Energy

Warum die Energiewende Deutschland zerstören wird: Blackout – Deutschland ohne Strom (Video) – #Blackout #Stromausfall #Energiewende

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For my German-speaking readers.

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German wind industry “threatening to implode” as subsidies end wiping out half or more of new plants

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– German wind industry “threatening to implode” as subsidies end wiping out half or more of new plants:

In Germany as 20 years of wind subsidies comes to an end in 2020, half to three quarters of the industry may disappear.

So many parallels with Australia. The Germans have had wind subsidies for 20 years, but even after two decades of support, the industry is still not profitable on a stand-alone basis. In 2016, some 4600MW of new wind plants were installed, but that may drop to one quarter as much by 2019 as subsidies shrink. According to Pierre Gosselin (August 31st, 2017) there are more wind protests, electricity prices are “skyrocketing” and “the grid has become riddled with inefficiencies and has become increasingly prone to grid collapses from unstable power feed in.”

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Unstable Green Power Grids: German ARD Television Tells Citizens To Start Getting Used To Blackouts!

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– Unstable Green Power Grids: German ARD Television Tells Citizens To Start Getting Used To Blackouts!:

Flagship ARD public television here broadcast a report on the state of the German power grid, which until about some 15 years ago was by far among the world’s most stable. But those days are now gone, thanks to volatile green energies.

The ARD report basically tells German citizens and industry that they need to prepare quickly for blackouts because the country’s power grid is as unstable as never before.

Just last week the power went out due to a winter North Sea storm which swept across a large part of Germany: 300,000 people lost power.

Outages leading to millions in losses

Read moreUnstable Green Power Grids: German ARD Television Tells Citizens To Start Getting Used To Blackouts!

This Cryptocurrency Mining Rig Can Also Heat Your Home

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– This Cryptocurrency Mining Rig Can Also Heat Your Home:

The intensifying energy consumption of the bitcoin network is becoming a concern for environmentalists who have begun to question whether digital currencies should be considered a socially responsible investment. As we pointed out last month, Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index stood at 29.05TWh.

That’s the equivalent of 0.13% of total global electricity consumption. While that may not sound like a lot, it means Bitcoin mining is now using more electricity than 159 individual countries, including Ireland and Nigeria.

As the share of the world’s electricity consumed by miners of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rises, miners will likely face pressure – both economic and social – to find efficiencies wherever they can.

In anticipation of this trend, a crypto startup called Comino is marketing a mining rig that also functions as a heater.

Read moreThis Cryptocurrency Mining Rig Can Also Heat Your Home

German Energy Policy Gone Lost: “Energiewende Has Failed,” Writes Leading Environmentalist

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– German Energy Policy Gone Lost: “Energiewende Has Failed,” Writes Leading Environmentalist:

n an opinion piece at the Mittel Bayerische daily, Harry Neumann, National Chairman of the environmental group Naturschutzinitiative e.V. declares Germany’s Energiewende (transition to renewable energies) a failure and writes: “The wind power industry and nature protection cannot be reconciled.”

Moreover Germany’s EEG green energy feed-in act is doing more harm than good, writes Neumann: “The EEG is impeding the research of environmentally compatible technologies.”

Neumann also notes that despite having installed close to 30,000 wind turbines, Germany’s “CO2 emissions are not dropping, but rather are rising again.” He adds:

Read moreGerman Energy Policy Gone Lost: “Energiewende Has Failed,” Writes Leading Environmentalist

Germany’s National Power Grid Mess…Country Seeing Whopping 172,000 Power Outages Annually!

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– Germany’s National Power Grid Mess…Country Seeing Whopping 172,000 Power Outages Annually!:

Germany’s Energiewende threatens to follow a similar path as the Berlin-Brandenburg airport debacle, but on a far greater scale. When bureaucrats take over project engineering...

