Rightwing Merkel Govt now overtly blocking renewable transition

[kristopher]

They got rid of the pro-renewable environment minister by blaming him for the recent election loss caused by Merkel's policies. Now they are overtly coming out to derail the transition to renewables.

Many claims are made about how difficult or expensive the transition is, but none of that is new information. The key to their actions is found in the last paragraph of the article:

Germany Rejects Subsidies for Energy Projects, Says Market Can Provide
By Beate Preuschoff and Franziska Scheven

BERLIN--Germany's economy minister and environment minister Tuesday rejected demands for more state subsidies for the construction of new power plants and grid expansion in Germany.

"The market alone is best suited to handle a task of that size," Energy Minister Philipp Roesler said during an energy conference in Berlin.

...Many power utilities have called for some form of subsidies for building and running fossil-fueled power plants that are needed to complement the intermittent generation from renewable energies. The companies face an increasingly difficult task in operating fossil-fueled power plants profitably, because of the number of hours they produce power has dramatically reduced due to increased production from renewable energies.

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/germany-rejects-subsidies-for-energy-projects-says-market-can-provide-20120605-00957


The right wing attack on renewables is a global event, it is not limited to the Koch Brothers, ALEC and the US.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112714465

[dipsydoodle]

1. The actual headline

states ALL energy projects. - not just renewables.

[kristopher]

2. That has disproportionate effect on emerging technologies

It is a move designed to preserve the established energy infrastructure and it flies in the face of the commitment made last year.

[NickB79]

3. So renewables aren't at grip parity in Germany then?

[kristopher]

4. Is there a point to your question?

If so, it would help if you'd make it clear.

Are you suddenly fond of protecting fossil fuel plants?

[NickB79]

5. If renewables are at grid parity in Germany

Why can't they compete economically with fossil fuel thermal plants?

[kristopher]

6. Who said renewables were at grid parity in Germany?

And even if they were how does that address an accelerated transition away from fossil fuels, which is the goal.

When did you become so protective of fossil fuel plants?

[GliderGuider]

7. It really doesn't matter much.

Last edited Tue Jun 5, 2012, 07:48 PM - Edit history (2)

Renewables may replace nuclear power, but they won't displace FF in the short or medium term.





Merkel's crew is definitely right wing and obstructionist, but even if they had all the good intentions in the world it wouldn't alter current and future global reality. It takes a remarkable amount of faith to believe otherwise.

We're heading for a +6 degree future, and all the policy tweaks in the world won't change that.



Fossil fuel use will not be reduced by trying to displace it with alternatives. Alternatives don't have the horsepower at the moment, and if they ever do it won't be until it's far too late to avoid truly catastrophic climate change. Fossil fuel use will be reduced only by actually reducing fossil fuel use itself - which implies a truly major reduction in humanity's overall energy use. Concepts of displacement or transition are pipe dreams.

[kristopher]

8. Those bullshit projections again?

The use of long term data to predict growth patterns that have shown dramatically different trends in the last several years doesn't work, GG. I tried to be nice about last time, but now that you repeat it even after being given a heads up it is clear that you aren't simply making an innocent error.

Since the data prior to 2000 is not at all a reflection of current market dynamics, by incorporating the data for renewables going back to the 80s you are knowingly flattening the curve going forward. In other words you are yet again deliberately falsifying the picture you are (literally) drawing.

[GliderGuider]

9. Funny, you agreed with them the last time.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1127&pid=16186

As you agreed in that post, my projections are fully in line with the IPCC SSREN projections. If I'm making an error, the IPCC is making a similar one, leading to the same results.

It's not a question of "error" - we have a conflict of beliefs. You seem to believe that renewables will overtake FF use before the climate situation becomes unrecoverable, while I definitely believe they won't. What you don't like is my rock-solid, unshakable conviction that wind and solar power won't save civilization's bacon and that our efforts on behalf of the planet would be better spent attacking fossil fuel use directly.

[RobertEarl]

10. attacking fossil fuel use directly.

