only embarrassing propaganda comes out of it.
Worked up as a competence actor
So far, they have always gotten away with it splendidly, with supposedly scientific findings, "everything has been calculated". Professor Kemfert is counting on this here too, on her title and her prominence thanks to talk shows: familiarity induces credibility. With her single-minded media orientation, she has worked her way up as an authority figure, marketing her face as a projection screen for professorial authority. Isn't it also gratifying how she translates her great professional expertise into simple language for the lay public? No doubts there, no unanswered questions, everything will be fine. But mixed in with her put-upon aplomb is pique ... good grief, how clearly does she have to say it. What a truculent lout, this media type.
The governess doesn't like to see her authority challenged. Especially since she has played along professionally: for television, she has strode down the street toward her workplace, has allowed herself to be teasingly photographed by the camera through a bookcase, with an extremely large amount of expertise in colorful folders. "Righteous indignation" (in vulgar German: beleidigte Leberwurst) is the impetus, the main psychological motive of these people's public actions: they are morally superior, fighting for the world of tomorrow, and then come these retarded guys who just don't want to see it and put up obstacles everywhere.
Impatient indignation is also written on the face of State Secretary Graichen. What is this all about, he wants to scream out. Are you still in your right mind, you TV idiot? These people in the energy supply industry always want so-and-so many safety reserves, just so that electricity is always guaranteed to come out of the socket. That's not the way it works. We need a different - watch out, here it comes intellectually thick - "mindset" (10:58 with a pretentiously relaxed tone of voice). People, change your brain! Your thinking! Now other strings are pulled up in the green Germany! Something stupid like Stuttgart 21, for years on important projects rummäkeln and stop everything, so it can be of course nothing with the transformation (22:15 - so goes arrogant big-headed).
This is truly breathtaking. The green-maoist father of the state Kretschmann in Stuttgart would probably never have come into office without the S21 protests, Greens have for decades dragged every allegedly endangered beetle through all instances, in order to push back projects worth billions - but now here is "governed through" according to the Chinese model, basta. Dozens of new gas-fired power plants to secure the grid, which then very often come to a costly standstill, unsecured energy imports from all over the world - money plays no role, nor does credibility. (To this still another green top power is given opportunity to disgrace itself high-frequency idling: 12:15).
Hollow chatter as an overall concept
Unusual words on Achgut.com, but it is appropriate: Thank you, dear ZDF. This is great cinema. You have given the energy transition duo infernale Kemfert/Graichen a big stage, and they have both talked their heads off. So far, only almost chancellor Annalena has managed to do that so beautifully, but in the end she didn't have to know it all that well, she was allowed to rely on her group of green experts and on the fact that the electricity is stored in the grid and that everything is possible. After all, she was just the happy face of the movement and the personified good intention.
But now it's clear: The "experts" are also just frothers and steam talkers. The "arguments" of Kemfert and Graichen are so thin, so transparent, full of holes and ridiculous. Perhaps they know better, but for the sake of the essentially correct political cause, they believe they have to keep the audience happy with tactically useful narratives. Or maybe they are so obdurate and have come to believe their own propaganda that they can't get out of without endangering their existence - a crisis they are much less able to risk than a little power outage here and there.
ZDF informs: Until now, power plants have generated electricity exactly when and in the amount needed; supply follows demand (9:16). Wind and solar only work the other way around: consumers wait until there is electricity again. So what? We make the grid "flexible" and "digital" - the professor expresses this with a conviction as if such juggling with jargon vocabulary could solve the problem, and then she also accompanies her rhetorical phrases with "we experts call it that" (7:11). Embarrassing cluelessness, concealed with professorial presumption - which is immediately exposed by ZDF: No, she has to admit, we don't have the magic grid of tomorrow in the real energy industry by a long shot, but we just have to do it now. (7:32)
The harsh reality is: the extreme variability of wind power (and similarly solar) would have to be balanced by storing excess power on "good days" for cloudier periods. Most importantly, gigantic amounts of energy would have to be captured in the summer to be drawn from reserve in the winter, when buildings need to be heated and lit almost all day, but at the same time the sun hardly shines and often enough the wind weakens. Such a "dark lull" can last for days and even - as ZDF warns - longer than a week.
