Germany’s power supply, once mostly made up of a mixture of coal and nuclear power, used to be among the most stable and affordable in the world. Power outages were rare and grid interventions were infrequent.
German consumer electricity prices shot up to 36.19 euro-cents per kilowatt-hour while blackouts threaten.
Greens and socialists then tried electrical power engineering
But then in the 1990s environmental activists and politicians got involved, believing they could manage and design a grid and power supply that would be technically and environmentally superior than what the leading power generation and electrical engineers and experts themselves had in place.
Sun and wind were the way to go, the environmentalist Greens and SPD socialist’s declared. After all, the wind and sun don’t send electric bills and are “free for the taking”. This they somehow managed to convince the public. And so the greening of the grid began.
2000 EEG feed-in act
In 2000, the coalition government of the Socialist’s and Greens, led by Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, introduced the EEG renewable green energies feed-in act. What followed was a green energies construction frenzy with hundreds of megawatts of volatile wind and solar capacity being added to the grid every year while nuclear power was shut down.
Today now comes the EED’s price shock. Wind and solar are not free after all. In fact they are outrageously expensive, and they are even more volatiles in terms of supply than the country’s Corona policies!
Unstable grid, record high prices
Today German weekly news magazine FOCUS here reports how Germany’s electricity prices have now reached “record” levels: “Germany is the world champion in electricity prices – no country pays more for electricity. According to new data from the German Association of Energy and Water Industries, German households paid an average of 36.19 cents for a kilowatt hour in January 2022.”
That’s over 40 US cents per kilowatt-hour!
Three times higher than international average
“Never before have German consumers had to pay so much,” writes FOCUS. “Germans have to pay almost three times as much for electricity from the outlet compared to the international average. This is mainly due to unusually high taxes and eco-taxes in this country.”
Volatile grid teeters on collapse
What’s worse, the country now teeters on power grid collapse, meaning blackouts are a real threat. Moreover, high-tech computer-controlled production machines and plants rely on a steady supply frequency to operate. As grid frequency becomes increasingly unstable due to the volatile wind and solar power input, the equipment risks costly unplanned production shutdowns. In total this makes Germany a less attractive place to invest, despite its highly skilled labor force.
Half price in some neighboring countries
According to FOCUS, consumer electricity costs significantly less in neighboring countries like Italy, where the price 25 euro-cents, or in Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg where it is about 23 cents.
In France a kilowatt of electricity is 21 cents, and: “in the Netherlands and Poland only 19 cents. In large countries like the USA (16 cents) or Brazil (14 cents), electricity costs less than half as much as in Germany. In Canada (12 cents) or South Korea (11 cents) consumers pay only a third, in India (8 cents) and China (9 cents) only a quarter of the German price level.”
50% increase in just 2 years!
German industry, which gets a lower price than consumers do, is now paying “an average of 26.64 cents per kilowatt hour”, up from just 17.76 cents in 2020 – that’s a roughly 50% jump! Industrial association are warning that these astronomical prices are rapidly making Germany unattractive as a place to do business, reports FOCUS.
According to Holger Lösch, Deputy Managing Director of the BDI industry association. “Energy-intensive industries in particular (steel, metals, paper, glass, aluminum, cement) are threatening to move out of Germany.”
No wonder not long ago The Wall Street Journal dubbed it the “world’s dumbest energy policy”.