UnitedNationsprobablynonetoopleasedwithAustralia’s

United Nations probably none too pleased with Australia’s new, less climate-change-minded budget plan

posted at 2:41 pm on May 23, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

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Last September, Australians gave their progressive Labor Party the boot after six years of national government dominance and instead ushered their conservative-lite Liberal Party into power. Their new prime minister, Tony Abbott, promised to reduce government expenditures and streamline the bureaucracy amidst a slowing economy and high taxes, with an especial emphasis on reducing the country’s green-energy commitments and unpopular carbon tax. Last week, Abbott released his budget proposal amidst a flurry of controversy, but he did take a pretty sizable axe to some of Australian green groups’ most treasured areas of government spending:

Australia’s conservative coalition is set to cut more than 90 percent of the funding related to global warming from their budget, from $5.75 billion this year to $500 million, over the next four years.

Environmentalists and leftist politicians in the country protested the move by conservative Liberal Party Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s governing coalition to slash funding for climate programs, arguing such funding for green energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions were necessary to stop global warming.

But Abbott’s government shot back, saying that the country needed to reduce the size of government and improve the economy.

“The coalition government acknowledges the role of renewable energy in Australia’s energy mix,” said Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane. “There is over $1 billion in funding for existing renewable projects to be completed over the coming years.”

The budget is coming under plenty of fire from the opposition, but the new Australian government has been more than up front with voters and with the United Nations about their disinclination to eagerly participate in the ever-elusive “global climate treaty,” a.k.a. mutual impoverishment pact, that the UN is trying to scrape together (especially not one that relies on “socialism masquerading as environmentalism” in which wealthier countries voluntarily shrink their own economies while redistributing funds that will supposedly be for climate-change mitigation to poorer countries). Abbott has proposed an alternative plan to the carbon tax that would provide taxpayer funded grants to companies and projects that reduce emissions, but that isn’t nearly enough for the international globalist-environmentalist set, which is getting pretty bent out of shape about the signals Australia’s budget proposal is sending. Via Bloomberg:

Australia’s program to rein in pollution is losing momentum, the latest in a series of setbacks for the international effort to tackle global warming. …

The shift in Australia comes just ahead of a series of global climate talks set for later this year. The UN is aiming to craft an agreement in 2015 that would include 190 nations. That pact would limit emissions in both industrialized and developing nations for the first time. Yet China and India have signaled their reluctance to join without broad participation from richer industrial nations, including Australia.

“It feels like a 180-degree turn for Australia,” said Jake Schmidt, director of international climate policy at the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council. “That’s the hardest thing for the international community to take.” …

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has asked world leaders to bring plans for action on climate to a summit in New York in September. The U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest polluters, have started diplomatic coordination on the issue, and Europe is expanding the world’s biggest carbon market.

“Australia risks being embarrassed by global leaders who are determined to take action, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama,” said Kobad Bhavnagri, the Sydney-based head for Australia research at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

I’m sure they’ll be devastated.

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Tags: Australia, carbon, economy, green energy, renewables, taxes, United Nations

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Congressonceagaincirclingbacktothewind

Congress once again circling back to the wind production tax credit that refuses to quit

posted at 1:21 pm on May 16, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

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We are already well into the fifth month of 2014, and the expired 2.3 cents/kilowatt-hour production tax credit by which the wind industry lives and dies is still just that — expired. While I would call that major progress in learning to let go and suggest that the PTC should stay expired forever, rather than Congress belatedly renewing it as it has after the PTC’s periodic expiration dates over the past two-plus decades, the wind industry’s well-monied lobby is reliably still courting (and I do mean “courting“) that ever-likely possibility. The lobbyists have finally succeeded in getting their goodies back on the mainstream Congressional agenda, with their usual champions workin’ the floor with legislation that would extend the credit for yet another two interminable years as part of a gigantic package of various tax extenders:

The US Senators from Colorado are hoping to salvage a renewal of the wind production tax credit, a policy that is bundled into a bill that stalled on Thursday in a procedural move. …

For them, this is about the four manufacturing plants in Colorado owned by Vestas, which makes wind turbines and employs nearly 2,000 people.