But there are plenty of storage facilities, Kemfert insists, it is just a "myth" that there is a lack of them! We have memories "still and nöcher", one hears them still thinking "...you stupid backwoodsmen" [36:00]. That is "science" 2022 in Germany: We have memory for current still and nöcher. Here one can be ashamed of oneself as one would not have to be for the most rustic reality soap on redneck television: Not only is the wording incredibly imprecise and linguistically oblique, it is also a propaganda lie.
However, state energy investor Patrick Graichen is also relying on it on Habeck's behalf: 15 million electric cars will be on the road by 2030, and all the electricity that goes into them! And then the solar system owners with own large accumulator in the house! That comes even everything quasi as by itself, "automatically", the policy must only access it, and in addition is worked government-officially still on a trend-setting "total system" (39:38). In "overall systems" the Greens are world leaders, below that they do not. They think big and globally, and with the right mindset. Then the energy turnaround will also work, you just have to want it.
Like Habeck's friend Graichen, these guys all think and talk in the "elitist" circles between politics, ministries, "scientific" institutes, opportunistic companies and NGO environment, pushing the green ball to each other, as well as in shameless, almost limitless amounts of positions and tax money - also for the "enlightenment" of the stupid rest of the population. This man is officially the number 1 politico-network functionary cadre whipping through the "energy turnaround," and clearly didn't get there by accident: He represents the whole bunch prototypically, in attitude and aspiration, way of thinking and speaking.
Just real numbers
Graichen is a master of political power games, but he is still a stranger to technical facts: in 2021, not even 14 percent of the 2.6 million new vehicles registered in Germany (Federal Motor Transport Authority) were genuine electric cars, i.e. with thick batteries, not just some hybrid gimmick with a ridiculously small electric range, making an additional 350,000 or so (so that the total number of vehicles on the road at the end of the year was 618,460).
Assuming that this rises to 2 million new battery-only cars per year by 2030, and exponentially so, as is usual in real life, then 15 million is unattainable, because this would require an average (!) of almost 2 million per year over 8 years. In addition, quite a few of the vehicles purchased by then will have long since disappeared from the road again, for example because of deteriorating batteries, or will simply have been sold abroad by fleet operators.
Even the 15 million suggested cars with large storage capacities are pure fiction (vulgo: lie). They would also not be financed by the population on a broad basis (there are not so many highly paid green lobbyists, institute directors or wind turbine investors), because e.g. a fully electric BMW starts today at about 60,000 euros, still a third more expensive than a comparable combustion engine, which is to be pushed out of the market as far as possible (also by harassing fuel taxation).
Draining the battery for the whole world
Realistically, in 2030, there will be a maximum of 8 million pure battery cars in the user's garage, with a range of about 500 km... but not really in winter, when the dark doldrums threaten. The battery then freezes and gets bitchy, plus the car has to be heated up with the valuable electricity, the BMW driver is hardly freezing his butt off for Mr. Graichen in an 80,000 euro sleigh. The capacity of the batteries is 100 kWh, in a purely electric VW or Renault rather lower, let's say generously on average of all vehicles at 80 kWh. And that times 15 - cough, maybe 8 - million!
Insanity! But: Is the car even connected to the grid in the dark? Is the owner willing to have the battery sucked dry for the whole world and stay at home for the next 3 or 5 days? Can he tell "the grid": ok, take some out, but leave me 300 km of range? Are the car, the "wallbox" and the power technology of the private house at all designed for "the grid" to help itself to the battery car, depending on the mood of the day? And what state of charge does the car actually have after a long day, when it suddenly becomes dark, windless and difficult?
Admittedly, these are all just such stupid detailed questions, wrong "mindset"! Let's just say, it will be fine. It has to! So let's assume that you can branch off 30 kWh each from 8 million passenger cars, more or less voluntarily as far as the owners are concerned. That adds up to 240 gigawatt hours of energy. (Million means thousand times thousand, so you get from kilo to mega and then to giga). Sounds like a lot! Great! Problem solved! Ms. Kemfert is right: In 2030, as if by magic, we will have storage reserves galore.
Hooray, another 4 hours of electricity!
