Germany’s renewable energy program, Energiewende, is a big, expensive failure

Preface. After reading this post, or better yet the original 44-page document, you’ll understand why the Green New Deal isn’t working out despite being crazy expensive.

The goal of Energiewende was to make Germany independent of fossil fuels. But it hasn’t worked out. The 29,000 wind turbines and 1.6 million PV systems provide only 3.1% of Germany’s energy needs and have cost well over 100 billion Euros so far and likely another 450 billion Euros over the next two decades. And much more than that when you add in the extra cost of maintaining fossil generation systems to back up the lack of wind and sunshine from microseconds to weeks.

Because of rebuildable’s wind and solar extremely low energy density and need for a great deal of space, forests are being cut down, pits dug, and filled with hundreds of tons of reinforced concrete for wind turbines to stand on, 5 acres per turbine. With the forest no longer protecting the soil, it is now vulnerable to wind and rain erosion.

Because wind and solar farms get a guaranteed price for 20 years, they have no need to innovate, do research, or please customers, who paid them 176 billion euros for electricity with a market value of just 5 billion euros from 2000-2016. This is money that taxpayers could have used to build bridges, energy efficient buildings, or renovate schools, which would create even more jobs than the wind and solar industry claims so they can tout themselves as good for society, perhaps they aren’t so great when you look at other ways and jobs that could have been created with all the subsidies (Vernunftkraft 2018).

Germany’s electricity rates have skyrocketed to the highest levels in the EU because of the Energiewende debacle.

Other news about Energiewende:

Germany’s Federal Audit Office has accused the federal government of having largely failed to manage the transformation of Germany’s energy systems (Energiewende program), and will miss its targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption and the share of renewable energy in transport.
At the same time, policy makers had burdened the nation with enormous costs. The audit further concluded that the program is a monumental bureaucratic nightmare.
The build-up of renewables benefited from more than $800 billion in subsidies.
The country has not just been burning coal; it has been burning lignite, one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet. In fact, in 2016, seven of the 10 worst polluting facilities in Europe were German lignite plants.
When it’s windy and bright, the grid is so flooded with power that prices in the wholesale market sometimes drop below zero.
Transport consumes 30 percent and mining & manufacturing 29% of Germany’s power, but for each, only 4 percent of its energy comes from renewables. Households use 26% of power, but only 13% of it comes from renewables, and Trade, commerce and services 15% but just 7% renewables.
Germany’s carbon emissions have stagnated at roughly their 2009 level. The country remains Europe’s largest producer and burner of coal, which generates more than one-third of Germany’s power supply. Moreover, emissions in the transportation sector have shot up by 20 percent since 1995 and are rising with no end in sight

Vernunftkraft. 2018. Germanys Energiewende – where we really stand. Bundesinitiative für vernünftige Energiepolitik, Vernunftkraft.

The Energiewende has the goal of making Germany independent of fossil fuels in the long term. Coal, oil and gas were to be phased out, allowing drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. However, these goals have not even begun to be achieved.

The idea of meeting our country’s energy needs with wind power and solar energy has proven to be an illusion. At present, around 29,000 wind turbines and 1.6 million photovoltaic systems together account for just 3.1 % of our energy requirements. There were hardly any successes in the heating/cooling and transport sectors.

Well over a hundred billion euros have been spent on the expansion of solar and wind energy over the same period. The financial obligations undertaken in the process will continue to burden taxpayers for another two decades and will end up costing German consumers a total sum of around 550 billion euros.

To compensate for the lack of reliability of wind and sun and to be able to actually replace conventional power generation, gigantic amounts of electricity storage would be required. The replacement of controllable power generation with a fluctuating power supply is impossible without storage and unaffordable with it.

A reliable supply of electricity around the clock is taken for granted by citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. But only those who have taken a closer look will appreciate the importance of a reliable power supply for our highly complex, high-tech society. It is not just about comfort and convenience. It is not only a matter of maintaining an essential input for important manufacturing processes; it is about nothing less than the functioning of civilized community life.

A fundamental characteristic of electrical current must be taken into account when answering this question: it must be produced, to the millisecond, at the moment of consumption, giving an exact balance between power supply and demand. Stable power grids are based on this principle.

At the end of September 2017, more than 27,000 wind turbines with a rated output of 53,374 MW were installed in Germany. Nominal power is defined as the highest power that can be provided permanently under optimum operating conditions (strong to stormy wind conditions). In Figure 2, the dark blue areas represent the delivered power from the German wind turbine fleet during September 2017. A total of 6,380 GWh (1 GWh = 1 million kWh) was sent to the grid, corresponding to just 16.6 % of what was theoretically possible.