“These are good, American, high-paying jobs,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado,) who approached 9NEWS together with Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) for an interview about the credit. …

The tax credit goes to wind farms for the energy their turbines produce. Wind projects under construction by the end of 2015 would get the credit for ten years.

It’s a big incentive, which leads wind project investors to buy more turbines from Vestas.

“When we’ve let the production tax credit languish, then you have seen this drawback,” said Udall, referencing past layoffs by turbine makers.

Right, which is precisely why we should let the production tax credit languish — i.e., because wind energy is highly dependent on taxpayer largesse (the PTC is a major yet only one of the myriad forms of special treatment that the federal government bestows upon the industry), and it will never be able to compete on its on competitive merits until it is pushed out of the nest and forced to innovate more effectively. Wind energy in the U.S. has lived in a constant boom-and-bust cycle perpetuated by the PTC for over twenty years, while its apologists insist that, this time, renewing the credit for just a couple more short years will provide the wind industry with everything it needs to compete. Still waiting, ya’ll.

The wind-production tax credit should not be renewed for three principal reasons:

1) It wastes money. The proposed two-year extension would cost taxpayers nearly $13 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation. In 2013, when Congress renewed the subsidy for one year, the cost was nearly $12 billion over 10 years. This is more than the federal government spends on energy research in one year.

A better use of taxpayer dollars would be to reduce the ballooning federal debt or to invest in research to find new forms of cheap, clean, reliable electricity. For example, what about a substantial cash prize from the U.S. Department of Energy for creating a truly commercial use for carbon captured from coal and natural-gas plants? Such a discovery would be the Holy Grail of clean energy—permitting the use of coal world-wide to produce an abundant supply of cheap, clean, reliable electricity to reduce poverty while protecting the environment. …

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Tags: Congress, green energy, renewables, subsidies, wind energy

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Germany’sversionofTheDailyShowlampoonstheir

Germany’s version of The Daily Show lampoons their failed green-energy transition

posted at 7:01 pm on May 10, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Via James Delingpole at Breitbart and the folks at the American Interest, this is a few weeks old by now but certainly worth a [joyless] chuckle or two. A few years ago, Germany decided to phase themselves off of nuclear energy while transitioning to a more wind-and-solar-centric energy grid — a so-called Energiewende that was supposed to set a pioneering green example for the rest of the world. Germans have now invested quite a bit of money into that endeavor through subsidies and state-mandated scheming, but all they have to show for it is an increased reliance on coal and higher energy prices hindering their economic opportunities. The jokes practically write themselves (language warning):

Tags: coal, comedy, entertainment, Germany, green energy, humor, nuclear, renewables

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BrokeFrancethinkingaboutfollowinginGermany’sutterly

Broke France thinking about following in Germany’s utterly failed green footsteps for some reason

posted at 8:11 pm on May 1, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

I fear that this will not end well. Via Reuters:

Segolene Royal, appointed French energy and environment minister this month, said on Friday she planned to create 100,000 jobs in the next three years with a drive for green growth.

Royal told a news conference she wanted to accelerate investment in renewable energies like wind, solar, biomass and marine energy, as well as in insulation of buildings. …

“I consider that, in the current context, the quasi-automatic increases of power bills are too brutal,” she said, adding that her cabinet was studying a new decree to control energy bills in the coming three years.

Royal also plans to present a law on France’s energy transition to parliament in July. This plan will confirm Hollande’s pledge to reduce France’s reliance on nuclear energy for electricity production from the current 75 percent to 50 percent by 2025.

It sounds like they’re still in the pre-legislative planning phase here, but let’s go ahead and get straight the gist of what one of France’s newest government ministers would like to achieve with some top-down direction of the country’s energy sector:

1. Boost renewable energy technologies and create thousands of “green” jobs;

2. Phase out a big chunk of their nuclear energy; and

3. Bring down consumers’ energy prices.

…Go home, France — you’re drunk. To handily reduce your reliance on nuclear energy, you need to replace that nuclear energy with a ready substitute. In order to use wind and solar as those ready substitutes (rather than the more affordable coal or natural gas options), you need to throw gobs and gobs of money at them. To throw gobs and gobs of money at them, you need to heavily subsidize them via direct payouts, government “investment,” tax credits, and/or consumer quotas, all of which are costs that inevitably get passed on to taxpayers/consumers in some way — often via higher energy bills, higher taxes, or taking your country further into debt. You’re already in major debt and have had to renegotiate your required deficit-reduction targets with the EU several times over, and let’s not forget the fact that your economy has been skipping between contraction and stagnation for going on several years now.