(Enter small-minded, old-fashioned engineer...) 240 GWh - if Germany needs about 60 GW on average, that's enough for ... calculator ... can't be ... really? ... FOUR hours, that is, from getting up late on a dull, windless winter day until lunch. For the microwave lunch it was still enough, then the network jumps to zero state, but certainly super "smart", and ZDF watch you can then only on the iPad, as long as the battery holds and the mobile network still runs on diesel emergency power.
But wait! We still have all those thick batteries in the houses, where the owners stuff the solar power from the roof into the battery during the day in order to be independent of the grid for 24 hours. Mr. Graichen is also building these into his overall green system, which is now being worked on feverishly. According to Graichen, we only need to think and act like Tesla (22:32). (Voice from the post-off: Hahaha. A windbag like that wouldn't last a full work week in Elon Musk's environment).
A "Powerwall" from Tesla (quasi the Porsche among home electricity storage systems) has 13.5 kWh storage capacity - unfortunately only a fraction of what an all-electric BMW can swallow, and even in 2030 there will probably be far fewer people with a "Powerwall" than with such a passenger car. 13 kWh is enough to get through the night in summer and even through a dark rainy day if need be. But in winter, the fun quickly comes to an end and the house is predominantly dependent on the grid for months. Apart from that: How does one get the idea that homeowners would have such storage units installed for thousands and thousands of euros in order to then leave the valuable electricity to the general public?
Interim conclusion: What the professorial still-and-holes expert and the federal energy turnaround state secretary activist on ZDF offer as a solution - storage-supported bridging of days-long green power doldrums: that is at most as helpful as a sticking plaster when one has been run over by the smoothly silent approaching electric car.
With the rough calculations in part 1 of this article, the whole stupid "Energiewende" propaganda chatter of the rulers and their activist front has already been sufficiently debunked, it remains the same: Germany cannot be powered by wind power, supplemented by solar power during the day, because both fluctuate much too strongly in the course of the year, while the power demand remains fairly constant all in all. Even if wind and solar on bad days are not only around 5 GW, but after massive expansion (naively hypothetical) even three times that, we would still have 15 GW, not even a quarter (!) of what Germany needs on average, throughout the year - today already.
Another -zig gigawatts simply can't come from storage facilities, even with childishly optimistic assumptions based on electric car batteries and throttled industry, that wouldn't even be enough for half a day. Now, however, the electricity demand is supposed to increase even more massively, politically desired: Habeck's Secretary of State for Energy Graichen also has to admit this in the ZDF interview, and he does so - annoyed by insubordinately probing questions - gesticulating awkwardly and in a rather bitchy tone of voice. Half more electricity demand - never mind, let's just do it! [17:13]
The green guiding idea (or vision) is to cover all energy needs with electricity, not only for mobility, but also for heating buildings: gas heating is no longer possible, so we replace it with heat pumps. This is typically overall systematically green: switching electricity generation completely to unreliable and at the same time driving up the demand for electricity as quickly as possible, i.e. always letting demand run well ahead of the available "green" electricity supply. Yes, this is counter-intuitive, but the Greens find themselves ambitious and all the more exemplary for it.
Electricity storage in the Annalena network
Such a heat pump is - surprise! - is needed primarily in winter and must, as if by magic, turn even minus-degree outside air into 30-degree heating water. This is technically possible, but it costs a lot of electricity. Unfortunately, the colder it gets, the less efficient it becomes, so smart engineers say: If it's really cold outside, we'll just heat directly with electricity, without a pump. The appliances will then draw five or more kilowatts from the grid.
If Germany were to continuously add 300,000 homes a year, most of them heated with heat pumps, then in ten years millions of additional units would generate heat from electricity in this way, which would mean that tens of gigawatts more electricity would be needed on cold days - while at the same time periods of darkness threaten the grid, especially in winter. Unfortunately, you can't pull the heat out of the apartments and convert it back into electricity, otherwise that would also be a nice contribution to the overall green system. Where are inventors when you need them?
Back to the electricity storage units, which are just waiting to be used in the Annalena grid for "peak smoothing" and miraculously bridging days of dark lulls. Of course, the energy users are really proud of their super idea, which has been propagated since the beginning of Merkel's electric mobility euphoria, because it was clear even to the dumbest that wind power cannot be generated in a plannable and reliable way. The storage capacities of cars come just in time, what a wonderful - watch out, another magic word - "synergy"!
