German Feed-in Tariff Costs Invisible Without Magnifying Glass

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

Originally published on the Lenz Blog.

At the occasion of the announcement of a moderate rise in feed-in costs in Germany today (they will be 6.24 cents Euro per kWh next year) here is a reprint from a post published last October, when the feed-in tariff was announced last year. The only thing one needs to adjust is that surcharges may amount to 0.33 percent instead of 0.3 percent of household expenditure…

The German Environment Ministry has compiled a helpful page on recent development of energy costs for use in school lessons.

For anyone paying attention, there is not ever so much new information. However, this comes in handy in the current wave of anti-renewable energy propaganda.

A couple of facts from that page.

For one, the costs of the surcharges amount to a grand total of 0.3% of average household consumption.

When visualizing this tiny fraction with an appropriate graph, the Ministry adds a magnifying glass, so as to make it visible.

UmwMin1

I am sure there is a useful metaphor to be found here. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what that might be. Hint: Look at the headline of this post.

There is also a very helpful graph on development of all energy costs since 2000 for the average three person household:

UmwMin2

Chip in a few dollars a month to help support independent cleantech coverage that helps to accelerate the cleantech revolution!

Electricity is up from 44 euro per month in 2000 to 75 in 2012 (with only 9 of that coming from the increase in feed-in tariff surcharges). In other words, two thirds of the increase in costs comes from factors unrelated to those surcharges.

And the increase in electricity cost of 31 euro per month is less than the increase in heating oil cost of 57 euro and the increase of gasoline cost of 45 euro per month.

With fossil fuel getting more expensive all the time, costs for all forms of energy are going up. Add those increases and you get 133 euro per month, only 9 of which are due to increased surcharges.

And of course, in the long run, renewable will save energy costs. Renewable deployment becomes cheaper all the time, while fossil fuel costs are going up, even if you don’t count the cost associated with heating Earth up to Venus levels.


Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.

Latest CleanTechnica TV Video


Advertisement
 
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.

Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz

is a professor of German and European Law at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, blogging since 2003 at Lenz Blog. A free PDF file of his global warming science fiction novel "Great News" is available here.

Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz has 67 posts and counting. See all posts by Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz