Recession.

http://www.westernadvocate.com.au/story/2187882/lights-out-at-wallerawang-power-station/

If I’m buying the power I’d rather lock in 9c/kwh (What guaranteed 100% wind commitment is going for here in Texas) than 11c/kwh Nuclear (Average price of current FF/Nuclear mix in Texas). Both current rates with 2 year commitment for my local power grid – guess which one we chose?

For starters only 1/3 of the price increases since 2000 can be attributed to the rise of the renewable energy surcharge. So blaming the expansion of renewables is already questionable.

In general mixing social policy relevant to individuals with energy policy relevant to the macro-economic long term outlook of the entire country seems to be a silly notion.

Did you know that the government charges an additional 0.99 cent / kWh of value added tax on top of the renewable energy surcharge? That’s approx. $1.5 billion Dollar in 2013… enough to finance an energy savings micro-credit program.

But does the current government do that? Nope.
They prefer to abuse poor people for their anti-renewable strawmen arguments.

Dirty politics against clean energy.

All the hype about wind & solar hides that maybe the best result in Germany to reduce CO2 have been coming from transport, the industry, better insulation, biomass use. After all Wind & solar were only 12% of electric power last year, with 10% coming from other renewable sources.

About coal, the start point is using the death/TWh data from this report 8000 death caused every year : http://www.env-health.org/IMG/pdf/heal_report_the_unpaid_health_bill_how_coal_power_plants_make_us_sick_final.pdf

Even if the filters enhance things significantly and will reduce that number of deaths per TWh, it’s well documented they can’t remove 100% of the fine particles, so there’s still some deadly pollution. And anyway managing the coal ash is an unavoidable problem, should we talk about what happened in Kingston, Tennesse with coal ash ? The trouble is that the total volume is hundred of millions of tons.

By 2020, 18.5 gigawatts of coal power capacity will be decommissioned, whereas only 11.3 gigawatts will be newly installed.

Furthermore those plants will be more efficient, releasing less CO2 per unit electricity produced than are the ones they are replacing. And the new coal plants are partially load-following.

You have King C.O.N.G on one side fully commited to a Coal, Oil, Nuclear & Gas based conventional energy mix… and you got mainly independent investors of renewables on the other side.

If the other side would not exist, the conventional power companies would replace almost their entire existing 100 GW fossil-nuclear power stations. That was their goal at the beginning this century, because it suites their business model.

Now. They did have plans to build at least 22 GW by 2020-2030…. they’ve started several projects between 2000-2006… most of those will propably come online. All of those approx. 6-8 GW coal power stations were designed & permitted as replacements of older power stations. (including those that went into operation last year)

That’s the fossil fuel lobby / energy corperations side of the energy system. I don’t deny their motives nor their agenda… what I am telling you, is that their strategy is a failure and that those investments will not pay of as well as indented.

Now to the other side: Renewables and their supporters.

There have been noteworthy success stories of Anti-Coal Nimbyism… The coal power station near Mainz was stoped by protests & reason. There’s also the the ongoing legal battle of the already build Datteln-4 power station. (might never go online = several billion dollar wasted)

Besides all that:
Somewhere between 2020-2030 renewables will reach a share of 50% in the electricity supply. At that point the share of coal will be limited to approx. 25% in the electricity supply due to technological limits of coal plant flexibility.

There are certain short term trends that you mentioned, but I know of no new coal power station that went into construction during the last 5 years. No replacement, shrinking market and political consensus for long term phaseout of the ENTIRE conventional power system. Why should anyone invest in coal?

What counts is indeed the tendency, and the tendency is that Germany is building more new coal than any other rich western country (except maybe Australia).

What counts is not the decoy projects that BUND can boats about. The coal industry is using here the shower of missiles strategy of starting many more projects than they ever intended to actually build. Then BUND can claim having stopped many of them but in truth the industry has had build as much as they ever really wanted to build, and maybe even more, because I doubt they really wanted 4.3 GW of new power with a demand that is not growing, gaining less money and having badly performing stocks.

But the first effect is that this power will replace gas generation, because it can still make a profit even at a much lower price, and push it almost fully out of the market. The Fraunhofer data shows in January and February gas was rarely running at less than 4GW, that’s so much power coal can take the place of running almost 100% of the time.

The death sentence is for gas, not for coal.

As well as the social implications of taking that money to distribute it to the home-owners with room on the roof for solar panels, and who also are the one who have savings to invest in a wind turbine project.

It might revolutionize Germany, but maybe not in the way you think.

… it takes substantially more than two years to build a new coal power plant. Even if, as Barry Brook seems to think, the German government had decided to build lots of new coal as compensation for shutting down nuclear right after the Fukushima accident two years ago, none of those plants could be “started up” this year.

Where this argument fails is in forgetting that the nuclear phaseout policy was set back in 2000, long before Merkel’s 2010-11 flip-flop, and plans were made accordingly.

Back in 2009,

Germany’s environment minister [!!] Sigmar Gabriel (Social Democratic Party) is pushing for the construction of new coal-fired power plants in Germany. “We need eight to twelve new coal plants if we want to get out of nuclear energy,” Gabriel said on Friday at a meeting of the Mainz-Wiesbaden AG (KMW) in Mainz. With regard to the opponents of the planned coal-fired power in Mainz, the minister said: “Those who demonstrate against coal-fired power will get nuclear power plants instead.”

http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/?p=5064

And why hasn’t the nuclear industry given up in Germany? I mean obviously they haven’t given up completely from a business perspective, but they have to realize with the entire country supporting a move away from Nuclear they are fighting an impossible battle… At least in Germany.