Which is it, driving or buffering?
Not only can you then drive with nice clean solar power generated on your own roof instead of nasty diesel (although the house is connected to the grid, of course, and the solar power could and, in the sense of the "energy transition," should actually serve to make the nearest fossil-fuel power plant superfluous). No, one has then at the same time buffer batteries to keep the grid stable! Ingenious!
Energy supply engineers shake their heads at so much naïve delusion of feasibility beyond technical constraints in power plants and grids, but not only that: Rather, the synergy thinkers also ignore two crucial facts. First: You can use a battery car for driving, you can also use it as a grid buffer. But unfortunately not both at the same time! Either the owner can be mobile thanks to battery power, or he has to stay at home in favor of buffer use. It is to be wished urgently that this wonderful synergy effect is massively communicated by the Federal Government, in order to "take the population along" and to inspire for the large idea. Surely this will greatly encourage the willingness to buy immoderately expensive cars with fewer benefits.
Secondly, and even worse, the demand for electricity in general has been massively increased - as if that would simplify the "energy transition". 15 million electric cars (as announced for 2030 by Habeck's energy campaigner Dr. Graichen)... If each of these cars is driven only 40 km per day (which results in statistically appropriate mileage over the year), then realistically about 8 kWh of electricity must be produced for each of these cars for recharging. Times 15 million results in 120 GWh; generously distributed perfectly over 12 hours overnight, this means an additional capacity on the power plant side of 10 GW (where today perhaps only 40 GW are needed at night).
10 GW cannot be reliably provided around the year by wind power even at three times today's installed capacity, and then not a hallway light has been flicked on, not a liter of hot shower water produced, not a designer espresso machine rattling while dozens of electric cars in the neighborhood are all eagerly hooked up to the grid. (And speaking of nights in winter, there's no solar power either).
Electric cars as green power-saving hogs.
Theoretically, super many battery cars could very occasionally feed some reserve into the grid; if 3 million cars were really available for this, at "smart" "wallboxes" whose owners were sufficiently willing to sacrifice, and there were also to be "only" 12 GW flowing grid-wide, then each vehicle would have to deliver a constant 4 kilowatts in real time over many hours, which a normal socket would not be able to cope with at all. But in order to theoretically have access to such an option, the power demand for the whole year has been increased by a similar order of magnitude beforehand!
So the clever "battery cars as grid buffers" idea solves at best a problem that the many additional Teslas and i-BMWs that are being forced into the market in a politically frantic manner are causing themselves: Without the e-mobiles, one would not be able to retrieve the electricity from the batteries, but one would also need correspondingly less from the outset and would much more often not even have a deficit that one would need storage reserves to compensate for. Compensating for gaps in the capriciously unstable green electricity by creating more electricity consumers: you really have to roll off the tongue how completely stupid this kind of political self-delusion is.
Speaking of eating and animals with plug-in noses: You could also tell people in poor countries with food shortages to keep pigs, which you can slaughter and eat if necessary, if food is really scarce and nothing more is available for a week. Only that the pigs must be fed of course the whole year over and thus the food in the country becomes only more scarce. (If one made the same with horses, however, one could even ride on it besides!)
Energy turnaround in a dilemma
A contribution to the "energy turnaround" is the Kemfert/Graichen-Noch-und-nöcher concept only, if it is in reality a matter of simply shutting down all the private cars depending on the wind mood (which cannot be done so easily with diesel vehicles). Or, technical feasibility naively assumed, one gets in his exuberant professorial totally cleanly calculated fantasy from 8 million battery cars 8 kilowatts each, then one can supply with 64 GW all of Germany, but that is then again only a few hours, even if the duped owners have their 60,000 euro cars afterwards with net zero range in the garage, and then there are still several days of dark lull left. Does Prof. Kemfert perhaps have to send her scientifically spotless "flexible digital network" through peer review again?
From the point of view of the ZDF journalist, her still-and-quite storage paradise is also rather a Potemkin village, and he too seems somewhat puzzled as to why one wants to increase the power demand so massively so quickly with electric cars and heat pumps, when the secure green power supply cannot even function at today's demand level. (Of course, he doesn't really elaborate on the fact that this would make the gaps much more frequent and probable than if one did without the increase in demand. It's only 40 minutes of airtime, after all).