France’s next-door-neighbor Germany has been in a much better fiscal and economic situation over the past few years, and even they couldn’t manage to make their similar Energiewende plan work without jacking up Germans’ energy prices — with the end result being a major shift to coal as costly renewable energies failed to provide the kind of affordable, reliable energy as the nuclear sources they were meant to replace. These guys need to either get over their nuclear hangups or their reluctance to start fracking, because so far, these grandiose schemes to engineer renewable-based energy sectors are just not working out for either their economies or the environment.

Tags: debt and deficit, Europe, France, Germany, nuclear, renewables, subsidies

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APstudy:“Advanced”cornethanolmightactuallybe

AP study: “Advanced” corn ethanol might actually be environmentally worse than gasoline

posted at 5:21 pm on April 21, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Last November, the Associated Press released their own study that confirmed more or less everything we already knew about the damaging unintended consequences created by the Renewable Fuel Standard: That the artificially jacked-up demand for corn incentivizes American farmers to bring marginal lands into agricultural production, effectively obliterating millions of acres of conservation land in favor of putting more strain on the water supply, pumping more fertilizer into the environment, and churning up more soil (subsequently releasing the carbon trapped within) than they otherwise would. The champions of the Big Ethanol lobby, shameless rent-seekers that they are, denounced the AP’s study as obviously biased hogwash, and demanded that the U.S. Environmental Protection ignore the abundant evidence against ethanol’s supposed environmental benefits by upholding the ever-increasing volumetric blending requirements of the RFS.

If Big Ethanol didn’t like what the AP reported last fall, however, I think they’re likely to have an even bigger tantrum over what the AP is reporting on today — this time, a study funded by the feds that undercuts ethanol’s counterfeit environmentalism even further:

Biofuels made from the leftovers of harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline for global warming in the short term, a study shows, challenging the Obama administration’s conclusions that they are a much cleaner oil alternative and will help combat climate change.

A $500,000 study paid for by the federal government and released Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change concludes that biofuels made with corn residue release 7 percent more greenhouse gases in the early years compared with conventional gasoline.

While biofuels are better in the long run, the study says they won’t meet a standard set in a 2007 energy law to qualify as renewable fuel.

The conclusions deal a blow to what are known as cellulosic biofuels, which have received more than a billion dollars in federal support but have struggled to meet volume targets mandated by law. About half of the initial market in cellulosics is expected to be derived from corn residue.

And seeing as how these “advanced” cellulosic biofuels derived from biomass other than corn starch (i.e., in this case, the stalks, cobs, leaves) are technically supposed to release 50 to 60 percent fewer carbon emissions on net evaluation than gasoline, that’s something of a problem. I might also add that “a billion dollars in federal support” is a vast understatement, what with that whole Renewable Fuel Standard injecting a bunch of fake signals into the market by forcing Americans to purchase a product that they obviously wouldn’t without the presence of a federal mandate (despite the repeated failure of the well-subsidized biofuels market to actually provide the requisite amount of biofuels in commercially available quantities, yeesh).

Tags: biofuels, cellulosic biofuels, Environmental Protection Agency, ethanol, gas, Renewable Fuel Standard, renewables

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Isthewindlobby’smostprecioussubsidyfinally

Is the wind lobby’s most precious subsidy finally losing steam in Congress?

posted at 8:41 pm on April 16, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Via the WFB, we can only hope. The egregiously generous wind production tax credit (which provides a guaranteed 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour of energy during the first ten years of a project’s operation, by the way) has been through fits and starts of expiration in Congress only to be followed by belated renewal over the past two decades — and funnily enough, the construction of wind projects has correlated rather conspicuously with the credit’s fortunes. What might we suppose that suggests about the nature of this heavily subsidized and politically prized form of renewable energy? That is has yet to achieve the type of cost effectiveness that would allow it to successfully compete in the free market based on its on merits and that is has been living a lie courtesy of the taxpayer, perhaps?

