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Saturday, July 27, 2019

GWPF Newsletter: Collapse Of Wind Power Threatens Germany's Green Energy Transition








Germany's Green Economy Is In 'Freewill'

In this newsletter:

1) Collapse Of Wind Power Threatens Germany's Green Energy Transition
Die Welt, 26 July 2019

2) Germany's Green Economy Is In 'Freefall' 
The Daily Telegraph, 26 July 2019



3) Benny Peiser: Incredible Shrinking Europe
Global Warming Policy Forum, 25 July 2019
  

4) Onshore Wind Critic Andrea Leadsom Is New UK Energy Secretary
Recharge News, 25 July 2019

5) Sanjeev Sabhlok: Why The Precautionary Principle Is Bad Policy
The Times of India, 23 July 2019
 
6) And Finally: Germans Choose Fuel-Guzzling SUVs, Pushing Up CO2 Emissions
Clean Energy Wire, 26 July 2019

Full details:

1) Collapse Of Wind Power Threatens Germany's Green Energy Transition
Die Welt, 26 July 2019

Hardly any new wind turbines were built in Germany in the first half of the year. Turbine makers call it a “punch in the gut of the green energy transition” and blame environmentalists.

The expansion of wind power in the first half of this year collapsed to its lowest level since the introduction of the Renewable Energy Act (EEG) in 2000. All in all, just 35 wind turbines were build with an output of 231 megawatts. “This corresponds to a decline of 82 percent compared to the already weak period of the previous year”, according to the German Wind Energy Association (BWE) in Berlin.

“This makes one nearly speechless,” said Matthias Zelinger at the presentation of the data. The managing director of the Power Systems division of the German Engineering Federation (VDMA) spoke of a “blow to the guts of the energy turnaround”. This actual development doesn’t match “at all to the current climate protection debate”.

“On the one hand the Federal Government speaks of its achievement of ambitious renewable expansion and climate protection goals for the years 2030 and 2050. On the other hand, the perspective is missing,” said Hermann Albers, President of the German Wind Energy Association (BWE): “The discrepancy between claim and reality is growing.”

The federal government wants to increase the share of renewable energy in the electricity supply from around 40 today to at least 65 percent in 2030. But when in 2021 thousands of wind turbines come to the end of the 20-year subsidy period of the Renewable Energy Act, more wind turbines will be demolished on balance than new ones will be added, the wind industry fears. The government’s green energy and probably also its climate targets would fail.

The reasons for the slump in new construction figures are manifold. Unlike in the past too low subsidies for wind power is not the cause this time. “It’s not about the money,” said Albers: “The energy transition is being slowed down on a small scale.”

The most important cause lies in the legal resistance of wildlife and forest conservationists fighting new wind farms. The BWE President referred to an industry survey of the onshore wind agency. According to its findings, more than 70 percent of the legal objections are based on species conservation, especially the threat to endangered bird species and bats. Wind power president Albers called many complaints unfounded. He claims that the population of the red kite raptors has actually increased in parallel with the expansion of wind power. However, the nature conservation federation of Germany would not support this claim when asked by Die WELT.

In addition to species protection, it is primarily conflicts with noise protection that are leading to legal objections against wind power projects. They are responsible for 17 per cent of legal cases. Monument protection are behind six percent of lawsuits.

By introducing a market-based tendering model, the federal government forced the wind power industry to cut costs and make cut-throat calculations. On top of the growing economic risk comes now the risk of legal action. Both together scare off more and more potential investors. Since the federal government also removed some problematic privileges for so-called community wind farms, there are no longer enough participants for the public auction rounds. Of the more than 1350 megawatts of wind power projects tendered this year, only 746 megawatts could be slated for a project.

Ever since local resident protests in many state parliaments have led to critical discussions about a minimum distance to residential development, the licensing authorities have been acting much more cautiously than before, the wind power lobby criticises. According to BWE figures, 11,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity are currently stuck in the permit backlog.

“Military concerns and FM radio beacons also constituted significant approval barriers”. Altogether 4790 megawatts of wind power are blocked here, of which alone 2370 megawatts are blocked by the distance control. Wind power projects would have to keep a distance of 10 to 15 kilometers in Germany to the stations that are used for navigation in aviation, Albers claimed: Some neighboring states were content with half this distance.