But green "total system" (patent Dr. Graichen) clearly means: we want everything, and we want it now, unabashedly even when the individual components are obviously in conflict: Electricity only without fossil power plants, which is already hardly achievable, and at the same time, increase the demand with caracho. In this way, the energy users are continuing to heat up their central dilemma, in which they are already sweating uncomfortably, just before the boiling point: Either they simply shut down the evil fossil-fuel power plants based on coal anyway. This makes a blackout more and more likely, and even well-behaved state media are getting on the government's case. Or, of necessity, the coal-fired power plants are left running, so that the goal (to make electricity generation CO2-free) becomes ever more remote.
More CO2 through green political art
But it gets much dumber - where the ZDF documentary leaves off with its warning of blackout, it's just getting started! Because all the fine progress that green-red-yellow-black wants to force on the climate front, for example also by further "traffic shift" from the evil car to the great railroad, 1 million funny charging columns at every corner, overhead lines for trucks on highways (!), heat pumps instead of proven efficient gas heating: It all costs a heck of a lot of money. Once you've spent that, even purely consumptively puffing away on "9-euro tickets," it's gone for now and missing where it could be invested in expanding green power generation, grids or storage technology.
All the screwing around on the demand side to convert energy consumption to electricity is therefore doubly fun: coal-fired power plants have to run longer and longer and more and more of them to cover the wantonly increased demand in the first place; and at the same time the money is missing that could be used much more urgently and with much greater efficiency for the conversion of the power supply. (Sensibly with nuclear power plants, of course).
But now the real climax of the madness: The additional power consumers, if they are not shut down in the dark, will still be supplied many years from now almost always by coal-fired power plants, which - as Greta's FFF fanatics demand - actually should have been blown up the day before yesterday. It almost doesn't matter if you could theoretically get by on 30 or 60 days a year with wind and solar alone. If 90 percent of the time the additional demand for car batteries and heat pumps can only be met by "extended" fossil fuel power generation, then the supposed benefit to the world's climate is only zero at best, more likely negative.
Green "total systems" are a huge rotten spell
The all-electric BMW consumes about 20 kWh per 100 km, according to official measurements. If only 80 percent of the electricity comes from what may even be a modern coal-fired power plant, that's easily 130 to 150 grams of CO2 per km. A comparable conventional BMW with a diesel burner is easily below that! In addition, you don't need huge batteries for the latter, whose production in China has produced so much CO2 that a diesel could be driven for years with them. (One of the quite clever climate "enlightener" activists claims in the ZDF impudently [19:32], from the primary energy in the fuel 75 percent are lost with cars by exhaust; the efficiency of a modern turbo diesel lies in truth with 45 percent!)
The energy turnaround enthusiasts (also of the industry, who want to sell the stuff) suggest in all seriousness to buy the electricity "guaranteed CO2-free" from the supplier, or they juggle with the "electricity mix". But that's also just sleight of hand for people to whom math has always been a mystery. In truth, higher total electricity consumption by society at any given time in the coming years means that the CO2-neutral portion of the electricity mix will be less than it could be if, for example, we stayed with diesel cars and gas heating. Which is arithmetically identical to realizing that you (almost always) need additional fossil fuel power generators to meet the additional demand.
The green "total systems" of Kemfert and Graichen are a huge rotten magic, dangerous jugglery. Germany's energy security is being shamelessly put at risk; money is being mercilessly squandered that we have long since run out of, and especially like to do so inefficiently in the wrong place - and then, in truth, even more CO2 will be produced than necessary, if only a little engineering common sense were applied. Thus, this energy turnaround is already at its well-deserved and self-inflicted end, provoked out of sheer wantonness.
Energy turnaround, won to death
The shrill activists on the street and the smart networkers at taxpayer expense have been so successful in "politically pressuring", getting such ambitious goals chiseled into granite by law and in court, that it can never, ever be realized. Even if wind and solar power could be expanded quickly enough to generate sufficient electricity over the year: It just doesn't match demand, fluctuates far too massively. Without storage in lavish, hardly imaginable scales, over long periods of months, the community then cannot be kept alive, and with that is also meant human survival. [27:42 - Horror of a Blackout in the Capital]
Not only are car batteries not a sufficient solution, even if the naive fantasies of this kind would not encounter any technical implementation problems or resistance from the owners. Batteries cannot be the solution on the whole, on a global scale. It would not be possible to procure so many raw materials worldwide to provide the necessary storage capacities. The only way would be with chemical energy storage, i.e. hydrogen, methane, synthetic ethanol and similar substances, but then there would be such massive losses between green electricity and storage fuel that the whole house of cards would collapse.