It is too late to avert the setup. The program is loaded and running.
Ice - she be going. Seas be rising.

Of course what we should do is close down the coal plants. Drive cars less and eat more local. But we won't. Not even our very own government is behind doing what needs to be done. Never has been.

If government won't begin attacking fossil fuel use directly who will?

The only thing it can do and might do is prepare. But it won't do much of that either. You are on your own.

It's been real and it's been fun. But it hasn't been real fun.

[kristopher]

11. No, I didn't agree with them

I said that it was in line with the conservative projections that had been part of the IPCC analysis. I then asked you some questions that pertain to the method behind those projections; particularly the point I made above. Using data back to 1980 on renewables is an absurd choice that is geared to deliberately skew the results for renewables downward.

It's not the beliefs you hold that I object to, it is the dishonest nature of your argumentation.

[GliderGuider]

12. I used wind data only from 1990 on because it gave more optimistic results than starting in 1983.

My outcome was in the middle of the IPCC result range, so it was neither the most optimistic nor the most conservative. I'm suggesting that wind will be generating around 4,000 to 5,000 TWh per year by 2030 - I think that's realistic and achievable in the current global economic and political climate. Unfortunately I also think the projected fossil fuel numbers are highly probable - at five times that amount.

I don't recall if you've ever told us what you think are the "correct" numbers for wind and FF, and why. What do you think the global generating mix will look like in 2030 - how much fossil fuel will we still be using? I'd like to offer you this opportunity to put your stake in the ground.

[GliderGuider]

16. A look at the global wind power trends for different start dates

I decided to plot the trends to 2030 for wind power using a variety of data spans: 1985-2010, 1990-2010, 1995-2010, 2000-2010 and 2005-2010.

All the trend lines are third-order polynomials. The interesting thing is what happened in 2005. Until then, your implied claim holds - every curve that begins later ends higher. However, the difference between the curve starting in 2000 and the one starting in 2005 is dramatic: the projection based only on the most recent five years of data is half that of the one based on the most recent 10 years.

This of course implies that the rate increase in generation has flattened a fair bit recently. This by itself isn't that surprising, but it does imply that wind power generation may be quite sensitive to political and economic influences.

A corporatist political shift resulting from a recessionary or depressed world economy over the next 20 years could spell a lot of trouble for renewables. Given what's happening in Europe at the moment that possibility seems quite high.

[joshcryer]

13. A truly alarming graph. Explains why policy analysts champion renewable's "resilience" to AGW.

We aren't doing shit about AGW, therefore, profit.

For what it's worth I think the policy tweakers are going to start polluting our skies to modify Earth's albedo. If we ever get the Terrestrial Planet Finder out there we need to search for plants whose skies were darkened and who were forced into an ice age because of it. Could tell us something about why civilizations die out.

[GliderGuider]

14. A new hypothesis for the Fermi Paradox?

Discovery of fossil fuels --> planetary warming --> disastrous geoengineering --> extinction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself

This is the argument that technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or space flight technology. Possible means of annihilation include nuclear war, biological warfare or accidental contamination, climate change, nanotechnological catastrophe, ill-advised physics experiments, a badly programmed super-intelligence, or a Malthusian catastrophe after the deterioration of a planet's ecosphere. This general theme is explored both in fiction and in mainstream scientific theorizing. Indeed, there are probabilistic arguments which suggest that human extinction may occur sooner rather than later. In 1966 Sagan and Shklovskii suggested that technological civilizations will either tend to destroy themselves within a century of developing interstellar communicative capability or master their self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales. Self-annihilation may also be viewed in terms of thermodynamics: insofar as life is an ordered system that can sustain itself against the tendency to disorder, the "external transmission" or interstellar communicative phase may be the point at which the system becomes unstable and self-destructs.

[joshcryer]

15. Yeah. We'll be able to analyze nearby planet atmospheres.

If we find a planet with heavy sulphates, but no indications of life, well, there's your hypothesis. And a credible one at that.