Hannelore Morton Just now · In face of fragile national security, economic decline and real human pain, how can Europe maintain its aggressive pursuit of renewable energy? Resisting Vladimir Putins expansionist plans or quashing radical Islamist terror are not likely outcomes within a systematic industrial massacre, as the former EU Commissioner of Industry described the consequences of EUs green mandates. With 75% of electric generation derived from nuclear plants, France is insulated from the hazards of renewables, but most EU countries are not. Europes renewable programs — particularly as undertaken by Germany and the U.K. — represent the first energy regression in human history as a result of the elites policy choice. Green energy policies hinge on a gamble that renewables can supplant fossil fuels without major economic disruption, geopolitical instability or human pain. As Germanys and the U.K.s green mandates now reveal, wind and solar are not capable of performing the task that fossil fuels have achieved in modern industrial economies. As the Financial Times reported in late November, Europe made the wrong bet on renewables. For an example of green pain, the German Association of Energy Consumers estimates that 800,000 households are cut off from electricity because of inability to pay rates now two to three times higher than the U.S. average. Benny Peiser of Londons Global Warming Policy Foundation noted in recent testimony to the U.S. Senate that hundreds of billions are being paid by ordinary families ... in what is undoubtedly one of the biggest wealth transfers from poor to rich in modern European history. Germanys minister of the environment, Barbara Hendricks, nonetheless declares the countrys energy revolution a success. In a recent op-ed for CNN, she boasted that renewable energy now accounts for nearly 30% of our electricity demands. She omits, however, that perhaps a half of the renewably generated electricity amounts to negawatts — surplus generation that Germany pays other countries to use. Europe miscalculated the share of electric generation that wind and sunshine could provide. As Peiser estimated in his testimony, Twice as much generating capacity is needed just to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar. Imagine winning World War II under that energy metric! But it gets absurdly worse. The lavish subsidies and dispatch priority given to renewables have made natural gas and coal plants unprofitable. To avoid blackouts, the great green schemes now require subsidies for gas and coal generation — the fuels the scheme was intended to eliminate. Read More At Investors Business Daily: news.investors/…/011615-735189-renewable-energy-… Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 01:44:29 +0000
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