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Online daily Die Welt here reports on how German consumers are being forced to pay huge sums of money to wind park and solar plant operators who are ordered to stop feeding electricity into the grid, but yet get paid anyway!

As volatile green electricity increasingly gets fed into an ever more unstable German power grid, wind parks and solar energy producers are being asked ever more frequently to switch off their plants to prevent grid overloads. Yet, they still receive money for the power they would have produced. It’s one of the nutty peculiarities of Germany’s wacky green energy feed-in act.

Die Welt calls this never-produced power “phantom electricity”. But it is costing consumers real cash.

One reason wind parks are unable to feed into the power grid at times is because the transmission lines needed to carry away the excess power are too inadequate to handle the frequent overloads, or they just don’t exist. Die Welt reports:

Because power lines are missing, wind parks have to be switched off more and more often. Yet wind entrepreneurs get paid for not producing. The costs for this are rising rapidly.”

Making money (and doing so with absolutely no risk) has never been easier!

Naturally this is causing electricity bills for German consumers to jump yet again. Die Welt reports that just the green electricity feed-in surcharge levied on consumers will reach “a record value of 6.35 cents per kilowatt-hour” next year. Now consumers will also have to pay even more money for power that never gets produced.

Already this year it is expected that a quarter billion euros will be added to electricity bills for the green kilowatt-hours which were never produced.”

This, Die Welt writes, is based on calculations by the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur). The reason the estimated 1580 gigawatt-hours of electricity were never produced (but still paid for): “…because there was not enough powerline capacity to deliver the power to consumers.”

Consequently: green power producers and investors get off scot-free; consumers get the shaft.

The quarter-billion-euro amount is three times higher than the 82.6 million euros from a year earlier.

Die Welt reports that this warped market situation will only worsen in the future. As more volatile wind and solar energy come online, Germany tries to unload the excess power from it’s overloaded grid by dumping it into neighboring foreign markets such as in Poland or the Czech Republic, sometimes even at negative prices.

However these eastern neighbors are refusing to allow all the excess electricity to flood into their national grids unhindered. Die Welt reports: “Beginning next year Poland and the Czech Republic want to prevent German green power from coming into neighboring countries by employing power blockers at their borders, so-called phase shifters.”

So, on windy and sunny days, excess German green power will have no place to go, and thus this will necessitate the shutting down of even more wind parks and solar plants. That means the tab for the never-produced (phantom) electricity will continue it’s upward spiral. The result: even more money flooding up from the poor to the coffers of the rich.

No wonder the German model has become an export hit to countries with greedy green energy developers and investors! Making money has never been easier.

Die Welt summarizes:

Thus in the foreseeable future the German domestic power grid will be so massively loaded that there will be hardly any alternative to more frequent shutdowns of expensive wind and solar parks in Germany.”

That means more costs for consumers – for nothing in return.