Expired federal tax credits for the wind industry are in front of Congress again, but the political future for the long-standing subsidies is anything but safe, according to a new report.

Experts at Capital Alpha Partners, one of a burgeoning group of research firms that provides political intelligence for investors, wrote last week that the appetite on Capitol Hill for continuing the wind energy production tax credit (PTC) is declining.

In a report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, Capital Alpha writes that a combination of flagging political will and changing market environments could signal the decline, and possibly the end, of the two-decades-old tax credit for the wind industry.

“There comes a time when subsidies which are popular to start with become less popular as conditions change,” the report says. “The wind PTC may be reaching that point—not just because some in Congress are losing patience with the so-called tax extenders, but also because fundamental market conditions are putting the traditional utility model under stress.”

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t count on Congress not finally succumbing to the wind lobby and tacking an extension onto some bill or other under the radar, and even if they don’t — the wind production tax credit might be the single most significant subsidy for wind, but it certainly isn’t the only one. There are investment credits, loan guarantees, renewable quotas, state subsidies, etcetera etcetera for the taking, and I have little doubt that ‘environmentalist’ investors will shortly find a way to lobby/make up for their lost income somehow. Ugh.

Tags: Congress, Democrats, renewables, subsidies, wind energy

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EuropeanUnionfinallydecidestoscalebackon

European Union finally decides to scale back on the renewables subsidies, sort of

posted at 8:21 pm on April 10, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Last year, European bureaucrats finally seemed to be cottoning on to the fact that their self-imposed renewable energy targets were the direct cause of the region’s soaring energy prices, with Europeans’ electricity bills decreasingly made up of actual standalone commodity prices and increasingly made up of subsidies, taxes, and charges especially designed to support renewable energy — often amounting to at least half of bills’ total costs. The European Commission finally got around to releasing some revised rules on Wednesday that effectively take some of those romanticized green mandates down a notch, via the WSJ:

The European Commission watered down some key parts of new rules on government aid aimed at encouraging production of energy from renewable sources, lessening the financial burden on heavy industries and reducing the scale of government subsidies for providers of renewable energy.

The new rules set tougher terms for government subsidies for energy sources such as wind and solar.

The commission, the EU’s executive body, said government subsidies for renewables have led to progress on environmental goals, but have also caused “serious market distortions and increasing costs to consumers”.

Bowing to intense lobbying pressure from industry, the commission also reduced—compared with its earlier proposals—the payments that chemical, glass, steel and other heavy-energy users will be expected to make into public funds to finance renewables. …

The new rules, which will apply from July until the end of 2020, were also the result of pressure from Germany, which is overhauling its own ambitious renewable-energy laws. “Politically, this was the best balance possible,” Mr. Almunia said.

Energy-intensive industries across Europe, like chemical, glass, and steel producers, have been lobbying hard for a break from the costly renewables burden they have been required to shoulder (especially since energy prices in the U.S. have been dropping because of the shale boom). They partially got their wish in the form of a cap of “15 percent of the companies’ gross value added — the value of goods and services that a company produces, minus the cost of all inputs such as personnel and raw materials,” a decrease from the 20 percent cap in the EU’s original draft. As you might imagine, Europe’s environmentalists are not pleased about it, claiming that now the costs of the renewables targets will be shifted even more to consumers. …I don’t quite understand how they failed to realize that consumers have always borne the cost of these renewable targets in one way or another, but oh well.

Germany in particular has been quixotically suffering beneath their own high energy prices and worrying about a loss of business and manufacturing competitiveness, and Chancellor Merkel also announced a drawdown on Germany’s catastrophically misguided Energiewende plan this week:

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet approved on Tuesday a reform of Germany’s renewable energy law designed to curb a rise in the cost of electricity in Europe’s biggest economy driven by the rapid expansion of green power.

The reform will slow the growth of green energy, which accounts for 25 percent of Germany’s electricity, and force new investors in green power to take some risk. …

It will scale back green subsidies and upper limits will be placed on onshore wind power expansion (at 2.5 gigawatts in capacity per year), photovoltaic (2.5 GW per year) and offshore wind plants (6.5 GW to 2020).