For approximately half of September 2017, the power delivered by the wind fleet was less than 10 % of the nominal capacity. Values above 50 % were reached only 5.3 % of the time, in essence only on 8 and 13–15 September.

Electricity consumption in September 2017 was 39,000 GWh. Wind turbines delivered for 6400 GWh of this and PV systems another 3100 GWh. The minimum power input by all of the PV and wind energy systems was below 0.6 GW, representing less than 1% of the installed capacity of 96 GW.

Since wind and solar are often absent, conventional power plants are needed to ensure grid stability at all times – often over long periods. Consumers pay for the costs of maintaining two parallel generation systems.

There is no discernable smoothing effect from the size and geographical spread of the wind fleet: the argument that the wind is always blowing somewhere is not true. Even a Europe-wide wind power expansion in conjunction with a perfectly developed electricity grid would not solve the problem of the fluctuating wind energy generation. It is quite possible for there to be no wind anywhere in Europe.

Anyone who studies the feed-in characteristics of electricity generation from wind power and PV systems thoroughly must realize that sun and wind usually supply either far too little or far too much – and that one cannot rely on anything but chance.

Despite the increased capacity and the increasing peaks, the guaranteed output of all 27,000 wind turbines and the 400 million m² of PV systems remains close to zero because of their weather-dependency. This is a particular problem in the winter months, when electricity consumption is high.

Even the ‘dumping’ of electricity abroad to reduce the surplus energy will become increasingly difficult, since neighboring countries are closing themselves off with electricity barriers in order to protect their own grids.

There is no sunshine at night and electricity cannot be stored in bags

The wind energy statistics reveal the absurdity of wanting to tackle the problem of intermittency through construction of additional power lines and extensive wind power expansion.

So even with a European electricity grid based on wind turbines, a 100 % replacement system would always have to be available to ensure the security of electricity supply.

With PV systems, the lack any smoothing of electricity over the diurnal and seasonal cycles is even more evident. It is obvious that the generation peaks in Germany occur at the same time as the peaks in the other European countries. This is due to the size of the low pressure areas, which results in a positive correlation of wind power generation levels across the continent: if too much electricity is produced in Germany, most of our neighbors will be over-producing too. This calls into question the sense of network expansion a priori.

German energy consumption is particularly high in the winter months, especially during inversion weather conditions, when PV systems barely supply any electricity due to clouds and wind turbines are usually at a standstill. The weather-dependency of electricity generation would thus have direct and fatal effects on the transport sector. It would not be possible to heat electrically either. In other words, renewable energy can’t keep transportation or heating going.

Climate protection: a bad joke with deadly undertones

No discussion about the construction of wind turbines and no energy policy document of the last federal government can avoid the suggestion that the Energiewende might help avert the dangers of climate change. This is why the last German government continually described the EEG as a central instrument of climate protection. The thesis – often presented in a shrill, moralizing tone – is that the expansion of ‘renewable energies’ is a human obligation in view of the impending global warming apocalypse. Particularly perfidious forms of this thesis even suggest that not expanding wind power plants in Germany would mean that we would soon be dealing with ‘billions of climate refugees’.

At least one hectare of forest is cleared per wind turbine and is thus permanently destroyed. Afforestation elsewhere cannot make up for this, since old trees are in every respect much more valuable than new plantations. The negative effects of global warming predicted for Germany are more frequent floods and droughts, but forest is the best form of protection against soil erosion, cleaning soil and storing water.

Whether it is forest destruction, cultivation of maize for biogas plants, the destruction of habitats or the direct killing of birds and bats – the massive expansion of ‘renewable energies’ has appalling consequences, the result of their low energy density and the resulting requirement for vast areas of land.

Besides intermittency, the core problem of wind and solar energy is that it is generated in a very diffuse form. Anyone who has ridden a bike against the wind will understand: a headwind of 3m/s makes clothes flutter a little, but hardly makes it difficult to pedal. Water, on the other hand, flowing towards us at the same speed, will wash us away. This is because the power of water is comparatively concentrated, while the power of the wind is much more diffuse. In the case of hydropower, ‘collecting from the surface’ is done by a wide system of ditches, brooks, rivers and streams. If you want to ‘capture’ the power of the wind, you have to do the tedious work of concentrating the energy yourself – requiring a multitude of collection stations and power lines to connect them. Instead of ditches, streams, and rivers wind power required 200-m-high industrial installations, pylons and wires. Inevitably, natural areas become industrialized and opportunities for retreat in nature are gradually destroyed.

