The price of trying to go green.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Wolferz

Skybird,

They do need to recoup the investment in those wind turbines and give the dirty electricity producers their cut for using their transmission lines.
Then there's the maintenance on those turbines. etc etc ad nauseum.

One would think so, yes, it sounds like the most likely and natural explanation, right?! Better think again.

The situation is much more absurd. Photovoltaic got pushed over here by subsidizing the installation of solar panels on private roofs and promising to pay private owners and companies alike a certain fee for each kW-hour produced. Those tax-payed investement subsidies for the most then were fetched by Chinese companies producing such panels, which helped them - with German tax money - to wipe the German solar panel industry off the market with cheap Chinese imports, with the German industry just some years ago having been both in quality and quantity world market leader - now, just a few years after that system was implemented by political-ideological will, practically all German solar panel producers have been destroyed, a German solar panel industry no longer exists. We subsidized the Chinese to do that to us! And we use tax money as well for making electricity needlessly more expensive the more sunny the day is!

I hate subsidies, always. They always mean to distort market mechanisms. Political regulation (planned economy) versus free market - guess my assessment the one versus the other...

Wind suffers from the same problem: subsidizing the production of wind energy; also, we do not have the infrastructure to transport the power from where it gets produced (the windy north) to the places where it is needed most: the South. According national powerlines have not been built, and we are still years away fro that. Since years we must spend millions every month to pay the maintenance of windwheels that are not linked to the powergrid, on land as well as offshore. First investors have moved out (or went bancrupt). It was all planned in total haste, for ideological reasons, and because nobody on this planet suffered so dearly from the Fukushima disaster as us poor Germans, you know.

What also helps to let costs explode for private households is that the government created many of exception rules for the industry. Almost all producing industry can get excluded fro these rises in prices for electricity. The difference - must be payed for by households to whose bills the differences from the industry get added.

They are so proud on the "deutsche Weg" (German way). Hah...! It is laughable and ridicules, a mouse that tries to roar! And not just on this question of green energy! That they seriously believe they do motivate the rest of the world to follow the German ways here, only illustrates the megalomaniac messiah syndrome they suffer from.