Translation GWPF

Full story 

see also The Impact of Wind Energy on Wildlife and the Environment (PDF)

Green Killing Killing Machines & The Silence Of The Greens (PDF)

2) Germany's Green Economy Is In 'Freefall' 
The Daily Telegraph, 26 July 2019

German industry is in the deepest slump since the global financial crisis and threatens to push Europe’s powerhouse economy into full-blown recession. The darkening outlook is forcing the European Central Bank to contemplate ever more perilous measures. 














The influential Ifo Institute in Munich said its business climate indicator for manufacturing went into “free fall” in July as the delayed damage from global trade conflict takes its toll and confidence wilts. It goes far beyond the woes of the car industry. More than 80pc of Germany’s factories are in outright contraction.

The Ifo plunge follows warnings from IHS Markit that manufacturing activity for the wider eurozone has dropped to levels last seen in the depths of the 2012 European debt crisis.

Clemens Fuest, Ifo president, said Germany’s forward-looking gauge of business expectations saw the steepest fall since early 2009.

“All the problems are coming together. It’s China, it’s increasing protectionism across the board, it’s disruption to global supply chains,” he said.

Mario Draghi, the ECB president, warned that the picture is getting “worse and worse”, describing the German and Italian economies as victims of an asymmetric trade shock.

There are signs that industrial woes are spreading to the broader service sector, raising fears that the slowdown could turn into something far worse. Mr Draghi said the labour market is holding up for now. “We still see the risk of recession being pretty low, all in all,” he said. But jobs are a lagging indicator.

Full story

3) Benny Peiser: Incredible Shrinking Europe
Global Warming Policy Forum, 25 July 2019

Presentation at the Heartland Institute’s 13th International Climate Change Conference, Washington DC, 25 July 2019












Interested readers can find video recordings of all of yesterday's presentations on the website of the Heartland Institute.

4) Onshore Wind Critic Andrea Leadsom Is New UK Energy Secretary
Recharge News, 25 July 2019

The UK has a new energy secretary after Andrea Leadsom was appointed by incoming UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, putting a high-profile critic of onshore wind in charge of national policy.

Leadsom will lead Britain’s Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy under a mass clear-out by Johnson at the top of the UK government that included her predecessor, Greg Clark. Her main qualification for the job may have been her status as a loyal ‘Brexiteer’ like others in the governing Conservative Party promoted under Johnson – and unlike the pro-EU Clark.

Leadsom is familiar to the UK sector after completing a stint as energy minister in 2015 and 2016, when she helped steer through legislation taking onshore wind out of the national support mechanism, and championed the role of fracking-based gas extraction.

She has previously claimed turbines are inefficient and have an unacceptable impact in local communities.

In 2011 Leadsom wrote in a highly-critical article for the Conservative Home think-tank: “Whilst I accept that onshore wind has its part to play in generating renewable energy, I conclude that the benefits of onshore wind have been hugely exaggerated by the developers who stand to make huge sums from the taxpayer incentives.”

She added: “It used to be the case that criticising onshore wind energy led to being denounced as a ‘climate change denier’. I sincerely hope those days are over …”

Full story
 
5) Sanjeev Sabhlok: Why The Precautionary Principle Is Bad Policy
The Times of India, 23 July 2019

We have evolved as a species to be curious about scary things. Newspapers love to publish scary reports, which are like click-bait: they catch our attention. Health scares fascinate us the most. Environmental scares grab our interest, as well. Most scares, however, turn out to be false.

For every true scare, there are hundreds of false ones. The failure of a scare is generally not reported because such information doesn’t quite excite us. So most false scares linger on in the public consciousness.

For example, in 1981 it was said that coffee causes 50 per cent of pancreatic cancers. But the scientists who made this claim retracted it in 1986. Despite that, the International Agency for Research on Cancer took until 2016 to reverse its claim that coffee is a possible cause of cancer. It is likely going to take much longer than that to dissipate the scare from the public mind.

The problem with these scares is, of course, that we do not know in advance which of them is false. But in most cases the harm caused by believing false scares is small. Some of us might stop drinking coffee, but that doesn’t matter much.