Berlin-Brandenburg BER airport: Construction began in 2006 with operation scheduled to begin in 2011. And now as 2017 nears the end, BER is not even close to opening. Currently it is well over 2000 days behind schedule. Massive technical deficiencies with the airport’s safety systems plague the entire project, and now it is questionable whether the airport will even open in 2021.

Bureaucrat run airport-project turns into national embarrassment

BER’s original estimated price tage was 2.5 billion euros, but since then the costs have ballooned to 6.6 billion euros today. Worse: billions more are expected, nobody knows when the project will be completed, and there’s even talk the project might be abandoned altogether! It is undoubtedly the country’s greatest construction and engineering debacle so far this century. The joke today: It would be cheaper to move the entire city of Berlin to another airport then to sort through the catastrophe that is the BER airport.

Read moreGermany’s National Power Grid Mess…Country Seeing Whopping 172,000 Power Outages Annually!

Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than 159 Countries Including Ireland & Most Countries In Africa

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– Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than 159 Countries Including Ireland & Most Countries In Africa:

Source: Power Compare

Bitcoin’s ongoing meteoric price rise has received the bulk of recent press attention with a lot of discussion around whether or not it’s a bubble waiting to burst.

However, most the coverage has missed out one of the more interesting and unintended consequences of this price increase. That is the surge in global electricity consumption used to “mine” more Bitcoins.

According to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, as of Monday November 20th, 2017 Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption stands at 29.05TWh.

That’s the equivalent of 0.13% of total global electricity consumption. While that may not sound like a lot, it means Bitcoin mining is now using more electricity than 159 individual countries (as you can see from the map above). More than Ireland or Nigeria.

Read MOre…

H/t reader kevin a.

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Energy Storage Company 1414 Degrees Plans Two “Gigawatt Hour” Silicon Storage Plants In South Australia

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– 1414 plans two “gigawatt hour” silicon storage plants in S.A.:

Energy storage company 1414 Degrees has opened a new factory and will begin building its first commercial system next month before listing on the Australian Stock Exchange in early 2018.

The South Australian company has spent almost a decade developing its Thermal Energy Storage System (TESS) technology to store electricity as thermal energy by heating and melting containers full of silicon at a cost estimated to be up to 10 times cheaper than lithium batteries.

Read moreEnergy Storage Company 1414 Degrees Plans Two “Gigawatt Hour” Silicon Storage Plants In South Australia

German Conventional Turbine Producer Siemens To Slash 6900 Workers Worldwide Due To “Energiewende”

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– German Conventional Turbine Producer Siemens To Slash 6900 Workers Worldwide Due To “Energiewende”:

The Swiss online SRF public television site here reports that German power engineering giant Siemens plans to eliminate some 6900 employees, half of them in Germany. Hit will be the conventional power plant and electric drive systems branch.

German energy sector in turmoil

The SRF writes that the power plant branch “is suffering due to the Energiewende“, Germany’s attempted transition to renewable energies. This branch alone will see 6100 job reductions. Turbine plants in Görlitz, Leipzig, Offenbach, Erfurt, Erlangen, Berlin and Mülheim (Ruhr) will be impacted. The announcement just before the start of the Christmas holiday season has angered trade unionists.

The Handelsblatt here reports that some of the impacted engineering workers are “in shock and in tears” over the news. Protests and strikes have been announced.

Read moreGerman Conventional Turbine Producer Siemens To Slash 6900 Workers Worldwide Due To “Energiewende”

Wall Street Journal Calls Merkel’s Energiewende “A Meltdown” Involving “Astronomical Costs”

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– Wall Street Journal Calls Merkel’s Energiewende “A Meltdown” Involving “Astronomical Costs”:

t an accurate, concise assessment of how Germany’s “Energiewende” (transition away from fossil and nuclear energies over to green energies) has been faring so far. It’s grade? I’d interpret it as an F for failure.