These sound like at least small steps in kinda’ the right direction, but at the end of the day, the region is still largely operating under impractical, costly, top-down energy schemes that are focused on forcibly integrating more renewables while simultaneously shoving out nuclear and discouraging fracking — two of the cleanest, most efficient, and economical options we have at the moment.

Ever since Russian forces took hold of Crimea last month, the British prime minister has been leading a chorus of conservative politicians and energy executives in a refrain they believe will spark a shale gas revolution in Europe: Frack, baby, frack.

The push for a European boom in fracking — shorthand for hydraulic fracturing — has been underway for years, but it has taken on new urgency in recent weeks as fears grow of a revival of the Cold War. With Europe leaning on Russia for a third of its natural gas needs, the continent’s leaders say they need to develop their own energy sources — and fast. …

And yet, Britain is like North Dakota in one important respect: There’s a lot of gas down there, both in the United Kingdom and over vast stretches of continental Europe.

Estimates of shale gas reserves are notoriously imprecise, but the U.S. Energy Information Administration last year placed the amount of recoverable resources in Europe at nearly 470 trillion cubic feet — an amount that could light cities from London to Warsaw for decades.

Tags: energy, Europe, fracking, Germany, renewables, subsidies

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Tensions with Russia proving unhelpful for Germany’s green-energy transition

TensionswithRussiaprovingunhelpfulforGermany’sgreen-energy

DOEreadyingtorampuptheremainderof

DOE readying to ramp up the remainder of their loan-guarantee program

posted at 1:21 pm on March 3, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

The Department of Energy’s green-energy loan-guarantee program was first authorized back in 2005 and then expanded in Obama’s 2009 stimulus law to especially support renewable-energy projects and companies with government-selected “investments,” a.k.a. political favoritism. In 2011, however, after a rather large handful of well-publicized failures like Solyndra, the DOE thought it wise to take a hiatus before they cashed out on the full extent of their allotted loan authority; in the interim, they’ve doled out a few billion here and there to a couple of nuclear projects and clean-tech for fossil fuels, but the Obama administration now feels itself ready to make a grand return to its industry-coveted renewables “investments” of yesteryear:

The Department of Energy is targeting from $1.5 billion to as much as $4 billion for a new renewable energy project loan guarantee program, one that could open the door to solicitations for a range of smaller-scale, distributed and grid-integrated projects by the end of this year.

These details on a potential second round of DOE green energy loans were provided by Peter Davidson, executive director of DOE’s Loan Programs Office…

While DOE’s 1705 program funding is gone, the Loan Programs Office still has $1.5 billion in remaining renewable energy authority under the separate 1703 program, he noted. It also has roughly $2 billion in mixed-use authority, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in credit subsidy authority, that could add up to about $4 billion in available funds for a renewable solicitation.

None of this is set in stone, Davidson emphasized. But the Obama administration and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz are eager to fulfill the program’s mandate to back innovative technologies and business models that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and are viable for commercial scale, yet lack the track records to obtain purely private financing.

Yes, I have no doubt that they’re super eager to once again begin handing out special treatment, courtesy of the taxpayer, for their own political gain — i.e., bolstering their climate-change agenda with still more small-ball yet costly executive actions. Let not the fact that those projects “lack the track records to obtain purely private financing” trouble them, hem hem, nor that renewables investments across the globe have been declining in the past couple of years while several countries that dove into renewables-subsidization schemes headfirst have lately been heavily backtracking — nor that one of the last massive solar loan guarantees they issued in 2011 was for a gigantic solar farm whose specific technology might already be irrelevant. It’s whatever.

Tags: Department of Energy, energy, Obama administration, renewables, solar energy, wind energy

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Germangovtofficials:It’stimetocutour

German govt officials: It’s time to cut our losses with these renewable subsidy programs already

posted at 1:21 pm on February 27, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

In the full throes of realization that their top-down, heavily subsidized energy-sector transition from fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewable sources has directly resulted in energy prices around three times higher than those in the United States — not to mention a resurgence of coal to close the practicality gap left by those renewables — the German government has been looking for a way to steeply revise the Energiewende program of which they were once so loud and proud. On Thursday, a group of German government officials submitted their recommendations to Chancellor Merkel for saving Germans some of the tens of billions of dollars they’re losing in renewable energy “investments” every year, including ideas for just getting rid of entire facets of the program. Via Bloomberg:

Germany should scrap its clean-energy subsidies because the system has driven up electricity costs for consumers and hasn’t spurred innovation or reduced greenhouse gases, a group of government advisers said.