A few years ago, a wind turbine invasion of the many forests that have been managed for decades in accordance with the principle of sustainability was still unimaginable. But huge pits are now being dug and filled with thousands of tons of reinforced concrete, with considerable effects on the ecosystem. The effects on wildlife, soils and water as well as on the aesthetics and natural harmony of hilltop landscapes are catastrophic.

The direct cost drivers of electricity prices are the feed-in tariffs set out in the legislation: operators of wind farms, PV and biomass plants will receive a guaranteed price per kilowatt hour, fixed for 20 years after commissioning. This is set at a level that is many times higher than the market price. The difference is passed on to (almost) all consumers via the electricity price. In addition, producers are guaranteed to be able to sell electricity into the grid at that price, regardless of whether there is a need for it or not.

In the period 2000–2016, 176 billion euros were paid by electricity consumers to renewables companies, for electricity with a market value of just 5 billion euros.

What else could have been done with this money? This is known in economic terms as the ‘opportunity cost’. For example, the St Gotthard tunnel opened in 2016 at a cost of 3.4 billion euros; the Hamburg Elbe Philharmonic Hall cost 0.8 billion euros. The refurbishment needs of all German schools are estimated to total just 34 billion euros.

The fact that electricity from wind and sun is randomly produced puts the power supply system under considerable and increasing stress. The task of transmission system operators to maintain a constant 50Hz alternating voltage becomes more difficult with each additional weather-dependent and privileged feeding system. In order to cope with increasing volatility, the generation output must be repeatedly intervened in order to protect line sections from overload.

If a bottleneck threatens at a certain point in the grid, power plants on this side of the bottleneck are instructed to reduce their feed-in, while plants beyond the bottleneck must increase their output. The need for re-dispatching will continue to increase. Together with the expansion of wind power, the costs of these re-dispatching measures rose continuously. By 2015, grid operators had to spend a billion euros to protect the power grid from the blackout. Since this billion did not ‘fall from the sky’, the unreliability of EEG electricity is reflected in higher electricity prices.

But that’s not all: In order to protect themselves from unwanted erratic electricity inflows and to prevent their grids from being endangered, our neighbors in the Czech Republic and Poland were forced to install phase shifters, i.e. to erect ‘electrical current barriers’. The costs of these self-defense measures are also borne by German consumers.

The ‘energy revolution’ is often referred to as a modernization and innovation program. Germany will become a global leader in technology development, is the slogan. In green-inspired literature, ‘wind and solar’ should be celebrated as the ‘winners’. However, the real world is only partially impressed by this case: those technologies that prove to be economic will win, not those that bureaucrats and officials favor. Long-term economic gains can only be made through competition. However, with renewables, the competitive mechanism is switched off: prices and quantities are determined in a political process, the outcome of which is ultimately determined by the producers of renewable energy themselves.

If post-war governments had adopted the same approach for the automobile industry, it might have demanded that by the year 2000 every German must have a car. The Volkswagen Beetle – at the time, one of the most technically advanced cars in the world – would have been declared an industry standard and a purchase price that would deliver `cars for all’ would have been determined in a biennial consultation process between government and manufacturers. As a result, we would still have vehicles of the technical standard of the VW Beetle, innovation would be irrelevant, and the German industry would never have achieved its position of global leadership.

The plight of the German photovoltaic industry, which rapidly lost international market share and had to cope with many insolvencies, is an example of this. The availability of easy money – subsidies – was the main rea son for the sector’s loss of competitiveness. It is a harbinger of what can be expected in other artificially nurtured segments of the renewables sector.

Subsidies, however, take away their incentive to innovate. German PV companies invested only 2–3 % of their sales in research and development. In the highly competitive automobile industry, the equivalent figure is 6%; in the pharmaceutical industry it is even higher, at around 9 %. Subsidies make businesses sluggish.

Green jobs? On large posters and in advertisements in autumn 2015, the Energiewende congratulated itself for the creation of ‘230,000 sustainable jobs’. This myth of a ‘job creating’ energy transition is regularly disseminated. Of course, the energy transition is shifting purchasing power from traditional consumer and capital goods industries to industries that produce wind turbines, solar panels and other equipment. This shift generates gross jobs in the those sectors: wind turbines, solar parks and biogas plants must be built. The components have to be produced, delivered and assembled; the finished systems have to be maintained. The investments require financing and credit agreements. This creates employment in banks and law firms. Subsidies must be regulated and monitored, which leads to even employment in the bureaucracy and, once again, lawyers’ offices.

