I don't like this. Instead of heavily subsidizing some technologies, they should tax externalities (i.e. pollution) and let the markets do the rest. It's annoying having to pay 15% more energy bills because somebody has decided that wind and solar are the hot thing of the moment.
Bad, really bad. Same way of thinking that brought us to the debt crisi in Europe.
To everybody who thinks energy right now is too expensive.
A couple of friends and I built a bike generator station for five bikes. We are using DC-Motors as dynamos and lead batterys for buffering the output.
Five bikers in total can generate between 220W to 250W for an extended time. Let assume they bike at 200W for five hours. They then will have generated one kilowatthour of electricity, which costs 25ct. I'm pretty sure they will be happy with their five cent per person when they get off the bikes after five hours.
Bike generators are powered by people. People biking require time. What is the labor or opportunity cost of having all of these people sustaining 250W per hour or essentially a .25kW-hour? Just a thought but that doesn't sound cheap.
That's exactly what jsilence is saying. Energy from the grid is so incredibly cheap that you're using it without a second thought on things you would never consider doing without a grid. It could go up hundredfold before becoming expensive.
* It is difficult, no doubt. But it is also difficult to find a way to efficienlty store solar and wind power. It is difficult is not a good excuse not to do it.
* It does not help innovation. Not true. It does. Taxes will lower the margins of the businesses with externalities and capital holders will look for more efficient technologies. Less cost and/or more profit are the only way you incentivate innovation.
* Energy is cheap. That doesn't mean it couldn't be cheaper. I mean, I prefer to spend my money on what I like, not on energy bills. And again, cheapER, bettER, are the real incentive to innovation.
* Politics. Don't know, don't care. If I had to go with politics, I'd say that solar and wind are mainly politics: it helps with votes and reputation, but only that (at least now).
* Nuclear. There is research also there. There has been progress for decades. Why that research is not as good as the one for solar and wind power I don't understand.
Fair enough - but not caring about this will leave you unable to fix serious problems, and incurably unhappy with the state of the world. Every problem, every issue, every project of non-trivial size is critically dependent upon politics of some stripe or other. History is riddled with excellent ideas that failed because they didn't consider politics (and for that matter, terrible ideas that succeeded because they did).
I agree with you that the public revulsion over nuclear power is unwarranted - but that battle is lost. No reasoned argument can hope to win over emotive shots of Chernobyl and Fukushima. We have to look forward.
Engineering is about achieving goals within constraints. Good engineering takes political constraints into account as well as technical and budgetary ones.
Addendum
Whoever is downvoting this guy, STOP. You might disagree with him, but he is promoting a debate in a civilised manner, and that's how we move forward.
You are right. But we still need to keep in mind that what's happening makes no sense. We need to know what the real, un-politic, solution is, otherwise we don't even know how and where to compromise. More public spending is not ground for compromises. We are gambling with our future packing debt on debt with silly ideas (like this one that throwing money at pig farmers to raise wind towers is going to save our energy-hungry asses). That's not going to happen and we will pay for this bad decision making in the future.
Said taxes can just as easily destroy the capital holders you claim will go looking for other investments. It's a fluid pool, you can't suck a billion out of the private economy without impacting all other private capital.
And that is all premised on getting the taxes right. If you miss in the guess work, you'll cause massive damage and dislocation of capital. The US has done that on numerous occasions (eg ethanol 1970s).
Energy is politics. There's really no other industry on the entire planet that is more defined by politics due to its importance and nature (from land for solar to drilling in Nigeria, to tar sands in Canada, to windmills killing birds and on and on).
If you don't know and don't care about politics when it comes to energy, then you're going to get nowhere.
In the past the governments and the companies gave a shit about public opinion. Government money was used to research and build the nuclear industry. The electricity companies were huge monopolies. Currently we have four huge electricity producers which nicely divide the market into four regions. Competition? Zero. Government support? Max.
That brought us huge coal power plants whic brought a lot of environmental problems and a fleet of very expensive nuclear power plants.
Keep in mind that Germany is a relatively small country with little resources (mainly coal) and more than 80 million people.
Several decades ago the green movement was started to be a lobby against this block of politics and industry.
They stopped the expansion of nuclear power and the build up of even more powerful monopolies. They also stopped much of the coal power plants from polluting the country.
The voters brought the green party into power. First they were in regional parliaments, then in the Bundestag and eventually they were even part of the Bundesregierung (Schroeder/Fischer). The latest coup was that they lead the government in one of the Bundesländer where actually is one of the hearts of the German industry.
This happened because the voter placed them there. Over time also the conservative, right wing party, the CDU and its sister CSU, learned to support environmental policies. Part of their conservative ideology is the love to the country and to preserve its nature ('Wertkondervative'). Chancellor Merkel herself has a Dr. in Quantum Chemistry and she was responsible some years ago for the ministry which is concerned with environment and reactor safety. She is an expert on these topics.
What the voter now wants is to put more market, more competition into the energy landscape with a preference for renewable energy. You can see who is the opposition: the four huge electicity producers.
But now you can see the results. Renewable energy is up from 6% in 2000 to now over 20% share in electricity production.
But more important half of the new energy projects is privately owned or locally owned. We are bringing democracy and the local market to the energy system.
Before the grid was tightly controlled and only the big companies had access to it.
Now everyone can demand that his energy will be fed into the grid.
We tax energy use very high. This gives an added incentive to use less electricity and investing in modern technology pays back - if it uses less energy.
The 'Energiewende' is not a government project. It's the opposite. It took several decades of hard work of many citizens, a new party, ... to actually get the governments to support it.
It means lots of research, new industries, new companies, ... some will survive, some won't.
Much of the investment into new energy infrastructure is necessary anyway - because some of the infrastrucute is getting old - we direct more investments into renewable energy, than we had done in the past.
> You can see who is the opposition: the four
> huge electicity producers.
And responsible-budget people. Germany is running in defecit beyond it's European treaty obligations. A factor contributing to the bottom line is expensive energy and expensive energy projects.
Reasonably budgeted? More like recently decreasingly subsidized.
Germany is making an investment towards a more diverse, ecologically sustainable energy market. That's expensive in the short run, simple as that. The four big players don't like it - and they particularly don't like that decades of a very controllable market are drawing to a close.
You should see the desperate advertisements they run, trying to appear "green" and reasonable, lately. Very entertaining.
Also - if you're going to talk deficit, don't forget that Germany had to pay a couple of extra bills since 2008.
Almost every country in the EU has deficit beyond the allowed regulations for a huge different number of reasons. Energy is a factor that is so small, if it even is one, that it can be safely ignored.
Europe also brought us the air travel tax, which does target externalities and seems close to sparking a trade war because it covers all flights in the EU, not all EU-based airlines. It's difficult to do.
Taxing external effects like pollution does nothing to ensure the taxes drive benefit toward the technology (renewables) the taxes were created to spur.
If you go looking for technology breakthrough by tax, you'll find nothing unless a particular technology breakthrough is able to be produced in said time and place. Which is why the approach doesn't inherently work, nothing guarantees a meaningful tech breakthrough is waiting in the wings, it might take 50 years for all you know.
On the negative effect side, by attaching the new pollution taxes, you're removing private capital that could have been put toward innovation.
Then to top it off, deciding how to measure and tax pollution and what should be or should not be defined as pollution, is rife with incredible disagreement (and that is not going to change). The games politicians start playing when you open that can of worms....
It's not in any way inherently a better way to go.
Bad, really bad. Same way of thinking that brought us to the debt crisi in Europe.