Adding renewable-energy plants in Germany doesn’t cut Europe’s emissions because they’re released elsewhere, the Commission for Research and Innovation said in a report handed to Chancellor Angela Merkel today. The uncapped aid provided by the system known as EEG — about 23 billion euros ($31 billion) last year — doesn’t encourage new technologies, it said.

“The EEG isn’t a cost-efficient instrument for climate protection nor does it have a measurable impact on innovation,” the commission said in the report. “That’s why there is no basis for the continuation of the EEG.” …

The European Commission, the EU’s regulatory arm, is pressing Germany to auction off aid instead of granting fixed, uncapped subsidies, Merkel said today, according to a transcript sent by the government’s press office. “The EEG in its current form will be replaced by an auctioning system and will therefore also qualitatively change,” she said.

A similar industry report also came out this week, recommending that Germany stop cutting itself off at the knees by eschewing heightened natural gas production and instead jump on the bandwagon that’s helping to keep costs so much lower in the United States, via Reuters:

Germany’s current policy of rapidly deploying renewable energy should be redesigned to prevent its industry from losing global market share because of high power costs, a report by international think-tank IHS said on Thursday. …

The report said that if the policy was changed to focus on domestically produced gas and the expansion of technologically mature renewables such as onshore wind and solar power, Germany could still shift to low-carbon energy while reaping more benefits from exports, jobs, incomes, tax and royalties.

“Germany’s current path of increasingly high-cost energy will make the country less competitive,” Dan Yergin, IHS vice chairman who headed the study, said in a phone interview. …

Germany’s industrial power prices have risen around 60 percent since 2007, while those in the United States and China have risen less than 10 percent.

This has hit manufacturers that accounted for 21 percent of Germany’s economic output last year, one of the highest shares for a developed country, IHS said.

Despite Germany’s relatively strong manufacturing and export performance compared to the rest of the European Union, the report estimates that their mandated shift to renewables has cost them “€52bn in net export losses for the six-year period from 2008 to 2013.” Dang. That translates to a huge loss of competitiveness for the nation currently ranking as the economic leader of the EU, and if they’d like to keep it that way, they have some serious rethinking to do.

Tags: Angela Merkel, competition, Germany, natural gas, renewables, subsidies

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Australia on their renewable-energy mandates: We’re kinda’ over it

Australiaontheirrenewable-energymandates:We’rekinda’over

Tosalvagetheirenergiewende,Germanyshouldgetto

To salvage their energiewende, Germany should get to fracking

posted at 5:01 pm on February 9, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Germany began what they hoped would be a magnificent transition away from fossil-fuel based energy sources a few years ago, but after their decision to simultaneously retire their nuclear energy plants, hugely subsidize wind and solar energy, and decline to further frack their own natural-gas reserves, they have little to show for it besides an unmitigated disaster of skyrocketing energy prices and a revival of coal-powered energy plants. On top of the $32 billion in the form of government subsidies that Germany is expected to spend in 2014 alone, the country recently got into trouble with the European Union for handing out tax breaks to companies in energy-intensive industries. Germany is worried that, if they don’t give these companies a big break on high energy prices, they’ll close up shop and move to more competitive pastures — like the United States, which is flush with shale-led energy abundance and cheaper natural gas prices.

If Germany is so worried about losing their competitive edge, however, there’s a very easy alternative to both coal-fired power plants and untoward tax breaks staring them smack in the face. Reuters gets it:

Germany’s gas industry says it needs shale to halt a sharp decline in domestic output, but behind its pleas lies private acknowledgement that environmental and political opposition is just too strong. …

“Currently, there is a decline in domestic production…a major share of planned investments in our industry is stymied politically,” said Hartmut Pick, spokesman for the WEG oil and gas industry group that produces domestic gas worth 4 to 5 billion euros ($5.4-6.8) a year. …

Despite suspected vast shale gas reserves in its north, Germany has not just passed up the chance to assess these, but also stopped expansion of its traditional gas technology two years ago, after local authorities and policymakers bowed to environmental concerns and refused new licences. …

“If Germany and other European countries do not try and tap their shale gas potential, they will likely have to pay higher gas prices in future than would otherwise be the case,” Dan Yergin, a U.S. energy advisor and vice chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, told Reuters.