In the end, more resources are invested in the production of wind turbines and all the other extremely capital-intensive large-scale technology (huge factories!) than the amount of useful energy that can be obtained at the end of an insanely complicated, unaffordable process chain - because the "harvest factor" (energetic "return on investment"), especially in the case of solar panels, is puny from the outset, the "storage factories" would only be used to capacity in a fluctuating manner, and massive conversion losses occur several times over. The Swiss Jean Tinguely has designed insane tinkering machines as art fantasy, funny and stimulating; the climate fanatics strive for a gigantic material battle, a "regenerative" giant machine, which only just keeps itself running - not funny, only vain folly.
Economic suicide and ecological damage
That's not all: Making industry in Germany impossible by expensive, unreliable energy is not only economic suicide, but even aggravates ecological damage worldwide - but that doesn't bother "globally thinking" German Greens in their local actions. That's what you get when you think "politically" and think engineers are idiots, as a clearly articulated practitioner tells the ZDF reporter [16:39]. Further highlights of the enlightenment: The global corporation BASF dares to say clearly into the TV camera that core statements of the energy transition faction are completely unreal nonsense [20:29]. The president of the Federal Court of Auditors (!) bluntly and emphatically calls for reason and consumer protection [13:42].
Professor Kemfert and Mr. Graichen, the super-state activist, are slowly getting an inkling that the stupid reality is destroying their beautiful political life's work. The stubborn insistence on primitive incantations of the TV-famous "energy economist", as well as the defiant know-it-all-ness of the political manager, who only has left to impute character deficits to skeptical engineers and political opponents... these arrogant types are dumbfounded that they suddenly get headwind from such an official side. But declaring the Mainzelmännchen ("Gu'nahmd!") to be right-wing populist conspiracy theorists won't work.
A few people at state television were pretty brave to corner the high priests of the energy transition like that! If the mainstream-liberal ZDF teaches its pensioner audience for three quarters of an hour with dramatic background music that the blackout is really threatening and the critics are experts who are to be taken seriously, then we are already a big step further. The documentary vividly shows how absurdly naïve and mendacious the "leading", politically authoritative energy campaigners in Germany are and how stupid they take the public for.
Saving the world by reducing prosperity
At the end, however, the ZDF documentary takes a surprising turn. Someone who sees the technical problems, who is not naively running to our doom, explains to us that we must nevertheless save the world by foregoing consumption, prosperity and security [42:28]. The ZDF sees "devastating consequences for Germany" coming, because the "energy turnaround" obviously cannot work, and proves this factually correct with clear numbers, facts, contexts. To conclude, a professor in a knitted sweater demonstratively climbs off his bicycle and says that the end of our "lifestyle" is necessary to save the world.
Whether the population is properly prepared for this in its "mindset"? Do we have to say goodbye to an "affluent society", to "materialism"? This has always been and still is the goal of the green misanthropes, and the "energy turnaround" leads exactly there. That is the real explanation of the puzzling politics, which seemingly stupidly plunges an industrial society into ruin. Without energy, no industry, no prosperity. That is not a risk to be taken recklessly, but that is the real goal of these troops. This is the "Great Transformation" (aka "great reset") that Angela Merkel, Uschi "Wanderlein" (as the British call our top woman in Brussels) and many more have been raving about for years.
What exactly did the ZDF reporter have in mind with this conclusion? Where he wants to go politically? Was it tactical camouflage or his own conviction? It doesn't matter. He convincingly warned of the blackout, practically declared the energy turnaround a failure, and then truthfully put into the picture what the vain do-gooders are actually about. That would be worthy of a Grimme Award [a German TV award, like German Emmy, Skybird].
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https://www.achgut.com/artikel/pfauen_der_energiewende_vom_zdf_gerupft
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/lebensluegen_der_energiewender_vom_zdf_zerrupft