Green Energy Transition = €25.000 For Each Family Of Four
In this newsletter:
1) German Energiewende To Cost €520 Billion By 2025, New Study
Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft, 10 October 2016
2) While Europe Gets Gouged, Americans Enjoy Cheap Power
The American Interest, 7 October 2016
3) Aussie Warning: Wind Farms Are Risk To Energy Security, Prime Minister Warns
Bloomberg, 7 October 2016
4) The Guardian’s ’100 Months To Save The Planet’ Was Always Just Bunk
The Sunday Telegraph, 9 October 2016
5) County Council Faces Legal Bill Of £330.000 For Refusing Fracking Application
Blackpool Gazette, 8 October 2016
6) Europe’s Electric Cars Fiasco
Forbes, 8 October 2016
7) Paris Deal Is Driving Germans Bonkers: Pushes For EU-Wide Ban On Petrol Cars
ITechPost, 9 October 2016
Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft, 10 October 2016
2) While Europe Gets Gouged, Americans Enjoy Cheap Power
The American Interest, 7 October 2016
3) Aussie Warning: Wind Farms Are Risk To Energy Security, Prime Minister Warns
Bloomberg, 7 October 2016
4) The Guardian’s ’100 Months To Save The Planet’ Was Always Just Bunk
The Sunday Telegraph, 9 October 2016
5) County Council Faces Legal Bill Of £330.000 For Refusing Fracking Application
Blackpool Gazette, 8 October 2016
6) Europe’s Electric Cars Fiasco
Forbes, 8 October 2016
7) Paris Deal Is Driving Germans Bonkers: Pushes For EU-Wide Ban On Petrol Cars
ITechPost, 9 October 2016
Full details:
1) German Energiewende To Cost €520 Billion By 2025, New Study
Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft, 10 October 2016
The total cost of Germany’s green energy transition (Energiewende) amounts to over €520 billion euros by 2025 in the electricity sector alone. This is the result of a report commissioned by the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) on behalf of the Initiative New Social Market Economy (INSM).
By far the biggest cost driver with a total of €408 billion is the levy to finance renewable energy (EEG levy). The expansion of electricity and distribution networks totals €55.3 billion. The study is the first full-cost estimate which takes all the costs of the energy transition in the electricity sector into account. In addition to the direct costs of subsidising renewable energy, indirect expenditures such as the cost for the expansion of transmission and distribution networks were included in the calculations, as well as offshore liability expenses and network, capacity and replacement costs.
At the end of 2015, 150 billion euros had already been spent on the Energiewende, not including the cost for network expansion. The bulk of the costs (25.000 euros for a family of four) will have to be paid in coming years.
Full story & full report (in German)
2) While Europe Gets Gouged, Americans Enjoy Cheap Power
The American Interest, 7 October 2016
We told you yesterday that spot prices for German electricity jumped more than 17 percent in one day due to constricted supplies from renewable producers and French nuclear reactors, but as green-crazed Germany continues to wrangle with some of Europe’s highest (and most volatile) electricity prices, American households are about to see the first annual drop in average electricity prices in 14 years.
The WSJ reports:
In the first six months of 2016, American residential consumers paid 12.4 cents a kilowatt hour, on average, a 0.7% drop over the same period of last year. If the trend continues, it would mark the first annual decline in home power prices since 2002. Prices for industrial and commercial customers already had been dropping for a couple of years.
There are several forces working in favor of the drop, including low prices for natural gas, which is an increasingly important fuel used to generate electricity. Overall U.S. electricity demand slumped 1.6% between January and July of this year versus a year ago, according to Energy Department data.
Plentiful—and therefore cheap—natural gas is one of the biggest drivers behind this drop in average American electricity prices, and this bounty comes to us courtesy of none other than the shale boom. Thanks to fracking, U.S. natural gas production is up more than 37 percent over the past decade, and at this point the hydrocarbon has gotten so cheap that it’s doing something very few other energy sources have ever done: it’s outcompeting coal on price.
Shale gas’s ascendance is undoubtedly a boon for Americans, who as we can see are paying less on their power bills every month. That’s especially helpful for poorer households, for whom these bills take up a larger slice of a monthly budget. Just as expensive energy can be seen as a kind of regressive tax that disproportionately harms the poor, so too can we consider cheap power as especially welcome for lower-income families.
Frack, baby, frack.