It is when governments get involved in scares that things can take a sinister turn. Vast amounts of public money can be then wasted or irrational prohibitions imposed.

We know how hard it is to stop governments from interfering in our lives. The cost-benefit test was devised specifically to stop bureaucracies from running amuck at the slightest scare by forcing them to confess all costs and all benefits.

The cost-benefit test can often be tortuous and is hated by all bureaucrats and ministers, but it is invaluable in imposing a crucial discipline on them.

The cost-benefit test is particularly well suited to dealing with scares. Its demand for unequivocal proof of harm (or at least the best available proof of harm) and analysis of scenarios with different levels of risk can help determine a reasonable and prudent way forward.

Since most scares will end up being found to be false anyway (such as the AGW scare and the GM scare), it is important to keep governments on a tight leash.

Unfortunately, the hard-earned improvement to the policymaking process through the cost-benefit approach was cast aside after the introduction of the precautionary principle in the 1990s. Perhaps its best-known formulation – in relation to the environment – is Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio Declaration which states: “In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation”.

This exhorts governments (the “States”) to act vigorously if they suspect something may go wrong – a suspicion is enough. It doesn’t require governments to understand the harm thoroughly or even be sure that it will eventuate.

It doesn’t exhort governments to undertake better scenario analysis and pick the option with a net benefit to society. Instead, it is effectively an appeal to discard the cost-benefit approach and a carte blanche for strong action.

In this manner, the precautionary principle gives bureaucrats the freedom to only count benefits (e.g. the alleged benefits of renewable energy) and ignore costs, or to only count imagined costs (e.g. in the case of GM technology) while ignoring benefits.

This principle reverses the burden of proof of harm for regulatory intervention. It undermines reason and the Enlightenment itself, taking us to the Dark Ages. It is impossible to argue with the precautionary principle because it specifically excludes the use of logic.

Had this principle been applied in the past, scientists wouldn’t have been allowed to develop vaccines or antibiotics which inevitably have some side effects and can even, in rare circumstances, kill.

While the precautionary approach would have prevented a few side-effect harms, the main benefit – of saving hundreds of millions of lives – would have been lost. Only a social cost-benefit analysis can help us pick up the full suite of costs and benefits.

Likewise, the precautionary principle wouldn’t have allowed scientists to research the atom because of the risk of creating an atom bomb. But atomic research has led us not only to the atom bomb but to nuclear energy (and potentially fusion energy in the foreseeable future), nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars, nuclear medicine, imaging and radiotherapy.

By exploiting our fears, the precautionary principle gives the power over our choices and decisions not only to national governments that are hungry for power but to unaccountable global mega-bureaucracies. The IPCC is just one such example.

This principle has been a godsend for the left after the fall of communism. The beauty of the precautionary principle for the socialists is that lets them occupy the moral high ground while they demand complete control over society. The Green New Deal being canvassed by socialists in the USA is one of the most brazen examples to date of this approach. And it is based entirely on the precautionary principle.

Full Post
6) And Finally: Germans Choose Fuel-Guzzling SUVs, Pushing Up CO2 Emissions
Clean Energy Wire, 26 July 2019

The intensifying public debate over climate change in Germany isn’t boosting sales of low-emission cars, German energy agency dena says.


Germans are likely to buy more than a million new SUVs this year, according to a new study, published by researchers at the Duisburg-Essen University

The share of new car sales in highest efficiency category fell 5 percentage points between 2016 and 2018, to 69 percent. The biggest sales growth was in heavy, fuel-intensive SUVs and all-terrain vehicles. SUV sales in 2018 were up more than 21 percent compared to the previous year. The total number of new car registrations remained steady at 3.4 million. Overall, the average CO2 emissions of new cars was up 2 percent between 2017 and 2018, dena says. This is at odds with the government’s goal of bringing down greenhouse gasemissions across all sectors and “should give policymakers, carmakers and customers food for thought — and maybe serve as a wake-up call,” dena head Andreas Kuhlmann said. Kuhlmann said action was needed to make low-emission cars more attractive to buyers and to counter the preference for ever larger cars among customers.

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.

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