In Germany, Der Spiegel writes, “The Energiewende — the biggest political project since reunification — threatens to fail.”
Energiewende is Germany’s attempt to leverage a renewables energy transition.
With Germany as an inspiration, the United Nations and World Bank poured billions into renewables like wind, solar, and hydro in developing nations like Kenya.
Last year, however, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get at the coal underneath it. This also comes as it unplugs many of its nuclear power plants.
Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside. “The politicians fear citizen resistance”
Der Spiegel reports – “There is hardly a wind energy project that is not fought.” In response, politicians sometimes order “electrical lines be buried underground but that is many times more expensive and takes years longer.” As a result, the deployment of renewables and related transmission lines is slowing rapidly. Less than half as many wind turbines (743) were installed in 2018 as were installed in 2017, and just 30 kilometers of new transmission were added in 2017. Solar and wind advocates say cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons to believe the opposite will be the case.
Der Spiegel cites a recent estimate that it would cost Germany “€3.4 trillion ($3.8 trillion),” or seven times more than it spent from 2000 to 2025, to increase solar and wind three to five-fold by 2050. Between 2000 and 2019, Germany grew renewables from 7% to 35% of its electricity. And as much of Germany’s renewable electricity comes from biomass, which scientists view as polluting and environmentally degrading, as from solar. Of the 7,700 new kilometers of transmission lines needed, only 8% have been built, while large-scale electricity storage remains inefficient and expensive. “A large part of the energy used is lost,” the reporters note of a much-hyped hydrogen gas project, “and the efficiency is below 40%… No viable business model can be developed from this.” Meanwhile, the 20-year subsidies granted to wind, solar, and biogas since 2000 will start coming to an end next year. “The wind power boom is over,”
All of which raises a question: if renewables can’t cheaply power Germany, one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world, how could a developing nation like Kenya ever expect them to allow it to “leapfrog” fossil fuels?
The earliest 20th Century case for renewables came from German philosopher Martin Heidegger who, in his 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning of Technology,” condemned the view of nature as a mere resource for human consumption. The use of “modern technology,” he wrote, “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such… Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium…to yield atomic energy.”
The solution, was to push human society and its economy to unreliable energy flows. He praised windmills because they “do not unlock energy in order to store it.” In the US, Heidegger’s views were picked up by renewable energy advocates. Barry Commoner in 1969 argued that a transition to renewables was needed to bring modern civilization “into harmony with the ecosphere.” The goal of renewables was to turn modern industrial societies back into agrarian ones, argued Murray Bookchin in his 1962 book, “Our Synthetic Environment”.
But then, starting around the year 2000, renewables started to gain a high-tech luster. Governments and private investors poured $2 trillion into solar and wind and related infrastructure, creating the impression that renewables were profitable aside from subsidies. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk proclaimed that a rich, high-energy civilization could be powered by cheap solar panels and electric cars. As batteries became cheaper, many saw a tipping point at which conventional electricity utilities would be “disrupted.”
But no amount of hype could change the poor physics of resource-intensive and land-intensive renewables. Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants, and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells, to produce the same amount of energy.
Efforts to export the Energiewende to developing nations may prove even more devastating. The new wind farm in Kenya, inspired and financed by Germany and other well-meaning Western nations, is located on a major flight path of migratory birds. Scientists say it will kill hundreds of endangered eagles.
In response, the wind farm’s developers have done what Europeans have long done in Africa, which is to hire the organizations, which ostensibly represent the doomed eagles and communities, to collaborate rather than fight the project. Kenya won’t be able to “leapfrog” fossil fuels with its wind farm. On the contrary, all of that unreliable wind energy is likely to increase the price of electricity and make Kenya’s slow climb out of poverty even slower.
Green energy movement has become an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes and local communities. Opposition to renewables comes from the country peoples that Heidegger idolized as more authentic and “grounded” than urbane cosmopolitan elites who fetishize their solar roofs and Teslas as signs of virtue.
The transition to renewables was doomed because people do not want to return to pre-modern life. The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to.
About the Author
We are lucky to be living in a time such as this, where we get to see a lot of scientific theories being played out in real time to see how valid any of them actually are.
Can a highly entropic society such as the Germans survive their entropy?
It has been theorized both ways – that entropy like national debt doesn’t matter one whit versus a highly entropic society will simply end up burning itself out as it tries harder and harder to catch its own tail, having to have more tomarrow that it had today, just because.
It has also been theorized that excess entropy can actually cause a society to become insane, as in mass hysteria mass hysteria which is a condition in which a large group of people exhibit similar physical or emotional symptoms, such as anxiety or extreme excitement, also called epidemic hysteria.
As the Chinese saying goes, may we always live in interesting times!
Good Lord. Take a quantum leap with the summary in this opinion, did we ? “The Green Energy movement has become an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes and local communities”……..REALLY ? Do you really think that’s a fair comment/summary ?
“The transition to renewables was doomed because people do not want to return to pre-modern life” . DUH ? I never heard anyone ever say THAT was the idea in the 1st place.
Personally, I also never thought that there would be a “transition to renewables”. Not in our lifetime. I think they are a supplement to other existing sources.
How many light bulbs did Thomas Edison construct before he got his idea to work ?
Renewables work. To be saying they are ready for a huge transition is the sale of The Brooklyn Bridge.
Now I don’t know about anybody else, but this wind project by Germany is not the 1st BIG GOV project that I’ve read/known about that was a huge boondoggle and way over budget expenditure. Have any of us ever heard of “The Big Dig” in Boston ?
Then throw in the wonderful elements of The United Nations and The World Bank. Two organizations that are best known for tremendous wastes of ideas and money. Toss those two into any project and it often predicts doom. And in a corrupt 3rd World Country ?? HA HA HA HA HA
YUP. HUGE fields of solar panels or wind turbines are far from an answer to our electricity needs. YUP. it’s also true that this type of electricity cannot even perform many of our needs. Some of us need to learn that the commercial needs of electricity cannot be supplied by wind or solar. Heavy equipment and machinery demand a stronger electricity that must come from heavy duty production of it.
Some salesmen are honest and some aren’t. Just like politicians. You get the two of them together and you sometimes then need to hold onto your wallet. DUH ?
How about this for a solution ? Anything/everything in moderation. Mankind has come up with plenty of wonderful ideas and solutions to situations. In my opinion we should be using hydro-electric, coal fired, renewables and atomic energy. Use ’em all. Revamp them all. Don’t let trendy new ideas throw out the old because of some new sales idea. Use the one for each specific need and application that makes the most sense for that general area, is the most available, energy efficient and cost wise. Our problem is that takes compromise and honesty w/o fear. Need I say more ?
Yeah use coal and scrub clean the stacks as much as is financially reasonable for the good of all.
Yeah use atomic energy. Three Mile Island was the only problem we ever had and it was a close one, but did mostly result in only a bad scare. We would create units even safer and better now. It is a tragedy all of Three Mile Island is being shut down. Sure California shut all theirs down a long time ago. Salesmen sold politicians the idea to build most of them right on top of major tectonic faults. Now look at the price of their electric. Stupid is as stupid does. Even N.Y. did the same thing on The Hudson River. Our leaders recognize good ideas and then destroy them with stupidity.
On a personal application basis for our homes, it wouldn’t make too much sense to put solar panels on a house for heating water in the arctic. Small wind turbines may work/help there.
Lots of areas of this country can use solar and turbines for personal home use. Even hydro electric on small rivers works individually to charge batteries and partially individual homes.
Supplementing our home use energy is a wonderful idea and destroys nothing. Just don’t try to make a mountain out of a molehill.