It should also be noted that were the money not spent on ‘renewable energies’, investments could have been made in other areas that would also have created employment. If, for example, the 178 billion euros mentioned above had been used to renovate schools, the order books of countless businesses would have remained full for many years to come.

If one wants to focus not only on short-term economic effects, but also on long-term growth, one has to ask not only about the scope, but also about the type of investments made. Otherwise you run the risk of losing to ‘Broken Window’ fallacy. According to this, a large stone would have to be thrown through the nearest window as powerfully as possible as an immediate measure of economic policy. This would ultimately give the glazier a large order and thus income, of which he would spend a portion on the confectioner, for example, and thus generate income again. An income that he in turn would spend partly on the butcher, resulting in a virtuous circle that would ultimately benefit everyone and increase national wealth…

Anyone who produces electricity will be remunerated at a guaranteed rate far above the market price for a period of 20 years. EEG beneficiaries do not need to worry about the needs of customers, the offerings of competitors, technical progress or other such ‘banalities’. The search for profitable locations is made easier for wind power producers insofar as the fixed prices per kWh are in essence higher at ‘bad’ locations than at ‘good’ ones. This principle – of incentivizing the use of bad locations – can intuitively be recognized as foolish, but was nevertheless adopted in the tendering procedures of the 2017 revision of the EEG. This absurdity was justified with a claim the fact that an expansion of the area covered in windfarms would lead to a reduction in the volatility of the electricity supplied – a fundamentally wrong idea

Tax consultant Daldorf, analyzed over 1600 annual financial statements of wind energy projects between 2005 and 2013. They found that the vast majority of wind farms in Germany operate at a loss. With many local wind farms, investors are lucky to get their original investment back at all. Daldorf gives the following reasons for the poor performance of windfarms:

poor wind assessments or no one-year wind measurements on site
erroneous wind indexes as a basis for planning
overly low margins of error in wind forecasts
underestimates of plant downtime for maintenance and repairs
’planning optimism’ of the project promoters as a strategy for maximizing profits

The operators and investors bear the full risk. Before they can make a profit, the following costs must be covered from the sales achieved:

lease costs
insurance premiums, fees
maintenance costs
repairs, reserves for dismantling costs
management costs
administrative and other costs
interest-costs
taxes

The cubic relationship between wind force and power generation is decisive for the frequent red numbers: a doubling or halving of the wind speed changes the generation by a factor of eight. The smallest deviations from the expected wind input are reflected in sharp deviations in power generation and thus in revenues. Measurements on wind masts are the most accurate method, but even here the typical error range is 2–8 %. The uncertainty of measurement alone causes an uncertainty of the expected yield of up to 16 %. Measurements with optical methods (LIDAR) or even wind assessments are even less accurate. Anyone who evaluates such measurements will find that the operation of wind farms entails considerable economic risks. These risks apply in particular to wind assessments, whose error rate is in the order of 20 %.

The profit is almost solely determined by the annual electricity yield. No matter how clever the marketing may be, it cannot influence profitability, which depends on the whims of the weather.

Investment in wind turbines on the basis of wind assessments is close to gambling. Anyone who does so is responsible for their own downfall. However, anyone who lives in a community whose elected representatives fall for the promises of windfarm promoters is virtually forced to the roulette table.

The cardinal problems – weather-dependence and low energy density – are unsolved or unsolvable.

My note: there are even more reasons in this document than I have listed above for why Energiewende is a failure. And also see:

Germany’s Failed Climate Goals A Wake-Up Call for Governments Everywhere. Bloomberg
Germany’s green energy shift is more fizzle than sizzle. Despite spending billions, it is falling behind other European countries. Politico.eu
AOC’s green deal isn’t new — it’s been a flop in Germany.
Germany’s Energiewende program exposed as a catastrophic failure. EU climate alarmist champion Germany has its Energiewende program exposed as a catastrophic failure with enormous costs

Germany’s renewable energy program, Energiewende, is a big, expensive failure

Vernunftkraft. 2018. Germanys Energiewende – where we really stand. Bundesinitiative für vernünftige Energiepolitik, Vernunftkraft.

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