If, on the other hand, its shale resources were developed, German would be able to “maintain its competitiveness and export strength in the global economy, which is so critical to Germany’s overall economic performance,” Yergin said.

Germany has been fracking for more than 50 years, but environmentalist scaremongers determined to move the country toward an almost fully-renewable energy scheme are having none of it and insisting the Germany transition away from that, too — but that kind of political stubbornness is a great recipe to both marginalize Germany’s economic competitiveness, as well as induce energy companies to bring more coal-powered plants online. Good work, greens.

Tags: competition, economy, energy, fracking, Germany, manufacturing, natural gas, renewables

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Germanfinanceminister:OK,yeah,weprobablyoverdid

German finance minister: OK, yeah, we probably overdid it on the renewable-energy transition

posted at 7:21 pm on January 28, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Environmentalists have been trying to get really super stern with President Obama and his “all of the above” energy plan recently, hoping to pressure him into make a more outright declaration of love and support for further climate-change commitments (not to mention an anti-Keystone XL pipeline one) in his State of the Union address, so I’d expect a healthy-sized shoutout somewhere in the rhetorical mix on the many ostensible merits of the heavy taxpayer subsidization of renewables, a.k.a. wind and solar.

Which, if you happen to be into things like prosperity, job creation, and price efficiency, doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense at the moment. Just ask the guys over in Germany currently reaping the consequences of some of the very same sorts of plans President Obama is likely to tout, via Walter Russell Mead‘s blog:

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported this morning that one in three workers in Germany’s solar industry lost their job last year. By November, there were a mere 4,800 employees left in the sector, the first time in four years that number has fallen below the 5,000-mark. That’s less than half 2012′s levels, when there were still 10,200 solar jobs. These revelations come hard on the heels of news that the $30 billion German taxpayers shuffled into green subsidies last year didn’t actually make the country any cleaner, and that more brown coal was burned there in 2013 than in any year since 1990.

Granted, Germany’s attempt to completely get rid of nuclear and vastly downsize on fossil fuels at the same time was an overly ambitious recipe for disaster, and the United States’ shale boom just isn’t going anywhere for awhile — but trumpeting the supposed wisdom of the taxpayer subsidization of “green jobs” that at this point in time clearly have troubling staying self-sufficient hardly seems like a great policy recommendation when you’re trying to grow your economy. Via the Financial Times:

Germany’s powerful finance minister said on Tuesday that Berlin may have gone too far in its attempts to protect the environment, saying his government must now “rebalance” its policies to ensure environmental regulations do not cost jobs. …

“We did it too good and now we have to correct because otherwise we have an increasing of energy costs which will harm jobs in Germany in a serious way in the medium term,” Mr Schäuble said at a forum in Brussels, where he was attending a regular meeting of EU finance ministers. “Therefore, we have to rebalance.” …

Last week, the European Commission unveiled a new energy strategy for 2030 that disappointed environmentalists because it lacked binding national targets on how much power EU countries would have to generate from renewable sources.

And if just trying to persuade national governments to forcibly do away with fossil fuels point-blank is still environmentalists’ best plan, they should probably get used to that kind of disappointment.

Tags: Barack Obama, energy, Germany, renewables

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NYT:EvenEurope“seemstobehittingits

NYT: Even Europe “seems to be hitting its environmentalist limits”

posted at 2:01 pm on January 23, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Faced with electricity prices at least twice as expensive as those in the United States’ and the subsequently combined crises of business uncompetitiveness and ongoing economic lethargy, Europe has been considering a retrenchment on their once-grand climate-change ambitions for some months now — and it looks like they’ve finally hammered out a definite approach. They’re framing it as more of an acknowledgement of economic reality than a backtrack, and insist that they still have very tangible goals to which they’re determinedly sticking… but environmentalist groups are nevertheless most displeased by the announcements. Via the NYT:

On Wednesday, the European Union proposed an end to binding national targets for renewable energy production after 2020. Instead, it substituted an overall European goal that is likely to be much harder to enforce.

