Share this...



The online Berliner Morgenpost here reports that electric cars in Germany are going to lead to even higher electricity prices for the country’s already massively burdened consumers. Hat-tip Gerti B.

NAEB power price projections for 2020. Note that the horizontal scale changes at the year 2010 in order to condense the chart. The upper curve shows German electricity prices in euro-cents per kilowatt-hour, the middle curve shows the price for France and the lower curve for the USA. Source: NAEB.

The original plan was to put one million electric cars on the streets by 2020, but so far the country is nowhere near being on that trajectory, and very likely will fall very far short of the target. So far only 34,000 of Germany’s 45 million vehicles are electric. The plan for 2030 calls for 5 million vehicles!

What would cause electricity rates to climb if more electric cars come on the market? Citing the Bundesnetzagentur, the Morgenpost writes:

The power grid needs to be expanded for a million electric cars. Consumers will feel it through surcharges imposed on the price of electricity.”

Germany’s infrastructure for electric cars continues to be extremely limited and patchy, thus making electric cars impractical in most situations and areas.

A massive investment is necessary just to expand the charging station network in order to overcome the huge charging infrastructure obstacle — never mind the limited range of electric cars, long charging times, high life-cycle costs and environmental impact.

The Morgenpost also cites Germany’s National Platform for Electro-Mobility in stating: “for 1 million e-cars by 2020, about 70,000 charging locations and 7100 rapid charging stations are needed” and that currently “only about one tenth of that exists“.

According to experts, writes the Morgenpost, just the grid expansion (without charging stations) is estimated to cost 30 billion euros over the coming years. That figure may be enormously conservative, as recent German infrastructure projects have shown.

Another problem is that despite hundreds of billions in investment, Germany’s power grid is still nowhere near being green, and is still heavily reliant of coal and fossil fuels. Charging cars with electricity that is produced mostly by fossil fuel does nothing for reaching the greenhouse gas reduction targets. It could in fact be counter-productive.

Germany’s Energiewende (transition to renewable energies) is a classic case of a mad, activistic rush into something without first thinking it through.

They can’t even build an airport

Transitioning an entire economy to renewable energies is a worthy target, of course, if allowed the appropriate amount of time (some generations) to do so. But it is absolutely insane for a country to believe it can accomplish this in a decade or two, especially in light of the fact that it cannot even handle the construction of an airport in the same timeframe. Yes, these are the very same people who claim Trump is unfit to be president.

In a nutshell: These bozos can’t even build a simple airport, and so how can they be trusted to rebuild the nation’s entire energy supply system?

So far they are proving that they can’t, and that the Energiewende may very well turn out to be the Berlin Airport times 1000, or worse!