German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen never tires of all the praise for Germany’s energy revolution coming from around the world. Whenever he explains to foreign politicians that his highly industrialized country aims to decommission all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 and obtain at least 80 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2050, he is only rarely met with utter denial — at least not among his fellow environment ministers. The reactions range between incredulous amazement, genuine enthusiasm and envy over the great amount of courage such a move takes.
Germany produced more energy by coal in 2012 than it has in nearly a quarter century. King Coal’s return comes courtesy of the energiewende—the policy put in place following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The plan was to phase out the country’s numerous nuclear reactors and jumpstart its fledgling renewable energy industry, but coal has been forced to fill the gap, which is still harming the environment. As well as a bad start of reducing only clean energy.
So, a few things already began going wrong in the weeks just after the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, passed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s plan to shift to renewable energies in late June. A court put a spanner in the works, government plans ran up against opposition and the calculations didn’t add up. Is Merkel’s energy revolution now heading towards a crisis?
A Bad Beginning
The Bundesrat, Germany’s upper legislative chamber, immediately blocked two strategically important laws. Since early July, Germany’s 16 federal states have been refusing to co-finance subsidies for building owners who make energy-savings upgrades on them. The refusal sabotages the plan to lower the energy consumption of buildings, which currently accounts for 40 percent of total energy usage in Germany. Joachim Pfeiffer, the economics expert of the parliamentary group of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-left Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), warns that a “key building block of the energy plan” is in danger. Jochen Flasbarth, president of the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), is also critical of the development, saying it is “not a good sign for the energy-savings target.”
Broken Promises
On top of that, three promises are in danger of being broken. First, the government’s energy plan states: “The amount paid by every electricity consumer to subsidize renewable energies is to remain unchanged at around 3.5 (euro) cents per KWh,” or kilowatt hour. But the assessment of Germany’s Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) will already be rising to 3.8 cents per KWh soon.
Chancellor Merkel had also promised that Germany’s energy revolution wouldn’t force it to become dependent on imported nuclear power. But while German energy generators exported 6 percent of their power in 2010, since the swift shutdown of the seven nuclear power plants in the spring, they’ve been forced to import 2 percent of the energy used. The Environment Ministry denies that any of that energy is from atomic sources despite the fact that electricity generated from the Czech nuclear power plant in Temelin is making its way to Germany via Austria.
Chancellor Merkel also promised that the nuclear phase-out wouldn’t undercut climate-protection efforts. But experts have told the Economics Ministry that, according to their calculations, German CO2 emissions will actually increase by 5 percent — or 40 million metric tons — between now and 2020 because more energy will be generated by coal. And, as of yet, there are still no plans to offset this increase in another area, such as vehicle traffic.
Overall Germany’s plan to use renewable energy and taking away nuclear plants has being an epic failure. Worse they have rushed the plans so quickly that it backfires without even starting. So the people in Germany right now are likely to revolt because the cost of electricity might become a luxury, since the plans has failed and now is hurting the economy. i do believe an renewable resources, but I don’t think we have enough technology to explore clean energy at full extent/ we will get there, but it is not today or tomorrow, so we can’t afford to rush thing like Germany, but use whatever technology we have at our disposal and extract cleaner energy slowly until we can make it a permanent and of course cheap.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/revolution-threatens-to-falter-is-germany-s-green-energy-plan-failing-a-790940.html
http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/01/09/end-result-of-germanys-green-energy-policy-more-coal/
Germany’s Energiewende Troubles Prove That Renewable Energy Has Failed. And Other Strange Ideas