3) Aussie Warning: Wind Farms Are Risk To Energy Security, Prime Minister Warns
Bloomberg, 7 October 2016
Jason Scott
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull accused some state governments of putting too much emphasis on generating electricity from wind farms, putting Australia’s energy security at risk and “distorting the national energy market.”
Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft, 10 October 2016
The total cost of Germany’s green energy transition (Energiewende) amounts to over €520 billion euros by 2025 in the electricity sector alone. This is the result of a report commissioned by the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE) on behalf of the Initiative New Social Market Economy (INSM).
At the end of 2015, 150 billion euros had already been spent on the Energiewende, not including the cost for network expansion. The bulk of the costs (25.000 euros for a family of four) will have to be paid in coming years.
Full story & full report (in German)
2) While Europe Gets Gouged, Americans Enjoy Cheap Power
The American Interest, 7 October 2016
We told you yesterday that spot prices for German electricity jumped more than 17 percent in one day due to constricted supplies from renewable producers and French nuclear reactors, but as green-crazed Germany continues to wrangle with some of Europe’s highest (and most volatile) electricity prices, American households are about to see the first annual drop in average electricity prices in 14 years.
The WSJ reports:
In the first six months of 2016, American residential consumers paid 12.4 cents a kilowatt hour, on average, a 0.7% drop over the same period of last year. If the trend continues, it would mark the first annual decline in home power prices since 2002. Prices for industrial and commercial customers already had been dropping for a couple of years.
There are several forces working in favor of the drop, including low prices for natural gas, which is an increasingly important fuel used to generate electricity. Overall U.S. electricity demand slumped 1.6% between January and July of this year versus a year ago, according to Energy Department data.
Plentiful—and therefore cheap—natural gas is one of the biggest drivers behind this drop in average American electricity prices, and this bounty comes to us courtesy of none other than the shale boom. Thanks to fracking, U.S. natural gas production is up more than 37 percent over the past decade, and at this point the hydrocarbon has gotten so cheap that it’s doing something very few other energy sources have ever done: it’s outcompeting coal on price.
Shale gas’s ascendance is undoubtedly a boon for Americans, who as we can see are paying less on their power bills every month. That’s especially helpful for poorer households, for whom these bills take up a larger slice of a monthly budget. Just as expensive energy can be seen as a kind of regressive tax that disproportionately harms the poor, so too can we consider cheap power as especially welcome for lower-income families.
Frack, baby, frack.
3) Aussie Warning: Wind Farms Are Risk To Energy Security, Prime Minister Warns
Bloomberg, 7 October 2016
Jason Scott
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull accused some state governments of putting too much emphasis on generating electricity from wind farms, putting Australia’s energy security at risk and “distorting the national energy market.”
Turnbull is claiming that Labor party-run states are too reliant on wind and solar power as they seek to cut greenhouse gas emissions. His Liberal-National federal government called state energy ministers to a meeting in Melbourne on Friday after fierce storms last week knocked down transmission towers in South Australia, causing blackouts in a state that gets 41 percent of its power from renewables.
“This has been very much a Labor obsession, to set these heroic renewable energy targets,” Turnbull told an Adelaide radio station. “They assume that they can change the composition of the energy mix and that energy security will always be there and the lights will stay on, and that has been brought into question.”
State ministers agreed to hold an independent review to provide a blueprint for energy security across Australia, national Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg told reporters in Melbourne.
Dismantling Levies
Renewable energy — championed globally as a tool to combat global warming — is a contentious issue in Australia, the world’s biggest coal exporter. Since winning power in 2013 under then-leader Tony Abbott, the coalition government has dismantled a levy on carbon emissions and cut targets for how much energy it aims to draw from wind and solar generation by 2020.
Turnbull, whose support for an emissions trading scheme cost him his job as opposition leader in 2009, hasn’t diverged from Abbott’s climate-change policies since taking power more than a year ago. His government is pledging to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 26 percent by 2030.
Full story
4) The Guardian’s ’100 Months To Save The Planet’ Was Always Just Bunk
The Sunday Telegraph, 9 October 2016
Christopher Booker
100 months ago, The Guardian proclaimed that we have only “100 months” left to save the world from “irreversible climate change”: soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, dangerously rising sea levels, more hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and all the other familiar harbingers of catastrophe. Now those “100 months” are up and not one of these predictions has come true.
You may not have noticed, but 2016 was the hottest year for over 100,000 years. At least this was the claim reported last week by The Guardian, under the headline “Planet at its hottest for 115,000 years thanks fo climate change, experts say”.