Quickly turning into a huge embarrassment

Once seen as “a paragon of green energy virtue“, the Energiewende is nothing like it was sold to be by green energy hucksters. In fact things have gotten so bad that we can expect activists to grow totally silent on Germany’s Energiewende as its failure becomes glaring and embarrassing.

The WSJ editorial boards reminds readers that Germany is not even going to come close to meeting it’s 2020 or 2030 targets, despite the hundreds of billions of euros committed to the project so far.

No greenhouse gas reductions in 9 years

The truth is that the lion’s share of the country’s greenhouse gas reductions happened right after 1990 when free market principles were implemented to revamp totally run-down Communist East Germany. Yet since the mass state intervention that is the Energiewende, Germany’s reductions have ground to a halt. In reality the country — under Merkel’s leadership — has not seen its emissions of greenhouse gases fall since the end of the last decade, 2009! Read here.

“Astronomical costs”

By any measure this is an astonishing failure of Communist dimensions. The WSJ editorial board writes of “astronomical costs” in return for nothing.

Read moreWall Street Journal Calls Merkel’s Energiewende “A Meltdown” Involving “Astronomical Costs”

The Boy Genius Tackling Energy’s Toughest Problem

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– The Boy Genius Tackling Energy’s Toughest Problem:

In the past year or so an unorthodox think-tank called Helena has been quietly bringing together an eclectic cross-section of brilliant individuals (mostly bright-eyed millennials) with ambitious goals. They’re focusing on the world’s biggest and most insurmountable problems: climate change and global security issues such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and nuclear proliferation. The elite and edgy group includes Nobel laureates, Hollywood stars, technology entrepreneurs, human rights activists, Fortune-list executives, a North Korean refugee, and more, but one of Helena’s most unique members is undoubtedly the 23-year old nuclear physicist Taylor Wilson, once known as “the boy who played with fusion”.

Taylor Wilson garnered international attention from the science world in 2008 when he became the youngest person in history to produce nuclear fusion at just 14 years old, building a reactor capable of smashing atoms in a plasma core at over 500 million degrees Fahrenheit—40 times hotter than the core of the sun—in his parents’ garage. And this all happened after he built a bomb at the age of 10. As a child in Texarkana, Arkansas, Taylor became infatuated with nuclear science after trysts with biology, genetics and chemistry. At age 11, while his classmates were playing with Easy-Bake Ovens, Wilson was taking his crack at building a particle accelerator in an effort to makes homemade radioisotopes.

Read moreThe Boy Genius Tackling Energy’s Toughest Problem

Engineering Professor Believes German ‘Energiewende’ Close To Death As Inadequacies Become Glaring

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– Engineering Professor Believes German ‘Energiewende’ Close To Death As Inadequacies Become Glaring:

Just a few years ago, no party dared to express doubts over the Energiewende (Germany’s transition to green energies), or to question it for fear of being accused of environmental blasphemy and treason. But as the technical and economic problems of the Energiewende become ever more glaring, people and politicians are now speaking up.

One Germany engineering professor, Dr. Ing. Hans-Günter Appel, is now asking if the project “is near the end”

So far Germany has installed some 100,000 MW of wind and solar capacity, more than enough to more than supply the country during a windy and sunny day. But unfortunately the sun doesn’t shine 24 hours a day and the wind often stops blowing, sometimes for days and even weeks. They cannot be relied on. At times these two source of energy put out almost zero power.

Read moreEngineering Professor Believes German ‘Energiewende’ Close To Death As Inadequacies Become Glaring

Germany: Wind industry “threatening to implode” as subsidies end wiping out half or more of new plants

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– German wind industry “threatening to implode” as subsidies end wiping out half or more of new plants:

In Germany as 20 years of wind subsidies comes to an end in 2020, half to three quarters of the industry may disappear.

