As The US Follows Germany’s Green Deal, You Should Anticipate Uncontrollable Electricity Prices – OpEd

Germany was the first country to go “green”. Today, Germany now has some of the highest prices for electricity in the world and the number of Germany’s corporate insolvencies in March 2024 reached the highest level on record as the Great Green Electricity economic debacle continues.

The push to “green” electricity from wind and solar, and away from conventional sources, began in earnest under the government led by Germany’s Angela Merkel and her CDU center right party. The latest Socialist-Green coalition government, led by Olaf Scholz and Robert Habeck, have since pushed further draconian policies that have only exacerbated Germany’s economic and electricity woes.

In addition, high electricity prices in Germany and inflation are sapping consumers’ purchasing power, which further aggravates the economic situation. Currently, Germany is resorting to restarting several mothballed coal plants to keep the lights on as their wind industry continued its long record of failure to live up to promised performance and cost levels.

Shockingly, most of America and the Western Countries are following the German green movement, and are forging ahead with shuttering their generators of reliable, continuous, and uninterruptible electricity generation, that may be dispatched at short order as required by the network load, and adding more weather-dependent variable renewable electricity with almost no regard to electricity reliability or affordability to support hospitals, airports, offices, manufacturing, military sites, data centers, the general consumer public and telemetry, that all need continuous uninterruptable supplies of electricity.

Of the six electrical generation methods, occasional generated electricity from wind and solar cannot compete with reliable, continuous, and uninterruptable electricity from hydro, nuclear, coal, or natural gas:

• Wind and solar generate occasional electricity, due to the time of day and the inherent vagaries of weather.
• Hydro, nuclear, coal, and natural gas generate continuous uninterruptible electricity.

Solar and wind generators, as currently widely employed by the dreamers in Germany, America, Australia, and the UK, are inherently unreliable and cannot ever provide the continuous, uninterruptable, and reliable electric power as is generated by coal, oil, nuclear and hydro systems.  Their use, under mandatory policies of governments, is forcing the consumer to subsidize net-negative dreams of intermittent electric power from breezes and sunshine.  Such speculative ventures should not be funded by the taxpayer, they should be required to obtain funding from commercial entities and independent investors.

It is incomprehensible that twenty-three states in America have adopted goals to move to 100 percent “clean” ELECTRICTY by 2050.  The elephant in the room that no policymaker understands nor wants to discuss is that:

• The nameplate generation capacity of both solar and wind equipment is a total farce.  Time of day solarization and the vagaries of weather determine the power output of both systems, this has no relationship whatsoever with the nameplate capacity value. As these systems also exhibit frequent mechanical failures due to wear and damage from weather conditions, they should be subject to penalties for periods of inactivity.  Further, they should be subject to additional penalties for failure to provide adequate back-up generation during periods when there is no sun illumination, or the wind speed level is inadequate.
• Occasional electricity generated from wind and solar CANNOT ever support hospitals, airports, offices, manufacturing, military sites, data centers, computers, and telemetry, that all need continuous uninterruptable supplies of electric power.
• Wind and solar CANNOT manufacture anything as neither the occasional electricity from wind turbines nor solar panels, can replace the supply chain of products from crude oil that are the foundation of our materialistic society demanded by the 8 billion on this planet. 

Practically every wind turbine or solar panel requires a backup from coal, natural gas, or nuclear, thus understanding electricity generation’s true cost is paramount to choosing and prioritizing our future electricity generating systems.

When we look outside the few wealthy countries, we see that at least 80 percent of humanity, or more than six billion in this world are living on less  than $10 a day, and billions living with little to no access to electricity. 

Politicians and policymakers in the few wealthy countries are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity. Electricity poverty is among the most crippling but least talked-about crises of the 21^st century. We should not take electricity for granted. Wealthy countries may be able to bear the cost of expensive electricity and fuels, but those that live under conditions of “electricity poverty” cannot do so.

Germany was the first country to go “green”. Most Germans used to be enthusiastic supporters of the country’s Energiewende (transition to renewable electricity from wind and solar), especially in the early days when they were brazenly misled about the endeavor’s humungous costs and technical limitations. Those days are gone. Finland, France, China, Japan, and others are not following the lead of Germany that now has the highest cost for their electricity, and that electricity generation is occasional as it depends on breezes and sunshine.

Finland already gets about a third of its electricity from nuclear generation and has joined France, UK, China, Japan, and others as they pursue dependable, reliable, affordable, and zero emission electricity by ramping up their nuclear power generations capabilities. The Finnish government has announced that the first order of business is expanding Finland’s nuclear power generation capacity as soon as humanly possible.

Solar and wind power are specified by the state government to be critical to meeting California’s ambitious requirement to switch to 90% carbon-free electricity generation by  2035 and to 100% by 2045. This policy has resulted  in the state  continuously  shutting down coal, natural gas, and nuclear generating stations that provide continuous uninterruptible electricity in favor of occasionally generated electricity from renewables  However, in spite of the policy and renewable stations built, California now imports more electric power than any other US state, more than twice the amount in Virginia, the USA’s second largest importer of electric power. California typically receives between one-fifth and one-third of its electricity supply from outside of the state.

Most experts argue that the government hasn’t been fixing problems, rather it has been making them far worse. It simply refuses to acknowledge the reality and participate in conversations regarding the real verifiable science of the world’s climate changes.  

A situation is developing in the US where personal debt and homelessness numbers are increasing at an alarming rate.  The average debt in this country is greater than $100,000 per person (across credit cards, mortgages, auto loans and student loans), and with more than half of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, society is facing an unsustainable problem where those “financially challenged” will never pay off their continuously increasing debt.

Further, the loss of employment resulting from failed businesses, the failure of which is mostly caused by impossible increases in power costs, has forced many more people into a homeless situation.  It is not possible to forecast the rate of rise of homelessness, but it will increase substantially as power prices continue to escalate under a failed renewable electricity policy.

The question that must be answered is how the electric power process can be brought back to sustainable levels to halt the failure of businesses and the resultant increases in poverty and homelessness.

Wind turbines and solar panels are recipients of free breezes and free sunshine, plus humongous government subsidies, so the question needs to be asked of those in charge of electricity policy in the governments of the USA why are ELECTRICITY PRICES ESCALATING AT AN ALARMING RATES?

Please share this information with your friends to encourage energy literacy conversations at the family dinner table.