The “experts” in question are a bunch of US scientists led by James Hansen, the former Nasa employee who did so much to set the great global warming scare on its way in 1988. And of course such a claim could only be made by ignoring all the evidence that the earth was actually hotter than today during the Mediaeval Warm Period, less than 1,000 years ago, and even more so during the thousands of years of the Holocene Optimum, following its emergence from the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
But Hansen and his gang do not stop there. They argue that we can only hope to save the planet by finding ways to suck vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere, at a cost, they estimate, of up to $570 trillion. That figure which may trip off the tongue, but it equates to seven times the world’s entire current annual GDP, or $77,000 for every human being now alive.
If this only shows how dottily desperate some of our wilder climate alarmists have become, we may come back to earth a little by focusing on another version of the great climate scare which also got The Guardian very excited eight years ago, when it launched a campaign under the heading “The final countdown”. This proclaimed that we then had only “100 months” left to save the world from “irreversible climate change”: soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, dangerously rising sea levels, more hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and all the other familiar harbingers of catastrophe.
Now those “100 months” are up, it has prompted the diligent Paul Homewood to publish on his website, Not A Lot of People Know That, a set of graphs meticulously compiled from official data. The show what has actually happened to the earth’s climate in these past eight years. Despite the 2016 El Nino spike, now rapidly declining, satellite measurements still show that the trend in global temperatures has not risen for 18 years.
Far from the ice caps melting, the total amount of polar ice in the world is almost exactly the same in today’s Arctic and Antarctic as it was when satellite records began in 1979. Despite all those computer models predicting otherwise, the rise in global sea levels has been barely detectible, not having accelerated in more than a century.
Despite Hurricane Matthew, there has been no increase in the incidence or power of tropical cyclones. Tornadoes in the US have been at a historic low level. The number of severe droughts across the world since the first half of the 20th century has actually declined.
All the computer models which predicted these horrors were programmed to assume that they would be the inevitable result of that increase of CO2 in the atmosphere which has steadily continued all through these past 100 months. Yet not one of their predictions has come true. Indeed the most startling of Homewood’s charts (taken from the BBC website, no less) shows that the most obvious consequence of the rise in CO2 has been its effect, as plant food, on the “greening” of the planet, helping to boost a dramatic rise in crop yields across the world.
Yet to all this our politicians remain wholly oblivious. The irony is that 2008, when global warming hysteria was still at its height, was the very year when they landed us with the Climate Change Act, committing us to spending hundreds of billions of pounds on “decarbonising” our economy, at a time when other countries, led by China and India, are planning to increase their own “carbon” emissions by far more each year than the UK’s entire annual contribution to the global total.
Full post
5) County Council Faces Legal Bill Of £330.000 For Refusing Fracking Application
Blackpool Gazette, 8 October 2016
Lancashire County Council will face a bill for costs in excess of £330,000 over the planning battle for two bids to frack on the Fylde.
A spokesman confirmed Cuadrilla has been granted costs relating to the council’s refusal of permission to install a monitoring array near the Preston New Road site.
But the total could rise further depending on the final outcome of the application to frack at the Roseacre site.
If communities minister Sajid Javid decides that a new traffic management plan can be put together to make the rural roads near Roseacre safe and allows Cuadrilla’s appeal, then that total could rise further.
Full story
6) Europe’s Electric Cars Fiasco
Forbes, 8 October 2016
Bertel Schmitt
Sales of battery electric vehicles in Western Europe fell for the fourth month in a row, an analysis of a respected European industry publication says.
In August, a month in which the overall Western European new car market climbed 8%, sales of BEVs in the world’ second largest EV market behind China dropped 1.2% compared to August 2015, paid subscribers of the AID Newsletter were told.
The harsh realities of EU registrations cast a shadow on the EV euphoria of the Paris motor show, once again raising the question on auto executives’ minds: “Who will buy all those EVs?” Matthias Schmidt, editor of the UK-based publication, thinks he may have the answer: Push comes to shove, OEMs might buy their own cars.
In spite of electric car incentives doled out by some EU governments, “West Europe’s electric car sales share remains stuck at last year’s low level,” says the report. Even more worrisome “is the sudden speed at which Norway’s previously highly enthusiastic car buying public appears to be turning away from BEVs.”
After lavish Norwegian incentives for EVs were dialed back a few notches, Tesla’s marquee market folded its tent while customers switch to plug-in hybrids. Overall, the “gravitational pull from PHEVs” significantly lowered the trajectories of BEVs in the first eight months of the year, AID says.
