Wintertime is when people especially need reliable power for their homes, living and workplaces – especially in a northern country like Germany.
Unfortunately wind and solar power just aren’t able to come through and deliver when the chips are down.
The above chart shows German power supply by the various sources available and demand over the last 30 days. The lion’s share of Germany’s installed renewable energy (wind and sun) went just about completely AWOL three times during the period. Chart source: Agora.
Dark blue – conventional power (fossil and nuclear)
Medium blue – wind
Yellow – solar
Green – biomass
Germany today has a combined installed wind and solar capacity of close to 80,000 MW (see chart below). But as the chart above shows, often they put out only a tiny, measly percentage of that.
Germany installed sun and wind capacity (2013). Source Wikipedia.
And on the seldom occasions when the sun and wind do both happen to be in supply at near full capacity, the power grid gets severely overloaded, conventional power plants have to throttled, massive amounts of surplus energy need to be dumped at negative prices in foreign countries, power plants have to shut down (and lose money), yet can never be taken off line. Overall the German energy production system system is market hostile where demand is ignored and supply is uncontrolled.
Recently, German energy giant E.ON announced it is getting out of conventional power generation business altogether: too risky and no foreseeable profits in the future.
Former German Economics Minister and socialist party honcho Wolfgang Clement calls the German Energiewende “a disaster“.
in a recent stinging op-edpiece, environmentalist centre-left Die Zeit called the Energiewende “a blunder with ugly consequences“.
Renewable energy expert Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt recently called Germany’s energy policy “suicidal”.
Late last year, German Vice Chancellor and socialist party leader Sigmar Gabriel called the mad rush to green energies “ruinous” and said “others think we’ve lost our marbles“.
Overall in Europe wind puts out on average a measly less than 15% of its installed rated capacity.
Much of Germany’s solar system manufacturing, which in its heady days employed tens of thousands, have shuttered their operations – leaving a silicon rust belt in its wake and tens of thousands of disillusioned workers.
To top it all off, Germany’s coal consumption has risen, and not fallen as green energy proponents hoped.
But don’t expect to read this at Winston’s Wikipedia, or to hear any of it from Europe’s green energy swindlers.