German Solar: Mission Too Well Accomplished, from Perspective of Fossil/Nuclear Lobby (Reader Comment)

March 22nd, 2012 by Zachary Shahan



From this:

To this:

There were a number of good comments on John’s “German Policy Could Make Solar in America ‘Wunderbar’” post this week, but one comment stood out to me as a great comment for a reader guest post. So, I’m posting that below (with some minor edits). Note that the first quoted phrase (“Mission too well accomplished”) is piggy-backing on the last line of the article above, where John declared Germany’s solar feed-in tariff policy “mission accomplished”:

by Thomas Gerke

“Mission too well accomplished” from the perspective of the Fossil/Nuclear Lobby and their political puppets… which is, unfortunately, the current government.

During the entire last week, hard coal power stations ran at only 20-40% of their installed capacity during peak-load hours…. Gas power stations operated at about 7-18% of their installed capacity… remaining almost totally flat all day.

This is seriously killing the profitability of those huge investments and could very well turn them into a loss for the energy corporations that built them. Because, not only can’t they “sell” coal & gas in the form of electricity, but those power stations require a certain amount of load-hours per year to turn a profit.

Since those coal, gas, oil and uranium trading corporations (E.On, RWE, BASF, Vattenfall, RAG…) are quite influential and powerful, they are working very hard to kill solar now, before it kills them….

On this sunny day in Germany [Tuesday, March 20], PV solar will once again provide about 8% of the total German electricity demand of the day. As I write this, PV solar generates about 16 GW of electricity, approximately 25% of the entire German electricity demand at noon. Hard coal & gas generate less than 10 GW combined….

Interesting times, but the EEG (Renewable Energy Act) works as it was planned. It’s the implementation of the “Solar-Strategy” put forward by Hermann Scheer back in 1993… and while misinformation is being spread to discredit renewables all the time, it’s indeed “Wunderbar”.

Images: Germany coal power plant & Germany solar roof courtesy shutterstock









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