So many parallels with Australia. The Germans have had wind subsidies for 20 years, but even after two decades of support, the industry is still not profitable on a stand-alone basis. In 2016, some 4600MW of new wind plants were installed, but that may drop to one quarter as much by 2019 as subsidies shrink. According to Pierre Gosselin (August 31st, 2017) there are more wind protests, electricity prices are “skyrocketing” and “the grid has become riddled with inefficiencies and has become increasingly prone to grid collapses from unstable power feed in.”

Pierre Gosslin writes that “Germany is more in the green energy retreat mode”.

German flagship business daily “Handelsblatt” reported … how Germany’s wind energy market is now “threatening to implode” and as a result “thousands of jobs are at risk“. José Luis Blanco, CEO of German wind energy giant Nordex, blames the market chaos on “policymakers changing the rules“. Subsidies have been getting cut back substantially. The problem, Blanco says, is that worldwide green energy subsidies are being capped and wind parks as a result are no longer looking profitable to investors. The Handelsblatt writes that “things have never been this bad“.

Read moreGermany: Wind industry “threatening to implode” as subsidies end wiping out half or more of new plants

Australia: More than 120 Victorian electricity and gas connections cut off every day

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– More than 120 Victorian electricity and gas connections cut off every day:

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Energy companies reported disconnecting residential power and gas 46,122 times in the previous financial year.

Victorians raised the issue with the ombudsman 3411 times in 2016-17.

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H/t reader kevin a.

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Southeast Asia is planning 400 new coal power plants — what does that mean?

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– Southeast Asia is planning 400 new coal power plants — what does that mean?:

Southeast Asia is one of the fastest developing regions in the world.

Electricity demand in 2035 is projected to increase by 83% from 2011 levels, with many countries in the region still pursuing new coal-fired power plants, while lagging far behind China and India in scaling up renewable energy.

Among developed countries, only Japan and South Korea continue stand out as the only ones eyeing a coal power expansion, in direct conflict with climate commitments and concerns about public health.

Read moreSoutheast Asia is planning 400 new coal power plants — what does that mean?

Why Is Asia Returning to Coal?

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– Why Is Asia Returning to Coal?:

Just a few short years ago, few would have dared to predict that coal could have a future in the energy policies of emerging and developed countries alike. Yet the fossil fuel is undergoing an unexpected renaissance in Asia, buoyed by technical breakthroughs and looming questions about squaring development with energy security.

For Japan, coal has emerged as the best alternative to replacing its 54 nuclear reactors, which are deeply unpopular with the population and seen as symbols of devastation after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster six years ago. Mindful of the public mood, the government of Shinzo Abe has completely given up on the country’s dream of nuclear self-sufficiency, and pulled the plug in December on the $8.5 billion experimental reactor project at Monju. On February 1, the government pledged to decommission all reactors and replace them with 45 new coal-fired power plants equipped with the latest clean coal technology. In this, Tokyo seeks to achieve two overreaching goals: preserve its energy security and stay on course to fulfill the obligations set forth by the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement.

Read moreWhy Is Asia Returning to Coal?

Leading German Economics Professor Calls Germany’s Energiewende An Energy Policy Calamity

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– Leading German Economics Professor Calls Germany’s Energiewende An Energy Policy Calamity:

In a recently released video interview by journalist Jörg Rehmann, University of Magdeburg economics professor Joachim Weimann explains why renewable energies have been a terrible idea for Germany so far.

Recently a high ranking expert commission set up by the German government even sharply criticized the German Energiewende (transition to renewable energies), saying it was leading the country down the wrong path. But as Prof. Weimann explains, the commission’s results fell on deaf ears.

Weimann starts the interview by explaining that the target of the Energiewende is to replace carbon-dioxide-emitting fossil fuels in order to protect our climate. One instrument used to achieve that target was Cap and Trade, in combination with the Energiewende, which Weimann says has not worked well at all. The U. of Magdeburg professor says that every cut that gets achieved in Germany gets offset elsewhere, and so net CO2 gets saved at all.

Read moreLeading German Economics Professor Calls Germany’s Energiewende An Energy Policy Calamity