Would it not be for France, the BEV market in the EU would look much worse. “The country’s €10,000 ‘superbonus’ for anyone willing to purchase a new electric car while scrapping an old diesel car, singlehandedly propped up West Europe’s otherwise weak and frail-looking electric car market,” the report says. Without France, and with it without the very strong showing of Renault’s batter-electric Zoe in its home market, the overall Western European BEV market would have dropped 6.1% in the first eight months, and 6.7% in August, AID calculated.
What about Tesla, you ask? Tesla’s eight month sales in Western Europe are down 21.4%, says the report. Due to the sudden availability of the Model X, Tesla’s August sales recorded a widely reported 53.6% pop in Norway.
Full post
7) Paris Deal Is Driving Germany Bonkers: Pushes For EU-Wide Ban On Petrol Cars
ITechPost, 9 October 2016
Germany is going to push for all non-electric cars to be sanctioned by 2030 to meet the goals from the Paris global warming agreement. The agreement, which was made early this summer, requires every new vehicle to have zero emission.
Germany will also encourage all Europe nations to prohibit gas and diesel powered car by this year. This could prove a very hard task, not only because of the fact that some nations will have a difficult time applying these laws, but also because even if they achieve it, it will take about 20 years to get these cars off the road.
Once the last gas-powered car is sold, it is estimated that it could take another 20 years before the last gas-powered car is off the road. That timeline would be essential for Germany’s pledge to cut carbon dioxide output by 80% to 95% by 2050.
Full post
“This has been very much a Labor obsession, to set these heroic renewable energy targets,” Turnbull told an Adelaide radio station. “They assume that they can change the composition of the energy mix and that energy security will always be there and the lights will stay on, and that has been brought into question.”
State ministers agreed to hold an independent review to provide a blueprint for energy security across Australia, national Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg told reporters in Melbourne.
Dismantling Levies
Renewable energy — championed globally as a tool to combat global warming — is a contentious issue in Australia, the world’s biggest coal exporter. Since winning power in 2013 under then-leader Tony Abbott, the coalition government has dismantled a levy on carbon emissions and cut targets for how much energy it aims to draw from wind and solar generation by 2020.
Turnbull, whose support for an emissions trading scheme cost him his job as opposition leader in 2009, hasn’t diverged from Abbott’s climate-change policies since taking power more than a year ago. His government is pledging to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 26 percent by 2030.
Full story
4) The Guardian’s ’100 Months To Save The Planet’ Was Always Just Bunk
The Sunday Telegraph, 9 October 2016
Christopher Booker
100 months ago, The Guardian proclaimed that we have only “100 months” left to save the world from “irreversible climate change”: soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, dangerously rising sea levels, more hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and all the other familiar harbingers of catastrophe. Now those “100 months” are up and not one of these predictions has come true.
You may not have noticed, but 2016 was the hottest year for over 100,000 years. At least this was the claim reported last week by The Guardian, under the headline “Planet at its hottest for 115,000 years thanks fo climate change, experts say”.
The “experts” in question are a bunch of US scientists led by James Hansen, the former Nasa employee who did so much to set the great global warming scare on its way in 1988. And of course such a claim could only be made by ignoring all the evidence that the earth was actually hotter than today during the Mediaeval Warm Period, less than 1,000 years ago, and even more so during the thousands of years of the Holocene Optimum, following its emergence from the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
But Hansen and his gang do not stop there. They argue that we can only hope to save the planet by finding ways to suck vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere, at a cost, they estimate, of up to $570 trillion. That figure which may trip off the tongue, but it equates to seven times the world’s entire current annual GDP, or $77,000 for every human being now alive.
If this only shows how dottily desperate some of our wilder climate alarmists have become, we may come back to earth a little by focusing on another version of the great climate scare which also got The Guardian very excited eight years ago, when it launched a campaign under the heading “The final countdown”. This proclaimed that we then had only “100 months” left to save the world from “irreversible climate change”: soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, dangerously rising sea levels, more hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, and all the other familiar harbingers of catastrophe.
Now those “100 months” are up, it has prompted the diligent Paul Homewood to publish on his website, Not A Lot of People Know That, a set of graphs meticulously compiled from official data. The show what has actually happened to the earth’s climate in these past eight years. Despite the 2016 El Nino spike, now rapidly declining, satellite measurements still show that the trend in global temperatures has not risen for 18 years.
Far from the ice caps melting, the total amount of polar ice in the world is almost exactly the same in today’s Arctic and Antarctic as it was when satellite records began in 1979. Despite all those computer models predicting otherwise, the rise in global sea levels has been barely detectible, not having accelerated in more than a century.