It also decided against proposing laws on environmental damage and safety during the extraction of shale gas by a controversial drilling process known as fracking. It opted instead for a series of minimum principles it said it would monitor.

Europe pressed ahead on other fronts, aiming for a cut of 40 percent in Europe’s carbon emissions by 2030, double the current target of 20 percent by 2020. Officials said the new proposals were not evidence of diminished commitment to environmental discipline but reflected the complicated reality of bringing the 28 countries of the European Union together behind a policy. …

Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, described the proposals as “totally inadequate” and “off the radar of what climate science tells us to do in Europe to avoid climate catastrophe.” …

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, defended the new proposals as a hard-fought compromise and proof that it “is possible to make a marriage between industry and climate action.”

The European Commission’s proposals still have to be approved by the European Parliament and member states, but with what’s been happening in Germany and what was supposed to be their Energiewende revolution, I think we’re looking at a very probable climbdown from their erstwhile cost-defying loftiness.

Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday urged her cabinet to stop bickering and join her in backing Energy Minister Sigmar Gabriel’s plan to reduce financial support for renewable energy when the ministers discuss policies for the coming year at a closed-door meeting.

Germany is struggling with rising energy costs as it phases out nuclear power and tries to shift to more renewable energy.

In a bid to stem these rising costs in the coming years, Mr. Gabriel has proposed cutting the average subsidy for wind, solar and other renewable power sources.

German and European utilities complain their profits have plunged because subsidized renewables are displacing their conventional power plants, which are still needed as backups.

Tags: climate change, economics, economy, Europe, fossil fuels, New York Times, renewables

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Source from: hotair

Germanyjustdroppedaplantocuttheir

Germany just dropped a plan to cut their renewables subsidies by a third

posted at 7:01 pm on January 20, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Pretty big move for a country that, only a few years ago, was determined to serve as the zeitgeist of government-sponsored, infrastructure-overhauling “green” vigor, but I suppose the reality of coal’s comeback in making up for the deficiencies of their hastily-developed renewable technologies is just that unavoidable. Via Reuters:

Germany’s economy minister wants to cut the support price paid for electricity from solar and wind power generators by about a third by 2015, according to a draft proposal for one of the most challenging economic reforms facing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new government.

Under the draft proposal the feed-in tariffs paid to renewable power generators will be cut to an average across all technologies of 12 cents per kiloWatthour (cent/kWh) by 2015 from 17 cents/kWh currently.

And Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who also leads the Social Democrats (SPD), wants the reduction to start taking effect for some new projects from as early as next week, according to the draft seen by Reuters on Saturday. …

The subsidies are largely borne by households, whose bills have almost doubled to an average of 300 euros ($410) per megawatt-hour (MWh) of energy over the past decade to become some of the highest in Europe.

That still means that they’re going for increasing their renewables capacity, but it’s a significant slowdown on the rate at which they hoped to do so — and Germany isn’t the only one reassessing the wisdom of their forcibly rushed transition to a low-fossil-fuel, no-nuclear, no-fracking, largely-renewables energy sector via central planning — the European Union at large has lately been have some severe second thoughts on the matter, and it looks like they’re getting ever-closer to their own official retrenchment, says Der Spiegel:

The EU’s reputation as a model of environmental responsibility may soon be history. The European Commission wants to forgo ambitious climate protection goals and pave the way for fracking — jeopardizing Germany’s touted energy revolution in the process. …

At the request of Commission President José Manuel Barroso, EU member states are no longer to receive specific guidelines for the development ofrenewable energy. The stated aim of increasing the share of green energy across the EU to up to 27 percent will hold. But how seriously countries tackle this project will no longer be regulated within the plan. As of 2020 at the latest — when the current commitment to further increase the share of green energy expires — climate protection in the EU will apparently be pursued on a voluntary basis. …

In addition, the authority wants to pave the way in the EU for the controversial practice of fracking, according to the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The report says the Commission does not intend to establish strict rules for the extraction of shale gas, but only minimum health and environmental standards.

Tags: energy, Europe, fossil, Germany, nuclear, renewables, solar energy, subsidies, wind energy

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Source from: hotair