Despite Hurricane Matthew, there has been no increase in the incidence or power of tropical cyclones. Tornadoes in the US have been at a historic low level. The number of severe droughts across the world since the first half of the 20th century has actually declined.
All the computer models which predicted these horrors were programmed to assume that they would be the inevitable result of that increase of CO2 in the atmosphere which has steadily continued all through these past 100 months. Yet not one of their predictions has come true. Indeed the most startling of Homewood’s charts (taken from the BBC website, no less) shows that the most obvious consequence of the rise in CO2 has been its effect, as plant food, on the “greening” of the planet, helping to boost a dramatic rise in crop yields across the world.
Yet to all this our politicians remain wholly oblivious. The irony is that 2008, when global warming hysteria was still at its height, was the very year when they landed us with the Climate Change Act, committing us to spending hundreds of billions of pounds on “decarbonising” our economy, at a time when other countries, led by China and India, are planning to increase their own “carbon” emissions by far more each year than the UK’s entire annual contribution to the global total.
Full post
5) County Council Faces Legal Bill Of £330.000 For Refusing Fracking Application
Blackpool Gazette, 8 October 2016
Lancashire County Council will face a bill for costs in excess of £330,000 over the planning battle for two bids to frack on the Fylde.
A spokesman confirmed Cuadrilla has been granted costs relating to the council’s refusal of permission to install a monitoring array near the Preston New Road site.
But the total could rise further depending on the final outcome of the application to frack at the Roseacre site.
If communities minister Sajid Javid decides that a new traffic management plan can be put together to make the rural roads near Roseacre safe and allows Cuadrilla’s appeal, then that total could rise further.
Full story
6) Europe’s Electric Cars Fiasco
Forbes, 8 October 2016
Bertel Schmitt
Sales of battery electric vehicles in Western Europe fell for the fourth month in a row, an analysis of a respected European industry publication says.
In August, a month in which the overall Western European new car market climbed 8%, sales of BEVs in the world’ second largest EV market behind China dropped 1.2% compared to August 2015, paid subscribers of the AID Newsletter were told.
The harsh realities of EU registrations cast a shadow on the EV euphoria of the Paris motor show, once again raising the question on auto executives’ minds: “Who will buy all those EVs?” Matthias Schmidt, editor of the UK-based publication, thinks he may have the answer: Push comes to shove, OEMs might buy their own cars.
In spite of electric car incentives doled out by some EU governments, “West Europe’s electric car sales share remains stuck at last year’s low level,” says the report. Even more worrisome “is the sudden speed at which Norway’s previously highly enthusiastic car buying public appears to be turning away from BEVs.”
After lavish Norwegian incentives for EVs were dialed back a few notches, Tesla’s marquee market folded its tent while customers switch to plug-in hybrids. Overall, the “gravitational pull from PHEVs” significantly lowered the trajectories of BEVs in the first eight months of the year, AID says.
Would it not be for France, the BEV market in the EU would look much worse. “The country’s €10,000 ‘superbonus’ for anyone willing to purchase a new electric car while scrapping an old diesel car, singlehandedly propped up West Europe’s otherwise weak and frail-looking electric car market,” the report says. Without France, and with it without the very strong showing of Renault’s batter-electric Zoe in its home market, the overall Western European BEV market would have dropped 6.1% in the first eight months, and 6.7% in August, AID calculated.
What about Tesla, you ask? Tesla’s eight month sales in Western Europe are down 21.4%, says the report. Due to the sudden availability of the Model X, Tesla’s August sales recorded a widely reported 53.6% pop in Norway.
Full post
7) Paris Deal Is Driving Germany Bonkers: Pushes For EU-Wide Ban On Petrol Cars
ITechPost, 9 October 2016
Germany is going to push for all non-electric cars to be sanctioned by 2030 to meet the goals from the Paris global warming agreement. The agreement, which was made early this summer, requires every new vehicle to have zero emission.
Germany will also encourage all Europe nations to prohibit gas and diesel powered car by this year. This could prove a very hard task, not only because of the fact that some nations will have a difficult time applying these laws, but also because even if they achieve it, it will take about 20 years to get these cars off the road.
Once the last gas-powered car is sold, it is estimated that it could take another 20 years before the last gas-powered car is off the road. That timeline would be essential for Germany’s pledge to cut carbon dioxide output by 80% to 95% by 2050.
Full post
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
